# Gregory Patmore's Manager Readme

**Director of Consulting at Cognizant**

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# What should you learn by reading this

This document is intended as an introduction to me and the ways I like to work. I hope this will give you a sense of my expectations as well as what you can expect from me within a working relationship. I value open and honest communication within my teams highly and I see that as a two way street.

I expect my team to call me out if I'm not living up to anything mentioned here.

# My role

As a Technical Principal, my job is to make sure the team delivers on the promises made for our engagements. I do this by contributing in these ways (in no particular order):

- **Architecting Solutions** - Collaborating with our team, the client team(s), and the stakeholder to design and plan solutions to meet the target goals.
- **Upskilling/Teaching** - Workshops, Pair Programming, Tutoring. For both the client and our team. My goal for both is always to leave everyone closer to their goals then I found them.
- **Stakeholder Management**  - Ensuring that we remain aligned with our Stakeholder's goals and ensure they have continuous visibility into the work and the progress we are making.
- **Shield & Plow ** - Shield the team from distractions. Find a way to plow through any blockers we run into.

# If I do my job correctly, this is what it should feel like

- **Safe** - You should always feel safe on my team. Without this, people tend to not want to share their thoughts and ideas, and we need to leverage our collective skills and abilities to the fullest!
- **Heard & Included** - You should feel like your thoughts and ideas are just as important as mine or anyone else's. You should feel like you are able to share anything with the team, whether you think this is the best idea in the world or you aren't quite sure. Finally, you should feel like the team values your input and encourages you to provide it.
- **Empowered** - You should feel like you have everything you need to do your job, and when you didn't it was important to me and the rest of the team.  You should feel that you have some agency in regards to the work you are doing, and you have a clear support structure in place if you get in a jam.

**If you are on a team that I'm leading, and you don't feel like this, please don't hesitate to pull me aside right away so we can come up with a plan to fix it. **

# What I Value Most in a Teammate

- **Honesty** - This is most important to me. We should be able to speak freely and openly.  If you don't know how to use a tool/technique/technology, tell me. We will handle it together even if I have to tutor you myself. You won't be the first.
- **Respect** - Although I may be a manager, when it comes to working, I see everyone on the team as equals, but with different yet highly related roles to play. As such, we should treat each other as absolute equals 100% of the time. 
- **Positivity** - As a colleague of mine says 'Conflict is inevitable, but combat is optional'. Within a Contino delivery team we will be subject to a wide variety circumstances, and we won't love them all, believe me. While it's important to identify and call our issues as they arise, continuously harping on things out of our control is detrimental. 
- **Solution Driven** - We are hired to solve problems, so we should be good at that, or at least on the way. Part of that is taking ownership of the problems we face day to day. If you discover a problem or issue, while you should communicate it to the team ASAP, try to come up with an idea about how we could solve it. 
- **Proactive** - At Contino, we are all highly trained professionals with experience doing what we do. If you see something that can be improved and it's safe to do so, do it! (If it's not safe, bring it up and lets figure out how to get it done)

# My Expectations 

- **Status is a Push System**  - I like to treat everyone as the professional they are. In doing so, I expect my teammates to communicate changes in status as soon as humanly possible. Since my job as a manager is to manage, I need to know the current status of everything in as close to real time as I can. Whether you have a suspicion that a ticket won't be completed, or your arm has fallen off for some reason, the sooner you tell me about it, the more options we may have to correct or compensate for the change in circumstance. Whatever you do, just don't wait for me to ask you about it to let me know a change in status. I should never learn that a ticket didn't get completed during a retro, I should already know by then.  You should expect the same from me. 
- **Solutions and Subjective Opinions are Communicated to Clients with a Single, Unified Voice** - Driving change in organizations like our client's is a tricky business fraught with a myriad of different cultures, personalities, and alternative opinions. It's important that we do everything we can to ensure that the solutions we are proposing won't only work, but will be the right solution for our client.  The way we do that is to bring the problems back to the team, establish a consensus on the solution, and then communicate it to the client. This is probably the biggest issue I see with new Continis.
- **Participate**  - I expect everyone on my team to participate in everything they can. While we may all own different pieces of the puzzle, we have to deliver a completed puzzle by the time we're done, and it will take all of us doing our best to produce something we can all be proud of.  I want to hear all your ideas, good and bad. Sometimes a bad idea inspires a good one, let them fly. 
- **Pride in your work** - Everything we say and do, and everything we produce for our client represents our company, like an advertisement in a newspaper. Frequently, these things can outlive our relationship with a client for a time, and it's important to our clients that our work has as much shelf life as possible.  In order to do that, our diagrams, code, decks, even our emails need to be clean, understandable, well documented, and well explained. Our standards should exceed our clients' to retain a good impression of our work.
- **Collaborate** - I value the health and productivity of a team over that of any one individual. That being said, I understand that the team is made up of individuals and we need to find a way to accomplish our goals together. I expect us to make time for each other, lift each other up when we need lifting, and generally have each other's back like soldiers in a trench

# Communicating with me

- **Unless I am on-site, I am on East Coast time.**
- **During work** -  Reach out in Slack @grep
- **Outside of work** - _1._ Slack is still probably the best way to get me. _2_. If you want mobile, you're WAY better off texting me. _3._ If you want me to answer my phone make sure I have your contact in my phone. You can get me to do that by following #2.
- **Email** - Unless you're a client, if you need me to read it inside of some time frame, you should probably Slack me to let me know.
- **1:1s** - I do my best to have these at least weekly, especially during the beginning phases of engagements or for added teammates.  Most of the time they get cancelled or rescheduled because we've already spoken so much there's not much else to say. You can schedule or ask for me to schedule one whenever you want, even if it's every day. I want to know all about everyone on my team, so don't feel shy. I will do the same. One way or another, you should feel free to schedule time with me anytime Im available, and if Im not, I'll make the time.

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# Personality quirks

I would like to say Im passionate about solving problems (the bigger the better!), but Im not sure I can convey what this means in this limited textual format. Im told it's something you just have to experience.

I collect a lot of hobbies, so there's no telling what you will see me do, or around me.

Im a Principal Consultant, so I'm good at filling whatever space you need filling with words.

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