we routinely throw people in without any training
September 27, 2023 1:02 PM Subscribe
Consider the impact of bad management: Having a bad manager at the helm of a team can mean employees don’t have clear goals, or they have the wrong goals, or there are no checks in place to monitor progress against those goals. It can mean people don’t hear what they’re doing well or where they need to improve. It can mean problems fester, initiative is snuffed out, strong workers aren’t retained, and poor performers stick around for years while the good ones are driven off. So given how important good management can be, why are so few managers trained well? Ask a Manager's Alison Green tackles the question for Slate.
shhhh if they improve management I won't be able to suck at my job so consistently
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:31 PM on September 27, 2023 [16 favorites]
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:31 PM on September 27, 2023 [16 favorites]
In the tech field, management is often the only next step once you hit the senior engineer level. That pretty much guarantees that managers have no management background whatsoever.
posted by tommasz at 1:32 PM on September 27, 2023 [26 favorites]
posted by tommasz at 1:32 PM on September 27, 2023 [26 favorites]
Training, especially telling someone what they did right and wrong and how to fix it or do better next time, feels really outside the modern US corporate communication comfort zone. So does talking about the interpersonal skills a manager needs.
posted by smelendez at 1:36 PM on September 27, 2023 [10 favorites]
posted by smelendez at 1:36 PM on September 27, 2023 [10 favorites]
Yes, I've literally been told in job interviews they don't want to train anyone, which is why they only hire people who have already done the job before.
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:45 PM on September 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:45 PM on September 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
Because hierarchical organizations value bosses over coaches?
posted by Ickster at 1:53 PM on September 27, 2023 [13 favorites]
posted by Ickster at 1:53 PM on September 27, 2023 [13 favorites]
When I became a manager, I sought to improve. When we discussed management training at work, the most senior managers, who were themselves untrained, saw no value in it - after all, weren't they doing a great job with no training? When I looked for books to educate myself, it seemed to me the vast majority in the business section were not evidence-based in any way. My best resources were in the psychology literature, and the odd bits of coal-face wisdom dispensed by Ask A Manager or Rands. But anyway as Ickster observes, an outlook that values compliance over people doing their jobs better is never going to produce a great body of learning around working with other people.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:58 PM on September 27, 2023 [13 favorites]
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:58 PM on September 27, 2023 [13 favorites]
"Why, one might ask, don't more organizations actually coach managers on the practice of management? (Hint: the managers' bosses are managers too...)"
posted by Mutant Lobsters from Riverhead at 2:03 PM on September 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by Mutant Lobsters from Riverhead at 2:03 PM on September 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
The first time I was promoted to managing others I sucked at it incredibly badly. I still get flushed thinking about a conversation or even more, one I didn’t have.
I took an individual contributor role and the next time, I got a mentor and some training and Alison Green’s book. I sucked less. And I learned my initial “training” (you’re a manager, here’s 45 minutes on how to fill out some forms) was common.
But I’m relieved to be back in an individual contributor role.
posted by warriorqueen at 2:17 PM on September 27, 2023 [10 favorites]
I took an individual contributor role and the next time, I got a mentor and some training and Alison Green’s book. I sucked less. And I learned my initial “training” (you’re a manager, here’s 45 minutes on how to fill out some forms) was common.
But I’m relieved to be back in an individual contributor role.
posted by warriorqueen at 2:17 PM on September 27, 2023 [10 favorites]
I hear of these "good" managers, but I have yet to encounter one. Well, that's not quite true. We had one a few years back but all the shitty managers (and we have so, so many managers) apparently regarded her as a threat, ground her into dust and she fled for a job in a different organization after a year and a half or so.
Hell, a friend of mine recently took a job that is merely manager-*adjacent* and when we went out for lunch a little while ago in terms of job satisfaction she seemed like a shell of herself. Honestly, the managerial culture here is such a poisoned well that I doubt it's possible for anyone to succeed within it, if by "succeed" you mean "make the organization a better place, and a better place to work."
