• Written by: Joshua Bihun (my LinkedIn)
• Last updated: 2022 October 06

This document refers to me and how I comport myself, and not to any specific employer, though I and my team will do best in an environment where I can behave as described below.

This document is intended to give you an idea for how I prefer to work and lead my teams, and is intended for my employees, prospective employees, and prospective employers. It is intended to be a living document, and if you've worked with or for me I encourage your feedback.

Who I am at work and who I am at home overlap a lot. While I like to keep my work and home lives separate, understanding some about who I am as a person is important to understanding who I am as a manager.

• Awareness of privilege, especially mine.
• Mental and physical health. Taking time for both is very important, for oneself and the people one cares about. I take anxiety medication and am trying to fit exercise into my schedule, but I tend to get overextended at work and that makes finding the time difficult.
• Family. Mine is very important to me.
• I work to live, not live to work.
• Being on time.
• Communication and collaboration. I'm stubborn and will hold my line a lot of the time, but I believe in finding answers together, and I'm typically happy to be wrong.
• Humor. The world is a pretty awful place if you let it be, it doesn't need the help.

I am married and have two and a half children -- it's complicated -- and two dogs and a cat, and we live among the trees and deer in San Antonio, Texas. I was born in Chicago and grew up in central California, and lived most of my adult life in the Pacific Northwest, which I frequently miss. I read science fiction and fantasy and sometimes weird fiction. I play video games sometimes. Option paralysis and trouble putting work down mean I don't tinker on the house as much as I would like. Between late 2018 and early 2021 I completed a bachelors' degree and MBA in IT Management.

Things about me that tend to be mostly good:

• I like to try to see all sides, though I tend to be pretty confident in mine.
• I believe that accepting something doesn't mean approving of it.
• I care deeply and personally about my employees.

Things about me that tend to be mostly problematic:

• If I'm not careful, I will overthink things and dig myself into a perfectionist hole.
• I can let myself get spread too thin.
• When I'm tired I can be extremely distractable.
• Believe it or not, I'm an introvert. Balancing that can be a challenge.
• I don't have a way of tracking to-do items that I really like, and I've tried a number of them. Now and then things can fall through the cracks despite my best efforts. If you think this has happened don't hesitate to ask me about it -- not only will you not upset me, I'll kind of expect you to keep me honest.

• Not learning from mistakes.
• Not having the will to apply what we learn from mistakes.
• Making a habit of crisis.
• Not having a plan. And a backup plan. And a backup plan for that plan.
• Letting technical debt fester.

• In the DISC Plus test, I score very high on S (Stability) and very, very high on C (Cautious), and pretty low on D (Decisive) and I (Interactive). My Aesthetic and Theoretical values are very high, my Economic and Individualistic values are very low, and the rest are middling. This implies that I'm deliberate, agreeable, matter-of-fact, a bit reserved, loyal, patient, cautious, and process-oriented. This is largely accurate.
• I fall between the cracks a bit on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, but these days I fall somewhere between INTJ and ISTJ.

We both work for a company, and have responsibilities we must execute to further the company's aims. There are parts of our jobs that will fall out directly from that, whether we like it or not. I will try to make that as smooth for both of us as possible.

I believe that my job as a manager is to:

• Hire amazing people to meet the needs of the company.
• Help those people grow in ways that benefit at least them if not me and the company, too.
• Give them the context to understand what I and the company expect of them, and why.
• Provide them the tools and learning opportunities to do the best job they can to meet those expectations.
• Actively clear up roadblocks that would get in their way.

Every single one of those points is about people. It should be.

My job is not:

• Telling you how to do things, unless you ask or I think you're headed really off track and it's not worth the learning experience.
• Pushing you to meet a corporate bottom line; if we did it right, that should fall out of the points above.
• Making anyone's job harder unless the alternative is to make it harder-er.

• people, especially my team
• diversity
• collaboration
• personal growth
• leaving the tech ecosystem better than I found it by cleaning up messes and growing people
• honesty
• trust, including telling me when too much is asked of you
• kindness
• efficiency
• 'good' being good enough (you can't just do one thing forever until it's perfect)
• 'good enough' never being good enough (always reflect on the process and look for ways to improve it and make it more relevant)
• metrics, except when I don't
• being on time (though it's okay if you're not, if you let me know as far as advance as you can)

• Degrees; well, I do value them, because they demonstrate the skills needed to earn a degree, but my best employees have either not had degrees, or had them in fields unrelated to their jobs with me.
• meetings that could be e-mails
• e-mails that could IM conversations

• I prefer to be pretty hands-off as a manager, but ready to step in when needed; there's an expression I like, 'keep a tight grip on a loose rein'. I'll let my team have as much autonomy as I feel they can handle. Sometimes that's less, often that's more. If you feel my aim is off, let's talk about it.
• I hire for my weaknesses. If I hire you, it's because I think you are or can be better than me at something. It's a strategy that's worked extremely well for me when building amazing teams.
• I trust you to know more than I do about the work you're doing, but do please keep me in the loop.
• I will default to transparency and openness, unless I legally can't or the matter is personal. I will try very hard to never lie to you. This may require exceptional circumlocution, or I may just not answer you, but I will try.
• I will try very hard to not give my word unless I am sure at the time I can keep it. Circumstances can change and (like I said up there) I get overwhelmed, though, so I'll count on you to keep me honest if you think I've let something slide.
• I try to remove obstacles, not create them. I will also exploit the heck out of opportunities to advance our goals and/or make you look good.
• If you work for me, you are my job, above all else. I am always here for you first, though folks above my pay grade may interfere with that sometimes.
• I like process that builds good habits and stays out of the way, I will tinker with process to make it more efficient, and I will encourage you to do so, too.
• I am always open to your ideas. Like I said, I hire people who are better than me at something.

