Managers at 37signals are in place because teams and teammates need guidance. They need to know when they're doing well and when they need to improve. We expect all employees to operate as managers of one, but it's difficult for even the best managers of one to objectively assess and calibrate their own performance. Related, most teams need oversight to make sure they're steering in a direction that aligns with company goals and with what other teams are doing, both tactically and in terms of skill level.
But responsibility to the employee and team ops are not the only reason we employ managers. Your role also directly impacts how well 37signals ships software. When we manage well, the business compounds. When we don't manage, the business degrades. Subtly at first, then all at once.
There's an old saying: people don't quit jobs, they quit bosses. When you give your report quality feedback, address performance issues directly, create pathways for growth, and cultivate trust, you create an environment that promotes retention of our strongest contributors.
And those contributors in turn bring irreplaceable institutional knowledge, product context, and a sense of stability and continuity. As we know, backfilling a role is expensive and slow. Reducing turnover not only protects the individuals on your team from upheaval, it protects the momentum necessary for successful product development. To be clear: retention is not purely sentimental; it's necessary for operational stability.
Managers at 37signals are expected to be clear in their expectations. A big part of the job is communicating what "excellent" is, in its many applications. Standards begin to erode when you avoid clarity and expectations are unclear. Judgment declines, the boundaries of ownership and accountability blur, and unchecked apathy seeps into technical work.
When you're explicit with what the job demands, your report comes to work with a clear understanding of what's expected of them and their role in the team and company. Their performance is measured against our concrete progression framework, ownership & accountability standards are fair and consistently applied, and most importantly, quality standards are clearly stated. Underperformance is not just something to monitor for at the individual level, but at the team level (or even company level). Good managers are good at "quality control" ensuring team standards aren't being affected by a single contributor.
Managers cannot and should not be responsible for every major decision on their team. If every decision flows up, you become a bottleneck. To build scale, good managers are required to teach their report how to make decisions, and how to develop the judgment that we expect of all employees.
When you coach your report to solve problems without you, they learn how to think, not just what to do (or what you would do). Decision making scales, you spend less time unblocking your report, and you both can move faster and productivity and capability multiplies.
As managers, you’ll probably have a difficult conversation or two with your report about their performance. There are a couple chapters in this playbook addressing those, but here we're discussing the fact that avoiding those conversations and the related documentation and escalation creates risk to the company and our quality standards.
Documenting performance concerns early and every time reduces the chance for legal or compliance problems down the line. Please escalate issues to People Ops when you find yourself documenting problems more than once, before you reach out to your report to discuss.
Good managers know that proper performance management is risk mitigation. Not just legally, but to the technical quality standards we all commit to as employees.
Values written on a page do not define culture, but the behaviors of the people within the organization do. Managers' behaviors carry more weight, like it or not. The behaviors you as leaders reward becomes aspirational, and what you ignore becomes permissible. We enjoy a culture built on high standards and high degrees of trust, autonomy, and ownership. To retain what we have, managers need to keep those cultural touch points front of mind and enforce them with rigor.
To that end, keep your energy positive, especially when communicating a choice or direction you disagree with. Your demeanor can significantly impact your report's morale and outlook. Openly expressing frustration or discontent with company decisions creates a negative atmosphere and undermines team morale.