The only upside is that the vast majority of these managers have no interest in or knowledge of what we do or how we do it, and seemingly no inclination to learn, because if they did they might be asked to make a decision someday, so we're more or less left alone to our own devices. Which begs the question of what all these managers actually *do*...other than create more management positions, of course.
In conclusion, our managers are *not* a land of contrasts.
posted by The Card Cheat at 2:21 PM on September 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
Hell, a friend of mine recently took a job that is merely manager-*adjacent* and when we went out for lunch a little while ago in terms of job satisfaction she seemed like a shell of herself. Honestly, the managerial culture here is such a poisoned well that I doubt it's possible for anyone to succeed within it, if by "succeed" you mean "make the organization a better place, and a better place to work."
The only upside is that the vast majority of these managers have no interest in or knowledge of what we do or how we do it, and seemingly no inclination to learn, because if they did they might be asked to make a decision someday, so we're more or less left alone to our own devices. Which begs the question of what all these managers actually *do*...other than create more management positions, of course.
In conclusion, our managers are *not* a land of contrasts.
posted by The Card Cheat at 2:21 PM on September 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
And, echoing what others here have said, the organizational attitude towards any sort of practical training or knowledge transfer - at any level - is apathy, bordering on hostility.
posted by The Card Cheat at 2:28 PM on September 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by The Card Cheat at 2:28 PM on September 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
I'm not even joking, the last time the head of HR was any good in my organization that person was literally escorted to their car on the day they were canned
Luckily there are more-than-decent middle and senior managers in other areas of my organization, but that was a real eye-opener
posted by elkevelvet at 2:30 PM on September 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
Luckily there are more-than-decent middle and senior managers in other areas of my organization, but that was a real eye-opener
posted by elkevelvet at 2:30 PM on September 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
If only Green knew then, what she knows now.
posted by Ideefixe at 2:34 PM on September 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Ideefixe at 2:34 PM on September 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
Most of what I've learned about management I've learned from the blue.
posted by OrangeDisk at 2:37 PM on September 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by OrangeDisk at 2:37 PM on September 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
I have managed people in some professional capacity for most of my career. I graduated from college and took a job as a manager of the computer labs while figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up, which meant that I was overseeing helpdesk techs who I had been working with just a few months earlier. I moved to a big corporate bank to run a tech support team there and had to fire a 40 year old guy when I was 24. Not my call, not my decision, but it was my team so I had to do the deed. The only training that I had to do that awful task was the basic HR script around setting up a PIP and various CYA procedures to ensure we wouldn't get sued for wrongful termination. While different employers were happy to pay for training on the latest Windows or Cisco networking tools, none of them paid for any management training until I was much later in my career.
Now I have been told that I'm a good boss, and I have even been asked by former direct reports of mine to give them coaching or advice when they became managers or directors, which strikes me as good validation that I at least didn't mess up their careers. But I've been doing this for nigh on 20 years, and I have made a lot of mistakes along the way.
The senior engineer who has a lot of expertise and is then made a manager but doesn't know how to delegate and hoards all of the juicy assignments for themselves? Yup. Been that guy.
The engineering manager who doesn't have hands on experience with a given technology and has to trust their senior engineers and leads, but still feels a need to insert themselves in a planning process and micro-manage something to show that they're contributing. Been that guy too.
The engineering director who had to give concrete and direct feedback to a tech lead who wasn't trusted by other members of upper management and essentially fell into the trap of being a go-between buffering grudges between a product director and a hyper opinionated tech lead, then wound up making the situation worse by translating poorly, which always happens in games of telephone. Totally been that guy too.
In my most imposter syndrome-y moments, I think of myself like that quote from Churchill about Americans. "You can always trust the Americans to do the right thing. Once they've tried everything else."
