[deltaoneseven]

I have been a manager and I've realized that a huge portion of it is a communication problem. Not all of it but a big portion of it and not many managers realize this.

When I was a new manager I noticed an employee that would just get everything wrong and do things with a low amount of quality.

Turns out the problem was with me. As a new manager I failed to communicate and define objectives clearly. I simply assumed such things were obvious. The employee assumed different things and as a result his work output and what I expected were mismatched.

After some time reviewing my own behavior I began spending a huge amount of time defining and planning out the scope of the project at hand. I take the time to make sure that objectives and what's needed are completely clear. When I did this the employee in question delivered beyond expectations.

Turns out this guy was a literal technical genius and that his performance problems were largely communication problems on my part. The guy can literally solve technical issues no other engineer can solve and could finish his tasks twice as fast.

Other high performing employees I realized weren't necessarily technically advanced. They were just better at predicting and meeting my expectations and that was the key. They were managing me, and I wasn't doing any management.

If I hadn't reviewed my own behavior I would've went down the wrong road of firing a technically superior engineer while only keeping the people that could "manage up" better.

I will say that there are tons and tons of managers who don't realize this and even adopt a philosophy around managing as little as possible. What these managers don't know is more than likely they are letting go of engineers who are not only technically competent but technically superior by subconsciously pre-selecting for people who are better at predicting what you want rather then people who are technical wizards. You can recognize these types of managers as they have a bias for certain types of engineers who take "ownership" of something or essentially manage a product so you don't have to. These people are good people to hire but at the same time this philosophy is not scalable.

There are places for both types of people in a company and a company does worse if it only has one type.

[orzig]

That’s fantastic introspection, but to give another anecdotal piece of data: I spent 6 months stressing about how to keep iterating communication and fit with an underperformer, and he never managed to contribute (I was the second of four managers he worked with over 3 years).

[marcusklaas]

Kudos for recognizing your own mistake, owning up to it and ultimately correcting it. That is no minor feat.

But I do wonder if you're not extrapolating too much from this single case. Just because you made the mistake once doesn't necessarily mean it is very common per se.