Good managers realize they have to be managers and can't do an effective job of engineering (this is certainly true of a first-level manager with more than a few reports).
The best managers I've had have sighed wistfully and wished out loud that they could do engineering, but made a conscious decision not to. The really good managers will be very interested in how you are getting along with your career, and it will often not come as a surprise to them when it comes time for you to leave ("time to go, grasshopper").
The bad managers were bad for numerous reasons, but many of the worst were micro-managing, getting in the way, having technical arguments, dishing out unreasoned mandates to solve things one way or another, or generally trying to be Boss Engineers without actually being part of the team. Sucked hard. The times I've switched jobs underneath these bozos, I've called it "Firing my boss."
I'd go a step further and answer the question "What are some common mistakes new managers make?" with "Accepting a promotion to management".
If you're coming from a technical role, understand that your new job is not to be an engineer. If you're lucky and are good enough at your new job that you have some spare cycles, you might get to guide some architectural discussions
It can be rewarding to help guide a team towards something you could never accomplish alone, but you must resist the temptation to step and do "do things".
Disclaimer -- I moved up to a director-level position and realized within a year that to be good at it I would probably not be able to continue expanding my technical skills, at least not on company time. I moved on to an "individual contributor" role with a company that provides higher level career opportunities that don't involve having direct reports. The minutia of actual line management wasn't bad as long as there was a good team, but I definitely underestimated the people skills, budgeting, planning, and politics that goes along with being a good manager.
> dishing out unreasoned mandates to solve things one way or another
This is the problem I've run into most often with management: the command to do things using method or technology A instead of B, not because A is better (in fact, B usually is the better choice both for development and for internal user support), but because A is the pet preference of a manager not involved in the work and who doesn't actually work with any of the people who will be using or supporting the end result.
"Good managers realize they have to be managers and can't do an effective job of engineering..."
I can't agree with this strongly enough. When I was a manager (I've since gone back to being a developer), trying to do engineering work at the same time was probably my biggest weakness.
There will be times when there's an emergency (real or imagined) where your upper management wants you to come up with a fix for something right away, and you'll be tempted to drop everything you're doing as a manager and put out the fire. (One rationalization for this might be that you don't want to break the flow of your developers, who are working on important stuff of their own.) Resist this temptation. Not only will your management work remain undone, but if the people on your team don't get experience dealing with emergencies in parts of the code that they don't know much about, you'll be stuck doing this stuff forever and they won't learn these skills. Learn how to delegate, and learn how to set the expectations of your own managers so that they don't assume that every problem can be fixed instantly.
I just read your bio blurb – wow, that's pretty damn impressive! I'm a CS grad looking for a job, and am very passionate about Valve and what it stands for (while at uni I tried to create a startup based on basically the same principles).
I don't know how to contact you, so if you ping me at [0] or [1] I can send you a link to my resume. Thanks!
edit: I'm a big dum-dum – it was quite easy to find your Fb profile, I sent you my resume there (check 'Other' messages). :)
Those answers are great, but they're also very high level and general.
One of the best pieces of advice, badly paraphrased below, I've heard from a military context.
"Any time you instruct a subordinate, you must be
prepared to deliver the same instruction every single
time they perform that action, and expect it to be
performed in that way until otherwise instructed."
This is a warning about micromanagement, flippant decisions and how to delegate. For example, if you tell someone off-hand not to bother you with X, be prepared to never be bothered with X again. If you tell someone how to shine their shoes, be prepared to tell them how to shine their shoes every single day.
Again, this is an a military context where orders flow downhill, but the same applies in other areas of business. An experienced manager knows where they need to set the boundaries within which their staff operate, with as much autonomy and initiative as possible. An inexperienced manager doesn't understand how to balance this equation.
PS if anyone has a better formulation of the above, please share =D
So at one point I took on a management job, stepping up from a (lead) developer. I felt like the whole thing was kind of a train wreck and I am still slowly analyzing the black box recordings from it. This was my first time having direct reports that were not one or two interns and managing a team of seven other highly intelligent people was quite a chore in itself. What bugged me is that I could never tell if the problem was the environment or something I was doing. I tried to be fair. I mentored people when I could help. I tried to not be overbearing when I had nothing to add. I present challenging problems to the people who I thought would find them interesting. I advocated for my guys to the upper management, trying to improve working conditions. I insisted on being flexible, discarding what was slowing us down, and adopting what was good. None of that seemed to help: my dev team learned to resent me for delivering the bad news (for example the dev team was the fallback for doing data entry for weeks on end when nobody else could handle it and we had no time to finish better data entry tools because of it), and my boss(es) learned to resent me for not delivering what they expected.
