“Don’t forget you’re a resource.”
That was the first thing my manager said to me on my first day at a finance company in London.
I had moved from a small hometown to work in the city for the first time. I was a midweight engineer. I loved the job and I thought I had made it.
I nodded along. Yeah, sure. I’ll be a resource. Whatever you say.
It took me years to realise what that one sentence had done. I was not a person to him. I was a unit of output. Every interaction after that ran on the same operating system, and the relationship never recovered.
There is a different way to do it. I worked for one of the best examples of it during my time at Yelp. His name is John Weatherford, and I sat down with him recently for an EM Accelerator expert interview on values-based leadership.
Meet John Weatherford
John is currently Senior Director of Engineering at Medley, a medical staffing company. Before that he spent years at Yelp as an engineering manager and director. He has been an IC, a tech lead, a manager, a director, at companies large and small. The full span of the engineering career.
When I was interviewing at Yelp, John was the manager I would be reporting to if the offer came through. He called my references and went out of his way to talk to them properly. I found out later that he had not asked them whether I was any good. He had asked them how to get the best out of me.
I had not even started the job and the man was already trying to figure out how to help me succeed.
The Manager README
John writes a Manager README. It is a written document built around three values: transparency, autonomy, and authenticity. He gives it to people who report to him. He also gives it to the people he reports to.
Writing the values down is the part most managers skip. Values that stay in your head are easy to drift away from. Values on paper that you have handed to your team give them something to hold you to. If John ever acts in a way that contradicts transparency, anyone on his team can point at the document and say so. That is uncomfortable. It is also the point.
Giving the README upwards is the move most managers will not make. They will hand their boss a project plan and a status report. They will not hand them a document that says here is who I am, here is how I work, here is what I will not compromise on. It is a confident move. It says I know who I am and I do not plan to twist myself to fit your expectations.
If you have never written a manager README, this is the simplest leadership exercise you can do this week. Three values. Two paragraphs each on what they mean and what they look like in practice. Share it with your team. Share it up. If you cannot share it up, that tells you something about the company, not about the document.
Treat People Like Adults
You have to tell someone on your team they are not getting a raise this year. There are two ways to do it.
Option one: “I’m sorry, HR said no raises this year.”
Option two: “I can’t give you a raise this year because we’re tight on cash. Revenue is down about five percent and we’re trying to recover. Here is what that means for the team.”
Both are honest. Only one of them treats the person like an adult.
Option one hides behind process. It tells the employee that the company is a black box and the manager is just the messenger. It is cowardice dressed up as professionalism. If the employee gets angry, it is HR’s fault, not the manager’s.
Option two assumes the person on the other side of the desk can handle the truth. It gives them context. It tells them what is happening in the business. It treats them like a partner in the company rather than a cog in its machinery.
“We’re all adults. For the most part, we’ve all been through university. We’re of the age that we are becoming parents and homeowners and just responsible adults.”
The version of management that treats people like children is exhausting. It requires you to manage two stories at once, the official one you tell your team and the real one you tell yourself. Eventually those two stories diverge enough that everyone notices.
Your team already knows when you are managing them. They knew the moment you started using phrases like “circling back” and “let’s take that offline.” The polished corporate version of bad news is worse than just saying it, because the polish itself is the signal that you do not trust them with the truth.
The Line Between Authentic and Unprofessional
Most management content gets this wrong. Everyone tells you to be authentic. Almost nobody tells you where authenticity stops being a virtue and starts being a problem.
The useful frame is clarity about the lack of clarity.
If someone asks you a question you cannot answer, you do not have to stonewall them. You can say: “I understand that’s a hard question. I have an answer but I am not at liberty to share right now. I am working through it with leadership and I will bring you in as soon as I can. I am sorry I cannot share more.”
That is still an authentic response. It is honest. It tells the person on the other side that you respect them enough to tell them you cannot tell them.
“Clarity about the lack of clarity is still a very authentic response.”
The line is clearer than people pretend. Gross misconduct, harassment, things that affect another person’s privacy or career, those stay private. You do not gossip about why someone got fired. You do not share information that is not yours to share. Almost everything else can be discussed with the right framing.
The signal that you are doing this right is that people stop being surprised by bad news. They have been given enough context throughout the year that the layoff, the missed bonus, the reorg, none of it lands as a shock. If your team is consistently shocked when bad news comes, that is not them being naive. That is you not telling them what you knew.
Vulnerability Beats Projecting Confidence
There is a piece of management advice that has done a lot of damage. As a manager, you need to project confidence. Your team needs to feel that you have it all together. If they see you doubt, they will doubt.
