The transition from individual contributor to manager is one that many people struggle with. They understand that they now work with and through people. What they’re often not told is that their output is now something different. Instead of producing a product, you’re producing a better professional (that produces a better product). Those two things are vastly different. If you skip the professional and go straight to the product, you may get results in the short-term, but you’ll either stagnate or outright fail in the long term.

You manage complex people in a complex organization to do complex things. Invariably something is going to go wrong. Invariably the things that goes wrong is going to be because you made a bad decision. Invariably some of the time someone else knows it’s a bad decision from the start. The only question is when you will discover that it was a bad decision. Before you even commit to it? Or after the damage is done?

If the people on your team aren’t telling you things you don’t want to hear, it could mean that things are perfect and you’re perfect. It’s an incredible universe, and many things are possible. But what’s likely?

What’s more likely is that people aren’t telling you what you need to hear. They may be afraid of consequences. It may be a less punitive and more subtle inhibition, which is that they think it will be a hassle or futile. Either way, you’re not hearing the bad news when you should.

A sanity check is to pay attention to how often people question your decisions, disagree with you, and tell you you’re wrong. I don’t know how often is the right amount, but I have a few of these every week with each of my reports. It happens with important things and with minor things. I don’t know if they’re telling me about all the times they disagree with me, but they do it often enough that I’m confident they won’t let me make a major mistake. That’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good.

Of course, if you’re following my advice, you’re asking your reports, “how am I doing?” And then you find out without having to infer it. Odds are pretty good you’re not doing that, though, because it’s awkward and uncomfortable. Paying attention to the bad news will at least get you part of the way there.

The purpose of interviewing is predicting future job performance. Applying that well means focusing as much as possible on gathering information. You want to discover everything you can about the candidate that is relevant to the job.

Only when you’ve gathered as much information as possible do you shift into evaluation mode. If you evaluate too early, you’ll get less curious. You’ll be likely to confirm your biases. You may be too narrow in considering the role for the candidate.

What you’re doing is mapping the shape of a key. You identify the points and the grooves. Then you try to see if it fits the lock. If you map the key well, you can test it on multiple locks. It may fit several, one, or none. But if you only map the key by testing it against the one lock, you won’t fully profile it, and you won’t be able to test it against other locks.

Lots of people complain about meetings. I don’t. We are social creatures building something together. Meetings are how we get work done.

What I dislike are meetings that grow without enough thought. Everyone’s read or heard the trope about how much meetings cost per hour. There’s another cost that isn’t talked about as much.

Every added attendee of a meeting is a tax on the existing attendees. In a productive meeting, only one person can talk at once. The more people you have present, the more topics people will want to discuss, and the more aspects of each topic they’ll want to discuss. If the meeting stays the same length, that means everyone gets a smaller share. That means it’s less likely to reach resolution, and either the issue will be unresolved or you’ll need another meeting. Alternatively, the meeting is lengthened. Either way, it’s a cost that others will have to bear.

This tax is proportional to the size of the meeting. Adding another person to a four person meeting taxes four people. Adding another person to a ten person meeting taxes ten. When you add that person, your meeting starts off in the hole. To make it worth it, that person has to add value, and it’s not just some value but more value than they take away. Otherwise you made everything worse for everybody.

In management and life, I have failed many times. There is something that I want, something that’s important to me, but what I’m trying isn’t working. Persistence is an admirable trait, but sometimes the right thing to do is to give up.

We have a product generating job recommendations. The product seemed to be getting adequate results when examined in isolation. However, when we tried a blackout test, where the whole product was disabled, we discovered that the overall outcomes without this product were better than with it. While there were outcomes that could be attributed to the product, they were simple substitution or cannibalization of outcomes that would have come through other means. Many of us believed in the idea, but the product wasn’t working well enough, and we had no specific ideas or credible plans to make it substantially better. So we halted it, not because we didn’t believe in it, but because there was too big a gap between what we knew how to do and what we needed to do.

My son eats like a raccoon. Doesn’t use silverware, uses both hands, makes a mess. At every meal I would chastise him and remind him to eat one-handed or to use utensils. If I wasn’t watching, or a couple of minutes passed, he went right back to the way he was. Every meal for years. I think manners matter. I think his manners are poor. But what I was doing wasn’t working, and I didn’t have any better ideas.

Giving up now doesn’t mean giving up forever. Giving up on a tactic doesn’t mean giving up on a goal. It just means you recognize there’s no profit in banging your head against a brick wall. Use your energy on one of the hundreds of things you can make progress on. Don’t blow it on something that won’t budge.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of candidates for management positions. One of the questions I ask candidates is what their team thinks of them. I often get answers like, “I think they like me,” “they seem to respect me,” and the ever popular “my attrition is low.”

