For the tl;dr crowd, here's the key takeaway: "Most companies promote workers into managerial positions because they seemingly deserve it, rather than because they have the talent for it. This practice doesn't work."
Before I started a startup, I was a software engineer at a large firm, and it was clear they were grooming me for management because I was a strong individual contributor and had "put in my time": 3 years as an engineer. Advancement at this firm was measured by "how many reports" you had, as in "direct reports", or people managed by you, and if you just did superior individual work but had no one "under you", you weren't advancing. So they sent me to a couple of training courses about management and started prepping me for the path.
This was one of the many reasons I quit this BigCo to start my own startup.
I am now the co-founder & CTO of Parse.ly (http://parse.ly). In our first two years after starting up, I spent all my time building stuff -- which is exactly what I wanted. Ironically, because the company has grown and now has a 13-person product team, I am now technically "managing" my engineering team with 13 "direct reports". But at our company, we have completely decoupled management from individual contribution -- certainly, if a strong individual contributor shows an interest in management, we'll consider it. But becoming a "manager" is not how you "advance" here -- you advance by doing great work. Our first employee who joined in 2009 is a great programmer and he is still with the company, but he's still doing what he loves: building & shipping stuff. Based on our frank conversations on the topic, I think he would quit if I forced him to be a manager. The appropriate reward for doing great work isn't a "promotion to management" -- that's actually a punishment for a great individual contributor. The right reward is to ensure you continue to provide an environment where that great work can continue for that contributor, and where they can continue to grow their skills and apply themselves productively in the role.
That doesn't scale for motivated people. I was told the same thing when I joined FreshBooks when they were only a 20 person team. By the time they were a 45 person team the strain of lack of management (without the Github / Valve style decoupling) was obvious. Then I was tasked with hiring my boss. It sucked hard, I was doing awesome work (four raises in a year an a half) but when the writing is on the wall and you're only 25 years old the only play is to leave the company.
I'm 95% convinced that companies larger than 50 people can't acquire truly outstanding people without having a decentralized system that doesn't reward power grabs and people pyramids.
"Most companies promote workers into managerial positions because they seemingly deserve it, rather than because they have the talent for it. This practice doesn't work"
I love this. But let me play a mild devil's advocate. Sometimes people move into management not because they want to necessarily progress in the company they're in now, but because moving into management is an overall career advancement. Leaving a position with "manager" in your title makes it more likely you'll end up in one with "manager" in the title at your next job and be able to command a better position/pay combination.
The old way is basically aristocratic thinking, the people who actually do stuff are scum, the people "in charge" are simply better than them.
Once you start admitting that "managing people" is just a job that you can do well or badly, and that can be really important or just administrative trivia, then that worldview shatters.
Unfortunately it seems very well embedded in the general culture, even in tech where it's not totally unthinkable for someone to earn more money (and provide more value) to the firm than the person who manages them.
So this contributor who's been very productive since 2009, I assume he's gotten a series of substantial pay raises along with corresponding increases in "technical track" job titles?
I'm sure this was mentioned in The Mythical Man Month - the need to have a technical promotion track instead of just the managerial one, for exactly this reason. There needs to be a path to seniority that does not involve accumulating underlings.
How do you think this would scale if you grew to 100 employees? If the same person is with you then they would be the person with the most knowledge of the codebase and the business itself, so it would seem natural that newer employees would go to this person for guidance and defer to them for higher level decisions.
Would it still make sense to pay them as much to just write code as it would for them to take on a more decision making role?
I was never familiar with it nor with the responsibility in detail of individuals there, but the parent comment makes me think of the old Bell Labs. (And/or parts of Xerox, etc.)
Highly capable people given and environment that fostered their production.
Not everything generated was immediately commercial. But it was a very productive environment, and this had strong commercial implications. It also created a lot of public good, immediately and/or eventually.
Not every institution can afford a Bell Labs or a PARC. [1] But letting people do what they are good at, is perhaps not such a bad idea.
--
[1] P.S. I suppose that from one perspective, not even Bell nor Xerox could... although I don't subscribe to the argument, at least and especially not at such a simplistic level.
I just went through a situation where a reorg put a bad manager in a place of a good one. I was on the most talented and productive team that they had. Every. Last. One. Of. Us. Quit.
