Your team is not a democracy

TLDR: During a difficult team discussion, holding an impromptu vote to resolve the issue is rarely the right move. Trust your team but, as the manager, you may have critical information that your team does not and you are ultimately responsible. It is OK to make decisions that go against the majority view.

 

Imagine you are a manager on a team. The team is debating a thorny issue. There is disagreement on the best way to move forward and someone suggests putting it to a vote. As the manager, should you let the majority decide?

My own personal take is that as a manager, putting it to a vote is rarely the right move.

It is certainly your duty to stimulate debate. Encourage everyone to speak up, and ensure anyone who can’t seem to get a word in is given space. You should challenge the team into creative and out-of-the box thinking.

Ultimately you, as the leader of the team, need to make the call however. Why?

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Tags: developmentmanager, devmanager, engineeringmanager, leadership, management

Blog post summary: What is an Engineering Manager?

I liked the short What is an Engineering Manager? post on the AWS blog (from David Ives @ Pusher). This is a summary, but the original is worth reading and not much longer…

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Tags: developmentmanager, devmanager, leadership, management, summary

So you want to be a Manager?

Despite how satisfying and fun designing and writing software can be, building high-performing teams can be even more so. The highs are higher and the lows are lower, but overall it can be an incredibly rewarding career and developing future leaders on your team is a key responsibility.

So, as a manager, how do you handle an individual contributor (IC) engineer on your team expressing interest in becoming a manager?

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Tags: devmanager, engineeringmanager, knowyourteam, leadership, management, newmanager, techlead, yourteam

What is a Development Manager?

In a previous posting on Agile, I discussed the 3 main roles in Scrum: Scrum Master, Product Owner and the dev team. However, there is also an additional role that is not always considered core, but which is increasingly an integral part of Agile, and that is the Development Manager.

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Tags: agile, developmentmanager, devmanager, management, phb, scrum, scrummaster