People are hard. Emotions and politics and the ways teams work vary from workplace to workplace. As a manager you have to buffer stress from people below you and people above you and have to find some way to decrease that stress by making imperfect decisions. It's a shit job. But it has to be done. The only thing that I would point out that helped my career over time was working in places with good managers who could model good behavior that I could emulate, working for bosses who genuinely cared about servant leadership, and having a coach who met with me on a regular basis.
My current gig gives us access to LinkedIn Learning and an annual $500 professional development stipend to buy books and take classes, but tbh with management, you can read all kind of books and get all kinds of ideas from online classes, but for actual training, you need someone you can talk to about these shitty imperfect decisions you have to make and can help you with refinining your thinking, process your emotions and dig into the truth of what you really want to happen.
Managers, you all need to find your own work therapist.
posted by bl1nk at 2:50 PM on September 27, 2023 [43 favorites]
Now I have been told that I'm a good boss, and I have even been asked by former direct reports of mine to give them coaching or advice when they became managers or directors, which strikes me as good validation that I at least didn't mess up their careers. But I've been doing this for nigh on 20 years, and I have made a lot of mistakes along the way.
The senior engineer who has a lot of expertise and is then made a manager but doesn't know how to delegate and hoards all of the juicy assignments for themselves? Yup. Been that guy.
The engineering manager who doesn't have hands on experience with a given technology and has to trust their senior engineers and leads, but still feels a need to insert themselves in a planning process and micro-manage something to show that they're contributing. Been that guy too.
The engineering director who had to give concrete and direct feedback to a tech lead who wasn't trusted by other members of upper management and essentially fell into the trap of being a go-between buffering grudges between a product director and a hyper opinionated tech lead, then wound up making the situation worse by translating poorly, which always happens in games of telephone. Totally been that guy too.
In my most imposter syndrome-y moments, I think of myself like that quote from Churchill about Americans. "You can always trust the Americans to do the right thing. Once they've tried everything else."
People are hard. Emotions and politics and the ways teams work vary from workplace to workplace. As a manager you have to buffer stress from people below you and people above you and have to find some way to decrease that stress by making imperfect decisions. It's a shit job. But it has to be done. The only thing that I would point out that helped my career over time was working in places with good managers who could model good behavior that I could emulate, working for bosses who genuinely cared about servant leadership, and having a coach who met with me on a regular basis.
My current gig gives us access to LinkedIn Learning and an annual $500 professional development stipend to buy books and take classes, but tbh with management, you can read all kind of books and get all kinds of ideas from online classes, but for actual training, you need someone you can talk to about these shitty imperfect decisions you have to make and can help you with refinining your thinking, process your emotions and dig into the truth of what you really want to happen.
Managers, you all need to find your own work therapist.
posted by bl1nk at 2:50 PM on September 27, 2023 [43 favorites]
It’s generally agreed upon that skilled jobs require some amount of formal training—you probably wouldn’t hire an electrician with no training or a doctor who hadn’t been to medical school. But for one of the jobs that’s mostly closely tied to a company’s success—managing—we routinely throw people in without any training whatsoever.If the guiding principle of management science were to be something like 'first do no harm' I’d be all for it.
But in our for profit corporate world, any guiding principle of management science would quickly devolve into a somewhat obfuscated for PR purposes version of 'first, last and always, do anything and everything to maximize shareholder value' with an utter disregard for negative consequences for even the corporation itself beyond a five year horizon, and the resulting practice would be extremely inhumane at best.
posted by jamjam at 2:52 PM on September 27, 2023 [6 favorites]
Most upper level management can be replaced with a few hundred lines of shell script without anyone noticing.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 3:03 PM on September 27, 2023 [9 favorites]
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 3:03 PM on September 27, 2023 [9 favorites]
I'll also say that a dynamic here is the tension between: should a manager be a good supervisor and a hands-on expert who can do the job of the people that they oversee and improves the quality of a team's work by contributing their expertise. VS should a manager be a good strategic leader who knows how a team should work and they focus less on the day-to-day tasks and more on the overall dynamics of the team and how their teams work with other teams?
