[conradev]

While I love this quote:

> as long as you are doing your work well and continuously working on the next most important thing prioritised by the business, any pressure to deliver beyond what your team is capable of is objectively unreasonable.

I feel like this is missing an acknowledgement that "what a team is capable of" actually depends on the manager! Managing people and priorities takes skills that require practice and learning. A manager that, for example, assigns people to work on things they enjoy working on and avoids excess pressure is going to have a team capable of a lot more than a team where the manager doesn't bother.

So, when I see the list of "reasonable ways for the business to exert influence over the work" I feel like a huge missing one is "help the manager manage their workload and the team better". The manager has a manager and this is ostensibly their responsibility to see and correct

[tjlingham]

I couldn't agree more. This is written from the perspective of a manager so I am likely asking a bit too much from the reader to make the connection. Thank you for the feedback!

My experience tends to be that managers will rarely get help to manage the teams WIP and it's often left to that same manager to provide that mechanism of back-pressure. But if they then don't, for whatever reason, then it can be bad news for the team.

I'm weeks away from going on a significant period of leave and I sincerely hope that the precedents I have set carry forward during my absence.

[teekert]

As a manager, my long term goals are perfectly aligned with my teams. I want them to be (mentally) healthy, motivated and happy. This is what makes the team (and me!) loyal and productive, and it will prevent sickness/absence. I never get the manager vs team perspective, it feels like whenever there is a “versus” in perspectives, something is wrong and will lead to problems over time.

[lifeisstillgood]

Surely then all that should matter is reviewing the code and reviewing the WIP (jira). for each manager each day

doing anything else is pretending project managers are managers