It turns out that there is an interesting feedback effect. People who have the capability to be smart, are only smart when the environment is right. Therefore your best people disappear first when you destroy the environment, because they are the ones who most strongly experience how their productivity has been undermined.
In my experience, one of the reasons teams end up quitting like this, is the hopes that it sends upper management a signal that "this guy is no good". Turnover has tremendous immediate and long-term impact on the bottom line. I guess the hope is that upper management will swoop in, fire the crappy manager, contact out all the about to leave/left employees and put them back in their jobs.
But it never seems to work that way. I think it's more a fear that if you bring them back, it gives the inmates a reason to revolt rather than the signal getting lost somewhere.
My wife went through a similar situation with a manager two levels above her. And this guy was easily among the worst managers I've ever even heard of -- case study worthy material, the textbook definition of a Machiavellian management style (it's funny that he also runs a management consulting business on the side). Within months of him being put in place the company shed about 40% of their staff under him, including people who had been there more than a decade.
While all this was going down, his manager would come down and talk to the malcontent and implore them to not leave. But the condition was clear, get rid of the asshole or they'd have no choice. As it turns out a few months later they did eventually fire him, but the damage had already been done and not a single former employee was contacted with a "hey sorry about all that, we fixed things, would you think about coming back?" From conversations with those that left, most of them would in fact return.
In the interim, they've lost tens of millions of dollars on failed projects, outside consultants to try and fill in the gap, and other related issues.
From the employee level it seems bizarre, but the only rational explanation I can think of is that they're afraid of bringing people back and thereby granting them too much power. Somewhere in management training, the seniors probably learned that "officers don't show weakness in front of the men" and have been holding to that at all cost.
I feel your pain. I left a job after a reorg during which a VP promoted the people he hired over the rest of us. Bureaucratic protocol required loss of titles for a number of those not promoted. (No one could have the same title as the person one reported to.) I asked the VP if this was a demotion. There was no notation in my personnel file. "I don't want you to think of it that way," he said. I was reassigned to a smug platitudinous know-nothing who enjoyed remarking that he had an "environment" (this was never explained) whereas I had a "bunch of servers." He also enjoyed driveling on about "culture." I left within weeks of the reorg. But the next job was exploitative. That was harder to leave because the actual duties differed significantly from the job description in a direction detrimental to my career, and I took a significant salary cut, which created problems down the line. I tried to make the best of it and did some of my best programming on a hilariously underbid nightmare of a project that inordinately consumed the time of all involved, at significant opportunity cost. I left that for a job that, I found out, was notorious for high turnover, thanks to a rude, humorless manager who compusively emailed unreasonable demands involving continual upward modification of duties at all hours of the day and night as if they were emergencies, seven days a week. Rather than attempt to keep rolling with the punches and see things from the perspective of my torturer, I took inspiration from a Harvard business school professor whose advice is to quit early and often. I resigned within weeks. Now I'm back with friends. It is a weakness of mine that I don't like bosses, unless they are very, very intelligent.
This should be the sort of thing that the managers above notice, I wonder why they never seem to. Tracking turnover within a team should be a trivial query in any HR system.
I see only one quality separating good and bad managers - their confidence in their own competence. Bad managers seem to feel they lucked out in getting their job. Like it might be "found out" that they are not really qualified. Good managers are at ease in their job. They usually seem to feel the company is lucky to have them, as with some effort they could get into a slightly better job. They often do, especially after static happens at a company.
A boss goes to his own boss, and that boss gives him an unrealistic goal to be accomplished in a short time frame. The good boss remains calm and pushes back. The bad boss walks out of the meeting full of anxiety and tells his team to accomplish the impossible, quickly. This might work the first few times, but soon the competent people on the team will leave.
One of the quirks here is management is usually better off in the long run hiring bosses who will say no to them once in a while. Bosses who always say yes are more pleasant in the short term to their superiors, but they will be better off in the long term to have someone who pushes back on requests which are too unreasonable. We see blog posts here every day about how hard it is to find good engineers. Incompetent bosses who are dripping with anxiety after a meeting with their own boss, relaying marching orders for yet another death march project - good engineers do not remain under such people very long, especially in job markets like the current one.