A lot of companies prioritize the former, which is how you get bosses who are really good supervisors of work, but are shit leaders and can often struggle with delegation. It's also a fast way to ruin a good individual contributor by making them do manager tasks that they hate. However, if you go too much into the latter, then you have clueless bosses who just focus on organizational politics and TPS reports, and become deadweight in the organization.
Tech companies tried to figure a good balance point between both, but as they grew, they needed more of the politics players until they got fat and bloated, and then in the recent downturn have said things like "every manager needs to be able to code" and over corrected to having the more hands-on model, and shuffling out good managers who had gotten too rusty.
I think to Alison Green's point, a good manager needs to be someone who understand the work that their team's are doing well enough to give folks good feedback and correct when the work is suffering, but that is only part of their job. Their main focus is still a healthy team, but how you balance your attention between the work or the team? Well, that's the crux of it all.
posted by bl1nk at 3:05 PM on September 27, 2023 [9 favorites]
A lot of companies prioritize the former, which is how you get bosses who are really good supervisors of work, but are shit leaders and can often struggle with delegation. It's also a fast way to ruin a good individual contributor by making them do manager tasks that they hate. However, if you go too much into the latter, then you have clueless bosses who just focus on organizational politics and TPS reports, and become deadweight in the organization.
Tech companies tried to figure a good balance point between both, but as they grew, they needed more of the politics players until they got fat and bloated, and then in the recent downturn have said things like "every manager needs to be able to code" and over corrected to having the more hands-on model, and shuffling out good managers who had gotten too rusty.
I think to Alison Green's point, a good manager needs to be someone who understand the work that their team's are doing well enough to give folks good feedback and correct when the work is suffering, but that is only part of their job. Their main focus is still a healthy team, but how you balance your attention between the work or the team? Well, that's the crux of it all.
posted by bl1nk at 3:05 PM on September 27, 2023 [9 favorites]
What I've learned about managers from working in a big organization is that good management and career progression are at odds. If you are an ambitious manager, you need to network ceaselessly, work on all the important metrics and avoid wasting time and energy on irrelevant matters. It turns out that most of what employees regard as relevant management matters (hiring good people, ensuring there are sufficient resources for a given job, having tough but fair conversations, accommodating employees facing life difficulties, etc...) detract from career progression. So your 'good' managers get fired or transferred, and your sociopathic manager gets promoted.
It was a sad day when I finally realized that big organizations assiduously promote people who are out only for themselves and their clique, to the detriment of the organization itself. 'Quiet quitting' has been a thing for a long time.
posted by SnowRottie at 3:05 PM on September 27, 2023 [17 favorites]
It was a sad day when I finally realized that big organizations assiduously promote people who are out only for themselves and their clique, to the detriment of the organization itself. 'Quiet quitting' has been a thing for a long time.
posted by SnowRottie at 3:05 PM on September 27, 2023 [17 favorites]
there’s inherent moral injury involved in
> I moved to a big corporate bank to run a tech support team there and had to fire a 40 year old guy when I was 24. Not my call, not my decision, but it was my team so I had to do the deed. The only training that I had to do that awful task was the basic HR script around setting up a PIP and various CYA procedures to ensure we wouldn't get sued for wrongful termination.
i would like to particularly focus on the moral injury produced through lying. “personal improvement plan” is a lie in this situation; it is, as you identify it, a cya move to prevent the company ordering you to do this from experiencing some of the consequences of their actions, and a cya move designed to prevent the person you’re lying to from getting (at the very least) the payoff they deserve.
it absolutely does not matter that everyone involved knows that “personal improvement plan” is a lie — knowing it’s a lie and still telling the lie is isomorphic to being one of those gen-x comics who tell jokes about how bad they are as cover for continuing to be bad.
