# Greg Hap Pearman's Manager Readme **Senior Director at Contino** # **Motivation for this document** 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 honest and transparent communication within my teams and I see that as a two way street. I expect to be called out if I'm not living up to anything mentioned here. # **My role** As a Senior Director - Cloud Consulting, my job is to make sure the group has a unified direction for addressing client needs for cloud and cloud based services. I do this by contributing in these ways (in no particular order): - _ **Thought Leadership** _ - Collaborating with our team, client partners and our market stakeholders to define and deliver forward thinking solutions. This also includes enabling others to drive thought leadership as I cannot be an expert in all areas. - _ **Upskilling/Coaching/Mentoring** _ - Shadowing / Pairing / Advising / Encouraging. I have gained a lot of experience and insights over my career and I feel it's part of my responsibility to share that with others as they would like. This isn't a push model but a pull one. My goal is always to leave everyone closer to their goals then I found them. - **_Strategy Management_** - Provide leadership in defining and promoting our strategy. Ensuring that we remain aligned with our groups strategy goals and ensure they have continuous visibility into the work and the progress we are making. - **_Shield & Plow_** - Shield the group from distractions. Find a way to plow through any blockers we run into. As a Career Manager, my job is to make sure my direct reports have set goals and are getting the help and direction they need to achieve those goals. I do this my contributing in these ways (in no particular order): - **_Goal Setting_** - Collaborating with my direct report on defining what goals they want to achieve and then following up with them on how they are doing in that pursuit. - **_Sounding Board_** - Provide a safe place to talk, vent and ask any question or raise any concerns. - **_Reviews_** - Depending on the current company process (or even in the case of a lack of process), provide regular cadence of review based on any and all feedback I have received. This will include any feedback that I have received either directly or through any other avenues such as company review systems. - **_Personal Improvement Plans_** - In the case of low or under achieving performance, I will help in outlining a plan to allow the direct report to improve their performance to an acceptable level if they so choose. 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 don't it is 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 do I value most?** - **_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 of circumstances and we won't love them all. While it's important to identify and call out 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 let's 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 work won't be completed, 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 work 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 joiners. - **_Actively 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. # **1:1s** - I schedule these on a weekly basis. - These are your meetings. This is your opportunity to discuss and bring up anything you feel like. Therefore, it's your agenda. If you don't come with one, I can improvise but then it becomes more my meeting and that isn't the intent. - This isn't a status or standup meeting. We don't and shouldn't focus on that stuff. We can talk about anything else though, your career, how you are feeling (happiness, stress level), sports, your weekend plans - what ever you want. # **Communicating with me** - Unless I am on-site, I am on East Coast time though I live in the Mountain timezone. - Lunch: Taking a lunch break is very important to me as it allows me to have a good break to reset. I take my lunch break at 12:00 pm MT (2:00 pm ET) each week day. - During work -  Reach out in which ever collaboration tooling we are using - Outside of work - - Text is probably the best way to get me. - If you want me to answer my phone make sure I have your contact in my phone. - Email - Unless you're a client, if you need me to read it inside of some time frame, you should probably direct message me to let me know. # **Personality quirks** - Please be respectful of everyone's time - Be on time to meetings - Come as prepared as you can - Wrap up meetings on time so no one is late to their next appointment - Don’t micromanage me. I like to be afforded the opportunity to work things out on my own and use my own creativity. If I am failing at something, let me know and I will work on improving it and also taking constructive criticism to improve it. - Lack of transparency. I understand that there may be times due this isn’t always possible (political, personal, etc…). I work best when things are direct, simple and clear. - I also prefer to work as asynchronously as possible. This makes synchronous meetings more impactful and shorter the more upfront and behind the scenes the work can be done. - I also like to have all of my meetings in the morning and then be heads down in the afternoon to get stuff done. Please try and schedule then in the morning and group with other meetings so I don’t have a bunch of small gaps that are hard to reset and focus on.