I know that there were quite a few problems above me. Lack of leadership carries far and wide and there was a disconnect between what the products did and what the management thought it did. Lack of money (think lack of compensation, lack of tools, lack of time for anything but immediate returns) did not help either. I do keep questioning whether I was doing all the wrong things or if I was put in a situation designed for me to fail, or perhaps both.
After I left I understand the company hired three different people to replace me: a manager, a dev lead, and a support engineer. I suppose that's some kind of a sign that I was trying to do too many things at once. Most of the engineering team also left after I did. The least I could do is give them the great recommendations they all deserved so all of them moved onto exciting new pastures. However, I cannot help but feel like I failed at this task that I felt sure I could tackle and I don't understand why.
Please excuse the rant. These types of topics always trigger those same feelings in me.
Edit: now I work as a developer on 2-3 person teams. I have no reports. I get to be productive again! I can write code that doesn't have to suck to compensate for poorly chosen deadlines. This is good for the soul. I do miss leading a team though; not managing but really leading. One of my proudest moments was when I was allowed to follow a system of estimates and sprints I put together and for 8 weeks my team delivered on schedule and exactly what was promised. That was one of my more joyful moments.
welcome to low/mid-level management. You get squeezed from the top and bottom. Everybody will hate you, so you just try and hit deadlines.
It also sounds like a typical story where the larger organization was trying to keep management lean, without realizing that it really did take multiple people to do the job.
One place I worked at ground through three managers in 6 months (with 120 people under them) before finally getting the clue and hiring a proper team of 7 to do the job.
It's not uncommon at all and it really is the upper management's responsibility to properly staff their low/mid management teams.
I only know your side of the story, so I know this assessment won't be entirely accurate. However, based on what you have written, it sounds like you were a pretty good manager who just got caught between your employees and your bosses. I especially like how you recognize your team members' intelligence, and tried to advocate for them with senior management. You likely made some mistakes along the way, but every manager on earth makes many mistakes.
Sometimes even the greatest skippers can't keep a boat from sinking. It's helpful to consider how you could have made the situation better or worse. But, based on what I've read, you're putting too much blame on your own shoulders. Rather, remember that it took three people for them to replace you.
> the dev team was the fallback for doing data entry for weeks on end
Wow, what? It sounds like you were doing the right things, but this is hard to comprehend. Wouldn't temps cost $12/hour for this? No wonder they were angry.
Thanks for sharing - the description of your situation echoes my self-questioning in similar situations. My own post analysis now makes me always consider if there a clash between my personality and work culture? Sometimes these differ and you don't want to be the manager that the work culture has moulded. I am not a whip or hard ass, I am there to take a certain load that permits the workers to do their job. Management requires all the things you mentioned, but sometimes the workplace has developed a culture where this isn't possible. Most companies mess up management, and often the people that aspire to it don't pull their weight and think it is a promotion to tell other what to do.
I don't think you have enough data points to draw a meaningful conclusion about whether the problem was with you or if it was with the environment you were working in. The best you can do is look at the individual situations and circumstances you were in and think of what (if anything) you will do differently next time when faced with the same scenario. However with that said, it has been my experience that when there is a lack of leadership above in a company, the knock on effect is generally a bad working environment for everyone working in the organization below the bad management.
If most of them left after you, you were doing a good job.
Employees know when you are with your back against the wall, but because you deliver the news, you also see the reaction (i would realize that some choises are made above you).
the top answer is really well done, but lacks the gem from the second answer: "One of the major rookie mistakes I have made and see many others make is the assumption that human motivation is tied to economic outcomes"
put another way - you might have a personal ambition to have a title like "VP of Engineering" or make $500k a year, but most others don't. so if you project your motivations / world view on those who work for you, you will have a bad time building a great team with a great culture. knowing what your people value is really important and will help you get the best work from your team.
