Jez Humble

When I became a manager, there were a bunch of things I knew I would have to get used to. Lots of time in Mingle, Excel and PowerPoint creating finger charts and project status reports, being responsible for the process of the team, spewing forth a welter of emails, learning to use the “follow up” flag on Notes, keeping a holiday calendar, kissing goodbye to Linux. However it turns out that I am also now a line manager – responsible for the well-being of the members of my team (thanks to my wife, Rani, for explaining to me what a line manager is). Since I believe that a happy team is a productive team, I thought I had better do some research on what makes a good line manager.

It turns out that the UK’s Health and Safety Executive publish a great document called “Line management behaviour and stress at work — guidance for line managers”. It starts off well: “there is a clear distinction between pressure, which can be a motivating factor, and stress, which can occur when this pressure becomes excessive.” But it gets even better, because it contains a table which summarises research derived from “interviews from 320 managers and employees, and discussions held with over 50 HR professionals.” This table represents “a competency framework … which provide[s] behavioural indicators of what constitute[s] ‘healthy’ management”. The table below is reproduced under the terms of the Click-Use Licence.

I learned a lot from reading through this table. Here are some of my conclusions.

• You might think that following agile methodologies will solve your team problems. However it seems to me that they don’t cover line management in much detail at all.
• The table above seems to me to be (un-)surprisingly compatible with agile. For example, the positive behaviours in the “empowerment” section are precisely what you’d need to support a self-organising team. The “Process planning and organisation” section lays out how important it is to constantly review and adapt the team’s process.
• The table demonstrates to me that it is possible to model the skills and behaviours associated with being a line manager. It has obvious-in-retrospect but actually non-trivial bits of behaviour like “uses HR when dealing with a problem” and “knows when to consult employees and when to make a decision”.
• There are more things that are my responsibility than I thought. For example, I’m responsible for the health and safety of my team.
• I should be reviewing this list at least once a week to identify areas I’ve missed out on.
• Transparency and communication with your team and management are key. The best thing I’ve done since I became a project manager is to do regular (bi-weekly) one-to-ones with my team members. I use a Manager Tools template for this (thanks to Marco Abis for the link), which gives 10 minutes of time for your team member to talk and give you feedback, ten minutes for you to talk and give feedback to your team member, and ten minutes to define actions to be followed up at the next meeting.
• There’s more to project management than dealing with delivery issues such as managing risk, scope, time, cost and dependencies. People over process means taking line management seriously.