“Project confidence” is mostly bad management advice repeated by people who do not know how to manage. It is what insecure leaders tell each other to feel better about the fact that they are scared and pretending not to be. The teams that work do not need their manager to seem invincible. They need their manager to be honest.
The teams I have been on that worked best were not the ones where the manager seemed to know everything. They were the ones where the manager was first to put their hand up and say I messed that up, here is what I am going to do about it.
That kind of vulnerability does two things. It models the behaviour you want from your team, and it gives them permission to be honest with you about their own mistakes. If the leader is always perfect, everyone else is always pretending to be perfect too. That is when problems get hidden until they explode.
Vulnerability without follow-through is just complaining. The version that works is “I do not know, but here is what I am going to do to find out.” Or “I do not have the answer, but here is the person I am going to talk to.”
“I do not know” is one of the most powerful things a manager can say. It is also one of the rarest. Most managers will bluff before they admit they do not know something. People can tell when you are guessing. The bluff is always worse than the admission.
The Bowling Alley
One analogy I have used for years to describe the manager’s role is the bowling alley.
Your team is bowling. You do not pick up the ball for them. You do not tell them which pins to aim at. You let them bowl however they want. What you do is put up the bumpers so the ball does not roll into the gutter.
Your job is the bumpers. You watch. You step in only when you need to. You let them shine.
The bumpers are not always going to be there. If someone is bowling badly and only succeeding because of the bumpers, that is a coaching moment. You sit them down and say I have noticed you are leaning on the bumpers. Here is what we need to work on so you can throw a clean ball without them.
That is most of the job. Provide the bumpers. Coach the throw. Let them take the credit when the strike comes. The managers I have seen fail are the ones who either pick up the ball and bowl for the team, or remove the bumpers because they want their best engineer to “step up” before they were ready. Both are abdication. The job is the bumpers.
Build a Peer Manager Group
The best practical thing in the entire conversation was about peer manager meetings.
At Yelp, John ran something we called Weather’s Managers. It was a weekly meeting for the engineering managers who reported to him. The format was simple. We went around the room and talked about something that had gone wrong, something we were struggling with, or something we wanted advice on. The other managers offered their perspective. Nobody was there to judge. Nobody was there to score points.
I have not seen this format replicated anywhere else, before or since.
It is a hard thing to pull off. It requires the leader to model the vulnerability first. If John had not been willing to talk about his own mistakes in those meetings, none of us would have done it either. The format had come down from Sam Eaton, his director, who later became CTO of Yelp. Sam ran the same meeting one level up for directors. That meeting produced more VPs than any other group at the company.
“Managers are people too. It’s easy to forget that.”
The peer manager group does something formal training and 1:1s cannot. It gives you a sounding board of people doing the same job. They know your context. They know your constraints. They can give you advice grounded in reality, not in a textbook.
The voice in a new manager’s head telling them they are getting it wrong has no counter-voice. The counter-voice is supposed to come from peers, and most engineering managers do not have any. They have a manager above them. They have their own team below them. They have nobody at their level to talk to. That is one of the loneliest positions in any company, and it is the reason so many new managers feel like they are flying blind.
If you are a manager reading this, find your peers. Set up a recurring meeting. Make it small, five or six people maximum. Make it confidential. Show up to it even when you do not feel like it. It will change how you experience the job.
Final Thoughts
What John wishes he had had at the start of his management career was not a skill or a framework. It was a mentor like himself. Someone who treated engineering management as a craft. Someone who would push back, give honest feedback, ask the questions he was not asking himself. He also wished he had had peers earlier than he did. The first companies he managed at were small, and he was figuring it out on his own.
That part of the conversation hit me hardest. I had the same experience. I started as a manager at a smaller company. I was doing what I had done as an IC, just more of it, and assuming that was the job. It took me longer than I want to admit to realise the role is fundamentally different. You go from being a doer to being an enabler. Nobody told me that. Nobody had the conversation with me. I had to figure it out the hard way.
The thing that struck me most about John’s approach is how unflashy it is. There is no framework with a clever acronym. There is no five-step process. There is the consistent application of three values, written down, lived in practice, held to account by the people he works with. It works because it is genuinely how he operates, not because it sounds good on a leadership podcast.
If you take one thing from this piece, take this. Write down your three values as a manager. Share them with your team. Let them hold you accountable. Then find five other managers and have an honest conversation with them every week.
That is most of the job.
John’s reflection is one of the reasons I built EM Accelerator. The peer group of engineering managers he had at Yelp, the kind that shaped how he developed as a leader, is rare. Most EMs never get one.
EM Accelerator is built to be that group. The EM Playbook gives you a structured 90-day foundation. Monthly office hours and expert interviews like the one with John keep you growing as the role grows. The private community is where you find the peers you have been missing.
