There’s a great post on the Reforge blog about people manager responsibilities that lays out the balance of being a manager quite nicely. It’s a balance I’ve always tried to achieve but never really put into words.

I love teams. I love working in a team, I love creating teams, leading teams, helping craft a high performance highly empowered groups of people that get shit done and have a lot of fun along the way. But to be an effective team lead, you really have to be cognizant and purposeful with how you balance your responsibilities.

In the article on Reforge, they lay out three major areas of responsibility: coaching, directing, and evaluating.

So often, I have had managers that really suck at coaching. The focus is primarily on directing with the company mandated semi-annual nod to evaluation via some intricate process with obscure scales of evaluation that are applied without direct correlation to specific behaviors or events.

Being constantly directed is tedious. It disempowers me, it creates a forced reliance on my manager to provide direction, it takes any ambition you might have had to advance your skills and career and just grinds it into dust.

Frankly, I’ve never had a manager that was also a good coach. Maybe that’s why I try so hard to make sure I’m shaping and leading the team with lots of coaching, clear goals and lines of responsibility, with small and frequent feedback cycles.