The Manager Trinity: The 3 Tenets of Successful Management
Insights from a decade as a Google manager on the key to success and how to be a force multiplier for your team and organization
Have you ever defined your job as a manager?
Whether you’re an aspiring, new, or seasoned manager, this article is for you. I’ll share insights and learning drawn from my personal experiences of leading teams for over 20 years (half at Google) and coaching numerous managers. The learnings I collected apply to most management positions, including PM, UX and many more.
Effective management is a multifaceted role that requires a combination of tactical and strategic skills, focusing on individuals on one hand and team dynamics on the other. It requires collaboration and communication abilities and knowledge of delivery processes. It’s a balancing act between individuals, group dynamics, strategy and process.
Effective managers focus in three main areas:
Just a second before we jump into the details of the trinity (I’ll follow up breaking down each piece of the trinity and add examples), let me touch on the biggest difference between individual contributors and managers.
Multiplier, Force Multiplier
As a frontline manager responsible for individual contributors, your role shifts from being a contributor (coding, designing, reviewing, supporting, writing PRDs, designing and implementing processes, etc.) to becoming a force multiplier for your team’s collective skills and efforts.
While others on your team focus on delivering artifacts (code, architecture, PRDs, mocks, etc.), your value lies in optimizing the group’s performance and aligning it with company needs. The better you can make the group work — individually, together, and matching with company needs through all the activities mentioned above — the more value you add, this is where it is.
Time and attention invested in individual contributor activities will detract from your ability to mold a high-performing team. While others can do your previous job (analyzing product usage, triaging bugs, coding, designing, etc.), no one can do your current job — connecting the dots between people into a machine contributing to the company’s needs.
If you spend time on hands-on work, avoid being on the critical path of delivering a project because your attention might be needed at the team level, and you’ll risk hurting the team’s ability to deliver.
You might be the best coder or most experienced architect on the team. Still, continuing to play those roles without mentoring team members to fill those spaces eventually means limiting growth opportunities for your reports and limiting your future ability to scale (taking on more projects or more reports).
The Manager Trinity
About two years into my tenure at Google, despite having 15 years of prior managerial experience, I finally crystallized the essence of a manager’s responsibilities — a task that had eluded me until then:
Help individuals be happy and productive so they can form happy and productive teams that deliver value to the company (through software).
This managerial trinity involves a progressive focus, starting with individuals, expanding to teams, and ultimately impacting the company. There is not specific order of priority here, as mentioned before, it’s a balancing act between individuals, group dynamics, strategy and process. I’ll delve deeper into each tenet in the subsequent articles. My goal here is to provide a concise overview:
Individuals
Help individuals be happy and productive (link):
Hire, fire, mentor, guide, coach, manage performance and help people grow and develop. Genuinely care about the people you work with and take action to help them succeed.
Teams
Help teams be happy and productive (link):
In parallel to molding the individuals on your team, your job is to build, design and shape effective teams that predictably deliver business value.
You want to create a well-oiled machine made of gear wheels. Each team member is a gear wheel, turning to produce something valuable for the company. When the wheels integrate sufficiently, even one working wheel can slowly turn the others, so each wheel’s work is a bit easier, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Company
Create value for the company (link):
This is the final aspect of your role, achieved by aligning the team’s abilities, skills, and aspirations with the company’s business goals. Simply said, it’s a matching challenge. The work assigned to team members should help the company — this is called Impact or Value — and inspire the team members.
They should understand how they help the company achieve its goals and, ideally, see how it helps them achieve their individual goals (based on their skill set and aspirations). I say “ideally,” recognizing that matching everyone’s personal goals with company needs is hard to do consistently but is doable most of the time.
This is where strategic thinking by the manager comes in. Based on the manager’s understanding of the company’s direction and current and future needs, and their team’s abilities and gaps, they will develop a strategic plan. That doesn’t have to be a formal written plan. It can be technical, process, or product strategy. As you gain experience as a manager or in the company, you will start guiding the team in certain directions to better connect the dots between the company and the people you lead.
Product/UX/PgM managers — this is about you too!
Having worked closely and mentored managers of PMs, UX, and PgMs, I can attest that the three aspects of their job roles are identical: individuals, teams, and the company. In practice, most of my peer leaders invested their time in developing individuals’ growth and gaining upward visibility, overlooking a vital element for long-term success: investing in the collective strength of their teams.
By nurturing team bonds and aligning members with company objectives, you create a force multiplier effect. Strong, cohesive teams collaborate efficiently and provide vital support for individual success. The dividends of team strength are remarkable. Connected and supported team members exhibit higher motivation, morale, productivity, and innovative problem-solving. A robust team dynamic helps identify thematic weaknesses, often missed amidst multiple initiatives.
Let’s not miss this opportunity for collective growth. Like engineering managers, embrace team-focused leadership. Strengthen your teams, and you’ll witness enduring success. Unite to build a culture of collaboration, innovation, and growth for our organization’s bright future.
BTW, this is not meant to be a comprehensive job definition. These are my learnings of what’s important and what might be pitfalls.
One more time: Manager, your job is to help individuals be happy and productive so they can form happy and productive teams that deliver value to the company.
In the following articles, I will detail what each element of the manager trinity means and offer tangible examples. Stay tuned.
Have you ever defined your job as a manager? Share your version in the comments section!
