 Welcome to the Lead Ribbius Track. I hate puns, I hate them so much, but Ernie makes me do these things. First, I'd like to set some expectations for this talk. It's called the new manager's toolkit, and in your mind you might have a picture of what a toolkit should look like. If you walk in my garage, will you see a well-organized, labeled, and predictable arrangement of tools? No, you will not. I have a collection of crap that I've accumulated through several times of need, a toolbox from my mother-in-law from a Christmas 16 years ago filled with a bunch of crap that I've collected through, let's say, 500 trips to Home Depot. So even with this modest setup though, I've been able to handle most of my household needs with these basic tools. So today I'd like to drag you through an abbreviated journey through 500 extremely painful trips to Home Depot to assemble a list of about 20 tools that you can use to solve most management problems that you're likely to encounter. My name is Brandon Hayes, and I lead and manage technical teams in Austin, Texas for a company called Affinipay. First, I'd like to dispel any illusion that I'm about to hand you detailed diagrams for an orderly, mess-free plan for your career, leading teams and engineers. I'd rather just tell the story of how one manager accumulated their set of tools, but this isn't my story, I want to tell your story. And I'm going to warn you, our story is going to take us to some dark places. That said, let's start with the happiest moment. Your manager calls you into her office and she says, you've done great work as a contributor, but you've shown a special amount of promise in leadership and collaboration. And you've excelled at the leadership opportunities that you've been given so far, and I need his open on our team for an engineering manager. And I think you'd excel at this. She's reasonably enlightened, and so she warns you, this is not a promotion. You're moving from being a senior manager to a junior contributor. Or senior contributor to a junior manager. So think hard about whether this is a track that you want to pursue. Still, it's a pretty amazing compliment, and you think about this opportunity, and you wonder if you have what it takes to do this job. You don't have any formal training. There isn't any Wil Wheaton School of Engineering Management. Okay, so it's not a promotion. It's going to be more stress, and it's going to take you out of something that you're succeeding at and put you into who knows territory. But you like people, you'd learn a lot, and it's an interesting career track. And your manager wouldn't have asked if they didn't think that you could handle it. Plus, there's one thing pressing on you that's pushing you in the direction of accepting. You think about the possible bosses they might hire instead of you, and you start to think, well, it's better than risking the future of your team on some rando you don't even know. And you could at least start with a pretty clear picture of the kind of boss you don't want to be. You've had some pretty crappy bosses in the past. So let's actually take a quick detour through the hall of crappy bosses throughout history. The first archetype is the angry police captain. This is the boss that thinks that being in charge means being the disciplinarian. You're a loose cannon, McCluskey. I've got the board of directors breathing down my neck, and you go and issue a poll request like this. I'll have your commit bit for breakfast. Turn in your mechanical keyboard, and get out of my sight. So you may or may not have actually been screamed at, but there's this entire distorted idea that being a boss means intimidating people into compliance. I had one that literally used to walk around yelling, I don't see hands on keyboards. Like, have you programmed? The second archetype, the Lumberg, solely exists to ensure compliance with company policies and protect their little fiefdom. They produce little obvious value, and to hide that, they sort of reflexively steal credit for other people's ideas. They act calm, but they're deeply insecure, making them particularly dangerous. The third bad boss is the hovering art director. This is the boss who knows or thinks they know the intricate details of your job and can't help but micromanage every keystroke to make sure it's how they would do it themselves. It only just now occurs to me that I should have just made this entire talk a classification system for bad bosses, but we've got to move on to the granddaddy of them all, bad boss alpha. The patron saint of bad bosses is definitely Frederick Taylor. I'll summarize rather than wither in comparison to the quality of historical narrative that you're going to see Nick Meansweave. In the late 1800s, Frederick Taylor worked his way up through the ranks as a manager. He quit to become a management consultant, and his first big client was Bethlehem Steel. There, he pioneered scientific management with a focus on using science to make people more productive and reduce waste. His basic working theory was that rigorously optimizing each task will maximize the output of each employee, and therefore, the company as a whole. Well, that sounds like agile, kaizen, or lean, or any modern management strategy, so what's wrong with that? Well, the problem with this is it requires a command and control management style that's designed to turn people into replaceable cogs and pits them in competition with fellow employees, leading to mistrust between employees and managers, mistrust between employees, even sabotage. It also requires strong micromanagement and discipline, leading to the modern archetypes of bad bosses that we talked about a minute ago. And when you see problems in management, I think it's usually fair to say it's a trust problem. Taylorism solves these trust problems by strict measures and systems of command and control. That's definitely one way to go. So