One of the amazing things I've learned as a manager is how much you can get out of asking people what they want.
Many people haven't really thought about it and so you end up going on a fun journey helping them figure it out. Usually, you discover over time that there are a lot of things more important than money. Being the manager that helped them figure out what they really want (and hopefully get closer to it) builds awesome loyalty and motivation on the job.
Once you have the minimum amount to live comfortably (which in places like SF is actually a non-trivial amount), I've found raises and bonuses have only very short-term happiness that wears off in a week or two. It's feeling fulfillment in your job and making progress on your long term goals that really brings career happiness.
I've found its common in a new manager to assume that their people want the same things they want. Happens in relationships too, people act in a way they want to be treated, not in the way the other person wants to be treated.
I surely agree with most of what's posted there - a majority of it is straightforward common sense that's barely even specific to management.
"Don't procrastinate, communicate clearly" are to management what "eat less, exercise" is to losing weight or "only buy things you need, spend less than you earn" is to saving money.
The problem isn't managers that they haven't read this compilation of checklists or its equivalent in any of the thousands of management books out there.
The problem is the brokenness of management as a role in general.
Too many organizations are stuck in an broken structure which makes management the most direct if not only way to advance in terms of status, pay, autonomy or all three.
The end result are incompetent managers who need to be taught common sense or unhappy ones who are far better suited to other roles, but recognize them as dead-ends.
If becoming a manager stops being desirable for all the wrong reasons you won't have to remind your new, inexperienced managers not to be lazy or not to manage by intimidation.
>I surely agree with most of what's posted there - a majority of it is straightforward common sense that's barely even specific to management.
I agree, and would add that they're not even answering the specific question being asked (which happens a lot on Quora). The question they're all answering is:
"What is good general management advice?"
But the question that was asked is:
"What are mistakes specific to new, inexperienced managers, that are common for that particular class of managers?"
A responsive answer to that question will generally be expressible as,
"The manager will make it a policy/habit that <blank>, thinking that <poor recognition of group dynamics>. In reality, <mechanism happens> and so they encounter <failure mode>."
For example,
"The manager will start a policy of not tracking employee time, on the grounds that the group is responsible and trustworthy, not realizing that this will make it harder to demonstrate progress and efficiency to higher-ups, and result in less leeway being given to the group on important decisions."
[Please don't refute the logic there, I'm not offering it as valid, just showing the form that a responsive answer would have.]
It seems like a number of newer, growing startups are making sure there are individual contributor paths for growth. What would you like to see as a solution?
Also - do you think it's that their overwhelmed, under-trained for the new demands of the role, or something else that causes so many managers to fail?
The single most common mistake I see managers making is assuming that their job is to manage the people rather than the project, closely followed by trying to micro-manage the project itself. Trust and delegation are key to all of this.
A good manager looks after a project not its people, concentrates on the big picture while letting others deal with the small details. A good manager achieves this by delegation.
Assuming you've hired the right people in the first place you should be able to let people get on with their jobs — if you try to do their jobs for them you will fail through lack of expertise or lack of time.
I would add that iteration is also key - a manager should check on a regular basis that what has been planned is what is being done and that if not ensure there is time to change what is being done as early as possible. Good staff and good managers appreciate that some things will take a few iterations to get right but it is better to iterate than to take the first version of everything (and foolish to plan for this) - not iterating leads to over-design and slow progress as everyone desperately tries to second-guess all the situations their work might have to cover.
Iteration is also the best way to get a feel for individual workers' pace and abilities.
When I first started work out of college I kept a notebook of "things I like/don't like" about my managers, mostly as a training piece for myself. One of the top qualities one of my managers had was his comfort level with admitting to me "I don't know the answer to that, but I think I know where we can find it".
Probably summed up as something like "check your ego at the door".
This goes for not only managers, but any member of an organization -- pretending to know something when you really don't and being afraid to ask questions is a huge red flag to me for both managers and employees alike.
And back to the list, IMO that's a pretty good list, especially coming from one person's experiences.
