Michael Degnan
Director, Engineering Operations, VMware

In my 20+ years of partnering with and leading teams, I have found that people respond best when you genuinely and sincerely treat them as you would like to be treated.  Through the course of my career I have had managers ask for guidance on being a good manager.  It comes down to building the trust and connections with those you work with.  In my role as a DevOps leader, I interact with many people across several organizations. I have to rely on them and they on me to achieve our goals and move the company forward.  Building trust takes time.  But once that trust is established  the benefits can be game changing.  Here are a few key behaviors, qualities and traits that I strive to maintain in building connections and trust with my team and those I work with:

• Commit to what you say – honor your commitments  This one behavior alone goes a long way in establishing trust. 
• Manage with integrity – give credit where credit is due and accept responsibility when things go wrong.
• Practice being consistently fair and decent to all those you interact with.
• Build a culture of accountability and ownership where team members take action on their own initiative and are empowered to make decisions.
• Be available and at service to your team.  A good manager doesn’t dispatch orders, a good manager guides, coaches and clears roadblocks to allow their team to do the best work they can.
• Build and foster a safe environment where team members can take risks and make mistakes without fear of reprisal.  Dig into the learnings from the mistakes and continue to provide support and encouragement through ongoing coaching and guidance. We often learn the most from our mistakes
• Encourage and support innovation within your team.  Leverage your senior leads to model and promote innovation working with junior engineers. Each team member can be a thought incubator. 
• Be consistent and persevere through difficult moments. Keep chipping away at the problem. Break daunting challenges into parts that are more easily achieved. 
• Have patience. Big audacious goals take time to successfully complete. Break down the goals to objectives and tasks with intermediate milestones.  Create those landmarks so team members get a sense of velocity as they work towards the goal. Make sure your teams are laser focused on completing those tasks and reinforce and show how their work supports the vision and plays into the bigger picture. 
• Remember to keep a sense of humor.  We all need those lighter moments particularly when stress levels are high.

While much of the above may be motherhood and apple pie for experienced leaders, I’ve found that the consistent application of these behaviors, qualities and traits are hallmarks of a successful leader and successful teams.  Building trust and connections with those you work with basically comes down to treating others with respect and dignity no matter their rank or role.  It essentially comes down to managing by the golden rule.