> Bosses who always say yes are more pleasant in the short term to their superiors, but they will be better off in the long term to have someone who pushes back on requests which are too unreasonable.
This applies to engineers equally so. The ability to manage expectations is one of the most important skills one can possess. It also happens to be a particularly difficult skill to master, which is why, for example, just about every developer's first freelance project is a fixed bid scope creep nightmare that they end of walking away from or making $5/hour.
As a manager who has not problem pushing back and saying no to "the bosses", I can assure you it has fuck all to do with confidence in my own competence...
It's a matter of responsibility and ethics. No matter how much pressure there is on me and how unreasonable the request are, it's my responsibility to deal with it. If I would just shovel that shit over the wall and pass it on to my team, my presence would be 80% pointless. (Also, my team would bugger off a.s.a.p.)
So no, I'm not confident in my own competence. I feel the anxiety if the owners tell we are screwed if we don't accomplish X in Y amount of time. I sometimes say yes to things I should in hindsight have said no to, but it also happens the other way around. Management is almost always working of an incomplete set of data, a.k.a. guesswork.
But I have a job to do, and I wouldn't be doing it if I just made it someone else's problem, and nobody would believe or trust me if I didn't seem confident.
So that's pretty much the only thing I'm fully confident of: the ability to make people thing what I know what the fuck I'm doing. That is management competence #1, and unless you're a sociopath, it's not a trivial skill. Especially if you actually understand the field in which you work.
I totally disagree with this. I think there's probably a bell curve relating confidence in your own abilities to actual performance.
At one end, you have people who think they just lucked out, and they'll have poor performance because they'll practice cargo-cult management: doing things just because that's what the management books say you should do.
At the other end, you'll have people who are supremely confident in their own abilities, but their hubris will keep them from entertaining valid objections from other people. They'll be blinded by their sureness that the path they picked is the correct one.
You want people who are confident enough to know what they don't know and able to ask other people for help in those areas. These people will be able to lead a team by letting the people in the team know that they're important in the decision-making process.
Take for example a poor developer who keeps breaking things.
It can actually be difficult to get rid of someone. So the company instead makes him a low level manager (no longer directly touching code).
Yes! he comes up with stupid ideas etc, but, his team know he is wrong so they just work around the stupidity.
In a couple of years of poor management from this junior manager (who team keeps working through). Upper management (who forgot how bad a developer he was) think GOD! he has done a good job; his team get things done. Lets promote him.
"Managing upwards" is also a skill in and of itself; I've had the misfortune to work for a couple of managers like that - very skilled at personally taking the credit for anything their team does, and also for scapegoating one of their team when things go wrong.
This taught me a great truth tho': the people at level N+1 compared to you in a company, are there because they have the support of people at level N+2. Unless your problem is such that you can attract the attention of people at level N+3 to it, your options are extremely limited.
This old SGI post-mortem has a nice section on management, about halfway down the page. The contention there is that optimists get promoted. I have seen incompetence promoted (to get rid of people), but not as often as optimists.
Its very rare for a poor performer to get a promotion like that.
Generally in big companies especially, if you do well at development and promote yourself you'll become a manager regardless of managerial ability. You then get to micro manage the bad developers you mention.
But Ive never heard of someone getting promoted due to poor performance.
This only happens when management is poor. Good management will simply fire incompetent people unless they would in fact make good managers. In my experience, underperformers are:
1) fired,
2) transferred to a department that doesn't matter, or
3) admitted to a training program to develop their skills.
All in all great article, but it seriously lost credibility with "Talents are innate and are the building blocks of great performance. Knowledge, experience, and skills develop our talents, but unless we possess the right innate talents for our job, no amount of training or experience will matter."
Until such a time as we can (a) define "innate talent" precisely, (b) measure it so that we know now much a person has, and (c) determine that none of our current methods of teaching the related skill result in enough of an improvement, statements like that are just excuses for people to look at each other and say "I just don't think he has the talent to do this. Great guy, hard worker, but no talent."
Interestingly, if you dig into the links and studies provided, you find that "talent" is never defined and, where used, completely replaceable by "skills" or "interests". And once you replace it in the above sentence, it becomes either obviously false (of course skills can be increased with training) or patently absurd (of course training rarely changes your interests).