Piecemeal advice, even if you know the answer to all job interview questions answering a straight up "no haven't dealt with that before but I'd tackle it by learning x y z." Will set you apart from pretty much everyone. Being able to confidently tell someone you politely have no fucking clue is pretty rare in my experience.
Example I interviewed for a job I know I was qualified for, they kept asking questions about things I really had no idea about (all stuff I had never dealt with before - only similar things) they were so refreshed by the honesty and how I dealt with not knowing things they offered me the job despite pretty much what I thought at the time was tanking the interview.
This hit too close to home. As a subordinate and as a manager, I've always felt totally comfortable saying, "I'm not sure but I'll check this".
As a subordinate, it was quite annoying to deal with one of the worst managers in my career - I call him the "pretender". I already have plenty to do, and no I don't want to spend time on "checking if too many ping requests from other machines caused harddisk space on this machine to get full" (not joking, true story). The "pretender" had a title of "senior project manager" and the only thing true about that was the "senior" part (nothing against competent seniors), hemmed and hawed in the meetings pretending he knew what he was talking about and basically dumped it all on me.
Once I moved up and stopped reporting to him, he had nobody to dump work on, got exposed and last I heard, left.
Performance management: It is highly unlikely as somebody new to the team, and brand new to management, that you can work out who the high performers are and who the under performers are within the first few weeks. If you get it wrong then by making it official and documenting by email you will get the entire teams backs up.
Not explicitly managing resources: Really bad advice. How do you know what is important within the first few weeks? Often you will only have a high level view of what the team does within the first few weeks. Try and do this too quickly and again it can backfire.
When I wrote the answer (that is currently top answer) I was thinking about a longer time window for the "new manager" period, perhaps a year instead of a few weeks. You're right that someone new to the team and new to management won't be able to accurately assess who the top and bottom performers are in their first few weeks. Same for how to allocate resources.
If the "new manager" period is the first year of management then I stick by my answer on those points.
I thought the question was aimed at new to the role not necessarily new to the team?
I found the advice about visibility pretty on the nose. I have yet to have a direct supervisor who hasn't stolen credit a few times. In contrast the guys or girls above them have all been really good at directing it downward. As far as my career has gone anyway.
If you get it wrong then by making it official and documenting by email you will get the entire teams backs up.
Yep. Much of management theory assumes that employees are passive, like cattle, and that the employee will cluelessly make nothing of the manager who's "documenting". In reality, that puts the person into war mode.
The old phrase about never pulling a gun unless you intend to kill someone? It also applies to HR practices and "documenting". You only do that if you're sure you're going to fire someone as quickly as you can, because there's absolutely no way to turn back once down that road. The best route is to fire same-day with a generous severance, but most middle-managers don't have that leeway (either to fire quickly or to give severances). Which gets to the crux of why being a middle manager sucks so hard. You have major responsibilities (hiring, firing, defining and canceling projects) but none of the power to do them properly. You often get stuck between self-serving, arrogant executives (MacLeod Sociopaths) and checked-out minimum-effort players (MacLeod Losers) and can very easily be cleaning up the messes of both.
The hard part for me was that managing engineers takes a lot of time and energy, it's not possible to be a full time engineer and a full time manager.
Over time your understanding of the technical details of the work your team is doing will atrophy and where once you may have been an expert on all aspects of the system you must now rely on the judgement of the senior members of your team when making decisions. This is hard for a lot of people, to know that you don't know enough to make a decision and then to trust your team enough to help you make the right one.
Building that trust is important, because without it you'll make bad (or at least uninformed) technical decisions. it's easier if you moved up into a managerial role from a team you worked on instead of being hired to manage a team you just met.
What really always rubbed me up the wrong way was approaching me to come up with the question "OK, how long then?". Because "managers" tend to ask this when neither scope nor current state of the project are visible, and are then getting offended when one points out to them that it's an impossible question. They then usually proceed to ask you to just make something, clearly demonstrating that they don't want to improve the disaster state of the project or care for your opinion in any shape or form, but instead prefer some randomly made up number.
So whenever I hear this question in that very particular tone, I already plan my exit strategy because I know it's going to be a train wreck.
A number of the points in the top answer are really symptoms of not being aware of what is going on with your people. One of the fatal flaws (for the manager if not the company) I have observed in poor managers is a lack of spending time with the team members.
