Your organization is struggling. You’ve hired in 10 engineers, each with fewer than 3 years of experience. And despite your efforts, none of the existing engineers who might be qualified wants to take on a management role. None of them has much experience managing, anyway, so you would have to do a lot of training to get them up to speed. So, drowning in people, you decide it’s time to hire in a new manager to take over some of the team. But how do you do that?
Many people are very reluctant to hire in management from outside, and for good reason. We’re barely capable of determining if an engineer is capable of writing good code in a team setting without driving the other team members crazy. And coding is at least a skill that we can ask people to demonstrate for us. Management is…well, what even is it? How do we interview for it? What do we need to watch out for in the management hiring process?
Hiring for managers is a multipart exercise, and those parts are actually very similar to those of a good engineering interview process. First, make sure that the person has the skills you need. Second, make sure that she’s a culture match for your organization.
The biggest difference between a management interview and an engineering interview is that managers can, theoretically, bullshit you more easily. The skills of a manager, as we have discussed at length, are pretty much entirely based around communication. Someone who communicates well in a management interview, who talks a good game, can still come in and get nothing done. But engineers who code well in interviews also sometimes fail to ship anything once they join a team. Separate your fear of what happens after you hire the manager from what you’re trying to evaluate when interviewing her. You can evaluate her and get worthwhile information from the management interview. So how do you do that? Look at the skills you expect from a manager, and ask her about them.
Let’s start with 1-1s. As we’ve discussed, 1-1s are an essential tool for a manager to determine the health of her team and gather and impart valuable information. Any manager you hire should role-play a few 1-1s as part of the interview process. One of the best ways to do this is by asking the people who would report to the new manager to interview her by asking her to help with problems they have right now, or have had in the recent past. Similar to a senior engineer being asked how he might approach debugging an issue that you just resolved, a good manager — even without a full understanding of the people or projects involved — should have good instincts for questions to ask and suggested next steps that might improve matters. You can take it a step further and actually role-play other types of difficult situations, like dealing with an employee who is underperforming, or delivering a negative performance review.
Importantly, a manager must also be able to debug teams. Ask the manager to describe a time when she ran a project that was behind schedule, and what she did in that scenario. Or ask her to role-play with an employee who is thinking about quitting. Ask the manager to describe how she’s coached employees who were struggling, and helped great employees grow to new levels.
Ask her about her management philosophy. If she doesn’t have one at all, that might be a red flag. While a new manager may not be able to answer this question well, an experienced manager who has no clear philosophy is a cause for concern. What does she think the job of a manager is? How does she stay hands-on, and how does she delegate?
Depending on the seniority, you might have a candidate come in and give a presentation to a group of people. The point of this is not specifically to judge the contents of the presentation, but to see how she is at commanding a room, answering questions posed by a group, structuring her thoughts, and getting up in front of an audience. These are skills that a senior manager should possess, and if she lacks those skills, take that into consideration when you’re deciding whether to hire her. I’d caution you not to overvalue this step, however. As a pretty accomplished speaker myself, I think speaking skills are useful for certain types of leadership but not all, and there’s only so much you can learn from how well a person presents herself in front of a group. Plenty of otherwise excellent managers are uncomfortable speaking in front of strange audiences.
What about technical skills? You want to make sure that you get enough of a sense of a candidate’s technical skills that she’ll be able to establish credibility to the team she’ll be managing. In the case of someone who will need to write some code, give her an abbreviated version of your standard technical interview. For a noncoding manager, ask technical questions that you believe she should be able to address given her experience. Design and architecture questions based on the types of systems she’s built or managed are a good approach. Make sure she can discuss the tradeoffs that were made and why. You might also have her mediate a technical debate between engineers who disagree on the solution to a problem. A good technical manager will know what kinds of questions to ask that tease out the core issues and guide the group to a solid consensus.
So, those are some ideas for skills to look for. The second aspect is cultural fit. As we’ve covered, this is important throughout your team, but by far the biggest place where it can cause grief is in a management hire. Have you ever worked with a manager who didn’t understand the culture of the company or environment? Say, a person from a big company at a startup, who doesn’t seem to embrace the startup speed and informality? Or someone from a startup working at a big company, who doesn’t know how to get consensus? I’m not suggesting that big company employees can’t make great startup managers (look at me, for example), or that startup employees can’t succeed in a larger environment, but you want to understand the culture of the company around you and evaluate the manager’s ability to fit into that culture.
How do you screen for cultural fit? I discuss this more in Chapter 9, but to summarize, first you need to understand the values of the company around you. Do you have an informal structure that doesn’t lean too much on hierarchy, or is hierarchy taken very seriously? Either of those cultures will cause problems for a person who is used to the other. I’ve seen managers from big companies who treated their peers well but their underlings and other lower-level staff members like they were less than human, which caused massive friction in the startup space. I’ve also seen managers from startups who were used to being able to act on whatever they thought was most important struggle in environments that required more sign-off from other parties. This is the most obvious cultural element. If you value servant-leadership and you hire a manager who wants to dictate exact marching orders to the team, there will be a bad fit. Similarly, if you value collaboration and hire a manager who thinks that the loudest voice in any conversation should win, you will also have problems.
Culture fit is so important in managers because they shape their teams to their culture, and they hire new people based on their cultural ideas. If you hire a manager who doesn’t fit in culturally with the team she’s managing, one of two things is likely to happen: the manager will fail and you’ll have to fire her, or most of the team will quit and then you may still have to fire her. Sometimes changing the culture of an area is inevitable, and hiring in a new manager will hasten that change. You can use management changes to your advantage in this way. In fact, you see this frequently at growing startups, where they hire in more seasoned managers and executives to round out the lack of experience of the rest of the team. Sometimes this works incredibly well, and sometimes it’s a massive failure. No matter what, you will usually see attrition happening around the hire of these bearers of new and different culture, so proceed here with caution.
In his book High Output Management,1 Andy Grove talks about cultural values as one of the ways that people make decisions inside of highly complex, uncertain, or ambiguous circumstances where they value the group interest above their own. I find this insight very powerful. His observation is that most new hires act in self-interest until they get to know their colleagues, and then they move into group interest. So, if you start them in a highly complex or uncertain job, they tend to fail unless they quickly settle into the cultural norms and use cultural values to align their decision making. If you can screen for managers who naturally gravitate toward the cultural values that your company already possesses, they are more likely to make this shift quickly than managers who have very different personal beliefs.
Finally, I would be remiss if I did not point out one of the critical elements to hiring in new managers: the reference check. Do thorough reference checks for anyone you’re planning to bring on board, even if you’ve worked with that person before. Ask the references to describe the ways that the person succeeds as well as the ways she fails. Ask them if they would work with or for this person again. Ask them what they love about the person, and what drives them crazy. If you’re not doing reference checks when you hire management, you’re doing your team a massive disservice. Reference checks, even ones chosen carefully by the candidate, often reveal a lot about what you can expect to get when hiring her. Don’t leave out this crucial step.