Still a great article for the connection between management and employee satisfaction and productivity.
Anthropomorphizing companies, units, artwork, governments &etc is a long trend in humanity that needs to stop. I don't know the psychology behind it, but humans seem to love to find a handful of other humans to personify an agency, then become overly obsessed with them as the cause of success or failure.
The US government doesn't suck: Bush or Obama suck. Apple isn't a great company: Steve Jobs is a great leader. AIG doesn't have a bad business model: Mo Greenberg makes bad decisions. The Patriots didn't win a Super Bowl: Tom Brady won the Super Bowl!
No organization, NONE, has exploited this tendency more than Harvard. They are masters of the bait and switch. And this article is a classic example. They list all sorts of arguments for there being problems with companies/units, then, without any proof of causation, attribute the failures to bad management. They talk about what it means to be a good manager, but in no way do they offer any evidence that the problems of bad employee engagement and productivity will actually be solved by introducing a good manager.
Why? Because Harvard is in the business of selling you its students as managers. They've developed a reputation of offering highly-credentialed applicants two (HBS) and four year (HUG) vacations to ride the marketing wave of "Harvard grads are great managers." While MIT focuses on creating students who themselves will invent, create and further the pace of the world, Harvard instead seems to have chosen to exploit our tendency to anthropomorphize company success by latching onto shareholder and management insecurities (lack of engagement and productivity), even where there isn't anything to be insecure about, and inserting their graduates into highly paid positions as "the solution."
And they've been fabulously successful in this marketing campaign. I think SV has done a very good job of seeing through this schtick, but comments here make me think the tide is turning.
That's not to say there's no such thing as a bad manager. There are managers who can personally ruin/save a company. But all problems are not caused by bad management. All productivity issues do not stem from bad management. Sometimes it's a sociopath manager, but more often it's a bad product or business plan or economic downturn or any one of a set of problems that no shiny new Harvard manager will fix.
I'm stuck on the "don't anthropomorphize institutions" and then "Harvard is in the business of..." Is there a particular Harvard person(s) you think is responsible for this?
I worked at a place where the manager was chosen simply because she had a few months longer tenure than another coworker of mine. She was so obviously unqualified, it was ridiculous, but they stuck with the decision and within half a year they lost their two best developers. Even sadder, the person they passed up, IMO, would have made an excellent manager. Won't ever know now.
The article points out that good managers don't make decisions based on politics. What I have seen is not only do bad managers make decisions based on politics but also ego. I have seen ego destroy startups and big companies alike. Many tech companies interview managers purely from a tech perspective and do not effectively drill down into the management side.
A good interviewer can get a sense for someone's ego vs. assertiveness pretty easily, but so many interviewers are looking at experience and skillset over character, personality and style. Experience and skill set are important but the other aspects are often overlooked. As an example, a hands-on development manager needs to not only be screened for the development chops but also if they are mature enough to handle the decisions that need to be made in that management role.
@yiedyie, this is a fantastic article. Do you have any other recommendations along similar lines?
However, the original article is not as great. It starts strong but gets into hand-wavy generalities about the requirement of innate talent which is one which I vehemently disagree.
Note: This is not an original thought. It's the premise of "The Office", or something like that. But it's worth considering.YMMV.
CEO>Manager>Employee
==
Sociopath>Incompetent>Suckers
TLDR:
Manager<=>Incompetent
In other words, from a game theory perspective, being a (mid-level) manager (in a hierachy) is an unstable equilibrium for a vast majority of situations. Truly excellent companies have deeper benches of talent (or are structured in ways that compensate, ie. they are more "flat")
This is a great article and I think nails everything.
One thing I would add, contrary to conventional wisdom, is that Accountability is probably the least important. I don't mean to say that you should let poor performers hang around, but that, given that everything else is firing on all cylinders, your team will let you know who their poor performing peers are. So an innate talent or process at 'accountability' isn't really overly important.
In my opinion, the most optimal organizational structure to have is to train people who actively want to become managers (but don't promote them unless they can actually do the job), and give individual contributors an alternate career path - like that of a technical architect, senior contributor, etc.
Being a manager is a very, very different mindset from being an individual contributor. And there ARE people who want the managerial career path too. The trick is in finding them and offering the appropriate training (because not everyone is cut out to be a manager).
