Today and tomor­row I’ll be post­ing a few links I’ve saved on man­ag­ing: on being a man­ager, deal­ing with man­agers, and how to be a bet­ter one.

To begin, a six-part series from Rands in Repose—Decon­struct­ing Managers.

There Is Evil, Your Manager’s Job

I trust that, like me, you’re an opti­mist and you believe that every­one in your com­pany is busily work­ing on what­ever they do. I also believe the fact that you don’t under­stand what they do auto­mat­i­cally biases you. You believe that because you under­stand your job inti­mately, it is more impor­tant than any­one else’s.

In your head, you are king. It’s clear what you do; it’s clear what is expected of you. There is no per­son who rules you bet­ter than your­self because you know exactly what you’re about. Any­one out­side of your head is a mys­tery because they are not you.

Give Him Some­thing to Say, Where Does Your Man­ager Come From?

Your man­ager is your face to the rest of the orga­ni­za­tion. Right this sec­ond, some­one you don’t know is say­ing some­thing great about you because you took five min­utes to pitch your boss on your work. Your man­ager did that. You gave him some­thing to say.

Trans­form­ing Glar­ing Defi­cien­cies, How Are They Com­pen­sat­ing For Their Blind Spots?

Each man­ager, good or bad, is going to have a glar­ing defi­ciency. […] The ques­tion is, does he rec­og­nize they have a blind spot? […]

A manager’s job is to take what skills they have, the ones that got them pro­moted, and fig­ure out how to make them scale. They do this by build­ing a team that accen­tu­ates their strengths and, more impor­tantly, rein­forces where they are weak.

How Much Action Per Deci­sion?, How Does Your Man­ager Talk To You?

Yes, you want to fig­ure out how not be a bot­tle­neck in your orga­ni­za­tion and, yes, you want to fig­ure out how to scale, but you also want to con­tinue to get your hands dirty. […]

Pure del­e­ga­tors are slowly becom­ing irrel­e­vant to their orga­ni­za­tion. The folks who work for pure del­e­ga­tors don’t rely on him for their work because they know they can’t depend on him for action.

Inces­santly Demon­strat­ing Your Hunger

The organization’s view of your man­ager is their view of you.

They Might Be Evil, What Hap­pens When They Lose Their Shit?

Your man­ager is not a man­ager until they’ve par­tic­i­pated in a lay­off. […] He hasn’t truly rep­re­sented the com­pany until he actively par­tic­i­pates in the con­struc­tive decon­struc­tion of an orga­ni­za­tion. There is no more pure a panic than a lay­off and you want to see who your man­ager will become because it’s often the first time he sees the orga­ni­za­tion is big­ger than the people.

The above quotes are rel­e­vant to many more areas of life than man­agers and man­ag­ing a workplace.