Anita Lillie on staff.design

A great interview. Anita thoughtfully articulates the contrast between doing the work and managing the work and the need for experts in both.

both managers and ICs need to unblock projects, ruthlessly prioritize, rally groups of people, make hard decisions, and grow the people around them…

As a manager, you need all those skills to enable the people and organizations in your company. As an IC, you need all those skills to choose the right problems and then the right solutions. A company needs both roles, so they have healthy people and orgs that tackle the right problems intelligently.

Diversity is good:

why should [the] upper echelon of our company be the people who managed the best? What about the people who executed the best?

it’s better if [the people in the upper echelon of the company] look really different from each other! You want one super strategist, and one super negotiator, and one executor, or somebody who actually does the design work at an extremely high level. I think there’s room for all those people.

Also ❤️ this:

[give] people credit for failing when they took an intelligent risk