Load 'em up and throw 'em under the bus
This is a good tale, and one that folks really should take to heart. I have observed when good engineers get an over developed sense of ownership they will move &quot;heaven and earth&quot; to get things done. If you&#x27;re managing one of these heroes it is your job to spread the load of what they do across the team so that no individual is so overloaded everything suffers.<p>New managers who had been engineers before management and care about the work always tell me &quot;I feel like I&#x27;m not doing anything, I should be helping or something.&quot; And I tell them, your job is to look. Look at your team, who is working late nights, who isn&#x27;t. Who is meeting their commitments, who isn&#x27;t. Let their actions guide you getting them what they need to be the best they can be, things that you, and only you, as the manager can get for them. That often means blocking incoming requests for more &quot;stuff&quot; (features what not), carving out time for your &quot;doers&quot; to help bring the new people up to speed. As part of an IBM manager training video there was a discussion about how the US Navy trains every person on a submarine to do every job because you never know when the person whose job it is won&#x27;t be available to do it. That really resonated with me and I tried in future groups to try to overlap skills and cross train folks so that everyone could both appreciate what their peers were doing, but could also help out in a crunch if one part of the work needed more effort briefly.