• delegation
• keeping work at work
• ending 1:1s at the scheduled time

The company we work for may have other ideas, but absent those I would expect you to work roughly 9am to 5pm in your local time zone, but as long as you're getting your work done -- including meetings you need to attend and availability for the people you work with -- and you can let me know about your needs and hours in advance I'm willing to be very flexible and I'm not going to count your hours. I will try very hard to keep you from working more than forty hours a week. If you're sick, please don't work; remind me of this when I try to work while sick. Take vacation.

If I contact you by any means after hours, I do not expect a prompt response, and I will probably tell you in my message when I'd prefer one. Please don't respond immediately unless I clearly indicate that I'd like you to (and even then I will probably not expect you to). In general I should let you know well in advance if I expect you to be on call or available outside of our mutual understanding of your "normal" hours in any way. That said, you can reach out to me any time, and I will try to respond when I notice it, or I'll set a reminder to respond when I have more time; if you do contact me after hours, please do so by IM or e-mail.

Speaking of, my preferred communication media, in order:

• Slack/IM, especially for questions or urgent needs
• E-mail, especially for anything not urgent or which requires multiple people
• Voice chat
• Video chat

It's not that I won't like talking with you, it's that I am usually multiplexing; it's hard to take the time to focus on a single thread and, in my experience, in a distributed company people (myself included) are bad at noticing one is busy and at waiting to engage. If we're being honest, I'm also sometimes a little avoidant of the degree of focus that a voice or video conversation brings with it. Asynchronous communication is something I'm usually very comfortable with, though for 1:1 conversations I prefer Slack or voice -- those are typically the only meetings that I make a point of ignoring everything else for.

I believe that your career growth should be an important topic for both of us and I'll check in with you regularly about it, especially if you don't. As much as I might wish it otherwise I understand that my team is likely to be just one stop on your career. I intend to do what I can to prepare you for the next stop, whether or not that's on my team. I've had very, very few employees leave for other companies, and I've had a few move on, with my help, to different roles within the same company; with very few exceptions, I consider each of those to be a victory.

I don't like environments that handle goal setting once per year and penalize you for how much factors outside either of our control can render those goals irrelevant through the rest of that year. I prefer to sit down about once per quarter to review and reset goals, and typically touch on them about once per month. Goals for me aren't set in stone -- sometimes the goalposts move. I will push you to set goals that challenge you/us, and I will also work with you to craft goals that benefit both the company and your career progression. I will hold you accountable firmly but kindly for making progress on your goals or helping me understand why and how your goals need to evolve to reflect changed circumstances.

I will also probably ask for your help doing the same for me. I have a lot to learn, too, and I'll need your feedback.

I like to spend the first hour or so of my day catching up; first in IM, which tends to have a high criticality, and then e-mail. I will pick off very critical things to do immediately if they're quick to do, and otherwise will add things to my to-do list. I'll then review the previous day's to-do list to make sure it's up to date and prioritize my tasks for the day, then work through those, adjusting as necessary. Given my typical meeting load, items will tend to carry over day to day, so I'll need your help reminding me about anything you're waiting on me for. I'm going to be busy but don't let me block you.

• Unless there are a lot of people reporting to me, we'll start with half an hour weekly, and adjust to what works. A weekly 1:1 tends to work best for me, even though some weeks we won't need the time because we've stayed up to date over IM or elsewhere, but it's nice to have the time set aside.
• Conversations about goals (qv) and performance reviews will probably be longer. I used to try to shoehorn them into 1:1s but that doesn't really work very well, so I'll probably schedule those separately.
• I may have things I want to discuss at 1:1s, but you own the agenda for these conversations. They can be, but are not required to be, status meetings. Slack/IM is better for quick status anyway, and depending on our larger organization's needs you may be giving me your weekly status elsewhere anyway.
• Also I will try to not wait for a 1:1 for important feedback. I hope you won't, either. 1:1s are for catching up and nurturing our relationship.
• I'm probably in a lot of meetings but you will have dibs to any time not already booked, and can probably pre-empt my time if it is already booked. My calendar is usually current. If you need me now or at a particular time, you can always ask. I will see what I can do.
• You can always reach out over IM. Like, always.

• I like weekly-ish team meetings, but would be delighted to not need them because of an active team Slack channel.
• I like a more permanent record of weekly status and I believe in transparency, so I may set up a weekly status document on an internal wiki or something. If I owe status reports up to my manager, I'll collate and summarize those statuses.
• Either way, I prefer status in a searchable format -- voice or video conversations are nice for catching up, but they're hard to search when I need to look something up to answer a question or when I'm making sure to call out everything you've achieved in writing reviews about you.

I generally prefer to be handled like I prefer to handle my employees, but if some aspect of that doesn't work for you, we can work it out.

As I said above, this is a living document, and I welcome your feedback. You're welcome to comment, drop me an e-mail if you have it, or submit a pull request with your edits.