How to be a great manager

In 2002, Google decided to eliminate managers. It went terribly (as you might guess) and managers were reinstated. Still, Google remained so skeptical of management that, in 2008, they assigned a team of researchers to go figure out whether management was useful or not.

The effort was code-named Project Oxygen. The result of that research is some of the highest fidelity insight into what makes great managers great that we have ever had.

If you want to be a great engineering manager, you could do worse than to model the behaviors observed by Google’s Project Oxygen to produce the best outcomes.

Here, I will briefly introduce each behavior that Google identified to drive positive results, and then I’ll dive into the ones that deserve more explanation over a series of future articles.

What makes a great (Google) manager?

It bears mentioning that this research was done within Google, and while I believe these are universally applicable behavioral goals, they’re most likely to produce positive outcomes in work environments similar to Google.

Specifically, these are great management behaviors for organizations that embrace team autonomy and gauge team success through something vaguely resembling OKRs (final, measurable outcomes).

These are the areas in which to focus:

Be a good coach

A good coach is someone who believes in their team members' capabilities, even in things they have not yet succeeded in achieving, and unlocks that potential through the correct balance of curiosity and advice.

It would be impossible to teach you how to do this in two paragraphs, but the key point is that coaching gives the team space to find solutions on their own and thereby to grow into themselves, rather than giving advice or commands, which do nothing but over-leverage your time and attention and take agency away from your team.

Empower your team; do not micromanage

Along similar lines as the above, the Project Oxygen team found this to be so important that they gave it its own line. Don’t micromanage your team. If you feel yourself wondering at any point what a particular person is actually doing at that moment, resist the urge to find out.

Instead, make the outcome of the work crystal clear, be transparent about when you want to check in, and let the work happen.

Will this always work? No, it won’t. That’s why check-ins are useful. But if you don’t give the team space to screw up, they’ll never have the chance to learn to be better.

You might also be pleasantly surprised that everything goes off perfectly, which happens more often than not, in my experience.

Create an inclusive environment and show concern for employees’ success and well-being

Inclusiveness and belonging are very important. Innovations are not produced by teams wallowing in self-doubt. Creating an environment where everyone can bring their whole selves to work has never been more critical to success.

Take an interest in your team members’ well-being; nobody wants to work for someone who treats them like an emotionless automaton.

Your team members’ actual emotions aren’t your responsibility, but awareness of them is. Creating an environment that is resilient to people feeling their own feelings is literally what being a great manager is all about.

Be productive and results-oriented

It’s easy to say “be productive,” but what I think this finding actually means is that great managers visibly get shit done.

Being results-oriented means that your focus is on the outcome rather than the process. This is meaningful advice for two reasons:

By focusing on outcomes, you can empower the team to manage their own process, to own it, and feel responsibility for it. This gives the team room to grow.
Outcomes are generally what matters to customers, the rest of the department, and the whole company. Whether your team does “sprints” or describes work as “user stories” is irrelevant to everyone who pays you.

Be a good communicator

I interpret this point in two distinct ways:

Speak and write clearly, and
Listen and share information effectively.

I think that Project Oxygen found that #2 is what drives results for teams in general, but I strongly believe that it is hard to excel at #2 if you don’t also strive to be better at #1.

Especially in this increasingly remote work atmosphere, writing is critically important. If ever there was a time to lean into writing and learn how to be extremely good at it, it’s right now.

Support career development and discuss performance

Sometimes referred to by the odd compound verb “career pathing,” this means creating clarity for individuals on where they want to be in the future and how they can get there.

Even for senior members who are unlikely to get promoted, or outright disinterested in promotion, everyone has goals. People without goals are, quite frankly, bad for teams. Even savant principal engineers have goals; learning goals, accomplishment goals, behavioral goals, whatever.

As a manager, it’s your job to uncover those, make them plain, and help plot a course.

Nobody gets anywhere without knowing where they are. Providing timely performance feedback is part of the process of creating a career path.

Create a clear vision and strategy

This is one that I have struggled with when it feels like product management owns the vision, the customer goal, that the team is rowing toward. Still, as an engineering manager, you can create a clear engineering vision or at the very least clarify your team’s corner of it.

Demonstrate key technical skills

This one is up for broad interpretation, in my opinion. If you are a “tech lead manager,” where some big chunk of your time is spent contributing directly to projects, this essentially means that you’re good at that; the team doesn’t feel like you’re the drag on their productivity.

If you’re more of a “pure” manager, focused on the people, and you don’t contribute directly very often (or at all), then I think this means that you understand how your team’s systems work, you understand the broad architecture and how things link together, and you have a strong sense for system design.

Collaborate across the company

Especially as your company grows, teams will focus on narrower but deeper areas. The result is that teams won’t be able to accomplish meaningful things without working together.

A great manager forges connections between teams proactively and is deathly allergic to silos.

Make strong decisions

This does not mean that great managers are dictators. A strong decision is one that is backed both by data and by a holistic analysis of competing perspectives.

Entire books have been written about decision-making, so I’ll keep this brief: hear everyone out, test your understanding thoroughly, consider all available data, and synthesize your response in the clearest form possible.

A practical method is writing a single page position in a Google Doc and requesting comments from anyone with a stake in the outcome. Use a title like “DRAFT: Important Decision” so that it is obvious that you intend to change its content. Ask anyone with a stake in the outcome to add comments. Finally, resolve the comments through edits and remove the “DRAFT:” prefix from the title. The result is your decision.