Trust Need Space Opportunity (TNSO) Framework

Through out the last few years as a manager i have created a framework to help me position myself to guide others improve and be able to take it to the next level.

First let me tell you about some of my mistakes when i first became a manager. My first job as a manager happened very organically, I was on a technical architect role and it was my first job in the uk. Upon joining I got a reality check: all developers were leaving and the projects I needed to put in place wouldn't succeed as there was no one to keep the lights on. I was asked to help recruiting people. I did it but they were reporting to one of those managers that took a couple of excel courses, thinks that knows technology and was extremely directive. The developers that I hired were very unhappy and would come to me to unwind. After a lot of honest conversations with the manager and with the CTO the developers start reporting to me. I thought this was lovely and we were going to be an awesome team. Did I care about 1:1s and career development? Not that much as never have I haf loads of good examples. Here goes the first mistake! I didn't know the developers well enough and assumed that what i liked they would like.

Need

Let's talk about intrinsic motivations, ot all depends on who you are, at what stage of your career you are at and at what stage of your life you are at! One of the developers was only interested on hacking new features with low care about quality or stability. He enjoyed working with product/marketing and seeing his clients pleased. He was a young adult full of energy and i was getting frustrated with so many mistakes and roll backs caused by him. Ultimately he left the company and I was part of the reason as my evaluation made him very unhappy.
What have I learned from this? The intrinsic motivations need to be aligned with the work someone is doing. If not it will create stress, frustration and ultimately low productivity. The trick here is understanding the context of the individual by swapping chairs with the person.

Trust

I was so happy with my discovery that i started profiling the developers. Gave them survey's on values and motivations, asked them to pick the top 3 and to explain their reasons. I was on a roll! The fail here was when i moved jobs and had a new team. This team already had it's dynamics and I went to quickly into Move Fast mode and analysing the profile of the individual and of the team. This was not effective as the developers did not trust me yet and i didn't explain the why's about it well enough. Trying to coach or perform without trust is not effective, blows in your face as you will think everything is fine and in reality the individuals are reacting with silence or aggression. I learned how to be careful and look for signs of untrust or trust. everyt
Untrust: Silence, Distance, Aggressiveness, etc
Trust: Showing vulnerability, asking for advice without soliciting, Telling you something personal, etc

Space

As I progressed on the management side, my manager at the time asked me to chose: management or engineering. This was really difficult to me and i went back and forth many times. I tricked myself, if i wasn't coding everyday then i was making the choice. Well this isn't really true, i continued to design solutions and push my point of view. This has been on of the hardest choices and to be honest the tought of going back does linger on me when the job gets really hard. This battle caused many injuries as i was taking the space of the engineers. Even when i thought i was being brilliant and giving full credit to the engineers i was still not giving the space they need. The se ond mistake was to replace it by trusting a small set of engineers with whom i had most of the technical discussions.
It has been only a year and a half since i really understood what i was doing. The control freak inside of me and the desire of still having a hand on engineering caused some pain to newer engineers and whilst the engineers i trusted flowerished the others weren't at their full potential.

Opportunity

There has to be opportunities so the engineers can develop their full potential. As a manager this can cause several pain points:
- forging opportunities and ending up pushing for work that isn't really impactful
- being too attached to the engineers and not looking for opportunities outside of the team that can be better suited.
- pushing for an opportunity that doesn't really match skills and motivations ending up with an unhappy engineer.

The engineer can be coached on finding this opportunities himself. I try to focus on this one.
- When an opportunity comes up exposing it to the team opposed to push it to someone.
- If an engineer shows potential and needs a more open ended project or a challenge i prob what would he/she would be excited to do and incentivize not being afraid to take it.
- Supporting your engineers choices. Even when the initiative seems to be off this might be critical to guide the engineer to discover himself that is not thw best path to go. Asking the right questions here is critical (e.g. what does success look like?; why is this more impactful than x?). I would keep always an open mind as the engineer might be also right and needs someone to support him.

Hope this helps someone :)