I have to admit most of this went completely over my head. As a very junior developer, I like to read this type of articles as a way to understand what my managers <i>actually</i> want from me.<p>If I had to use this post as a guide on how to manage a team, I would not know how to materialize it's recommendations. Maybe it just goes to show how much of a gap there is.
>> take stock of the “what” you’re asking as well as the “how.”<p>I think a lot of errors stem from assuming that "what" and "how" are somehow distinct concepts. In reality they are the same thing, we are just describing objectives at varying levels of abstraction. There are important inflection points along the entire gradient.
The NATO version of this is called Mission Command. You train the levels below you in doctrine and rules of engagement and big picture things like that, and then you give them an objective and let them figure out the best way to achieve this.<p>Put another way: you tell them what and why, and they go off and figure out how.<p>To do this, you need the training to be up to scratch that you can trust your underlings to be competent, and once you have that, you have to actually trust them.<p>reference: <a href="https://www.armypubs.org/adp-6-0-mission-command-command-and-control-of-army-forces/" rel="nofollow">https://www.armypubs.org/adp-6-0-mission-command-command-and...</a> (PDF: <a href="https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN34403-ADP_6-0-000-WEB-3.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN34403-ADP_6-...</a>)<p>The bullet point principles at the top of page 1-7 sound a bit like the Army's version of the Agile manifesto.
With his first sentence, "I’m gearing up, like some kind of power washer, to spray new productized services into our operations group so they can SOP those services at scale." the author reveals his arrogance and poor communications ability.<p>First, a power washer is a violent device that strips the surface from its target. It's not something that you aim at people or animals. He needs a very different simile, maybe spreading seeds.<p>Second, must he speak only in non-English jargon? When did the acronym SOP become a verb? Does he want his Operations group to just "SOP" everything? Does he not want the group to do what we once called "kaizen", continuously improving upon the standard procedures?<p>His notions of how to delegate may be fine, but in my organization I'd want somebody other than him to be in charge of it.
This sounds similar to what Allen Ward prescribes in using ambitious but flexible targets (the what) to pull work products from teams, rather than pushing tasks (the how) onto teams.<p>One thing Ward emphasises that I often see missing in these discussions is the responsibility of the puller to perform demand levelling. Don't try to pull more work products out of teams than they have the capacity for. Spread the work out (over time and over teams), so that teams can focus on executing against targets rather than being distracted by competing targets that need to be traded off against each other.
Meta question, what is it with all this cookie cutter articles targeted towards new managers on HN at the moment?<p>I find it strange especially when you consider that these are not even particularly good or insightful articles.
I like the ideas proposed in “Turn the ship around” - create a bottom up culture and a culture of over communication so as a manager you can just sign off instead of delegate.
><i>When you’re dictating tasks to a savant that takes everything extremely literally, like, say, a programmer programming a computer.</i><p>Has the industry really fallen so far that people who have straightforward skills like programming are seen like Rain Man?