i hope that in this situation you told the person the company was targeting the following:
if you do not think you’re someone with the financial security and moral sticktoitiveness to do the moral thing, you have no business taking a management job.
i am throwing this out there as a counterproposal to the original article: it’s not that we have bad managers because people aren’t trained to be managers, it’s that it’s inherently bad to be a manager unless you’re willing to diligently fall on each and every grenade that comes your way until one of those grenades takes you out and you’re fired, and no one should be expected to take that kind of heroic action.
which is to say: we have bad management because management is bad.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 3:32 PM on September 27, 2023 [21 favorites]
> I moved to a big corporate bank to run a tech support team there and had to fire a 40 year old guy when I was 24. Not my call, not my decision, but it was my team so I had to do the deed. The only training that I had to do that awful task was the basic HR script around setting up a PIP and various CYA procedures to ensure we wouldn't get sued for wrongful termination.
i would like to particularly focus on the moral injury produced through lying. “personal improvement plan” is a lie in this situation; it is, as you identify it, a cya move to prevent the company ordering you to do this from experiencing some of the consequences of their actions, and a cya move designed to prevent the person you’re lying to from getting (at the very least) the payoff they deserve.
it absolutely does not matter that everyone involved knows that “personal improvement plan” is a lie — knowing it’s a lie and still telling the lie is isomorphic to being one of those gen-x comics who tell jokes about how bad they are as cover for continuing to be bad.
i hope that in this situation you told the person the company was targeting the following:
- the company wants to fire you and so they’re going to pretend that you need to improve, but that’s naked bullshit.
- keep this on the down-low for now but i’m forwarding you the emails i’ve received on this topic and will receive on this topic from one of my personal accounts to one of your personal accounts, in case it’s useful for future lawsuits
- i’m going to slow-roll this process as much as humanly possible, even if it risks my job
- because after all, i’m 24 years old and i don’t have a family or medical problems or gambling debts
if you do not think you’re someone with the financial security and moral sticktoitiveness to do the moral thing, you have no business taking a management job.
i am throwing this out there as a counterproposal to the original article: it’s not that we have bad managers because people aren’t trained to be managers, it’s that it’s inherently bad to be a manager unless you’re willing to diligently fall on each and every grenade that comes your way until one of those grenades takes you out and you’re fired, and no one should be expected to take that kind of heroic action.
which is to say: we have bad management because management is bad.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 3:32 PM on September 27, 2023 [21 favorites]
When my department's associate director retired a few years back, the department chair recruited me pretty heavily to take her place.
And I was flattered.
But then I thought about what the job actually entailed -- putting out fires, dealing with upset people, and reconciling budget spreadsheets.
I have two main work modes: performance (teaching) and "leave me the hell alone while I do stuff." I can drop into "cope with others" mode when I have to (and I do have to; I chair a major departmental committee and advise two student orgs), but I avoid it as much as I reasonably can. I hate Excel with a fiery passion (though OpenRefine is my jam).
I realized I'd be miserable. So I decided not to apply. And I'm still very happy about that decision. Something something something Peter Principle something.
posted by humbug at 3:45 PM on September 27, 2023 [9 favorites]
And I was flattered.
But then I thought about what the job actually entailed -- putting out fires, dealing with upset people, and reconciling budget spreadsheets.
I have two main work modes: performance (teaching) and "leave me the hell alone while I do stuff." I can drop into "cope with others" mode when I have to (and I do have to; I chair a major departmental committee and advise two student orgs), but I avoid it as much as I reasonably can. I hate Excel with a fiery passion (though OpenRefine is my jam).
I realized I'd be miserable. So I decided not to apply. And I'm still very happy about that decision. Something something something Peter Principle something.
posted by humbug at 3:45 PM on September 27, 2023 [9 favorites]
This is ancient history, but in my early time at IBM, they had the best manager training. They knew then that most people are not naturally good managers, and so every manager had training every year. And it showed. But by the time the late 80's-90's rolled around, I guess it took too much away from the stockholders' bottom line.