to give you a sense for how Frederick Taylor felt about trusting employees, I'll just pull a direct quote. Now, one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he should be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his middle makeup the ox than any other type. He is so stupid that the word percentage has no meaning to him, and he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself into the habit of working in accordance with the laws of this science before he could be successful. That's your father of modern management, everybody. Dude sounds like a tough hang. So basically a person with this amount of respect for workers is responsible for the prevailing management theory of the 20th century. Cool, cool, cool, cool. So first and foremost, you know that's not going to be you. You understand the concept of servant leadership, and you throw your world's best boss mug in the trash. In fact, you're not too thrilled with the idea of being a boss at all. So let's just throw that term in the trash with the mug. So you accept this new responsibility, knowing you can be a better boss than you've had in the past. Bright-eyed and full of optimism, you show up for your first day in your new role. And you look around for the manual at work for how to do management. That's weird, it should be on the desk somewhere here. No? Well, you check Emacs help, and your man pages, and there's no man manager. That's when you realize you're kind of on your own. So you do some stuff that feels like the right next thing to do. And you start by having conversations. You have several folks you manage, but you know you need a lot more context. So you talk to everyone to pull out, put down some routes, and pull out information, and find out where the pain points are. These conversations are actually pretty fun. It's nice to get this additional context that you never had time for as a contributor. They even have specific feedback and request for things they'd like you to do as a manager. That's a good start. This must be that communication stuff they told you you were going to be so good at. So first, you find out the old manager used to do one on ones, half an hour a week seems to be the going rate, so you arrange schedules to put those on your calendar and start talking with your team. Oh hey, you just acquired the first tool in your new, very own, manager's toolbox. You even found a great template for having a first one on one. You follow it, take notes, and have pretty productive conversations. It's a good start. But you're starting to understand what people mean when they talk about maker's schedule versus manager's schedule. You're meeting folks uncovering issues for you to solve, and with all this, your calendar's starting to fill up. That's weird. I didn't put this in here, so forget you saw that. OK, so you don't worry too much about the lack of clarity. You turn your notes from your one-on-one feedback into tasks and put them in your trusty note taking tool of choice, and turn it into a rudimentary to-do list. You have this nagging sense that like 90% of the stuff on this list is wrong, irrelevant, or never going to happen, but you've got to start somewhere, right? That's not the best feeling in the world, but there's one that's nagging at you worse. You feel completely lost as to what to do next. But then you realize, well, management is a multi-thousand-year-old discipline, and teaching management's probably a thing that exists somewhere. So you ask around, and a friend recommends the manager's path by Camille Fournier, and it gives you a pretty good perspective on some of the expectations of the job. And this realization comes just in time, because now you have your first real challenge. You have some people coming in soon to interview, and you're put in charge of revamping the interview process, which up to this point has just been whiteboard gymnastics and gut feelings. It's time to make your first mark as a manager by creating a new interview process and interviewing some candidates. There isn't currently a clear or well-documented process for interviewing, so you use your new found research abilities and find some solid resources on up-to-date hiring practices. You find some stuff about using exercises, culture questions, and other ways to avoid the stereotypical nonsense about reversing binary trees. You compile all this into an interview process that you're pretty happy with, and you share it with the team before scheduling a series of interviews with candidates. And you spend a bunch of time creating resources for the interview, mock problems, good questions, and a rough outline. Time to send in the team. The interview starts, and you get to see your carefully designed plan in action. Here we go. Except wait, why is one of these engineers having the candidate reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard? Damn it! There wasn't anything in these blog posts about wrangling the team around the interview and getting everybody onto the same page. And as a result, there's contention in the post-interview decision, and the team doesn't feel comfortable with you making them an offer, even though you thought the candidate would be a great fit. Do you fight this entire team? You decide to take the L, along with the lesson that real life is a lot messier than you can capture in a medium think piece. You just have to sit there and live with this fact that a potentially great candidate sank like a rock due to an interview that you lost control of. And it takes a lot out of you. You don't even want to go to work the next day. So you lay there and struggle, but after a tough night, you decide to get back in there. You can do it, smiley guy. Please. All right, give smiley guy a hand, everybody. So after shaking that off and taking a day to improve the process for next time, you get back into your routine and realize you have another problem. Your