# Brian Cheung's Manager Readme **Manager of Software Engineering at Cofense** # Motivation for this document One of the most fundamental responsibilities I have as a manager is to know my people.  To build effective and strong relationships involves building trust, nurturing respect, and finding common ground.  I've created my Manager Readme to provide a starting point for creating great relationships with my direct reports.  My hope is that, by reading this, you'll understand more about who I am as a person and a manager, how my background and experiences shape my behaviors, and both what you can expect from me as a manager and what I will expect of my teams. # My role As a manager, my top two priorities are retention and results.  Everything that I do, every metric that I measure, every goal that I create, rolls up into one of those buckets.  In pursuit of those priorities, I establish goals around getting to know my teams, talking about performance, pushing work down through delegation, and asking for more through coaching and mentorship.  Prior to being a manager, I was a developer, a marketer, a meeting planner, and sociologist, and I rely on all of those experiences and skills both to help my teams perform at their best and to help my directs achieve their personal and professional goals. # What do I value most? Above all, I value my relationships with my teams.  I believe people are the most important part of any successful organization and support this through consistently asking about what teams or team members need, identifying career goals and providing coaching to achieve them. In the [DISC model of behavior](https://discpersonalitytesting.com/blog/what-is-the-disc-model/), I am a high D and a high I (5-5-2-4), which means I am assertive/outgoing and both people- and task-focused.  What this means is that you can expect me to be direct in my communication; I don't use a lot of subtext.  I also have pretty thick skin and appreciate direct feedback on my behaviors.  My biggest weakness is a blind spot for when I am taking on too much; the fallout from this is a degraded capacity to support my teams resulting from over-extending myself (ironically in an attempt to support my teams). # My Expectations I expect my teams/direct reports to have good knowledge of themselves and the confidence and trust to speak up.  If you need my time, ask for it!  To the extent that our systems allow, I will be 100% transparent with my calendar; my colleagues not only see when I am free or busy, but _what_ I am doing as well so everyone can make educated decisions about when to schedule meetings or what could potentially be rescheduled. Confidence and trust also means knowing when something has gone wrong, knowing that mistakes are both encouraged and celebrated, and knowing that there is safety in bringing them up.  We only ever learn by making mistakes, and if everything goes exactly to plan every time, we aren't pushing ourselves hard enough.   # What You Can Expect From Me As your manager, I am committed to your personal and professional success and the success of the team.  In pursuit of these goals, I promise to be as transparent as possible about what is happening in the organization, bridging the gap between you and the organization above me.  I will have weekly staff meetings in which I share what I'm hearing from above and you will have an opportunity to share your recent accomplishments, needs for collaboration, and what might be on your radar.  I will have weekly one-on-ones with you to build and support our relationship.  I will be responsive and attuned to your needs and the needs of the team, advocating for whatever it takes to make you successful. How do I define success?  At a team level, success for me is making progress toward solving the problems we are challenged to solve.  This includes trying things that don't turn out the way we expected -- having things go wrong is not mutually exclusive from having things be successful.  So long as we are learning and improving, we're still moving towards solving problems.  At an individual level, I define success as continued growth, development, and challenge.  Do we have a clear understanding of what you want to be doing and goals to support that?  Are you challenging yourself either through your day-to-day work or through the coaching and goals we've laid out?  I think the worst thing a manager can do for a direct report is to accept stagnation.  We should always be challenging ourselves, growing and learning. # One-on-Ones One-on-ones (O3s) are my most valued meetings.  They are rare opportunities for me to meet with my direct reports in a private and isolated setting and, for me, are the most important tool for building the effective relationships I've written about throughout this document. I prefer to have 30-minute O3s with my direct reports every week.  The first ten minutes are for you to talk about whatever is on your mind: work, family, hobbies, sports, video games, whatever you want to talk about.  I've had conversations about farming, carpentry, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, animal husbandry, hunting, and myriad other topics with my directs, and appreciate every single one of them.  The second ten minutes are for me to talk about whatever I need to: this could be work stuff, updates on things that I think might impact you, HR stuff, etc.  The final ten minutes are for us to look to the future.  This could be coaching and mentorship, talking about career goals, training and development opportunities, anything that helps move your career in the direction you want. # Personality quirks I love hearing problems paired with your recommendations for solving them.  I have an enormous amount of trust and respect for my teams and rely on you to not only identify areas of improvement but also _how_ to improve.  If you think there are things that can be done better, absolutely let me know, and let me know what you think needs to happen. There are numerous ways to reach me and these are, generally, the guidelines I recommend for choosing a medium: - Slack or office chat for conversational topics that don't require any persistence - Email for sharing critical information or for anything requiring a decision - Voice (Zoom, Slack Huddle, Microsoft Teams [in case IT is reading this]) for anything important.  This includes O3s, actually _making_ decisions, and sharing feedback_._ # Where to focus on your first 90 days? In my first 30 days, I want to focus on getting to know you and everyone else on the team.  I'd love to know about your passions and interests, what led you to your current role, what you think is going well in the team/organization and what could be improved, and anything else that you think is important.  I'll sit in on any team meetings or ceremonies the that the teams are open to me observing to further educate myself on how things are currently being done.  I might ask you about how things have been done in the past, what's changed, and whether the changes were net positive or negative. That first month is all about establishing relationships, building trust, and figuring out how we best communicate and interact with each other. Between 30-60 days after I start on a new team, I like to add in another lens that focuses on the team and the organization, broadening my perspective from individual team members.  What are the challenges we're facing?  What recent successes and failures can we celebrate?  Who else in the organization is key for forming relationships with? After 60 days, and assuming there are solid relationships with the team and a good understanding of our landscape, I like to start gathering thoughts and recommendations on what my priorities should be and work on developing goals for myself and my direct reports.  From my experience, two months should be enough time to get up to speed and familiar with the teams, how they work, and what they need, enough information to start identifying what I should focus on next and how I'll tackle those problems.