At least in tech, many managers are promoted from individual contributor roles and they only carve out a little time to be a manager. Usually that means they don't know what is going on, and when issues do come to their attention those issues have been festering for quite a while.
I've always been stunned how few tech companies and startups do 1 on 1s. It's the single, easiest way to surface a lot of this. As long as you don't completely ignore what's brought up in them, you'll get in front of a lot of trouble.
@abdinoor - what tactics do you use to get in front of these issues?
My experience is that the more experienced the manager, the more he will remove himself from all conversations, the rookies always talk about themselves.
The biggest mistake I see managers make is that they think they are there to deliver completed projects to upper management. They are playing project manager when they should be playing people manager.
A good manager's job is to make sure their direct reports have everything they need to get their job done. The proper information, tools, training, time, motivation, etc. If they have the proper staff the rest of the success will stem from that.
I have employed that as a manager and expect it as a direct report and have only ever seen success when it is employeed both in the military and the private sector.
Mistake #1: It's not about you, it's about them.
Mistake #2: Not having frequent one-on-one meetings with your direct reports. For this I recommend you listen to: http://www.manager-tools.com/manager-tools-basics. One-on-ones are considered the core of the management trinity.
Mistake #3: Not giving timely, frequent feedback.
Mistake #4: Not coaching your team to help them grow.
Mistake #5: Not wanting to let go of your individual contributor responsibilities.
OP lists all the issues from the point of view of management.
From the employee point of view, here are some common manager problems:
Employee comes in earlier, leaves earlier than manager: manager assumes employee is only working the hours they see; they act on this and insult/piss off the employee with their assumption of slacking.
Manager optimizes group for his own metrics e.g. maximize resources/minimize commitments to increase likelihood of meeting all objectives. Company loses (spending way too much for the minimal accomplishments); employee loses when manager won't permit taking on anything but the most mundane projects.
Manager cherry-picks opinions in group to justify the approach manager Wants to take, instead of letting the experienced employees make their own plan. Managers don't 'get to' make decisions; they are supposed to gather information to make the Right decision.
I think the biggest mistake new managers make is to forget that you are principally managing people. Even though day to day there's a lot of email, meetings, project management and office politics it pays to remember that you succeed through your staff as much if not more than through your personal efforts.
[+] [-] kabdib|12 years ago|reply
The best managers I've had have sighed wistfully and wished out loud that they could do engineering, but made a conscious decision not to. The really good managers will be very interested in how you are getting along with your career, and it will often not come as a surprise to them when it comes time for you to leave ("time to go, grasshopper").
The bad managers were bad for numerous reasons, but many of the worst were micro-managing, getting in the way, having technical arguments, dishing out unreasoned mandates to solve things one way or another, or generally trying to be Boss Engineers without actually being part of the team. Sucked hard. The times I've switched jobs underneath these bozos, I've called it "Firing my boss."
[+] [-] scottm01|12 years ago|reply
If you're coming from a technical role, understand that your new job is not to be an engineer. If you're lucky and are good enough at your new job that you have some spare cycles, you might get to guide some architectural discussions
It can be rewarding to help guide a team towards something you could never accomplish alone, but you must resist the temptation to step and do "do things".
Disclaimer -- I moved up to a director-level position and realized within a year that to be good at it I would probably not be able to continue expanding my technical skills, at least not on company time. I moved on to an "individual contributor" role with a company that provides higher level career opportunities that don't involve having direct reports. The minutia of actual line management wasn't bad as long as there was a good team, but I definitely underestimated the people skills, budgeting, planning, and politics that goes along with being a good manager.
[+] [-] zyxley|12 years ago|reply
This is the problem I've run into most often with management: the command to do things using method or technology A instead of B, not because A is better (in fact, B usually is the better choice both for development and for internal user support), but because A is the pet preference of a manager not involved in the work and who doesn't actually work with any of the people who will be using or supporting the end result.
[+] [-] greenyoda|12 years ago|reply
I can't agree with this strongly enough. When I was a manager (I've since gone back to being a developer), trying to do engineering work at the same time was probably my biggest weakness.