team has no sense of progress about how they're progressing in their careers. You know your company cares about the engineering track, and you're not sure why nobody's done anything about this so far. So you ask your manager if you can help create an engineering ladder for your organization, and she gives you actually a work in progress that she started and says, knock yourself out. And you do some research, and you find this mattering of resources on the web to help build an engineering ladder, but not a lot of consistency to them. You synthesize what you can find and start compiling it all into something that makes sense for your team. And then you complete the work on a basic ladder. It takes a little time, but you step back and look at it, and you're proud of it, as you should be. You start sharing it with the team, and they like the ideas that it represents, and the sense that it's not just gut feelings, that there are concrete areas that they can improve on in order to grow in their roles as engineers. Now, after taking that beating on the interview process, it's good to have a win. Your manager notices your work on this, and after a couple of weeks points out, the great work you did on rolling this out. Hey, did that just happen? I think you might be getting the hang of this. Only, now that you're rolling out this accountability framework, one of the senior engineers that you've been talking to isn't really hitting their marks on this engineering ladder. And you start realizing there's a nasty side effect of accountability. You actually have to hold people accountable. So are these people missing the mark, or is the ladder broken? So you decide to investigate. And then on investigation, you find this engineer is exhibiting some pretty nasty behavior. They've intimidated others, made snide comments and meetings, and generally have not done the parts of senior level work that involve helping their team. Now, you have a real problem on your hands. You'd heard things about this person, but now you have a framework to hold them accountable. You wanted to be nice manager, but if somebody's acting like a jerk on your team, it's nice to know now you have the power to do something about it. So you go talk to HR. And you tell them, I'm going to get rid of this person. And they tell you, this company has made a significant investment in hiring and training this employee, and your job is to protect that investment. That didn't go as planned. And on reflection, you realize the HR person wasn't just covering their ass. This is a serious and weighty decision that you can't take lightly. Your job is to help clarify and defend the values that make the team work well together. And when you understand those, though, you do know this person is harming the team. So you talk to your manager, and you decide to put the additional effort into helping this person turn it around. That means putting together at least the basic components of a performance improvement plan. This is going to require techniques and tools that you've never had to exercise before. You look for books on the subject and realize the process starts by gathering enough data to understand the behaviors in this person that need correcting and assessing the impact that those behaviors have had on the team. Then it's time for some hard conversations. And the best manual for hard conversations I've ever seen is in Radical Candor by Ken Scott. If you haven't already read it, please do so. It's in my top five books that I believe should be mandatory for all new managers. OK, so you've got your homework, you've read crucial confrontations in Radical Candor, and you see clearly what this person needs to do differently to move from a place where they're harming the team to where they're actually benefiting the team. So you pull this person aside, give them this tough feedback, and they're surprised and they want to fight you in this process rather than engage. But you chew that glass, and you follow the principles you learned about, and they seem to understand how their behavior has hurt the team, and they want to change. So for a lot of people, a pit is a paper trail for being fired, but you actually want to invest in this person's success and turnaround. That's good. Otherwise, it is just a paper trail, and it'll never work. So you lay out expectations with total clarity and meet with them weekly and follow up. Week after week, you keep working and clarifying and trying to coach this person, but they just keep falling into the same behavior traps over and over again. They keep missing expectations. A verbal slip up here, a casual dismissal there, and their work performance actually seems to be declining. They seem to resent being held to this new standard, and they've threatened to quit several times. So you go talk to your manager and HR again, and they all agree, it's time. You really wanted to turn around, and you did your best to make it happen, but it doesn't always work. So you meet with your manager, the HR person, and this person, and lay out the situation. It's not going well. You sit in a meeting while you and your boss explain to this person that their time with you is up, and it's time for them to explore other opportunities. Well, this wasn't what you had in mind when your boss told you they thought you had leadership potential. This whole thing has been stressful and exhausting. You feel wrung out, and you really want to cry, but you're the jerk that just fired somebody. You should probably keep your complaints to yourself. My friend Lee made this for me when I said I needed a drawing for my talk, and it cheers me up when I'm down. And right now, you're feeling pretty damned down. Wow, what a transition from your first day thinking that you'd be a cool manager. You didn't want to be a boss, but whether you wanted it or not, you're the boss now, and everybody knows it. Maybe it's too late to, maybe