Lastly, the "manager" title is very broad. There are people managers, technical managers, project managers, etc. So training someone to be a manager needs to be tailored to the types of managers at your organization.
What I see more often than not is that bad managers come from lazy planning. Bob has been here for a long time now. We should reward him. Hmmmm. What to do . . . oh! Let's make him a manager. That way we have an excuse for a small raise.
Next thing you know, Bob is a crappy manager. Sorry, Bob. The leadership was too lazy to plan out career paths for the people. Now Bob is a crappy manager who will be pushed aside and ignored until he either quits or gets fired.
But now Bob has management experience. What does he do? Go back to doing the scrub work for scrub pay? Hell no. He wants that middle management pay check. Now Bob is going to make a career out of being a bad manager. Because Bob's first managers were lazy.
I have managed people with different skills and demographics and have figured out being a manager is a natural progression in some countries like India and not many companies are bothered if the person truly is meant for the role. I have seen brilliant tech resources totally screwing up their career paths becoming a manager.
This is something which is less practiced in the UK. I have worked in the city and have worked with experts who have been in tech for 15 years and there is no pressure either from their within or from the management.
As the article very rightly cites - "Companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time"
The conclusions in the report seem tenuous. Read the article, and you'll learn that this is all based on the Gallup "Q12" poll (read the report for yourself: http://www.gallup.com/strategicconsulting/164735/state-globa...) That poll is made up of 12 yes or no questions. 12. Including ones like "I have a best friend at work." Google "Gallup Q12 criticism" after reading the original survey, read what you find, and see if you still take it seriously.
We had such a problem at the company I worked last year.
The RnD-Director was a dev and wanted to develop and not to tell people what they should do or don't. So he went back being a dev and gave the position to another one, he probably still got the same pay but with a job he found much more pleasing.
The CTO of the company left it, because of the same reasons. He thinks of himself as a computer scientist and not a manager. He wants to solve technical problems and don't talk to the big bosses of customer companies or manage people around.
My take on Good vs Bad managers is very, very simple:
"Good managers are like sea captains. Bad managers are like a slaves overseer."
The last pearl from my manager was:
"If you can produce 100% in 6 hours/day you would for sure produce 150% in 9 hours/day (Together with a puzzled look after I pointed that no, we are not a screws factory)."
I don't need to mention that the entire team is aggressively looking for new positions on other companies (BTW a it is/was a VERY nice team).
[+] [-] pixelmonkey|12 years ago|reply
Before I started a startup, I was a software engineer at a large firm, and it was clear they were grooming me for management because I was a strong individual contributor and had "put in my time": 3 years as an engineer. Advancement at this firm was measured by "how many reports" you had, as in "direct reports", or people managed by you, and if you just did superior individual work but had no one "under you", you weren't advancing. So they sent me to a couple of training courses about management and started prepping me for the path.
This was one of the many reasons I quit this BigCo to start my own startup.
I am now the co-founder & CTO of Parse.ly (http://parse.ly). In our first two years after starting up, I spent all my time building stuff -- which is exactly what I wanted. Ironically, because the company has grown and now has a 13-person product team, I am now technically "managing" my engineering team with 13 "direct reports". But at our company, we have completely decoupled management from individual contribution -- certainly, if a strong individual contributor shows an interest in management, we'll consider it. But becoming a "manager" is not how you "advance" here -- you advance by doing great work. Our first employee who joined in 2009 is a great programmer and he is still with the company, but he's still doing what he loves: building & shipping stuff. Based on our frank conversations on the topic, I think he would quit if I forced him to be a manager. The appropriate reward for doing great work isn't a "promotion to management" -- that's actually a punishment for a great individual contributor. The right reward is to ensure you continue to provide an environment where that great work can continue for that contributor, and where they can continue to grow their skills and apply themselves productively in the role.
[+] [-] 3pt14159|12 years ago|reply
I'm 95% convinced that companies larger than 50 people can't acquire truly outstanding people without having a decentralized system that doesn't reward power grabs and people pyramids.
[+] [-] paukiatwee|12 years ago|reply
This known as Peter Principle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
[+] [-] bane|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|12 years ago|reply
Once you start admitting that "managing people" is just a job that you can do well or badly, and that can be really important or just administrative trivia, then that worldview shatters.
