I’m often asked what my management style is. I’m not even really sure how one defines these. Berkeley college was kind enough to pitch ten types, though Asana argues there are just nine. Some swear by servant leadership, and we’re all aware of micro-managers and the like.

Julie Zhuo doesn’t specify a style - she says it’s “to get better outcomes from a group of people working together.” I like this, but I fear it’s easy to abuse. An abusive manager can get great outcomes for an organization running their people into the ground, but why would anyone think that’s something to aspire to?

I workshopped this for myself and landed on a manager is a custodian for the health of a team because it blends the aspirations servant-led leadership, the North Star of Julie Zhuo’s outcomes based definition and the flexibility of style defined in other archetypes.

In choosing the word custodian, my mind first went to a school janitor. It’s socially maligned — it’s likely the job your parents hoped for you in their dreams — but profoundly important in caring for the operations of the building and (literal) well-being of the student body. You can apply the term more broadly: I’m a custodian of my house, tasked with maintaining and improving it until I pass it over to the next homeowner.

The word health is important to unpack as well. It’s fair to say that a healthy team produces high quality at high velocity, so improved outcomes certainly folds in here. A healthy team also takes care of each other, feels motivated and inspired, takes the priorities of the organization seriously, and so on. A manager’s job is to maintain a fluid definition of “health”, to notice and benchmark what healthy should be, to maintain what’s going well and improve what’s not.

As I’m an engineering manager, I often see the question asked “should managers code?” My answer: Maybe? If that’s what the team needs. I prefer to stay involved in the code base via “engineeracations”, occasional PR reviews or otherwise. It doesn’t have to be about code though - I’ve also managed designers, so partaking in critiques and sketching UI paradigms is healthy if not overdone. I encourage my reports to submit and review project ideas, so the shape of our products is inclusive of all voices. If the team’s pager is out of control, I’ll focus on detectors with them. Someone is going through personal trauma. Another wants to stretch for a career goal. A person in another part of the org wants to pitch a big idea and could use a sounding board. A customer can’t get something done because of a bad UI bug. We have an interview that candidates of a certain background routinely fail. All of that and more feeds into this framework.

A good manager can look up, down, and all around and see people with goals to improve the state of things. Yes, the product will come out better, but so will everything else, too.