it's not too late to fish that mug out of the trash. Okay, you survived that process, but it hardly feels like a win. In fact, now that you're in the day-to-day of managing, you kind of can't remember the last time you had a concrete win. You used to give this daily jolt of progress, but now there's no pull requests. There's no contribution graph. There's no milestones. Just the gap between where the team is and where you feel like it should be and the work of closing it. In fact, even though there's less of a sense of progress, there's more of a sense of accumulating responsibility. The number of people who need you in meetings or just to have a manager presence seems to be going up faster than you can decline the meeting invites. Now you're lucky to survive the barrage of meetings, ad hoc discussions, and Slack messages. It's very difficult to draw boundaries here because it's hard to know which parts are definitely your job and which parts you can give to someone else or just drop. And I'm not going to pretend like that's not my calendar. My friend Nick says a lot of smart stuff, and this is one of those things. We love leadership because it's so squishy and hard to figure out. But the problem is that it's so squishy and hard to figure out. And that includes the fact that from company to company, the specific responsibilities of a manager vary widely. But you can count on a few core responsibilities. One of the things that you've learned is that a big part of being a manager is to be available. If you look busy or talk through someone's one-on-ones, you're telling them they need to get support elsewhere or nowhere at all. So you set up some office hours where you're just open and available. You learn about and start practicing active listening techniques. You even clear the day with no meetings, just set for heads down work so you can start improving processes. Part of listening is taking action on the stuff that you talk about with the folks you manage. And you've graduated from that ad hoc to-do list to moving your tasks into a manager like Trello. After getting a little overwhelmed at first, you're even starting to get a handle on your Trello board. Your tasks were stacking up really fast. But you're starting to let some of the stuff just go knowing you can't do everything. Now, with all of this happening, you're actually starting to feel like you're getting out in front of your work just barely. But that's the first. OK, I don't know what to do with that. I check these, I swear. OK, so for all your attempts to get control over your work, you always have one chaos monkey in your system. And that's interpersonal conflict. And sure enough, one of your employees comes to you to complain about an interaction with a product manager where they didn't give clear enough requirements. And then it doomed the feature to late-stage rework and put the goal for their sprint in jeopardy. And now they're trying to figure out if they have to work extra hours to make up for somebody else's mistake. And now, you have a choice to make. What do you do? To commiserate, turn to slide 68. To go talk to the PM, turn to slide 71. To tell the person how to respond, turn to slide 132. Which one? Any suggestions? Nobody's got any suggestions. All right. Just kidding, it was a trap. There was no way to win. Each one of those options lures you into the swirling vortex of drama. Involving yourself in the swirling vortex always increases the swirling vortex. Do not taunt the swirling vortex of drama. So now you're stuck in this thing. And the worst part is you have no idea how it happened. So you don't know how to fix it. Is the situation terminal? Is the team just too dysfunctional to prevent this? Is there any way to figure out what happened here? I'll give you a hint. We can break that down further, though. Your job is to neutralize the swirling vortex of drama by finding the source issue and addressing it first. That didn't happen in this case. So let's dig in to find out what did happen. The vortex started when Person 1 on your team had a trust break with Person 2 on the product team. Your instinct was to jump in and talk to Person 2. It became defensive since a manager was going to them directly and asked you to talk to their manager. Now Manager 2 feels protective of Person 2 and pushes back on their behalf, pointing out that the person on your team has actually been pushing Person 2's buttons for a while, but they've been letting it slide. Now you have three problems. The problem Person 1 has with Person 2, the problem Person 2 has with Person 1, and the problem Manager 2 has with Person 1. And now, too late, you fell for the trap, becoming the detour to route around a trust issue and you've made the problem exponentially worse by creating an upward draft in the power dynamics involved. Not to mention, when team members go off to lunch and they're separate teams or beers, they just wind each other up about the other team. Now your team is frustrated, your other manager is mad, and you have a lesson to learn and actually some apologies to make. And that was your one shot at solving this problem for the rest of your career. Aw. Just kidding, this happens all the time. So you let yourself feel crappy for a minute, but you soon get another opportunity to do it soon after. So for this time, you'd like to know, how do we neutralize the vortex? Well, when you have trust, these problems become self-repairing. So you focus on finding the root cause for that broken bridge of trust. This time, you choose to help rebuild the bridge by teaching your team to find common ground and build trust on it using the skills that you learned in the book, Crucial Conversations. You get Person 1 and Person 2 together and find out where the broken trust is, help them understand their common goal and make a plan to work together toward it. You teach the person, you manage how to build trust by