Unfortunately it seems very well embedded in the general culture, even in tech where it's not totally unthinkable for someone to earn more money (and provide more value) to the firm than the person who manages them.
[+] [-] jordanb|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiggy2011|12 years ago|reply
Would it still make sense to pay them as much to just write code as it would for them to take on a more decision making role?
[+] [-] pasbesoin|12 years ago|reply
Highly capable people given and environment that fostered their production.
Not everything generated was immediately commercial. But it was a very productive environment, and this had strong commercial implications. It also created a lot of public good, immediately and/or eventually.
Not every institution can afford a Bell Labs or a PARC. [1] But letting people do what they are good at, is perhaps not such a bad idea.
--
[1] P.S. I suppose that from one perspective, not even Bell nor Xerox could... although I don't subscribe to the argument, at least and especially not at such a simplistic level.
[+] [-] waltherg|12 years ago|reply
http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0455
[+] [-] btilly|12 years ago|reply
It turns out that there is an interesting feedback effect. People who have the capability to be smart, are only smart when the environment is right. Therefore your best people disappear first when you destroy the environment, because they are the ones who most strongly experience how their productivity has been undermined.
[+] [-] bane|12 years ago|reply
But it never seems to work that way. I think it's more a fear that if you bring them back, it gives the inmates a reason to revolt rather than the signal getting lost somewhere.
My wife went through a similar situation with a manager two levels above her. And this guy was easily among the worst managers I've ever even heard of -- case study worthy material, the textbook definition of a Machiavellian management style (it's funny that he also runs a management consulting business on the side). Within months of him being put in place the company shed about 40% of their staff under him, including people who had been there more than a decade.
While all this was going down, his manager would come down and talk to the malcontent and implore them to not leave. But the condition was clear, get rid of the asshole or they'd have no choice. As it turns out a few months later they did eventually fire him, but the damage had already been done and not a single former employee was contacted with a "hey sorry about all that, we fixed things, would you think about coming back?" From conversations with those that left, most of them would in fact return.
In the interim, they've lost tens of millions of dollars on failed projects, outside consultants to try and fill in the gap, and other related issues.
From the employee level it seems bizarre, but the only rational explanation I can think of is that they're afraid of bringing people back and thereby granting them too much power. Somewhere in management training, the seniors probably learned that "officers don't show weakness in front of the men" and have been holding to that at all cost.
[+] [-] ChristianMarks|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sjclemmy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] archon|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaius|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ologn|12 years ago|reply
A boss goes to his own boss, and that boss gives him an unrealistic goal to be accomplished in a short time frame. The good boss remains calm and pushes back. The bad boss walks out of the meeting full of anxiety and tells his team to accomplish the impossible, quickly. This might work the first few times, but soon the competent people on the team will leave.
One of the quirks here is management is usually better off in the long run hiring bosses who will say no to them once in a while. Bosses who always say yes are more pleasant in the short term to their superiors, but they will be better off in the long term to have someone who pushes back on requests which are too unreasonable. We see blog posts here every day about how hard it is to find good engineers. Incompetent bosses who are dripping with anxiety after a meeting with their own boss, relaying marching orders for yet another death march project - good engineers do not remain under such people very long, especially in job markets like the current one.
[+] [-] morganherlocker|12 years ago|reply
This applies to engineers equally so. The ability to manage expectations is one of the most important skills one can possess. It also happens to be a particularly difficult skill to master, which is why, for example, just about every developer's first freelance project is a fixed bid scope creep nightmare that they end of walking away from or making $5/hour.
[+] [-] bowlofpetunias|12 years ago|reply
It's a matter of responsibility and ethics. No matter how much pressure there is on me and how unreasonable the request are, it's my responsibility to deal with it. If I would just shovel that shit over the wall and pass it on to my team, my presence would be 80% pointless. (Also, my team would bugger off a.s.a.p.)
So no, I'm not confident in my own competence. I feel the anxiety if the owners tell we are screwed if we don't accomplish X in Y amount of time. I sometimes say yes to things I should in hindsight have said no to, but it also happens the other way around. Management is almost always working of an incomplete set of data, a.k.a. guesswork.
