The following content builds on our performance and compensation management frameworks, plus (internal) our data-model for org-design.

When we say that someone is the manager of another person at TB, by default that includes the following building blocks of responsibilities:

• Staying aware of the person’s well-being, physically and mentally, and speaking up when they see issues.
• Performance management:
  • Defining/discussing/agreeing expectations by which the perf-rating will be made.
  • Deciding and explaining the performance rating.
  • Providing continuous feedback on results, behaviours and skills, and ensuring that’s reasonably documented so it can get incorporated into decisions that happen annually like the annual performance rating and decisions on compensation.
    • This includes soliciting and sharing/integrating feedback from colleagues.
  • Managing under-performance. Over the long term, the manager needs to ensure that the results delivered by this person meet or exceed the company’s expectations. That’s done primarily by helping the person improve, and sometimes by changing the expectations (aka “changing roles”). Prolonged periods of under-performance after having passed probation are not acceptable, so when various efforts have failed, the final resort will need to be managing the person out.
• Skill-dev planning:
  • Guiding discussions on identifying potential skill-dev areas.
  • Prioritising, deciding which skill-dev area is at the top.
  • Guiding them to create reasonable skill-dev plans (that’s separate from executing that plan), including decisions on time and money budgets.
  • Holding the person to account on their own skill-dev objectives.
• Some parts of skill-dev execution:
  • Mentoring: where applicable, helping them up-skill, though it’s common for various other people to get tapped as mentors, sometimes even people outside our firm.
• Coaching: (guiding someone to clearer thinking by asking questions and listening)
  • Career direction
  • Overcoming challenges at work
  • Personal issues that impact work
  • Time audits (ie: asking the person how they’re spending their time, how reasonable they think that is, and what if any actions that might try to make reality closer to how they’d like it to be)
• Being a default contact and escalation point for anything else
• Ensuring compliance with the company’s policies (HR, IT, conflicts of interests, etc.)
• Compensation management:
  • Recommending a salary increase (to be approved by COO)
  • Deciding a bonus number (strong relationship with the perf-rating) (COO has a veto)
  • Explaining salary and bonus decisions
• Guiding their onboarding when they join the company.

The following building blocks are not necessarily included, but sometimes are:

• Project leadership, as this is mostly handled by the team’s goal setting and backlog grooming processes.
• Creating compensation packages in offers to new-hires

Therefore, what the company expects of managers:

• Results:
  • Contributions from the people they manage should meet or exceed the company’s expectations
  • Managers themselves should make contributions (and absence of obstruction) to the growth of the people they manage
  • Absence of policy compliance problems
• Measurement includes:
  • Feedback from colleagues:
    • Relevant parts of the employee NPS surveys
    • Manager-specific surveys
  • Observations made by the “manager of the manager”, typically our COO