[mharroun]

As someone who's been leading people for 8+ years and also who remembers why I have left places... here is a long but comprehensive list.

1) Pay Fair at hire and try to keep it within the market as they grow in experience/skills.

2) Give opportunities to learn and grow based on their own personal/professional goals.

3) Be Communicative and Transparent when it comes to everything.... company/leadership asks, values, deadlines, hiring, firing, promotions. Attempt to have documentation/processes for these things so theirs no question in ambiguity or favoritism.

4) Have check-in's often and Listen to the wants, needs, issues of each individual. Attempt to quickly get back to them with a solution or at least an answer/explanation.

5) Create a 'culture of winning' where wins are always celebrated and mistakes/failures are treated as actual learning opportunities to improve.

6) Ensure everyone has a voice, it is heard, and people feel safe to be critical as long as its constructive.

7) Do everything you can to eliminate toxicity... weather is from members on/under you or above you. You cant stop others from being toxic but you should be able to shield most of it from those who report under you.

8) Since you should have the authority EVERY problem you have or those under you has and its then YOUR problem and your job to fix it (or at lease respond/escalte).

9) Judge people based on objective results not on "optics". Ass-in-seat time is a lazy and pointless measurement in most cases.

10) Delegate and empower those under you as much as you can. Lack of autonomy/ownership are signs of micromanagement, over-control, and poor leadership/delegation.

11) Accept a truth... your reputation/success as a leader is a direct aggregation of the success of those under you. If in anyway this is not the case there is a problem and that problem is you.

[kevsim]

Amazing list!

> 9) Judge people based on objective results not on "optics". Ass-in-seat time is a lazy and pointless measurement in most cases.

I'd only point out that as a manager one also needs to be aware of the optics because those can affect other team members. "So and so is never here" kinds of murmurings need to be dealt with (and dealt with by, as you said, ensuring that the team judges based on results and celebrates winning together).

[mharroun]

Completely agree, I left out the "other side" of leadership, working with other departments and senior leaders as it seemed out of scope of the question.

I put "optics" in quotes to use it as a pejorative as I only seen it used as a strawman. eg. "Your team is never at their desks... it creates bad optics". I prefer to file that under transparent communication between all sides of a company.

In one particular case it was a team that 19 times out of 20 hit every goal and expectation on the product roadmap on time to near 100% ask. As a snarky and sarcastic asshole my response was of course "Do you want to potentially sacrifice the fact that we nearly hit every roadmap deadline and OKR in order to make it "seem" like they are working harder?".

Note: This is based on the startup world... Its never senior management who does things like this as often all they are about is the company they put their blood, sweat, and tears into is successful and cant afford the luxury of ideal "optics". This is an argument/toxicity that comes from less experienced "leaders" who needs to find fault to make up for their lack of success or are micromanagers themselves.

[alexeiz]

So, what company do you work for? (Just asking for a friend :)