There were other companies that did this- Xerox for sure. The good old days when quality mattered.
posted by MtDewd at 3:46 PM on September 27, 2023 [10 favorites]
There were other companies that did this- Xerox for sure. The good old days when quality mattered.
posted by MtDewd at 3:46 PM on September 27, 2023 [10 favorites]
I am not sure if the vast majority of my management training coming from "How to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk" means I am a good, or terrible manager.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 3:55 PM on September 27, 2023 [11 favorites]
posted by Jon Mitchell at 3:55 PM on September 27, 2023 [11 favorites]
it’s inherently bad to be a manager unless you’re willing to diligently fall on each and every grenade that comes your way until one of those grenades takes you out and you’re fired
Not every workplace is this dysfunctional. Or at least, I've never worked anywhere that felt like this description and I've been in employment for 20+ years.
posted by plonkee at 4:20 PM on September 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
Not every workplace is this dysfunctional. Or at least, I've never worked anywhere that felt like this description and I've been in employment for 20+ years.
posted by plonkee at 4:20 PM on September 27, 2023 [3 favorites]
There were other companies that did this- Xerox for sure. The good old days when quality mattered.
That's how I got my management training. It didn't make me like being a manager, though. Now I'm out of corporate entirely and glad to be where I am now.
posted by tommasz at 4:27 PM on September 27, 2023
That's how I got my management training. It didn't make me like being a manager, though. Now I'm out of corporate entirely and glad to be where I am now.
posted by tommasz at 4:27 PM on September 27, 2023
I've been reflecting some more.
The most important part of this article is the observation that the people who could (and apparently should) pay for training good managers don't care to.
This is a theme in so many problems in our world. Those with the power to act don't wish to. Why don't they wish to?
My half-arsed idea (sorry I forget which social scientists wrote about this) is that control over others is a good in its own right from the point of view of the person in charge, and so where control is in conflict with maximising profit, managers will often prefer control to profit. Good management, understood as creating conditions where people are maximally productive and at least somewhat happy, is not consistent with control. As workers develop autonomy and mastery over the work, new kinds of management are developed to keep them in check - we had Taylorism and "scientific management" to deskill workers and prevent them gaining control over work, and now we have spyware and surveillance to keep the knowledge workers in check and AI assessment of your demonstrated happiness to go after service workers and algorithmic management of gig workers. The management as control model is not what we think of as "good management" but it is what owners prize.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 4:30 PM on September 27, 2023 [12 favorites]
The most important part of this article is the observation that the people who could (and apparently should) pay for training good managers don't care to.
This is a theme in so many problems in our world. Those with the power to act don't wish to. Why don't they wish to?
My half-arsed idea (sorry I forget which social scientists wrote about this) is that control over others is a good in its own right from the point of view of the person in charge, and so where control is in conflict with maximising profit, managers will often prefer control to profit. Good management, understood as creating conditions where people are maximally productive and at least somewhat happy, is not consistent with control. As workers develop autonomy and mastery over the work, new kinds of management are developed to keep them in check - we had Taylorism and "scientific management" to deskill workers and prevent them gaining control over work, and now we have spyware and surveillance to keep the knowledge workers in check and AI assessment of your demonstrated happiness to go after service workers and algorithmic management of gig workers. The management as control model is not what we think of as "good management" but it is what owners prize.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 4:30 PM on September 27, 2023 [12 favorites]
And I learned my initial “training” (you’re a manager, here’s 45 minutes on how to fill out some forms) was common.
I've supervised people for most of my working career, and that is 45 minutes more training than I've ever received. I've received exactly zero training in it, ever, and was always just expected to figure it out. I'm sure I was terrible most of the time, but I at least tried hard to not be a jerk.
