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One of my favourite books on management is Extreme Ownership. The classic mistakes I've seen made are: bypassing the chain of command and forgetting the mission.

There's a process by which my team accepts change requests, error reports, and feature requests from stakeholders. We plan our development in cycles and I co-ordinate efforts between teams so that people aren't getting blocked or stuck. The mistake here is when stakeholders bypass the chain of command and directly assign tasks to people on my team without telling me.

They don't realize the impact this has on productivity, momentum, and due dates. Not to mention morale! My developers don't like it when they have the next couple of days planned out for themselves and someone comes over and interrupts them to work on some non-related, trivial issue. They feel like they have no ownership or autonomy.

This all segues into _forgetting the mission_. A group of people need a clear mission in order to prioritize and co-ordinate work. Often times management will forget what the mission is and prioritize a customer's change request and delay important projects in order to meet their goals of keeping the customers happy. Sometimes you have to remember to say _no_ when doing the opposite harms the mission.



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