All is said in jest but what matters is, Which ones deliver on their vision? When a project is on the line, who actually gets the job done?Every team has a natural leader — and often that leader is not a team’s official manager. Your job is to get the team motivated. Once you do that, the natural leaders will emerge very quickly. If you keep an eye on the team, you can figure out who those natural leaders are — and then make sure that they’re happy and that they have everything they need to do their job. For instance, natural leaders need to feel that they have access to the company’s senior managers. Don’t forget: They feel like they’re changing the world — so you need to make them feel like you’re helping them do that.

There are easy ways that you can help them out. For example, encourage them to bypass layers of middle management and to send you email directly. Sure, that will piss off the people in middle management, but it’s better to piss off those people than to piss off your key project leaders.

arguments always centered on some problem that needed to be solved, and what the best approach would be to solve it. If there was a disagreement, he’d restate the goals and expectations, make sure everyone was still on the same page, and then lead a discussion of possible alternatives. Working for him always felt like a partnership. Decisions were made on the basis of their merit, and any point of view was allowed provided it added value to the discussion. He didn’t care if he was right or wrong, only that the best ideas survived.

He chose people that were self motivated and confident enough that he didn’t have to expend much energy figuring out how to get them to work hard. Then he created an environment where good ideas rose to the top, further encouraging smart people to want to contribute. The bossman made working for him feel like a proper relationship: he got something from us, and we got something from him. I think that this kind of management style requires more skill and savvy than a more hierarchical drill sergeant type of manager. Unlike the later, the former demands comfort with degrees of ambiguity, and the confidence to allow people to openly disagree, or intellectually trump, their manager. But from my experience, this open management style is the only way to have a “best idea wins” kind of culture.

It’s all about making actions and decisions that both clarify how people’s talents apply to the team goals, and working to keep the team happy, motivated, and focused in that application.

When people see that somehow you’re able to cultivate and grow smart people, you win more acclaim than if you presented the ideas yourself. I think if good ideas are in abundance, and the culture promotes and rewards their creation, there’s much less competition for credit for it.

Respect what talents they have, that you do not (and hire with this in mind)

I’m a fan of sports analogies to management, so here’s one: every team sport requires many different skills. No one player is the best at everything and winning games requires each player to understand their specific role, the roles others play, and how it all needs to fit together to work. Business or technical organizations are no different. Things only go well if everyone understands (and is comfortable with) their role, knows the roles of others, and has some understanding of how it all fits together. Good managers should be easily seen as coaches (not the Bobby Knight chair throwing type, but the John Wooden nurturing leader type), who value the different roles, and try to bring together the right kind of chemistry to make good things happen.

If you are a manager, it’s unlikely that you were born that way. For awhile you probably had the job that one of the people that works for you currently has. You used to be more specialized, and have a well defined expertise. This means that your natural bias will be towards over involving yourself in that role, and underinvolving yourself in the other roles people play on your team. It’s human nature. Perhaps you used to be a developer, you liked being a developer, and you think you’re good at developing. So when an engineering issue comes up that impacts marketing, interface design and localization, odds are you’ll tend to focus most on the engineering point of view, which might not always be the most important one.

Odds are also good that if you do this often enough, you will destabilize your team, undermine its other strengths, and lead you and the team to great shame and tragic ruin (Ok, maybe not. But it will impact what kinds of issues people bother raising in front of you). As the manager, your philosophical biases often become the team’s philosophical biases. You have to go out of your way to periodically allow your own points of view to be evaluated, questioned, and improved.

Sometimes the only way to make this happen is to bring an outsider in to evaluate the hidden biases an organization has, and who can make commentary and recommendations without fear of political recriminations. You can only have the best ideas surface if you’re drawing from a wide pool of perspectives, including those different or even in conflict with your own.

Another solution is this: First acknowledge that you have weaknesses, both in skills and in knowledge. Second, admit that you’re ignorance hurts not only the product or website, but the team itself. Third, get help in hiring experts for roles you are not familiar with, and go out of your way to involve them, and their perspective, in your decision making process. Deliberately hire first rate strong willed people to represent disciplines that you tend to undervalue. Force yourself to be on the top of your own game, and to make sure it’s not bias and ignorance that drive you, but good judgment refined by divergent perspectives.