# Colin Chauvet's Manager Readme

**Engineering Manager at Atlassian**

# What is this?

- Use this document as an intro to my mind and how I like to operate.
- This document is primarily targeted at my direct reports, but could hopefully be useful to anyone interacting with me.
- Hold me accountable to it, please!

# My job

- Attract, retain and grow world-class talent (that's you!)
- Set the right context for you to be successful
- Remove any blocker from your way (I try to follow the [servant leadership management philosophy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership))

# Your job

- If you are an individual contributor, your role is to ship great software to our customers (internal or external)
- If you are a Team Lead, your role is to 
  - build a team that is capable of shipping great software
  - make yourself redundant **.**  
    - This is the crown jewel of success for your role: if your team is healthy and balanced enough that you can go on a 3-month vacations and no one notices, you won.

- **You work for Atlassian, not for me. **
  - Optimise for Atlassian. If you see us optimising for the team to the detriment of the bigger picture,  **I expect you to call it out**.
  - Always ask yourself: are we working on the highest priority item? If not, why not?

# What I value

- Humility
- "Be the change you seek" attitude
- Seek first to understand
- Professionalism
  - Sometimes, you won't agree with some decisions that I/my manager/Atlassian make. I expect you to trust me, and " **disagree and commit**"

# What would disappoint me

- Not honouring your commitments.
  - If you tell me that you are going to do something, I expect that:
    - you won't forget about it. You should have your own system to keep track of what you have to do (GTD, to-do list etc...). If you are struggling with that, come and chat to me about it and I'll help you figure out a system that works for you.
    -  you will let me know if the "thing" is taking longer than anticipated
    - you will let me know when the "thing" is done (if applicable)

- Doing work without understanding the “Why are we doing it & Why now?”
  - Being busy is not a desired outcome.
  - Don’t assume that people who talk with confidence are necessarily right. Check and check again your assumptions with multiple people.

- Going against our "Be The Change You Seek" value,  i.e. complaining about something without attempting to fix it.
- Falling into the "us vs them" attitude, or "badmouthing" another team or colleague.

# Work / life balance

- I am big on work / life balance. 
- I'll never ask you to work overtime / during weekends (barring the extremely rare exceptions of high severity incidents, or on-call rotations)
- Unless I clearly indicate it's an emergency, if I reach out to you via IM or email outside of those hours, please ignore me until next day (I am also working on doing that less)

# Want to talk?

- I am in a lot of meetings
  - None of them more important than spending time talking with you if you want to talk with me
  - Feel entirely free to put time on my calendar to talk whenever you want
    - Let me know via IM or email and I’ll reschedule some meetings to make room for ours.

- On 1:1s
  - I have weekly, 1 hour long 1-1 with all my direct reports
    - I commit to never cancelling those meetings
      - On rare occasions, I might have to reschedule them, but I'll always check with you first.

    - You own the agenda for those meetings
      - please come prepared
      - I may also have some things I want to talk about (to help you or the team)

    - 1:1s are not for status updates
      - Hopefully we talk about [things you wouldn’t otherwise bring up in a group setting](https://medium.com/@mrabkin/the-art-of-the-awkward-1-1-f4e1dcbd1c5c). I want our 1:1 to be a safe place; if this isn’t the case  **please tell my boss**.

  - I have regular "skip level" meetings with people reporting to my direct reports. The goal of those is  

    - for us to get to know each other
    - to give them an opportunity to ask me questions about anything (e.g. long term roadmap etc...)
    - for me to stay connected with what the projects that the team is working on, to find ways I can help.

# My personality quirks

- I have a tendency to want to be right. I am working on it, and I think I am getting better, but I sometimes get stuck in conversations I should let go of.
- I have a french accent! Sometimes you won't understand what I am saying. It's always ok to ask me to repeat something, I won't get offended.
- I hate it when people have their laptops open during meetings, because I find it disrespectful to the person who is talking. I have a strict "no laptop policy" in all my meetings (except for the note taker).  
- I struggle to work well with people who lack humility

# Feedback

- I love feedback: please give me a lot of it (especially things you think I can do better)  
- I will also give you a lot of feedback. This is because I want you to grow, never take any piece of feedback personnally.