Grown, Not Born: Insights from a Remote Management Veteran, Laurent Parenteau
In this installment of our "Grown not born" series, we sit down with Laurent Parenteau to discuss his journey into a managerial role and the valuable lessons he has learned along the way.
Laurent Parenteau is a Senior Director of Engineering at GlacierGrid, a cooling intelligence IoT platform combating food and energy waste. He’s an experienced remote manager (remote since 2009) and is a mentor at Plato and ADPList, helping engineering managers and software developers grow.
As a seasoned remote manager and mentor, Laurent shares his insights on navigating the challenges of remote work, prioritizing tasks, fostering team alignment, and addressing burnout.
Sarah: Can you tell me about your experience transitioning into a managerial role? What did you find most challenging initially?
Laurent: At first, the most challenging part was the feeling that I had no idea what I was doing, and feeling lost in this new role. While there was much to learn, I now realize I knew more than I thought. Most things in life rely on the same basic principles.
For me, it took a long time to admit this. Had I had more trust in these basic principles, instead of expecting things to be different this time, it would have saved me a lot of worries.
Sarah: Can you share a significant learning experience from a mistake or failure as a manager?
Laurent: Early on, there were some decisions I made because someone with more experience told me that was the solution. Since I wasn't very confident in my judgment as a manager, I didn't question too much and went with that. When things went wrong, I spent time reflecting on that and realized that:
- Someone may have experience but not know anything.
- Experience from different contexts may not be good for your context.
- People have different values, so a decision they don't mind may not be good for your value system.
Now I still seek advice and ideas from people with more and/or different experiences. But I use that to refine my own thinking. I take their advice as suggestions but then make sure to think about the problem on my own.
Someone may have experience but not know anything.
Sarah: How do you assess performance within your team?
Laurent: I like to distinguish between 2 things:
- Are we meeting our goals as a team? If we are, then we're good and we should get an A+ on a performance review.
- What area can be improved, individually and as a team? This is where you work on improving yourself, your team, and the people themselves.
Mixing performance review (for the purpose of raise, promotion, etc.) and personal/team improvement is not a good idea.
Mixing performance review (for the purpose of raise, promotion, etc.) and personal/team improvement is not a good idea.
Sarah: What unique challenges have you faced with remote or hybrid work settings, and how have you addressed them?
Laurent: As I've only managed teams that were either hybrid or remote, I'm not sure which challenges are unique to them ;-).
That said, the biggest challenges are usually related to company culture. Once you have 1 remote employee, you need to manage everything as if everyone was remote. Everything needs to be accessible online and in public spaces.
A similar challenge happens when you start having 1 person in a timezone without much overlap with others. You have to start managing everything as if everyone were in a different timezone with no overlap, which means going toward asynchronous ways of working.
Once you have 1 remote employee, you need to manage everything as if everyone was remote. Everything needs to be accessible online and in public spaces.
Sarah: How do you balance the needs of individual team members with those of the team as a whole?
Laurent: I always try to find solutions that would serve both the team members and the team as a whole. That said, when tradeoffs are required, you have to favour the whole team first. If it means a person has to go (from the team or the company), it will be sad, but there's no other way. If you don't favour the team, then you don't have a team.
Sarah: How do you recognize and address signs of stress or burnout in yourself and your team members?
Laurent: It's easier in ourselves, at least for me. In either case, like for many things, I prefer to spend effort on prevention. Putting systems in place that prevent all sorts of depression is a good idea. Working on it daily is good as well.
Now if it happens, at that point, you have to be supportive and allow the person to recover. If the cause was mostly work-related, hopefully, you've learned something and can improve the system to reduce the chances of it happening again. If it is related to personal life, the best you can do is point the person in the proper direction for getting help, but as a manager, it's not your job to fix people's lives.
Sarah: How do you ensure that your team's work aligns with the broader goals of the organization?
Laurent: This all starts from the top. You need to have a clear vision, mission, and goals for the company. Then it should trickle down. If at some point the relationship breaks, then there isn't much you can do. You have to work on fixing that broken link first.
Once everything flows clearly from the company's own goals, then it's just a question of repeating the message in different ways, pointing to examples of that happening daily, and reminding people about these goals when they start to go in a different direction or work on something else.
This all starts from the top. You need to have a clear vision, mission, and goals for the company. Then it should trickle down.
Sarah: What strategies do you use to prioritize tasks when everything seems urgent?
Laurent: If you have a clear strategy for what you accomplish, then prioritization is surprisingly easy. When prioritizing is hard, it's usually because the strategy or goals aren't clear or not well defined.
More tactically, there are 2 rules I often end up using:
1- No 2 things can have the same priority. If you only have P1, P2, and P3, that doesn't work. Priority is a single column, where things higher are higher priority and things lower are lower priority. No 2 things equal priority.
2- Radical scoping: before starting any project, pick everything on the table and ask whoever has proper authority what will the decision be on the day of the release if that item isn't ready yet. Is the launch/release delayed, or do we launch/release without that? Anything that wouldn't result in delaying the release is getting removed from the scope. Then you prioritize the rest (which should be much smaller and so easier to prioritize).
No 2 things [have] equal priority.
Sarah: What tools or technologies do you find essential in managing your team effectively?
Laurent: A good tracking tool to know the state & dependencies of work items (anything from basic Trello to full-featured Jira work as well). That, and some chat applications with proper conversation grouping, so things can be organized.
Sarah: Are there any tools you wish you had access to or existed?
Laurent: An AI tool that can look at everyone's interaction (git commits, slack message, calendar, etc... everything!) and can figure out what moods people are in.
Sarah: Finally, what animal would you compare your management style to?
Laurent: A human ;-)
