Non toxic relationships between developers and managers

Note taker: Margot

• introduction circle to learn everyones background in management. Lots of folks worked in cooperatives. folks have good stories and bad stories.
• imposter syndrom, gender and other
• Bron talked about how many different managers they have had and how they recently got a great new manager that is now training their manager. Their boss published all these things in a public google drive. https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=1tfCklK4QfQoAhGi_Mxxm0llXQe-XUp72
• Shared google doc, 45 minute once a week meeting, great on professional development.
• Designed alliance — agreement on how you will communicate with each other. Includes something like we promise to be up front with each other, how to deal with frustration etc.
• Much of this kind of explicit setting out of expectations is one of the ways to address white supremacist office culture.
• The 45 minutes can be about just about anything and really get a feel for what is up with that person.
• In Palante they have a worksheet on conflict resolution that helps people understand how folks deal with conflict.
• Palante uses stewarding as a way to help give folks the person to listen to and support them.
• Being a less-technical project manager having to get on peoples asses to meet deadlines and timelines, doesn’t feel great. and in a place where people don’t want to tell each other what to do.
• Agile does seem to have helped to address some of the issues in terms of using structure to make it clearer what the expectations.
• In some cases folks separate the project management from people management and the advantage of that is that people manager can.
• Checking in about progress becomes less like nagging when we hand off some of the progress checkin to the process.
• How do we account for people different working styles? Letting folks set their own goals and work at their own speed rather than accidently pressuring someone to say yes to something. Letting people say what they can do.
• Certain styles can become toxic.
• Accountability for the outcome just isn’t shared across the group so this puts pressure on an individual to.
• In a more hierarchical group things like a career ladder. they read this book called “thanks for the feedback” — that differentiates between feedback, coaching and mentorship.
• A book called "crucial conversations” has lots of insight into how to talk about. There are some things in that book around accept and expect non-closure. If you try to hard to get closure you might not actually gloss over and people might just say things each other want to hear.
• How do we detoxify a relationship — where Jack has been noting that some people just are not carrying their weight or doing as much as some others and how do we address that.
• Sounds like a culture of accountability where you can say those things which just isn’t
• has been reading “ask a manager” and everything seems so clear.
• Leaning into awkward to learn to have these kinds of conversations.
• The Management center is a great resource for trainings, including good equity lens stuff.
• Managing devs is special because you are not a person necessarily who is just a more qualified version of your staff.
• It’s interesting because at their company there is a focus on mentorship that is not about hierarchical. There has been a focus on sprints.
• Compassion, concern and collectively deciding on what can be realistically accomplished.
• Project management is treated like something that everyone can do rather than a real set of skills, leaned and inclined. Management is a very specific set of skills.
• There is terrible culture of non-technical work being devalued by the developers and tech culture.
• What do we mean by team? Are other people on the team actually aware of each others strengths and weaknesses.
• The problem if you just have a certain set of people doing project management how does that not become defacto leadership in a cooperative.
• holding people accountable is what makes it feel like a position of authority.
• Emotional labor of all being in all the calls,

summary = clear process and collective accountability...