[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.