A fundamental part of being a good manager is showing up as a human. That means caring about your team as both employees and people. How was their weekend? How's their family? What vacations do they have coming up? These questions go a long way, but if they come out mechanical and inauthentic they'll do more harm than good. There's a fundamental requirement here as a manager that you both care about the work and the people and hold that tension.

I find that sharing my own time outside of work helps folks get comfortable with that idea. That might be a hobby I've been enjoying, a vacation I'm planning, or something my kids did over the weekend. Don't underestimate the value of humor either. Not everyone considers themselves to be funny and that's fine, don't be inauthentic here. However, if you're typically funny lean into that as that can help a team loosen up and start to be more honest with each other.

You need to be available as a manager if you want your team to trust that you'll both listen and respond. Obvious statement is obvious, but I've had many managers who haven't made themselves available. I had one manager at a prior company where I had to set three reminders in Slack to get a response from them in under a week. Don't be that kind of manager. At the same time, we're in more meetings and busy with our own work, so you can't always be available, but you can always tell your team you'll get back to them later, but then do it. You have to close that loop in order to build their trust.

You also have to set reasonable constraints on what it means to be on your team and then model that behavior. For me, that means working roughly 40 hours a week during normal working hours but using the flexibility we have to make sure family comes first (e.g. chaperoning a field trip and working later that evening). It also means that I rarely work in the evening and when I do, I don't ping other folks, I schedule messages for when they're likely to be on tomorrow. That also means being aware of people who work in different timezones and ensuring you're not burdening them with being up too early or staying on too late. om The counterpoint to this is that team meetings and rituals are important. I want everyone to be there if possible. Keep the overall number of meetings low (2 or fewer per week if possible), provide agendas, and keep the meetings high value.

Showing up authentically and being available is the foundation to being a good manager, but there's plenty more to it. Your team needs to understand why they're doing what they're doing and feel safe pushing back when something doesn't make sense. That's where the interesting work begins. In my next post I'll talk about how transparent disagreement and admitting fallibility creates a team that owns their work.