Managing people

In order to get a clear understanding of the problem, let’s start with the boundary condition. Imagine a company of one employee. That employee writes and tests all the code, does all the marketing and sales, and manages herself. She has complete knowledge of everything in the company, makes all the decisions, needn’t communicate with anyone, and i

The other thing we see companies really struggle with is new managers, or inexperienced managers. A lot of people in early-stage companies haven’t managed other people before, or don’t have a lot of experience doing that. So they’re just not great at doing basic manager things, like giving feedback. And giving good feedback, feedback about the proc

The process is key to making self-management work on a large scale. It is actually so critical that, at AES and other self-managing organizations, colleagues know that forgetting to uphold the advice process is one of the few things that can get them fired (we’ll touch later on the topic of how someone can be dismissed in the absence of hierarchy).

When you get deep into the team’s process of doing work rather than the actual work that results from it, that’s when you dive headfirst into micromanagement. (Of course sometimes it turns out that the process is flawed and leads to bad outcomes. In that case, the manager should feel free to dive in and revise the process. That’s the manager’s job,