There will be times when there's an emergency (real or imagined) where your upper management wants you to come up with a fix for something right away, and you'll be tempted to drop everything you're doing as a manager and put out the fire. (One rationalization for this might be that you don't want to break the flow of your developers, who are working on important stuff of their own.) Resist this temptation. Not only will your management work remain undone, but if the people on your team don't get experience dealing with emergencies in parts of the code that they don't know much about, you'll be stuck doing this stuff forever and they won't learn these skills. Learn how to delegate, and learn how to set the expectations of your own managers so that they don't assume that every problem can be fixed instantly.
[+] [-] ansimionescu|12 years ago|reply
I don't know how to contact you, so if you ping me at [0] or [1] I can send you a link to my resume. Thanks!
edit: I'm a big dum-dum – it was quite easy to find your Fb profile, I sent you my resume there (check 'Other' messages). :)
0: https://plus.google.com/+AndreiSimionescu
1: my username at gmail
[+] [-] polemic|12 years ago|reply
One of the best pieces of advice, badly paraphrased below, I've heard from a military context.
This is a warning about micromanagement, flippant decisions and how to delegate. For example, if you tell someone off-hand not to bother you with X, be prepared to never be bothered with X again. If you tell someone how to shine their shoes, be prepared to tell them how to shine their shoes every single day.Again, this is an a military context where orders flow downhill, but the same applies in other areas of business. An experienced manager knows where they need to set the boundaries within which their staff operate, with as much autonomy and initiative as possible. An inexperienced manager doesn't understand how to balance this equation.
PS if anyone has a better formulation of the above, please share =D
[+] [-] IgorPartola|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IgorPartola|12 years ago|reply
I know that there were quite a few problems above me. Lack of leadership carries far and wide and there was a disconnect between what the products did and what the management thought it did. Lack of money (think lack of compensation, lack of tools, lack of time for anything but immediate returns) did not help either. I do keep questioning whether I was doing all the wrong things or if I was put in a situation designed for me to fail, or perhaps both.
After I left I understand the company hired three different people to replace me: a manager, a dev lead, and a support engineer. I suppose that's some kind of a sign that I was trying to do too many things at once. Most of the engineering team also left after I did. The least I could do is give them the great recommendations they all deserved so all of them moved onto exciting new pastures. However, I cannot help but feel like I failed at this task that I felt sure I could tackle and I don't understand why.
Please excuse the rant. These types of topics always trigger those same feelings in me.
Edit: now I work as a developer on 2-3 person teams. I have no reports. I get to be productive again! I can write code that doesn't have to suck to compensate for poorly chosen deadlines. This is good for the soul. I do miss leading a team though; not managing but really leading. One of my proudest moments was when I was allowed to follow a system of estimates and sprints I put together and for 8 weeks my team delivered on schedule and exactly what was promised. That was one of my more joyful moments.
[+] [-] bane|12 years ago|reply
It also sounds like a typical story where the larger organization was trying to keep management lean, without realizing that it really did take multiple people to do the job.
One place I worked at ground through three managers in 6 months (with 120 people under them) before finally getting the clue and hiring a proper team of 7 to do the job.
It's not uncommon at all and it really is the upper management's responsibility to properly staff their low/mid management teams.
[+] [-] hluska|12 years ago|reply
Sometimes even the greatest skippers can't keep a boat from sinking. It's helpful to consider how you could have made the situation better or worse. But, based on what I've read, you're putting too much blame on your own shoulders. Rather, remember that it took three people for them to replace you.
[+] [-] pjungwir|12 years ago|reply
Wow, what? It sounds like you were doing the right things, but this is hard to comprehend. Wouldn't temps cost $12/hour for this? No wonder they were angry.
[+] [-] netcan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neumann|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kaizyn|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NicoJuicy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanburk|12 years ago|reply
put another way - you might have a personal ambition to have a title like "VP of Engineering" or make $500k a year, but most others don't. so if you project your motivations / world view on those who work for you, you will have a bad time building a great team with a great culture. knowing what your people value is really important and will help you get the best work from your team.
[+] [-] jevanish|12 years ago|reply
Many people haven't really thought about it and so you end up going on a fun journey helping them figure it out. Usually, you discover over time that there are a lot of things more important than money. Being the manager that helped them figure out what they really want (and hopefully get closer to it) builds awesome loyalty and motivation on the job.