handing the other person that vital token the benefit of the doubt. Well, that was 100 times easier. Plus, your employee has learned important skills around conflict resolution and that they're on the same team with the other person. So they're more likely to manage future trust issues themselves. So this was a success story thanks in part to leaning on frameworks for problem solving. By now, you've learned to look for existing frameworks for the problems that you run into. But when one of those doesn't exist, you take a moment to write up some documentation on how you might address that same problem in the future in a journal or a wiki and then you share that with your management team. That way you don't solve and re-solve the same problems over and over again. You get to leave behind a framework to improve upon for next time. You fix the problem and leave the framework. Yeah, my remote went crazy. So in fact, you seem to be on a roll lately, having tough conversations when necessary, pushing back on your team to build bridges of trust, sharing your problem solving frameworks and clearing tasks off your trailer board like it's your job, which for all you know is your job because you still don't really have a clear picture of what a manager's job is. With everything you've learned in the past few months, you can't shake the feeling that you've only seen the tip of the iceberg and that that iceberg is just stalking you, waiting for you, plotting to sneak up on you, which is totally a thing icebergs do. Most people don't know that. Okay, I'm not putting these AV teams. Cindy, can you do something about this? Cindy's great, they'll iron this out. Okay, that's better. Where was I? Okay, right. So even though things are going pretty well, you have a tuned cultural sense and a fair amount of experience in software and you're starting to see patterns in people's behavior. The cynical bite to their comments about a lack of direction that disengaged 1,000 yards stare in meetings. So you start finding yourself, start actually empathizing with these feelings. There's definitely something not right, culturally speaking. And now you even start understanding what that person that you had to fire earlier was sniping about. And no matter how many meetings that you call to resolve problems, these trust issues keep coming up and getting slightly worse. Like a creek in your floorboard that seems to get louder each time you step on it. Teach kids early people. Something about this doesn't feel right. You're like, it's supposed to be good. I don't know. All your tactical wins just feel like you're pulling at the weeds but not getting the roots of them. They keep coming back tougher each time. At some point you start realizing what's going on. By the way, this is a Thanksgiving baking idea for everyone. If you wanna spend a short time at your family's house. So you realize the root of your team's problems are due to a fragmented culture and they need help. You're no quitter and it's not really in you to say, that's not my job. So you decide to strike right at the root of it. The team needs cultural change and they need to center around a shared purpose. So you sit with each person to find their frustrations and document them and analyze strengths and weaknesses for the team and set up goals to help shore up those weaknesses. But how do you know things are actually improving? How do you measure something as squishy as culture change? Well, a manager tells you about objectives and key results and you dive in to start helping to find some of those for your team. All right, and now it starts, you start feeling like you're actually making traction on stuff that matters, except wait a minute. It feels like an important boundary has just been crossed. You were doing pretty normal manager stuff a minute ago and all of a sudden you're trying to shift the culture of your entire team. You took on this opportunity to learn how to manage people, not perform cultural foundation repair. So you start to make some realizations. You've now collected the problems of the entire team in your personal workload and your brain is screaming at you, this is too much work and you go home completely wrung out every day. And you've hunted down every scrap and every resource and you've made up enough of them to realize that most of the resources you do see are just other people like you making stuff up and leaving signposts along the way. And now your brain is screaming at you, oh my God, there's no track to get better at this. You're already learning as fast as you can but these challenges just come up faster than your fastest pace of learning. And then in a one-on-one you get some tough feedback that's hard to hear. You don't make me feel heard. I don't feel like you're a very good listener. And it's not just your fedora but that's definitely not helping. Maybe leave that at home next time. Your team is trying to tell you in their own way that they don't feel listened to, that the changes that they want aren't happening fast enough and are even headed in the wrong direction. You took this job because you were great with people and now everybody seems to be upset with you at once. And now your brain is screaming, I was supposed to be good at this and you feel like your manager might have been mistaken in what she thought she saw in you. In fact, she hasn't said it but you sense that she partially holds you responsible for the palpable decline in morale that's happened since you started trying to change things for the better here. At this point, the temptation to quit or ask for a return to day-to-day coding is pretty high because a nice merge conflict or fighting a bug deep in your framework suddenly sounds pretty nice in comparison to this. But you don't think of yourself as a quitter. When things get tough, you grit your teeth and you push forward. But why does it feel like this whole thing is sort of