It would’ve been so easy to go with some sort of Neo/Morpheus title, but instead I played it straight. I’m the epitome of restraint. And I hope both you and the SEO appreciate it.
In general there are three buckets of responsibilities managers are on the hook for.
- Functional expertise – If you’re an engineering lead, we expect you to be a decent engineer
- Task management – You decompose big problems into smaller ones for your team, and track their status
- People stuff – Professional development, performance reviews, interpersonal issues, etc
It’s comparatively easy to get someone who can handle those first two. They’re closely related. But the third one? Hoo boy. Far fewer people have an affinity or an ability to handle people stuff. And we typically do a crummy job of training them for it.
To set the stage let’s talk about functional leadership. This is where one manager handles all three buckets because they’re all pertinent to the project you’re on. Biff the Engineer is on project X so Engineering Manager will handle Biff’s tasks as well as Biff’s growth and performance. When I was a full time employee at a game company, this is how we handled it. You’re working on a game which has a project lead. That project lead has department leads (engineering, art, animation, audio, design, QA) reporting to them. Each of those leads has a team of developers, and that lead will handle all three buckets for each dev on their team. It’s all related to the project.
But what if Biff’s eng mgr is so not-good at people stuff we want to peel that bucket of responsibilities away from them? Or what if we need a new eng mgr for a team, but none of the folks we’d put in that role are prepared to handle people stuff? In these scenarios, maybe we could take Bucket 3 off of all the engineering managers and hand those buckets to a different type of manager? That new manager would be handling people stuff – and only people stuff – for all the engineers, regardless of which project those engineers are on.
This new type of manager is typically referred to as a Group Manager, and now we’ve created matrixed leadership.
If you think of the project work as being on one axis, the people stuff is on a separate axis. They aren’t unrelated, because where they intersect is a single human. But they needn’t be particularly entwined. Now each of our engineers has two managers and their two axes lead us to refer to this framework as a matrix.
This approach is typically used in larger companies, but I’ve seen clients try to use it with as few as 40-ish employees. The upside is that you need only one person – the group manager – whose strengths lie in handling people stuff. The downside is that this new role is a noteworthy chunk of overhead (good luck directly billing your clients for your group manager’s contribution to the project), and that it requires another human.
The fact that Biff now has two managers is kind of a plus and a minus. Biff is likely getting much higher quality attention for their career growth, professional development, and conflict resolution. But there are wrinkles to be worked out. Which manager handles the performance reviews? Which one handles 1:1s? There aren’t hard and fast rules. But it’s probably unwise to never have 1:1s with the manager directly handing out project tasks, and it’s certainly not a good idea to never have 1:1s with the person most responsible for supporting your career trajectory.
While there are costs, instantiating a matrix like this is better than leaving Biff to be solely managed by someone with little interest or ability to help him with his people stuff. Because Biff is still a people.
image courtesy of Shanna Camilleri via unsplash