# Matthew Sullivan's Manager Readme **Engineering Manager at Thinkific Labs, Inc** # As Your Manager **TL;DR** As your manager, my primary focus is to facilitate your career growth while providing context to our work. I will give reasoning to the decisions that I make and utilize past experiences for context. I am procedural and love to iterate until an optimal work-flow is in place. My primary goal is to empower you to do the best job you can while providing mentorship during your daily work and our bi-weekly one-on-one meetings. I am here to unblock you, ensure that you are happy, answer any questions you have, and learn from you! # Intro You may call me Matthew or Matt--whichever you prefer. I tend to be very organized and strive for efficiency in day-to-day procedures. I have a past in teaching and leadership and have shared successes with development teams on large-scale production applications. From this, I have learned that being an effective leader means being open with communication, providing feedback, and receiving feedback. I have also been a developer myself and contributed to applications in the Financial, Agricultural, Gaming, and E-Commerce sectors over the past 10 years. Ask me about some of the apps I have worked on (both professionally and for fun). I'd love to hear what you've been up to as well. On a final note, I am a distributed member of Thinkific and reside within the Eastern time zone (Toronto, Ontario). I plan to work 10:00 am - 6:00 pm (EDT or EST), but I will make sure to be at all relevant meetings and be flexible to be there for you when needed! If there are after-hour remote-friendly work outings, I will do my best to be there too! # Leadership Style I follow a people-first mindset. I am here to serve you and your needs to empower you to do your best work while ensuring you are supported every day. I will relate past experiences to situations, logically think through problems, and coach when needed. I prefer to have reasoning supporting the decisions I make and expect that same from you.  I am here to: • Answer questions you have about the work you are doing • Ensure the work you are doing aligns with your career goals and helps you accomplish them • Mentor the team on best practices • Provide context to decisions and clarify the reasoning • Make sure that feedback is taking into account and utilized in future endeavours I may not have an answer to your questions right away, but rest assured that I will seek out a solution for you (whether it be from me or someone else). Sometimes, I may need to dig into the codebase to understand your perspective better or take a coffee break to ponder. If you feel I am asking you a lot of questions, please know that it is to understand your question's context and get a background on what you have already tried. Mainly, I don't micromanage and trust that you are on track with your work or will say otherwise. # Communication I believe in open dialogue, where what is on your mind is said. I encourage you to be transparent about how you feel and to passionately debate. You can expect the same from me. Let's use Slack, and video meetings for discussions, or, if I'm in Vancouver, let's meet in person. Reach out often--ask questions, give critiques, and feedback as it comes up. Holding back will not only make it difficult to have a conversation, but it is also unhealthy. If you feel that you are having trouble reaching out and are keeping things in, please let me know, as this is a sign that our communication techniques need to be improved. Together, we will fix that and find the most comfortable way to communicate! # Feedback I encourage you to provide feedback as often as you can and are comfortable giving. Our one-on-ones will be a great time to provide feedback, but let's not wait for them to say how we feel. The end goal is to iterate and improve our processes to maintain a healthy and mature team.  As a side note, I prefer unfavourable feedback to be given privately and not within the public realm unless it's during retrospectives, where the input will benefit the entire team. For our one-on-ones to be effective, I suggest that: • The conductor of the meeting be you. I am here to listen, provide feedback, mentorship, and context • Notes be taken before our meeting. Take notes throughout the week. Whether that be in Lattice or somewhere else. I encourage you to put them into Lattice at least a few hours before our scheduled one-on-one • Utilize this meeting time as a way to tell me what's going on and how you are feeling. We will discuss the wins of the previous weeks as well as areas that didn't go so well • Be transparent and utilize our one-on-ones as a way to plan and enhance our working relationship # Pet Peeves I am laid back and approachable. However, for clarity, there are a few behaviour traits that bother me: • Disrespect towards others • Unnecessary drama • Consistently being late or ill-prepared • Committing and then not following through • Not communicating upwards or downwards • Keeping key information to yourself These traits should go without saying, but have proven to impact teams negatively and will not be tolerated. # Frameworks Some of the frameworks and concepts I follow are: • Radical Candor • Extreme Ownership • Servant Leadership • KISS (keep it stupid simple) # Fun Facts Here are various fun facts about me (there are more, but let's let them come up in conversation): • Before making a career switch, I was an Abatement Technician (a fancy title for removing hazardous waste such as Asbestos, Mold and Lead)  • I have not seen a Star Wars or Harry Potter movie in its entirety  • For over 15 years, I would grow my hair to donate it to people with Cancer • I'm a big fan of spicy food. During the summer, I grow peppers such as Carolina Reapers (1.5M+ Scovilles) to make Hot Salsa  • Carbonated water \> water  • I love playing and listening to music (especially Bluegrass)