Recently I became a manager at Amazon in AWS. I have always been a super relaxed manager but current boss is pressuring me to get higher output from the team. I’ve talked to some other managers and have gotten some feedback and advice from other managers in the org on how to drive higher output on the team can you guys let me know what you think? 1) weekly scoring where every member rates the other members on the team. The highest votes get a free coffee where as the lowest number gets an extra week of on call for the month or is given more tickets from backlog 2) double current projects the team is working on to be distributed across the team 3) schedule later meetings since we are all wfh and increase tasks to keep everyone accountable and working hard 4) public strike board where other teammates can pin what you can improve on and unpin it when you improve on that aspect
Those ideas are all terrible. How about talking to your team and asking what you can do to help them be more productive?
I like zrrU12 suggestion to asking your team to work with you on a solution. You might actually still come up with the similar techniques but it’ll be from your team. A question I forgot to ask, I thought amazon had performance bonuses? Aren’t those tied to performance targets and agreed to? Are your team members missing those agreed targets? Even being a manager I feel it’s unfair to increase developer load if they are hitting their targets. If you made a mistake on performance goals that’s one thing. Arbitrary increasing the work load on your team could drive your best performer to feel sympathy for his struggling team mate. If that happens you are toast as a manager. Still gotta be fair
You are being mentored into being a bad manager. Full stop. You need to work with your team to assess what the motivational problems are and protect them from an abusive skip level. Or leave. But if you learn to manage the way you are being taught, you will never get hired at another FAANG and will always have a sub par team with massive attrition.
Wow that is pretty brutal. I manage my team in a way more relaxed way than these suggestions. I think if I implemented these changes at my place I won’t have a team in a few months. Then I’ll be struggling to justify why my builds are unreliable and why there will be increased regression issues. I’ll probably will need to sit in on a lot of interviews to find new devs which will leave me with little time to get anything done.