Management is about repeating yourself, being honest, and repeating yourself

Managing a team can feel like guiding a boulder through a maze. You don’t have the strength to quickly navigate corners and make turns. All your effort can only make small changes to the boulder’s path. As a manager, you are responsible for results, but you cannot do the work yourself.

Jumping in to solve pressing problems for your team makes you into a bottleneck. I once heard a colleague joke that, after a two-week vacation, he was happy to find his team functioning exactly the same with him gone. “It would have been bad if everything suddenly fell apart — and worse if everything suddenly got better.” Learning to manage means learning to build a team that can be successful without you.

As a leader, it can be difficult to get out of your team’s way when the task at hand is clear, such as a release-blocking code review or a bug in production. However, coaching your team to solve the problem will make them more capable and autonomous next time. Doing it yourself robs them of that opportunity and wastes your time: as a manager your time is better spent looking ahead to anticipate the next problem.

It can be even more difficult to fix chronic culture problems that don’t have a direct solution. Sometimes your team prioritizes their time incorrectly, ignores the needs of the user, or even interacts in an unhealthy way. When team members are thinking about their jobs incorrectly, a manager’s challenge is to get them to understand their problems, rather than giving them solutions. For example, if your team is repeatedly prioritizing their own feature work over doing timely code reviews for others, no single instruction or action will remedy the problem: there is no direct fix.

Talk is cheap, and also the best tool you have

When solutions require a change in culture, the only tool you have as a manager is communication. Although changes in process can nudge a team in the right direction, changes in habit must be talked about, understood, and internalized. The process is slow, and can only be accomplished over time. The best way to make sure that the right messages are communicated is to consistently repeat those messages.

The 1:1 is the best opportunity a manager has to help their team, and the biggest benefit of frequent, highly-communicative 1:1s is the opportunity to repeat important things. If you feel that you are saying the same things over and over again, remember that it is your job to say things over and over again. Get used to thinking of this as consistent messaging, not wasted time.

Sometimes repeated messages are implied rather than explicitly stated. Your message is often embedded in the things that you omit. The emphasis you put on product robustness may be hidden in your prioritization of unit tests and monitoring. Your outlook on the company’s success may be baked into how you communicate updates to the team. These omissions are often unknown unknowns, which you won’t notice unless you take the time to examine the things you are saying, and find the gaps.

Since communication is your most powerful tool, treat it with the respect it deserves. Spend time explicitly outlining important updates. If you take time to internalize your message, opportunities to repeat yourself will become obvious. Often the most important things are stated very infrequently: pay attention to the high-level goals for your team and follow a process to ensure you are visiting them regularly, in performance reviews or otherwise.

In addition to spending time crafting your message, honesty is the second ingredient to keeping consistency. It may seem obvious, but truly understanding the reasoning behind your decisions is the best way to make sure you don’t contradict yourself. Examine every announcement and piece of advice, and try to buy into it. Put yourself in the shoes of your team members and see if you believe yourself. Find where you are adding your own spin or opinion and make sure to clearly call it out. In the unfortunate case where you must communicate updates that you disagree with, spend time understanding the justification for the decision, so that you can represent the organization’s point of view in a self-consistent way.

When might you find yourself repeating this phrase?

• Your company is going through a sales dip, and for the past two weeks, you’ve discussed people’s concerns in 1-on-1s as you await a new game plan from the CEO. In a 1-on-1 today, an engineer asks a question about sales organization that you’ve remember talking in detail about the week before.
• Over the past three weeks, there have been a barrage of technical failures in the product. In your sprint retrospective, team members voice concern that they are being blamed for these problems, even though you have emphasized in the past that some failures are unavoidable, and that a culture of blamelessness and a focus on improvement are the only thing that matters.

Embracing repetition means being confident in your words. Make those words conscious and deliberate, and remember that as a manager, your words matter, and words that you repeat matter most.