The Management Book I Still Recommend

I’ve read a lot of books about management over the years. Leadership models, coaching frameworks, organizational theory, difficult conversations, team dynamics. Like most people who’ve spent a long time managing, I’ve probably absorbed dozens of books and hundreds of articles on the subject.

But there’s one book I still recommend more than any other: Managing Humans by Michael Lopp.

I first read it sometime around 2007, when I was moving more fully into management roles in software. What I remember most is how different it felt from the usual management book. It was funny, practical, and incredibly relatable. It's semi-fictional but built around his real experiences. Lopp wasn’t trying to turn management into a neat framework. He was writing about what it actually feels like to manage real people, especially in engineering and technology organizations.

That’s probably why it stuck with me.

Management is messy. People are complicated. Great employees get frustrated. Teams change. Reorgs happen. Someone you thought was doing fine suddenly isn’t. A conversation you expected to take five minutes can become the most important conversation you have all week.

But there’s also the other side of it. You get to watch people grow into roles they weren’t sure they were ready for. You help someone work through a difficult moment. You build teams that trust one another. You see people accomplish things together that they couldn’t have done alone.

After years of managing people, I could probably tell a thousand stories that sound like something out of Managing Humans. I’m not sure reading the book ever prepared me for those situations exactly, but it did something almost as useful. It made the weird parts of management feel normal.

There’s one lesson from the book that I’ve remembered for nearly twenty years. I don’t remember the exact quote anymore, but the idea was simple: never casually cancel a 1:1, because what the employee hears is, “I don’t matter.”

That really stayed with me.

Managers are always busy. There’s another meeting, another deadline, another escalation, another thing that suddenly feels more urgent. A 1:1 can look like the easiest meeting on the calendar to move.

But to the person on the other side, that might be their only dedicated time with you that week.

Over time, I stopped thinking about 1:1s as status meetings at all. They’re where you listen. They’re where you understand what’s happening underneath the work. They’re where you coach, provide context, notice problems early, or sometimes just give someone a place to talk.

That idea shaped how I managed people.

One of the things I’ve had time to reflect on over the past few months is that I still really enjoy management. As I think about the next phase of my career, I know I still want leading people to be part of it.

Management has never been easy. I’ve had difficult conversations, dealt with performance issues, navigated reorganizations, made hard decisions, and made plenty of mistakes myself. But some of the most rewarding experiences of my career have also come from managing people. Building teams. Watching someone grow. Helping people discover what they’re capable of. Creating an environment where talented people can do great work.

I also believe more strongly now that there isn’t one management style that works for everyone. Different people need different things from you at different times. Sometimes they need direction. Sometimes they need coaching. Sometimes they need air cover. Sometimes they need you to get the hell out of the way.

That human complexity is what Managing Humans has always captured so well.

When someone tells me they’re thinking about becoming a manager, I usually smile and recommend one book.

This one.

Not because it contains the perfect management framework. It doesn’t. I recommend it because it tells the truth about what managing people actually feels like, including the messy parts and the really good parts.

It’s next on my reading list again.

I’m curious what I’ll notice this time.