A Manager’s Vision

A manager’s vision can make or break a team. A team without vision has no direction, no purpose. The team maybe busy doing things but all the stuff they do are just “one darn thing after another”. There is no coherence, no story to connect the dots, and no hope. Then people start to leave. It is the manager’s job to define and articulate their team’s vision. A manager is the care taker of their team’s vision. A good manager is also a storyteller. They tell the vision as a story to their team members. They inspire others to be part of the story. It may take sometime to settle down a vision. A vision has a life by itself, it grows as the team grows. If nobody takes care of the vision by retelling it, reenforcing it, keeping it grounded by incremental improvements, the vision dies. In KMS, my team’s vision is to “remove all limits for KMS customers.” All the work we do in secure software supply chain management, high performance hardware security module and large scale distributed computing, are part of that vision. I use all opportunities to retell that story to my team members, help them see their roles in the story. A manager with a vision needs to see beyond the conflict between short term and long term, problems and opportunities. Under the grand scheme of a vision, short term deliveries are the dots that connect to the long term goal defined by the vision, they keep the vision grounded; operational problems become the opportunities to invent and simplify. When KMS was buried under operational load, we started a big data team to address the ops problems, because we believe technical innovation is the answer to ops problems, not adding more human bodies to do manual labors. Nowadays the big data team is hottest team to attract new team members. A good manager deliberately celebrate small successes leading to the vision. When I started in KMS, I was asked to lead a team to focus on operational excellence. It was considered a dead end job by many. But we turned the dead end job into a grand vision: to solve KMS’ scalability problem - to remove limits for customers. We raised the default API quota more than 40 times in three years. We turned the internally facing team into the innovation powerhouse of KMS: we are the owner of KMS’ scalability and datastore architecture. My team still hold a record in AWS: we announced the most ops wins in two years in AWS’ weekly ops meeting. There were several team members transferred to KMS from other organizations because they wanted to know how we did it - a nice way to recruit top hands :-) So if you are shopping for a job, ask your future manager: “What is your vision for your team?” Then ask yourself: “ Did I hear an inspiring story? Can I see myself in that story? Did I hear evidence how the team’s everyday work leads into that vision? Do they have incremental wins that drive towards the vision? “ If not, time for another job!