Once you have the minimum amount to live comfortably (which in places like SF is actually a non-trivial amount), I've found raises and bonuses have only very short-term happiness that wears off in a week or two. It's feeling fulfillment in your job and making progress on your long term goals that really brings career happiness.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btgeekboy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] incision|12 years ago|reply
"Don't procrastinate, communicate clearly" are to management what "eat less, exercise" is to losing weight or "only buy things you need, spend less than you earn" is to saving money.
The problem isn't managers that they haven't read this compilation of checklists or its equivalent in any of the thousands of management books out there.
The problem is the brokenness of management as a role in general.
Too many organizations are stuck in an broken structure which makes management the most direct if not only way to advance in terms of status, pay, autonomy or all three.
The end result are incompetent managers who need to be taught common sense or unhappy ones who are far better suited to other roles, but recognize them as dead-ends.
If becoming a manager stops being desirable for all the wrong reasons you won't have to remind your new, inexperienced managers not to be lazy or not to manage by intimidation.
[+] [-] SilasX|12 years ago|reply
I agree, and would add that they're not even answering the specific question being asked (which happens a lot on Quora). The question they're all answering is:
"What is good general management advice?"
But the question that was asked is:
"What are mistakes specific to new, inexperienced managers, that are common for that particular class of managers?"
A responsive answer to that question will generally be expressible as,
"The manager will make it a policy/habit that <blank>, thinking that <poor recognition of group dynamics>. In reality, <mechanism happens> and so they encounter <failure mode>."
For example,
"The manager will start a policy of not tracking employee time, on the grounds that the group is responsible and trustworthy, not realizing that this will make it harder to demonstrate progress and efficiency to higher-ups, and result in less leeway being given to the group on important decisions."
[Please don't refute the logic there, I'm not offering it as valid, just showing the form that a responsive answer would have.]
[+] [-] jevanish|12 years ago|reply
Also - do you think it's that their overwhelmed, under-trained for the new demands of the role, or something else that causes so many managers to fail?
[+] [-] sambeau|12 years ago|reply
A good manager looks after a project not its people, concentrates on the big picture while letting others deal with the small details. A good manager achieves this by delegation.
Assuming you've hired the right people in the first place you should be able to let people get on with their jobs — if you try to do their jobs for them you will fail through lack of expertise or lack of time.
I would add that iteration is also key - a manager should check on a regular basis that what has been planned is what is being done and that if not ensure there is time to change what is being done as early as possible. Good staff and good managers appreciate that some things will take a few iterations to get right but it is better to iterate than to take the first version of everything (and foolish to plan for this) - not iterating leads to over-design and slow progress as everyone desperately tries to second-guess all the situations their work might have to cover.
Iteration is also the best way to get a feel for individual workers' pace and abilities.
[+] [-] mp3jeep01|12 years ago|reply
Probably summed up as something like "check your ego at the door". This goes for not only managers, but any member of an organization -- pretending to know something when you really don't and being afraid to ask questions is a huge red flag to me for both managers and employees alike.
And back to the list, IMO that's a pretty good list, especially coming from one person's experiences.
[+] [-] lugg|12 years ago|reply
Example I interviewed for a job I know I was qualified for, they kept asking questions about things I really had no idea about (all stuff I had never dealt with before - only similar things) they were so refreshed by the honesty and how I dealt with not knowing things they offered me the job despite pretty much what I thought at the time was tanking the interview.
[+] [-] noisy_boy|12 years ago|reply
As a subordinate, it was quite annoying to deal with one of the worst managers in my career - I call him the "pretender". I already have plenty to do, and no I don't want to spend time on "checking if too many ping requests from other machines caused harddisk space on this machine to get full" (not joking, true story). The "pretender" had a title of "senior project manager" and the only thing true about that was the "senior" part (nothing against competent seniors), hemmed and hawed in the meetings pretending he knew what he was talking about and basically dumped it all on me.
Once I moved up and stopped reporting to him, he had nobody to dump work on, got exposed and last I heard, left.