conspiring to make you feel bad? Okay, there's so much more to this video but we gotta move on. Okay, you decide you just need a plan so you pause and dig deep and cancel a couple of meetings and do a little mini retrospective on your current situation and use the start-stop-continue method to make a plan to move forward. Hey, you got knocked down again but you toughed it out and you survived the worst of it. Plan in hand, you gaze at the horizon, grim determination on your face. It's not the most satisfying place to be but it's better than having given up, right? Please, somebody tell me it's better than having given up. These are back, Cindy. I don't know if Searle's is somewhere punking me. Jen, somebody's doing this, okay. Okay, so you start putting this cultural change plan into action and amazingly the plan is actually working and the team is starting to find their footing culturally. You manage to move things forward in a meaningful way and the odds though were stacked against you and you managed to overcome them. You've navigated this whole process though through grit and sheer determination. That said, folks are starting to notice your good work and there are some outward signs of success. That success comes at a cost though and internally you're starting to feel a little burned. Okay, I don't mean to be rude but I'm trying to present a pretty serious topic here. Okay, so back to our talk. The only way you can relax is by playing video games, getting drunk or watching YouTube or watching YouTubers get drunk and play video games and in fact you've combined all of these in every conceivable way just to try to get enough sleep to wake up and do this all again the next day. But the end result of all this escapism is like putting aloe on a sunburn. It relieves the pain for a moment but you keep going out into the sun every day. Determination carried you through the job crisis but you still have to face yourself. Distractions aren't cutting it anymore. Sunday nights you're sick to your stomach about the upcoming week. The only thing pulling you in is the fact that you're desperately needed. Everyone's depending on you and you, you're not saying very nice things about yourself at this point. You run over all the things you've gotta do for work before you go to sleep if you sleep at all. You haven't reached out to that candidate because you still haven't talked to the team about that interview that didn't go well because you haven't designed a better interview process because your team told you they hate interviewing. You still haven't planned the next team off-site because you can't find something the entire team will want to do together and half the team thinks off-sites are stupid anyway. The list of stuff you're supposed to do is getting much taller than you can see over. On Monday mornings you sit in your car staring your building or you sit in your bathrobe staring at your computer before you open it up in your office and you have no idea why. You hope your coworkers don't notice but you think they do. You're ready to crack. You know you're not doing enough. But wait a minute, you're doing all you can. So that means you must not be enough. Your best is not good enough because you are not enough. How do you fix yourself and somehow be more than you are? You've already tried to pretend and that just makes things worse. If you could just hold on a little longer you could... All right, these aren't funny anymore. This is actually upsetting. What is going on? What? Okay, I think I've seen this. I know what this is. This whole time it's been you. This is total internal shutdown. You've been ignoring you. This is not good. You finally hit the breaking point. You can't even seem to get yourself out of the house to go to work. You were so busy focusing on making outcomes and taking care of other people with your grit and heroics that you neglected to even check in with yourself. You can't function normally. You're not sleeping. You're always distracted. Your physical health is suffering. You've been trying to warn you all this time but you haven't been listening and now you're in agony. You talk to your friends and loved ones and they tell you, if your job is making you this miserable just quit. But remember choosing this? Remember wanting this? Thinking you could do it that you should do it? What were your reasons? Helping the team, learning, trying an interesting career track? Can you even fix this? Or is it too late? But if you did quit then what? Should you give up and go back to contribution? Find a different job somewhere else as a manager? But you know you're not a quitter. So why can't you seem to turn this around? Were you just not meant for this? You can't see through the fog anymore. You don't know why but a friend told you about this video in this book by Brene Brown about vulnerability. You decided to check it out and realized that a big missing piece for you is having the courage to admit you can't do all these things perfectly all the time. So you make a decision. Something that hadn't occurred to you in all of this was to ask your manager for help. Maybe it's because you wanted her to feel good about trusting you with this role and you didn't want to let her down. But at this point, you're about to quit anyway. So what do you have to lose? You talk to your boss and you didn't mean to be the person that sits and cries in your manager's office but here you are. She tells you to take a few days off and just relax a little bit. It'll be okay to step away. And while you're away, the knot inside you starts to unravel a little bit and you can think a little more clearly. And you realize in that time that you've always been afraid to admit that you were underwater to your coworkers or even ask for any kind of help because of this image you've had in your mind of the perfect manager who can do anything. But when you get back, you talk to your manager