Hi, welcome to the team.
It’s going to take a solid quarter to figure this place out. I understand the importance of first impressions, and I know you want to get a check in the win column, but this is a complex place full of complex humans, and complex projects. Take your time, meet everyone, go to every meeting, write things down, and ask all the questions – especially about all of those baffling acronyms and inside jokes. Even though we are a remote team, many of us try to create relationships with others, I encourage you to do the same. We do our best work as a team.
One of the working relationships we need to define is between you and I. Think of this as a user guide for Kaio. It captures what you can expect out of the average week working with me, how I like to work, my North Star principles, and some of my, uh, nuance. I intend to accelerate our working relationship with this document.
You can always message me on Slack 24 hours a day, but I'm probably going to be checking it only on working hours. I don't have Slack on my personal phone, or even notifications anywhere, and I recommend everyone to do the same. We should work while working and not otherwise. To me, work exists to enable everything that happens outside of it. I like responding quickly but bear in mind that managing a team as big as ours take some time, so if it isn't something urgent then it may take a little bit of time for me to answer. I do my best to read all the slack messages I receive, but if I'm taking too long to reply, a reminder never hurts anyone, and I even encourage it as I'm constantly putting down fires.
If I am traveling and we have any meetings scheduled, I will give you notice of said travel in advance. All our meetings still occur albeit with time zone considerations. Since most of the team is in the EST timezone, this is the timezone you will find me doing most of my work.
Learning is a big part of who I am, so I study a lot on the weekends, and it won't be uncommon to see me recommending articles or books either directly to you or throwing them on channels where everyone can check.
I try to use the best tools to help me with my daily work, and communication is a big part of being a manager, if not the biggest one. Being a COO means that you'll see me all over the place, thus you should never be worried if you see me joining a meeting I wasn't invited to.
I take vacations. You should, too. Disconnecting from work is when I do some of my best reading, catch up on my studies and spend valuable time with my family.
Humans first. I believe that happy, informed, and productive humans build a fantastic product. I optimize for humans. Other leaders will maximize for business, technology, or any different number of important facets. Ideological diversity is key to an effective team. All perspectives are relevant, and we need all these leaders... but my bias is towards building productive humans.
Communication is key to having a better life. I believe that, unfortunately, we tend to believe that making sounds with our mouth, or writing words in a specific language count as communication, but it does not. Communication happens when two or more sides are understand the same message. Having a meeting, writing a letter, writing a message on Slack, and sending a voice message are tools to accomplish communication, and although they can't ensure it happens, you can. Before I send every message I assure it:
- Gives a context
- Is clear on what I intend to communicate
- Gives a narrow range of interpretation
My rule of thumb is that the person writing the message should spend more time in writing than the one reading spends time on understanding it. I learned most of what I know about this topic through the book Never Split the Difference, needless to say that I recommend you to check it out.
Leadership comes from everywhere. Coming from an engineering background, I remain skeptical of managers even as a manager. While I believe managers are an essential part of a scaling organization, I don’t believe they have a monopoly on leadership, and I work hard to build other constructs and opportunities in our teams for non-managers to effectively lead. I highly recommend the book Extreme Ownership book for this same reason.
It is important to me that humans are treated fairly. I believe that most humans are trying to do the right thing, but unconscious bias leads them astray. I work hard to understand and address my biases because I understand their ability to create inequity.
I heavily bias towards action. Long meetings where we are endlessly debating potential directions are often valuable, but I believe “starting” is the best way to begin learning and make progress. This is not always the correct strategy. This strategy annoys those who like to debate.
I believe in the compounding awesomeness of continually fixing small things. I believe quality assurance is everyone’s responsibility and there are bugs to be fixed everywhere and all the time.
I start with an assumption of positive intent for everyone involved. Even though sometimes we may disagree on the approach, I believe that everyone is trying to achieve our common goals the best way they can. Thus, it is important that we recognize our intentions, and focus on the means that will take us there.
I firmly believe that feedback is at the core of building trust and respect in a team.
I believe in a regular feedback cycle which occurs every two quarters. Review periods are not the only time we’ll exchange feedback. This will be a recurring topic in the 1:1s. If I'm your direct manager I am going to ask you for feedback in 1:1s regularly. I am never going to stop doing this no matter how many times you say you have no feedback for me.
Disagreement is feedback and the sooner we learn how to disagree with each other efficiently, the sooner we’ll trust and respect each other more. Ideas don’t get better with an agreement.
I go to a lot of meetings.
My definition of a meeting includes an agenda and/or intended purpose, the appropriate amount of productive attendees, and a responsible party running the meeting to a schedule. If I am attending a conference, I’d prefer starting on time. If I am running a meeting, I will start that meeting on time. If it’s not clear to me why I am in a meeting, I will ask for clarification on my attendance.
Preferably the meetings will be scheduled with me through this website
If you ever have any questions for me, feel free to ask me directly on Slack, and I will answer as soon as I can.
If you send me a presentation deck a reasonable amount of time before a meeting, I will read it before the meeting and will have my questions at the ready. If I haven’t read the deck, I will tell you.
If a meeting completes its intended purpose before it’s scheduled to end, let’s give the time back to everyone. If it’s clear the intended goal won’t be achieved in the allotted time, let’s stop the meeting before time is up and determine how to finish the meeting later.
Bad things don't wait until we come back to work, and for this, on my Slack profile, you will notice that I leave my personal phone number available for the entire company.
Although it is easy to contact me during off hours, please have a good reason for doing so.
When the 1:1 feels over, and there is a remaining time I always have a couple of meaty topics to discuss. This is brainstorming, and the issues are usually front-of-mind hard topics that I am processing. It might feel like we’re shooting the shit, but we’re doing real work. When I ask you to do something that feels poorly defined you should ask me for both clarification and a call on importance. I might still be brainstorming. These questions can save everyone a lot of time.
sidenote: This manager tutorial was heavily based on Rands, his thoughts on management align incredibly well with mine.