# David Kormushoff's Manager Readme

**Director of Platform Engineering at Koho**

# My role

If I'm doing my job right, you feel unblocked, excited about the future and have no restraint in reaching out for help, calling out my mistakes or wanting to share a personal story. 

# What do I value most?

**Honesty**. If I'm missing something, I want to know and I'll work to learn what I don't yet understand. If you think I'm dead wrong about something, tell me, you're probably right. If I said something that rubbed you the wrong way, while I promise it wasn't intended, I hope you'll trust me enough to let me know and I'll be better next time.

**Humility. ** I've been lucky in my career to work with people smarter than myself. The smartest of them understood when to flex their knowledge and when to step back and listen. Having the right answer isn't always the most important thing in my experience.

**Introspection. ** It's one thing to succeed/fail at what you're doing, it's an entirely different challenge to understand why and to grow from that understanding.

**Growth. ** A favorite quote of mine is "If you're not growing, you're dying". I live with imposter syndrome as a matter of life, and that's OK! I love it because it forces me to work on my problem areas and enables me to be receptive to criticism. My favorite book of all time is "Peak" which is all about growth mindsets and how anyone can become amazing at anything, given the correct path forward (I have multiple copies at my desk which I'd love to give you if you're interested).

# My Expectations

My primary expectation of any direct is they tell me when things are broken. Be that for your daily life, your career trajectory, your team or even (if you're comfortable) your personal life. As your manager I want to make sure you are happy with where your career is going and that you feel supported as a human being. That said, I can only be as helpful as you allow me to be. When things are great, I need to know. When things are broken, I **DEFINITELY** need to know. When you're happy, it makes me happy. When you're sad, I want to be someone you can rely on and trust to be there for you as a person. I do my best to be a mind reader, but it's not exactly a science, so your help is appreciated greatly.

As far as working hours and other expectations:

- You're an adult and you're here because the company/I trust you. PTO is a corporate formality to me, we'll figure it out so please don't stress about hours

- Work when your brain, schedule works. Don't shoehorn your way of working into an arbitrarily agreed-upon 9-5 5/7 schedule. We can figure the rest out

- Put time on my calendar **whenever ** you need it. Seriously! If my calendar looks like it can't accommodate you, it's wrong. You are always my #1 priority. I seriously cannot stress this enough. Nothing is more important to me than my team.

- Communicate with your team. I firmly believe any work setup "works" as long as people are on the same page. Let people know when you're going to be around or not and everything is much simpler.

# 1:1s

These are for you. They can be as long/short and frequent/infrequent as you want. Baseline for me is every two weeks at the very least and weekly as a norm. If you want to switch up cadence, please let me know! I will often come with topics but these are always secondary to what you want to discuss. So, if I'm taking up too much time  **please** stop me!

# Personality quirks

- I work outside normal work hours a lot because that's when my mind is clearest. Never EVER feel that because I'm working, you're expected to or that my 9 PM slack message needs a response! It can wait till the morning.

- I have a lot of thoughts that can sound certain or definitive, that is by no means the case. I usually assume someone else has a better answer. **Please challenge me!**

- I'm the champion of "dumb" ideas. I probably have 20,000 terrible ideas a day. Hearing your great ideas energizes me, so bring it on.

- I'm a sponge for other people's interests. I get energized by people's interests in and out of work. If there's something that excites you, I want to hear about it!

- I love to "connect the dots" between seemingly unrelated things.