# Anton Belonovich's Manager Readme

**Engineering Manager at Optimax**

# Why?

To describe my personal management style, philosophy, and expectations. I wrote it for my colleagues, though anyone is free to read it - or even provide feedback on it! Please treat it as a reference and promise on how I will conduct myself as a manager, and what I expect from you.

I urge you to hold me accountable to my promises, and to call out anything that might be missing from this document. Without your guidance, I will not be able to improve as a manager.

This document may change over time because we all change.

# My role

To assist teams and individuals in becoming better.

To assist teams to deliver valuable results.

To make individuals fulfilled at work.

# What do I think about productivity

Anything that moves towards the goal is productive. Everything else is not.

I am inspired by [Theory of constraints](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_constraints), a management paradigm that focuses on improving the overall organization productivity by repeatedly finding and removing bottlenecks.

Productivity should be sustainable over time. A system with clear principles and rules is a key for sustainability.

I make a bet on long-term productivity improvements. Although sometimes there are short-term victories that worth breaking the rules.

Even a failure can be productive - if we can learn from it and take an action to make our organization stronger.

# Principles

Principles are useful mental models. They help to make decisions and to share a mindset among coworkers. My principles are listed in the [mindmap](https://mm.tt/1213463929?t=Q3oI3TbQD8).

# Which person do I see as productive

- **Contributes to the organization goals.**  Understands organization goals, contributes to them and encourage others to contribute.

- **Self-disciplined.**  Knows how to be productive, has own productivity system.
- **Has growth mindset.**  Willing to develop onself and to become better.
- **Optimist.**  I believe that optimistic attitude is not something innate and can be learned.
- **Cooperative.** Knows how to work with other people effectively. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
- **Responsible.**  Honors own commitments and duties.
- **Autonomous.**  Doesn't need constant guidance and micromanagement. But asks for help when needed.
- **Honest.**  Can assess the situation and has courage to honestly tell if it's wrong. Can give and take a feedback.
- **Self-respectful.**  Carries oneself with dignity. Knows own strengths.
- **Has domain knowledge.**  Understands rules of business.
- **Expert. ** Has a deep knowledge of his/her area of expertise **.**

# How to work with me

**Ask you team lead before coming to me. ** Organization is a hierarchy. If you are not reporting to me directly, I expect you to ask your team lead before coming to me. Give him/her a chance to help you - it's their job and they most likely know the context better than me.

**How to ask me a question?** Ask me about anything. Send it to me over Slack, Skype or Telegram. Sometimes I can not react immediately, especially in non-working hours. But I will answer you later or forward you to a person who may know the answer.

**How to tell me about a problem?**  I seek for problems to solve. And I value my and your time. So the best way to trigger me is to formulate a problem clearly, send it to me over Slack, Skype or Telegram. Then tell me when do you prefer to discuss it and I will schedule our conversation in a calendar. As I value scientific approach to reality, I will also ask you to prove the problem existence with data or to collect this data.

**How to provide a feedback?**  I believe that honest feedback is crucial for trust and improvement. And I appreciate if you help me to improve. If you feel that I misbehave, describe what bothers you and send it via Slack, Skype or Telegram. I will take your feedback seriously and there will be no bad consequences for you.

# One-on-one meetings

The main goal of 1:1 is to listen to peers about their thoughts on the most important topics. To hear your voice in the environment with many voices.  This allows to build strong relationships over time and share understanding of what is important. 

These things are NOT the goal for 1:1s, although they may happen occasionally:

- solve problems
- share my ideas
- get status updates
- chat about weather

I would expect from you to come prepared: have a list of important topics you want to discuss.

# Personality quirks

**Bad listener.**  I tend to interrupt people when they talk and make my own assumptions about the topic. I am working towards solving this issue because I believe that listening and understanding skill is crucial for a manager. 

**Slow thinker.**  It can be annoying for people who expect immediate actions, but I prefer to sleep on a problem. Exception is my direct responsibilities, which are straightforward and can be done in a couple of minutes.

**Slow focus change.**  If I'm busy, I have a hard time switching to something else. If you come to me and see I'm busy and you ask me a question, I can miss the point. See "How to work with me" section.

Thanks for reading that far!