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June 10, 2004

Shit, I'm A Manager - The Talk

Shit, I'm a Manager
An introduction to the soft skills of
people-management for the
previously proudly unmanageable.

This talk was originally intended as a 45-minute talk at NotCon 04, but there wasn’t time for that. It also wouldn’t fit into a standard lightning presentation, so after a bit of begging Dave Green let me have twenty-minutes-and-no-more-including-questions. This is about the limit of what I thought I could get through in that time.

Anyway, quite often, when I’ve been talking to now-getting-on-a-bit techie friends about work, the thing that seems to strike terror into their hearts is the day-to-day work of people management. And yet, when I dig down a bit further, the problems aren’t quite so hard after all, and with some nudging they can actually turn out to be positive benefits.

The only reason I can say this is that I used to be one of the crappest people managers I knew, and over the course of a few years I became one that people actually wanted to work for.

So this talk is a heavily-edited mix of that pub advice and my own bitter experience.

I’m assuming that you’re someone technical who’s either about to start managing people, has just started managing people, have been managing people for ages and it’s all going tits-up, or just want to know why your boss is acting so weird.

Anyway, lets begin by looking at some of the things nobody tells you you’ll go through when you first become a manager...

Posted by Tom Dolan at June 10, 2004 04:36 PM

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