They also went on to pen a popular biweekly newsletter and two bestselling books: “ How F*cked Up Is Your Management?: An Uncomfortable Conversation About Modern Leadership” and most recently “ Unmanageable: Leadership Lessons from an Impossible Year,” something of a time capsule of the challenges managers faced in 2020. But those early management stumbles stuck with them, and the married couple decided to team up and found Raw Signal Group, a management and leadership training organization. “But when folks come to management with a learners mindset - and are supported by the right systems and training - that’s where managerial magic happens.”Īfter leaving Mozilla, both Melissa and Johnathan went on to startups, including Wattpad (Melissa) and Hubba (Johnathan). From outer space, we can see all these changes coming, so it’s wild that companies will let new managers walk headfirst off these cliffs,” says Johnathan. Giving feedback to a friend is much different than giving feedback to someone you can fire or promote. Being a peer and then becoming someone’s boss is weird. But startups have been slow to catch up when it comes to implementing sound leadership training.
Many column inches have been devoted to tackling the thicket of challenges in front of a brand-new manager.
BEST STARTUP MANAGER HOW TO
There are a lot of people who have been given power in an organization, but no training on how to wield that power. We quickly found out that the expectations of being a great manager are wildly different than that of an individual contributor,” says Melissa. We got promoted into management to lead teams because we were really strong individual contributors, but we didn’t get any training on how to manage. We both grew with the organization as it passed 1,000 people. “Johnathan and I met in the very early days of the web, working at Mozilla when it was sub-50 people, and growing really fast. But for scrappy companies, the overwhelming majority still have no training for people managers,” says Melissa.īoth Johnathan and Melissa Nightingale have felt these growing pains acutely in their own tech careers - and their experience probably sounds familiar to plenty of startup folks. “As an industry, we’re making progress on this front, with larger organizations bringing in formalized management training. One root cause? Manager training, which is largely ignored by startups as a BigCo bucket list item to be checked off later. “Below 1,000 people, a lot of organizations run into problems that are very clearly those of an under-equipped management team: Alignment issues, siloing, conflicts between teams, three different departments shipping variations of the same thing without talking to each other - those all stem from management,” says Johnathan Nightingale, co-founder of Raw Signal Group.
However, many of the cracks that emerge as startups scale can be traced back to those missing managerial cornerstones. Particularly at early-stage companies, where you’re still wrestling with product/market fit and building up the company foundation, management often falls to the back burner, leaving folks to generally figure it all out for themselves. “I never met Steve, but from everything we know about the Apple story, I don’t think he was one to stay out of people’s way.”Īnd yet, the ethos of that quote (and what it indicates about management) persists in founder circles. But if you ask 100 people about their lived experience of being managed, 100 people would say that it mattered,” says Melissa Nightingale, co-founder of Raw Signal Group. Worse, though, is that it’s often cited when saying management doesn’t matter.
It's wrong for two reasons: First, Steve never said this - Ford’s Lee Iacocca did. "Everyone quotes this Steve Jobs line: 'Hire smart people and get out of their way.' I've heard this my entire career, and I continue to hear leaders quote it all the time.
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