Eliminate Managerial Debt
What is managerial debt?
Managerial Debt can be defined in several similar ways:
- Not addressing issues today, which leads to more future pain and higher price
- Management-infrastructure that should have been set up within an organization but was deliberately deferred for later
- Lack of capacity to support and manage activities effectively
- Making short-term decisions with expensive, long-term consequences
Much like tech debt, it is a deliberate choice, meaning, deciding (or deciding not to) for a “quick and dirty” solution now, knowing we’d pay for it later. It is not inherently negative. All types of debt, like financial or technical may enable us to gain more value now and return it with time.
Decisions that are the result of obliviousness, ignorance or incompetence are widely known as “bad management”.
Common reasons for getting into debt:
- An urgent topic to solve now and deal with it later
- The wish to be liked
- Fear of conflict
- Fear to being seen as a micro-manager
- The belief that things will resolve on their own
- Politically malicious moves
Managerial debt doesn’t simply appear. It’s created by humans, and it’s either we who created it, or inherited it from the previous managers.
When the managerial debt is not paid and becomes too high, the manager might go “bankrupt”: they are either put on PIP (performance improvement plan), fired, demoted or consciously choose to run away by moving to another company.
Differences — tech and managerial debt
Awareness
Tech debt is known to many and often comes up in discussions.
Managerial debt is often unknown, known only to a few, or not brought up due to risk or sensitivity.
Measurability
Tech debt is relatively easy to measure, e.g. potential revenue not materialized due to blocked features, slowness of development, bugs in an area of the system, support efforts and the quantity of “tech stories”.
With managerial debt, it takes longer to correlate and see the effects even when measuring is easy, like higher undesired attrition, but usually is more qualitative like negative atmosphere or lack of growth or results of the team.
Fixability
Tech debt is fixable by many in various seniority levels and an empowered team can decide when to tackle it.
Managerial debt is fixable only by managers.
Take the following example:
Engineers prefer to either do only backend work or only frontend work.
The manager agrees and decides to build a backend team and a frontend team, to keep morale high and continue the delivery.
Engineers may be happy but perhaps cross-functional teams, each more independent and owning a certain domain end-to-end would be favorable and faster.
Examples of managerial debt
Managerial debt can be observed in different ways in how others behave, how the system works and the manager’s own behavior.
Others’ behavior
- Arriving late to work and leaving early
- Being late to meetings
- Missing deadlines (even when they set them) and not notifying before or even after
- Agreeing but not committing, not following up, dragging feet or questioning again
- Working on what they feel is best or most convenient for them regardless of priorities
- Demonstrating rude behavior, offensive language
- Deliverables issues, such as quality, accuracy, quantity, safety
- Gossiping
System
- Lack of process
- Too much process
- Too many projects and initiatives
- Lack of measurements
- Lack of strategy
- Strategy that over-emphasizes the near future
- Growing headcount too quickly
- Too many managers, nano-teams to retain certain individuals by “promoting”
- Too few managers, many direct reports per manager
- Assigning 2 people to manage a single team together
- Inappropriate titles, like undeserved “senior” title or a VP managing 2 engineers
- Results without retention — constantly pushing for more features instead of allowing learning time, coaching, fixing root causes or scaling the system. It might lead to burnout
- In teams where the manager assigns work — always giving the hard tasks to the same senior person to deliver fast, not allowing more junior ones to gain the experience
Manager’s own behavior
- Not making timely decisions
- Not understanding the business or terminology
- Not understanding what the team is working on, their struggles and priorities
- Not making personnel changes such as promoting, demoting, moving teams, firing
- Not setting expectations
- Not building rapport and trust with directs, peers and managers
- Not giving positive and negative feedback, avoiding difficult conversations
- Not coaching
- Not delegating
- Not holding others accountable
- Not working on priorities
- Giving a counter-offer to a direct report who received a better offer, violating the salary bands, risking it becoming known to everyone.
If she’s so great, maybe you should have given her a raise earlier, promoted her earlier, given her more responsibilities and satisfied her intrinsic motivation.
Maybe you should have changed the salary bands.
How come it came as a surprise to you? Why was it easy for her to leave for bigger pay?
Tackling managerial debt
“Do the hard right, not the easy wrong”.
Ignoring reality will not have a positive impact. Awareness that your purpose as a manager is not to be liked, but rather be trusted, and achieve results and retention, will make it a bit easier to start doing the right thing despite the difficulty.
For example, not giving harsh feedback to others is a disservice to them and prevents their growth. To get back on track after a long period of not providing feedback, you can say in 1:1s something like “I’ve been wrong to not give you timely continuous feedback, which didn’t support you in increasing performance. From now on, I will give frequent and timely feedback.”
The opposite of debt is investment — we pay now to benefit in the future. An example is a promising mobile engineer who aspired and transitioned to be a manager of a team that had no mobile product — it did take the manager some time to catch up and delivery was slower in the beginning, but after a while the friction reduced and the team did much better.
When we deliberately create such a debt, we need to plan how we’d tackle it, by when and with whom. We know it will come back to bite us, so we must consider if it’s really worth it. Is it really urgent or important to justify the debt?
The level of reversibility of decisions is a factor in deciding about taking the debt and the future payments. Easy to reverse — easy to pay it back.
Another mitigation option is having predetermined company policies, e.g. how to react to a direct leaving for a better offer or an employee under-performing.
Start tackling managerial debt:
Others’ behavior
- Lead by example
- Set expectations
- Hold weekly 1:1s — get to know them
- Give feedback — improve future behavior
- Coach directs — direct and support their growth
- Delegate to relieve yourself and allow them to gain skills
System
- Look for “org smells”, things that don’t make sense and debug them
- Rubber duck — tell about a situation to someone else and hear yourself explaining it
- In cases you find yourself making weak excuses for a process, org struct or decisions, seeing everyone bypassing a process — write down, prioritize — devise an action plan
- Ask in 1:1s and retrospectives what could be done to improve work
Own behavior
- Learn about management on your own
- Learn the business domain
- Learn the functional area
- Get support from a coach — externally or internally
- Consult other managers
- Request your manager for support and guidance after explaining the problem and suggested path forward
When inheriting managerial debt
In case of joining a new company or a team, we need to find out about the current managerial debt situation, as it is usually not accessible in front of us in some document of deliberate decisions.
- Observe: be present in meetings, watch the dynamics, hear about the challenges, what people complain about
- Org smells: is there someone in an official role that everyone is bypassing? Is someone at a role just to retain them?
- Talk to people — peers, managers, direct reports, skip levels: ask what is difficult, friction, what problems they have, technical challenges, process setbacks, what takes too long — actively listen
- Metrics: for example DORA and SPACE — find bottlenecks and opportunities to improve
- Engagement surveys: look at specific questions and answers, not categories
- Consult other managers in the org, what problems they solved and how
As recommended in The First 90 Days, actively listen and list the problems you encounter for a period of about 2 months and prioritize them. Don’t rush to fix the first ones because they might be politically charged or less important. Then start making changes.
You can use a calculation similar to RICE — how worth is solving a problem — the multiplication of its reach (how many are affected), impact (how much is each affected), confidence (that the change will yield a positive result) divided by the effort (how difficult and time-consuming it would be to change).
