How to manage

In his lecture How to manage Ben Horowitz introduces two ideas that stuck with me.

First one is the need to take all possible points of view into consideration when making a decision.

You have to add up every employee's view and then incorporate that into your own view. Otherwise your management decisions are going to have weird side effects and potentially dangerous consequences - Ben Horowitz

Before you make and important decision like promoting someone or handing out high profile tasks to an employee you must look at how it affects the business as a whole. You might feel like this person is best suited for the job/task but that isn't the only thing to consider. Giving this person more responsibility might impact other employees negatively, production could in fact decrease if the team would feel frustrated by the move.

The second builds on top of that idea, the idea of giving someone a raise. Horowitz feels it's important to create a process that is transparent and fair when distributing bonuses and increasing employees salaries. Instead of waiting for employees to ask for one and being in the position of giving some people a raise whilst turning others down he introduces a performance based review.

This on it's own limits politics with in the team and sets a real value based structure around the team. People that do the work but are afraid to ask will still be rewarded based on performance whilst the ones that ask yet don't deliver won't. It increases the feedback to employees and helps guide them towards their desired outcome.