[+] [-] sheepmullet|12 years ago|reply
Performance management: It is highly unlikely as somebody new to the team, and brand new to management, that you can work out who the high performers are and who the under performers are within the first few weeks. If you get it wrong then by making it official and documenting by email you will get the entire teams backs up.
Not explicitly managing resources: Really bad advice. How do you know what is important within the first few weeks? Often you will only have a high level view of what the team does within the first few weeks. Try and do this too quickly and again it can backfire.
[+] [-] ianmcall|12 years ago|reply
If the "new manager" period is the first year of management then I stick by my answer on those points.
[+] [-] lugg|12 years ago|reply
I found the advice about visibility pretty on the nose. I have yet to have a direct supervisor who hasn't stolen credit a few times. In contrast the guys or girls above them have all been really good at directing it downward. As far as my career has gone anyway.
[+] [-] gaius|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelochurch|12 years ago|reply
Yep. Much of management theory assumes that employees are passive, like cattle, and that the employee will cluelessly make nothing of the manager who's "documenting". In reality, that puts the person into war mode.
The old phrase about never pulling a gun unless you intend to kill someone? It also applies to HR practices and "documenting". You only do that if you're sure you're going to fire someone as quickly as you can, because there's absolutely no way to turn back once down that road. The best route is to fire same-day with a generous severance, but most middle-managers don't have that leeway (either to fire quickly or to give severances). Which gets to the crux of why being a middle manager sucks so hard. You have major responsibilities (hiring, firing, defining and canceling projects) but none of the power to do them properly. You often get stuck between self-serving, arrogant executives (MacLeod Sociopaths) and checked-out minimum-effort players (MacLeod Losers) and can very easily be cleaning up the messes of both.
[+] [-] klodolph|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fishkins|12 years ago|reply
edit: I personally use https://github.com/sindresorhus/quora-unblocker in Chrome to do this for me so I don't have to think about it. I also made https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quora-share/ to do the same thing in FF.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] hessenwolf|12 years ago|reply
Delegation: (usually the first failure I see) http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/art5.html
And the rest: http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/index.html
[+] [-] TwistedWeasel|12 years ago|reply
Over time your understanding of the technical details of the work your team is doing will atrophy and where once you may have been an expert on all aspects of the system you must now rely on the judgement of the senior members of your team when making decisions. This is hard for a lot of people, to know that you don't know enough to make a decision and then to trust your team enough to help you make the right one.
Building that trust is important, because without it you'll make bad (or at least uninformed) technical decisions. it's easier if you moved up into a managerial role from a team you worked on instead of being hired to manage a team you just met.
[+] [-] pascalo|12 years ago|reply
So whenever I hear this question in that very particular tone, I already plan my exit strategy because I know it's going to be a train wreck.
[+] [-] abdinoor|12 years ago|reply
At least in tech, many managers are promoted from individual contributor roles and they only carve out a little time to be a manager. Usually that means they don't know what is going on, and when issues do come to their attention those issues have been festering for quite a while.
[+] [-] jevanish|12 years ago|reply
@abdinoor - what tactics do you use to get in front of these issues?
[+] [-] peterwwillis|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidar|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanburk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tactic|12 years ago|reply
A good manager's job is to make sure their direct reports have everything they need to get their job done. The proper information, tools, training, time, motivation, etc. If they have the proper staff the rest of the success will stem from that.
I have employed that as a manager and expect it as a direct report and have only ever seen success when it is employeed both in the military and the private sector.
[+] [-] emilioolivares|12 years ago|reply
Cheers!
[+] [-] Dolimiter|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] RivieraKid|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|12 years ago|reply
From the employee point of view, here are some common manager problems:
Employee comes in earlier, leaves earlier than manager: manager assumes employee is only working the hours they see; they act on this and insult/piss off the employee with their assumption of slacking.
Manager optimizes group for his own metrics e.g. maximize resources/minimize commitments to increase likelihood of meeting all objectives. Company loses (spending way too much for the minimal accomplishments); employee loses when manager won't permit taking on anything but the most mundane projects.
Manager cherry-picks opinions in group to justify the approach manager Wants to take, instead of letting the experienced employees make their own plan. Managers don't 'get to' make decisions; they are supposed to gather information to make the Right decision.
[+] [-] edderly|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jevanish|12 years ago|reply