Yaniv Preiss

The Greek philosopher, Archimedes, said:

Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world

Management Leverages are the tools you can use as a manager to “shape the system”, that is, the environment in which your team is working, to gain high performance. The system refers to the industry, market, stakeholders, people, processes and financial situation to name a few.

Some of them are beyond the manager’s control or influence, like the market or industry, and others are more under their influence, but definitely not under control, as it is an open system, where external factors can change rapidly and drastically (yes, the title is a clickbait).

In his excellent book High Output Management, Andy Grove talks about increasing Motivation and Skills, and defines the manager’s output:

A manager’s output = output of their organization + output of the neighboring organizations under their influence

He defines management leverage as impact produced divided by time invested, or the ability to get more done with less effort, time or money.
It’s important to note that it’s not about our output or some busywork, but rather about activities that get us closer to our goals.

Which management leverages are there

In the physical world, we have obvious control mechanisms, such as water taps, door knobs, light switches. We have air conditioning to change the temperature and humidity of our environment.

How can the manager influence their environment to achieve this “more done with less” in practice? What are these management leverages?

• 1:1 – building trust and rapport with directs, which is also the basis of performance management
• Feedback – giving positive and negative feedback to improve future behavior
• Coaching – facilitating the process of the direct gaining new applicable skills
• Delegation – growing the direct, increasing business continuity and freeing the manager for higher value tasks and responsibilities
• Communications – the way messages and plans are delivered to the directs, written content, visual, verbal and body language, repeating and repeating, influencing in 1:1 settings or with a larger audience, storytelling
• Process – what’s the expected way to carry out various tasks, e.g. incident management, support cases, development process, what KPIs to track
• Ways of working – how engineers work with PM and UX, quality measures
• Guidelines – flexible definitions or requirements, such as pairing, TDD and speaking directly to customers, without dictating frequency, fixing root causes over symptoms
• Sync meetings – gathering stakeholders on a weekly basis to align on priorities and cover tactical and strategic topics
• Staff meetings – weekly communicating with all the directs, sharing information, collecting information, making decisions
• Psychological safety – encouraging learning from each other and knowledge sharing by not punishing ideas, questions and mistakes
• Goal setting – making it clear where we objectively (numbers) want to be and by when
• Reminding the priority – it’s easy for teams and individuals to lose track of what’s most important with all the product ideas, KTLO (keeping the lights on), incidents, support requests, bugs, tech debt, improvement ideas, legal, deadlines, etc.
• Metrics – what gets measured is what gets managed, e.g. DORA metrics, number of pager duty interrupts after work, team mood, planned vs. unplanned work, generally data-driven over opinions
• Asking – curiously understanding why things are the way they are, not assuming opinions and intentions
• Skips-level 1:1s – meeting the directs’ directs every some time to create the relationship, answer questions and get a feeling of what’s going on unfiltered by their managers
• Motivation and hygiene factors – addressing intrinsic motivations of people, autonomy, mastery and purpose as well as the things that can only demotivate when absent, like a too-low salary, inflexible working hours or inadequate equipment
• Hiring – having “the right people on the bus” – culture fit, urgently needed skills vs. acquirable ones, seniority level and serve the needs for the foreseeable future
• Onboarding – making new joiners effective as soon as possible, keeping in touch before their start date and getting them up to speed with people, process, technical setup
• Org design – how are the engineers arranged for effectiveness? Conway’s law, team topologies, flat hierarchies, tribes and guilds, end-to-end cross-functional domains, teams by expertise, nano-teams, 2-pizza-teams, mega-teams. Also having the people in the right seats, meaning, who fits in which team
• Promoting – recognizing that a direct is bringing a lot of value in their current role and partially of the next role, not because of a threat to leave or a direct demand because they feel they deserve
• Strategy – a short description of the challenges and their analyses, policies regarding them and actions. E.g. for a system that has stability issues and low fault tolerance due to shared resources between all teams, gradually migrate to resources per team and start with replacing the shared database with own databases or replacing kafka with synchronous API calls
• Policies – making it easier for everyone to know what to expect from each other, e.g. core working hours, remote work, on-call duty rotation
• Tech decisions – supporting the teams, breaking ties and interfering in case they are about to make a big mistake, bringing new ideas, e.g. use serverless in case of alternating load and scalability needs
• Values – the core behavior everyone is expected to display, which is expressed in hiring, repeated in onboarding and all-hands meetings, stories that highlight them. Examples are telling the truth, customer-first, moving slowly-an-surely
• Role model – setting an example of the desired behaviors. Behaving as you expect from others. If you tell others to always be on time, but you are always late because of important reasons, people learn quickly to believe what they see, not what they hear

There are many managerial leverages, each has its own time and place, and some require constant work. The idea is that these activities require time investment, but it pays off in higher performance for a considerable period.