Managing a Team

Collaboration Problems

Your team isn’t working well with the product team, or the design team, or another tech team, and the lack of collaboration is dragging everyone down. There’s no quick fix here, but showing a willingness to improve collaboration goes a long way. If you aren’t already, make sure you’re having regular touch-bases with the appropriate peers to work through issues. Gather actionable feedback from your team, and have productive conversations about possible improvements. You can make the situation worse by undermining your peers in front of your team, so even when you are frustrated with them, try to stay positive and supportive of their efforts in public.

If your team isn’t working well together, look into creating some opportunities for them to hang out without it being all about work. Taking the whole team to lunch, leaving work early on a Friday afternoon to attend a fun event together, encouraging some PG-rated humor in chat rooms, and asking people how their lives are going are all ways to cultivate team unity. As a new manager I was pretty reluctant to get into this type of bonding, but even most introverts want to have a feeling of relatedness with their team. Assuming you don’t have any of the “people drama” problems listed earlier, small efforts in this area can warm the group up considerably.

Ask the CTO: Managing a Former Peer

I just got promoted to run my team over another peer of mine, a senior engineer who also wanted the job. How can I make sure to manage this so that I don’t alienate him while still taking on the role?

This experience can be deeply awkward, so the first thing to do is to acknowledge that. If you’re now managing someone who was truly your peer, acknowledge the weirdness of the transition. Be honest and transparent with this person that you’re going to do the best job you can, but you’ll need his help to do it. You need him to be honest with you about the things that are going well and the things that are not. You’re going to have to be a little bit vulnerable with him, because you won’t be perfect the first time around.

Next, remember that your job has changed in some big ways. As his manager, you may now have the ability to override his decisions, but use this power very cautiously. Using your managerial power to override technical decisions is usually a bad idea. Resist the temptation to micromanage people — especially those who used to be your peers. They’re going to be sensitive to the feeling that you’ve been “rewarded,” even if they didn’t want to become managers themselves. If you question their every move and try to make every single decision yourself, you’ll make this sensitivity much worse.

A corollary here is that you’re going to have to let go of some of your previous work as you ease into the additional responsibilities of people management. Every step up the management chain will mean adding new responsibilities and giving up some of your old ones. You can use this situation to your advantage with former peers by openly giving them more control over some of that technical work you used to own. This is also an opportunity to give new challenges to more junior members of the team. While many engineering organizations want first-level managers to continue to write some code, they likely expect the code those managers write to be smaller features, bug fixes, and enhancements, rather than deep new systems.

Throughout all of this change, your goal is to show the team that you’re committed to helping them succeed. Your new role isn’t taking anything away from the rest of the team; it’s only giving you some new responsibilities that either were being neglected or used to belong to someone else, and shifting some of your old responsibilities to other members of the team.

Your team won’t be successful if your former peers all quit because they can’t stand working for you. They’re going to be extra-sensitive to any disagreements or perceived power grabs on your part. They may even do things to try to undermine you. Pick your battles. In the long run, handling this transition with maturity will pay off.