to go through your responsibilities to see what you can drop. You work with your peers and team to try to get some stuff off your plate so you can focus on stuff that really matters and open up some time. One of the older ones of these delegation frameworks is from Seven Habits and it works well enough. In looking for resources about leadership, you find the Reboot podcast. It's about being your true authentic self and leading from the heart. And then you start to realize it's okay to be a flawed person with limits and still lead others. And your friends have been telling you for months to see a therapist, but it just seems so, I don't know, weird or scary for some reason. It's a pain in the ass and you didn't wanna be one of those therapy people, but it seems a little less threatening now. You're open to it. So it takes a couple of tries to find the right person for you, which is frustrating, but you do click with one of them. Avdi Grim gave a talk a few days ago at Keep Ruby Weird that resonated with me and he brought up the point that programmers are obsessed with this idea of being brains in jars, completely focusing on our brains at the expense of our bodies. But our bodies have so much to tell us. They're the part of us that always lives in the moment. When they're tired, they're tired. When they're hungry, they're hungry. They're not fixated on some future state the way that our brains do. Your therapist knows this and starts working with you, starting with some simple breathing exercises. This is an animation a guy named Nathan Pyle made to help. So try it, inhale, exhale. You're not going anywhere, so you have to play along. If it feels awkward, that's okay. Just focus on the sensation of it. Inhale, feel your rib cage expand in all directions as you inhale and exhale. Inhale, feel your rib cage expand to the front and back and you can tilt your head back a little bit if you want. And as you exhale, let your shoulders relax just a little bit. If you're into the rhythm, you can let your eyes close. Inhale, exhale, one more. Okay, that was one minute. Imagine doing that just a couple minutes a day, a couple times a day. It's not about tracking or your quantified self. It's about listening to what your body wants. Is it sleepy? Is it thirsty? Is it warm right now in this room? How does the air feel on your skin? What's something you could do to show your body some love? In these moments, you start finding yourself more able to cope. You start wondering, what if your mind and body were in harmony and you start taking small steps toward moving around, working out, even meditating? And you're starting to be able to see over this mountain of challenges. They haven't changed, but you find yourself a little more able to cope. You're making time to teach your team to self-manage, creating tools, removing roadblocks in an upward spiral that makes you less desperately needed, but more effective. For well-meaning people, much of a sense of what we think a manager should be is defined in opposition of this Taylorist approach or our bad bosses in the past. But it's not a moral imperative that you be a certain kind of manager that somehow you're magically able to solve all the problems for all the people, all the time. It is your job to be available and listen to your team, to coach and support your folks, to tell the story of why their work matters both to them and to the business. Naturally, there's more to the job than this, but if you're doing these things, you're probably on the right track. You had no idea that so much of this was going to be about working on yourself. It's important work for anyone, but it's especially important for people who decide to take responsibility for others. Yeah, it's a privilege to be able to do this, to hire a therapist, and to be able to take time off. So use that privilege to make some space to help others. And in fact, that is the moral imperative of this job. Bad management is poisoning our industry. It's lowering the quality of life for everyone, muddying the definition of what managers are for, and worse, it's driving out the voices that we need most in this community by reinforcing existing biases instead of examining them and breaking them down. That sounds like a lot, but it's not your job to fix this industry. It's your job to be part of the solution, which is way less stressful. This wasn't my story. This was yours. If you manage people, I hope it didn't bring up old wounds too badly. If they haven't, I hope it doesn't scare you off. This industry needs managers like you, just as you are, and perfect, uncertain, struggling, failing, and learning. My manager's story actually started when Mike Moore took me to lunch one day and told me he was done running the Utah Valley Meetup and asked if I would take over organizing. I'd never really thought of myself as somebody who could do community stuff like that, but the fact that he saw that in me made me realize things about myself that I didn't know. A lot of you might know Jovial Mike, by the way, but I actually knew him as Disappointed Pull Request Mike, and that's the last and most important tool in the toolbox. It's gratitude. I suggest writing down notes of gratitude. You can keep them to yourself or share them with other people, but taking that moment will help recenter you in ways that not much else can. The process has been painful, but it's stripped away some protections that were keeping you from being your authentic self. The true, vulnerable, authentic self that you are is enough to do this job. You are enough, just as you are. The miracle of life is that whatever state you're currently in, you get to take another swing at it with this knowledge. We need you. Take care of yourself. Take care of your fellow human beings. Leave this industry a little better than you found it. Thanks to you for listening. Thanks to Affinitay for flying me out to join you all.