But I have a job to do, and I wouldn't be doing it if I just made it someone else's problem, and nobody would believe or trust me if I didn't seem confident.
So that's pretty much the only thing I'm fully confident of: the ability to make people thing what I know what the fuck I'm doing. That is management competence #1, and unless you're a sociopath, it's not a trivial skill. Especially if you actually understand the field in which you work.
[+] [-] SnacksOnAPlane|12 years ago|reply
At one end, you have people who think they just lucked out, and they'll have poor performance because they'll practice cargo-cult management: doing things just because that's what the management books say you should do.
At the other end, you'll have people who are supremely confident in their own abilities, but their hubris will keep them from entertaining valid objections from other people. They'll be blinded by their sureness that the path they picked is the correct one.
You want people who are confident enough to know what they don't know and able to ask other people for help in those areas. These people will be able to lead a team by letting the people in the team know that they're important in the decision-making process.
[+] [-] mattwritescode|12 years ago|reply
Take for example a poor developer who keeps breaking things. It can actually be difficult to get rid of someone. So the company instead makes him a low level manager (no longer directly touching code).
Yes! he comes up with stupid ideas etc, but, his team know he is wrong so they just work around the stupidity.
In a couple of years of poor management from this junior manager (who team keeps working through). Upper management (who forgot how bad a developer he was) think GOD! he has done a good job; his team get things done. Lets promote him.
Bad manager is now in a higher position again.
[+] [-] gaius|12 years ago|reply
This taught me a great truth tho': the people at level N+1 compared to you in a company, are there because they have the support of people at level N+2. Unless your problem is such that you can attract the attention of people at level N+3 to it, your options are extremely limited.
[+] [-] faster|12 years ago|reply
http://yarchive.net/risks/sgi_irix.html
[+] [-] Toenex|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cowls|12 years ago|reply
Generally in big companies especially, if you do well at development and promote yourself you'll become a manager regardless of managerial ability. You then get to micro manage the bad developers you mention.
But Ive never heard of someone getting promoted due to poor performance.
[+] [-] vvvVVVvvv|12 years ago|reply
If he's useless as a dev and hasn't the knack for management, then he is useless (in this position).
Business wise that's the only thing that makes sense.
[+] [-] pitnips|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EC1|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afthonos|12 years ago|reply
Until such a time as we can (a) define "innate talent" precisely, (b) measure it so that we know now much a person has, and (c) determine that none of our current methods of teaching the related skill result in enough of an improvement, statements like that are just excuses for people to look at each other and say "I just don't think he has the talent to do this. Great guy, hard worker, but no talent."
Interestingly, if you dig into the links and studies provided, you find that "talent" is never defined and, where used, completely replaceable by "skills" or "interests". And once you replace it in the above sentence, it becomes either obviously false (of course skills can be increased with training) or patently absurd (of course training rarely changes your interests).
Still a great article for the connection between management and employee satisfaction and productivity.
[+] [-] kolbe|12 years ago|reply
The US government doesn't suck: Bush or Obama suck. Apple isn't a great company: Steve Jobs is a great leader. AIG doesn't have a bad business model: Mo Greenberg makes bad decisions. The Patriots didn't win a Super Bowl: Tom Brady won the Super Bowl!
No organization, NONE, has exploited this tendency more than Harvard. They are masters of the bait and switch. And this article is a classic example. They list all sorts of arguments for there being problems with companies/units, then, without any proof of causation, attribute the failures to bad management. They talk about what it means to be a good manager, but in no way do they offer any evidence that the problems of bad employee engagement and productivity will actually be solved by introducing a good manager.
Why? Because Harvard is in the business of selling you its students as managers. They've developed a reputation of offering highly-credentialed applicants two (HBS) and four year (HUG) vacations to ride the marketing wave of "Harvard grads are great managers." While MIT focuses on creating students who themselves will invent, create and further the pace of the world, Harvard instead seems to have chosen to exploit our tendency to anthropomorphize company success by latching onto shareholder and management insecurities (lack of engagement and productivity), even where there isn't anything to be insecure about, and inserting their graduates into highly paid positions as "the solution."
And they've been fabulously successful in this marketing campaign. I think SV has done a very good job of seeing through this schtick, but comments here make me think the tide is turning.
