Synthesis Is a Fundamental Skill of Management

A manager is constantly sythesizing information into useful direction and feedback to the team.

For example, in performance management you are taking a body of work and extracting useful feedback. In team discussions and meetings, you are fascilitating discussions by making sure the important information is distilled and follow-up actions happen.

Without the ability to synthesize vast amounts of disparate information the team can feel unfocused or unclear in what they need to do to be successful.

See also:

• Engineering management

Links to this note

• The Line Between Micro Management and Leadership

  When things are going poorly, a natural response is for managers to get closer to the details. This can come across as micro management to others and they can be defensive about it. There is an important difference between micro management and leadership.

• Use a Scenario Table to Organize Complicated Situations

  When thinking in scenarios, I find it useful to lay it out as a table. A table is the most compact way of sharing definitions with a team. A table helps you explain what’s going on in a way that is mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. This keeps the team organized and provides the ability to refer to each case.