I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where my management style came from.
Not the practices. Not one-on-ones, retrospectives, career conversations, or any of the mechanics of managing a team.
The values underneath them.
Why do I care so much about trust? Why do I want work to be fun? Why do I believe you can have a relaxed team that still holds itself to a high standard?
I don’t think I picked those things from a list of management principles.
I lived them.
A job without trust
Early in my career, I worked somewhere with very little trust.
It was one of my first real development jobs, so I didn’t have much to compare it to. I assumed that was just what working in software was like.
There was a lot of oversight, and commitments were often made without the people doing the work.
One project stands out. The team walked through it, estimated several weeks based on the known effort, and then learned the customer had already been told it would be done in two. I know work tends to expand to fill the time it’s given, and a little pressure isn’t a bad thing. This was different: far too much work squeezed into far too little space, and nobody had asked us.
What followed was overtime, high risk and less polished work, all to hit a date when a modest, unrushed deadline would have accomplished so much more.
I spent a lot of time stressed in that job, and not the useful kind of stress that comes from solving a difficult problem or pushing yourself to do something ambitious.
I learned what it feels like to work somewhere you don’t feel trusted.
I didn’t think much about it at the time. It’s only looking back that I can see how much that job shaped the kind of manager I would become.
Then, the opposite
Then I had the opposite experience.
I joined a company where people worked hard and took the work seriously, but we also had fun. There was room for personalities. People trusted each other. There was accountability without the atmosphere feeling heavy.
There were Nerf guns in the office. Nobody thought that made us any less serious about the work.
It showed me that those things weren’t in conflict. You could have fun and still be serious about the work. You could give people room to operate without giving up accountability.
That experience stuck with me too.
Two workplaces, one management style
Years later, after moving into leadership and eventually management, I can see both workplaces in the cultures I’ve tried to build.
Some of my values grew out of experiences I wanted other people to have. Others grew out of experiences I never wanted anyone on my team to go through.
Trust goes both ways
Trust is probably one of the clearest examples. I tend to give trust freely.
That doesn’t mean ignoring problems or pretending every working relationship is perfect. Trust can be damaged. Sometimes there are gaps in it. When that happens, I think part of the job is recognizing the gap and doing the work to bridge it.
And it has to go both ways.
I want to trust the engineers on my team to make good decisions, raise concerns, ask for help, and follow through on what they say they’re going to do.
But they also need to be able to trust me.
They should trust that I’ll be honest with them. That I’ll represent them fairly. That they can disagree with me. That I won’t surprise them with feedback I’ve been quietly collecting for months. That when I say I’m going to do something, I’ll make a real effort to do it.
Trust isn’t something a manager generously hands down to a team.
It’s a relationship.
Fun with accountability
The same is true of another value I’ve carried with me: I want work to be enjoyable.
We spend too much of our lives working for the default atmosphere to be grim seriousness.
I like teams that laugh. I like inside jokes. I like people being themselves. I like a little chaos around the edges.
But I’ve also learned that fun works best alongside accountability. A healthy culture isn’t one where nobody expects anything from anybody. It’s one where people can enjoy working together because they know the people around them care about the work and about each other.
Fun and accountability aren’t opposites any more than trust and accountability are.
Where do your values come from?
Looking back, I can trace those beliefs surprisingly far into my career. And it has made me wonder about other managers.
We talk a lot about management values as if there’s one correct set.
Trust. Transparency. Empathy. Ownership. Accountability. Autonomy. Excellence.
They’re all good words. But two good managers can put very different weight on them.
Maybe that’s because our values aren’t formed in a vacuum.
They’re shaped by the manager who took a chance on us. The one who didn’t. The team where we did our best work. The job that made us dread Monday morning. The leader we wanted to become.
And sometimes the leader we promised ourselves we’d never become.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what my values are. I’m starting to think the more interesting question is:
What experiences made those my values in the first place?
What experiences shaped yours?
I’d genuinely like to hear your answer. Share it with me on LinkedIn or Bluesky, and subscribe to get new posts by email.