That's not to say there's no such thing as a bad manager. There are managers who can personally ruin/save a company. But all problems are not caused by bad management. All productivity issues do not stem from bad management. Sometimes it's a sociopath manager, but more often it's a bad product or business plan or economic downturn or any one of a set of problems that no shiny new Harvard manager will fix.
[+] [-] gbhn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mjklin|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] argv_empty|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joesmo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edw519|12 years ago|reply
If the hundreds of poor managers I have known would have just understood these 4 words, nothing else could have made more positive impact.
[+] [-] mediaserf|12 years ago|reply
A good interviewer can get a sense for someone's ego vs. assertiveness pretty easily, but so many interviewers are looking at experience and skillset over character, personality and style. Experience and skill set are important but the other aspects are often overlooked. As an example, a hands-on development manager needs to not only be screened for the development chops but also if they are mature enough to handle the decisions that need to be made in that management role.
[+] [-] yiedyie|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonathanwallace|12 years ago|reply
However, the original article is not as great. It starts strong but gets into hand-wavy generalities about the requirement of innate talent which is one which I vehemently disagree.
[+] [-] 001sky|12 years ago|reply
CEO>Manager>Employee
==
Sociopath>Incompetent>Suckers
TLDR:
Manager<=>Incompetent
In other words, from a game theory perspective, being a (mid-level) manager (in a hierachy) is an unstable equilibrium for a vast majority of situations. Truly excellent companies have deeper benches of talent (or are structured in ways that compensate, ie. they are more "flat")
[+] [-] arethuza|12 years ago|reply
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
[+] [-] sz4kerto|12 years ago|reply
I could give references, but the book (Thinking, Fast and Slow) is not in public domain yet, so just some 3rd party links: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/634181be-4769-11e1-b847-00144feabd... http://www.delanceyplace.com/view_archives.php?2084#.UyL_vIU...
[+] [-] jasallen|12 years ago|reply
One thing I would add, contrary to conventional wisdom, is that Accountability is probably the least important. I don't mean to say that you should let poor performers hang around, but that, given that everything else is firing on all cylinders, your team will let you know who their poor performing peers are. So an innate talent or process at 'accountability' isn't really overly important.
[+] [-] mikeleeorg|12 years ago|reply
Being a manager is a very, very different mindset from being an individual contributor. And there ARE people who want the managerial career path too. The trick is in finding them and offering the appropriate training (because not everyone is cut out to be a manager).
Lastly, the "manager" title is very broad. There are people managers, technical managers, project managers, etc. So training someone to be a manager needs to be tailored to the types of managers at your organization.
[+] [-] ianamartin|12 years ago|reply
Next thing you know, Bob is a crappy manager. Sorry, Bob. The leadership was too lazy to plan out career paths for the people. Now Bob is a crappy manager who will be pushed aside and ignored until he either quits or gets fired.
But now Bob has management experience. What does he do? Go back to doing the scrub work for scrub pay? Hell no. He wants that middle management pay check. Now Bob is going to make a career out of being a bad manager. Because Bob's first managers were lazy.
Sorry, Bob.
[+] [-] arijitraja|12 years ago|reply
This is something which is less practiced in the UK. I have worked in the city and have worked with experts who have been in tech for 15 years and there is no pressure either from their within or from the management.
As the article very rightly cites - "Companies fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the job 82% of the time"
[+] [-] alanlewis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k__|12 years ago|reply
The RnD-Director was a dev and wanted to develop and not to tell people what they should do or don't. So he went back being a dev and gave the position to another one, he probably still got the same pay but with a job he found much more pleasing.
The CTO of the company left it, because of the same reasons. He thinks of himself as a computer scientist and not a manager. He wants to solve technical problems and don't talk to the big bosses of customer companies or manage people around.
[+] [-] SixSigma|12 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle
[+] [-] lewaldman|12 years ago|reply
"Good managers are like sea captains. Bad managers are like a slaves overseer."
The last pearl from my manager was: "If you can produce 100% in 6 hours/day you would for sure produce 150% in 9 hours/day (Together with a puzzled look after I pointed that no, we are not a screws factory)."
I don't need to mention that the entire team is aggressively looking for new positions on other companies (BTW a it is/was a VERY nice team).