What’s astonishing about these answers is that they’re guesses. A manager, whose primary job is working with people, does not know what those people think. For some of them, it hasn’t even occurred to them to think about it.

The tragedy here is not just that the answers are important. It certainly is important. These are the people who have the best knowledge of how these managers work, and they’re also the ones most impacted by the manager. But the real tragedy is how easy the answers are to get.

I make it a habit to ask my direct reports what they think of my performance at least once a quarter. I typically do it in the middle of the quarter so that it’s not near any performance review period so they’re less anxious. I ask them if there are things I could do better, things I should stop doing, and things where I’m not active but should be. I also ask them if I am giving them the right balance of independence and direction.

Finally, I ask the most important question: “do you feel comfortable disagreeing with me or telling me when you think I’m wrong?” I don’t just listen to the answer. I watch them carefully and listen to how they answer. If they say yes, that they are comfortable disagreeing with me and telling me I’m wrong, I want to really believe it. If they hesitate, if they’re unsure, if they’re too quick to answer, then I’ll know they’re trying to tell me what they think I want to hear.

Between this and 360 feedback, I have a pretty good idea what my team thinks of me. If someone asked me, I could answer confidently and definitively. I wouldn’t have to guess. That’s not about being interviewed. It’s about being a little bit better of a manager every day.

Often requests come to us from stakeholders that are vaguely stated. That does not mean they won’t have expectations. It just means that they haven’t taken the time to think them through and articulate them. When you deliver, they’ll discover what their expectations were, and they’ll give you the hairy eyeball if you didn’t meet them.

There are two possible solutions to this problem. The first is to try to discover their expectations. Dig into the request. Understand its background and its purpose. Find out the parameters of the deliverable. This can work, but it requires them to be cooperative and to know what they want. If they had the patience and knowledge to do that, they probably would have done it from the beginning. So on to plan B.

Plan B is to tell them what you’re going to deliver. If they know what they want or at least can figure it out, they’ll correct you. If they don’t know what they want, you will fill the void. That way other notions can’t sneak in when you’re not looking. Either way, you’re better off than you would be if you guessed at what they wanted.

A manager’s job is to deliver results in the short-term and the long-term. There’s a lot that goes into it, but ultimately the manager is accountable for the results, not for the effort. Being accountable does not mean the manager gets credit for them. There’s a contradiction at the heart of being a good manager: if things go well, it’s because you hired a great team. If things go poorly, it’s because you’re a bad manager.

The first part requires a recognition that the manager doesn’t actually do the work. You plan, coordinate, coach, communicate, and so forth, but you don’t make the deliverable. You need the team for that. In addition, if you want credit, you shouldn’t be a manager. Being a manager is about other people not about you.

The second part is because you’re ultimately accountable for the results no matter what. If there’s a problem with someone on the team, it’s your job to fix that problem, work around it, or replace the person. Most failure modes for the team and the deliverable are in some way your responsibility and within your power to fix. If there’s a proximate cause to failing to deliver, there’s likely an upstream failure that you didn’t address or prevent.

This contradiction may seem unfair. Maybe it is. If that apparent unfairness makes you not want to be a manager, perhaps that’s for the best. If you’re willing to accept it, maybe you have the right mentality. Also, it’s not like it’s truly unfair. In most organizations, you can advance further on the management track than you can on the individual contributor track. That means more money and more authority. That makes up for quite a lot.

Every leader thinks they want high quality work. They often overestimate what it takes to get high quality work. Getting high quality work is one of those things that is simple but difficult. All it takes are three things:

• Assign the work to people who are capable of high quality work
• Reject anything that is not high quality work
• Pay what it takes in money and time

Almost all of the time that someone is not getting high quality work, they’re skipping at least one of these.

A lot of leaders emphasize the importance of hiring the right people. That’s necessary but not sufficient. Even the best of us gets lazy sometimes and needs some reinforcement to keep our standards up. They may want high quality work, but they don’t have the discipline to insist on it. They aren’t willing to reject low quality work because they think they’ll be a jerk. There’s certainly a jerky way to do it, but you can reject work without being a jerk.

Then there’s cost. What’s often happening when leaders complain about not getting high quality work is that they’re really complaining that they’re not getting high quality work cheaply and quickly. That’s just not being in touch with reality. Complain all you want, but if you’re not willing to pay up, the people who can produce high quality work won’t bother with you. They’ll go with someone who appreciates what it takes.

The royal “we:” I. “We will have crumpets at tea” means “I will have crumpets at tea.”

The common “we:” you and I. “We should go to the beach this weekend” means “you and I should go to the beach this summer.”

The managerial “we:” you. “We’re going to have to stay late to finish this project” means “you’re going to have to stay late to finish this project.”