I'm currently not supervising anyone and it is so much more relaxing. I'll probably get shoved back into it eventually, though I'm not looking forward to it and will try to avoid it.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:30 PM on September 27, 2023
I've supervised people for most of my working career, and that is 45 minutes more training than I've ever received. I've received exactly zero training in it, ever, and was always just expected to figure it out. I'm sure I was terrible most of the time, but I at least tried hard to not be a jerk.
I'm currently not supervising anyone and it is so much more relaxing. I'll probably get shoved back into it eventually, though I'm not looking forward to it and will try to avoid it.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:30 PM on September 27, 2023
good management and career progression are at odds
God, yes. I've had at least several dozen people tell me what a great manager I am over the past several years, but about a year ago I gave up that position. It just didn't seem to have a point, and the positive stuff I'd said to people over the years about growing their career just felt more and more like bullshit, even if it had worked for me (to a point).
I never had imposter syndrome as a manager at my current company (because I'd learned a lot from screwing up elsewhere), but I started to realize I looked like one to my ambitious peers as they brown-nosed their way up the ladder past me.
posted by Ickster at 4:31 PM on September 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
God, yes. I've had at least several dozen people tell me what a great manager I am over the past several years, but about a year ago I gave up that position. It just didn't seem to have a point, and the positive stuff I'd said to people over the years about growing their career just felt more and more like bullshit, even if it had worked for me (to a point).
I never had imposter syndrome as a manager at my current company (because I'd learned a lot from screwing up elsewhere), but I started to realize I looked like one to my ambitious peers as they brown-nosed their way up the ladder past me.
posted by Ickster at 4:31 PM on September 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
I've said "I don't want to be a manager" at interviews, I mean it as "I don't want your job" but I say it like "I'm not your competition"
posted by djseafood at 4:47 PM on September 27, 2023 [8 favorites]
posted by djseafood at 4:47 PM on September 27, 2023 [8 favorites]
My workplace provides a lot of manager training, but most of the actually good "training" I've gotten as a manager has been asking my own manager and other senior managers questions about situations that are specific to my role and my team. The formal training I've gotten was generic and simplistic; I learned most of those skills just by observing my own managers and seeing what worked and what didn't. The stuff that's actually hard about managing, and where I've made some big mistakes, is hard to teach in a "training".
posted by capricorn at 4:49 PM on September 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by capricorn at 4:49 PM on September 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
should a manager be a good supervisor and a hands-on expert ... VS ... a good strategic leader who knows how a team should work
Depends on how well the manager can trust their team to perform their jobs without (or rarely) needing additional expertise, freeing them up to focus on strategy.
A lot of companies prioritize the former
Probably because they don't spend the time and money to properly train their lower-level employees so they don't need micro-managing.
It's also a fast way to ruin a good individual contributor by making them do manager tasks that they hate.
I once had a former manager ask if I was interested in becoming a manager, on the grounds that it offered a higher salary. Fortunately (as with humbug) I knew what a terrible idea that was and how miserable I'd be, and declined.
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:16 PM on September 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
Depends on how well the manager can trust their team to perform their jobs without (or rarely) needing additional expertise, freeing them up to focus on strategy.
A lot of companies prioritize the former
Probably because they don't spend the time and money to properly train their lower-level employees so they don't need micro-managing.
It's also a fast way to ruin a good individual contributor by making them do manager tasks that they hate.
I once had a former manager ask if I was interested in becoming a manager, on the grounds that it offered a higher salary. Fortunately (as with humbug) I knew what a terrible idea that was and how miserable I'd be, and declined.
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:16 PM on September 27, 2023 [1 favorite]
In the tech field, management is often the only next step once you hit the senior engineer level. That pretty much guarantees that managers have no management background whatsoever.
I think that might be getting less true nowadays, there seem to be more super-senior IC rungs available, maybe still more “technical leadership”/less writing code but without a team of direct reports? Depends on company size and culture, though.
posted by atoxyl at 6:06 PM on September 27, 2023
I think that might be getting less true nowadays, there seem to be more super-senior IC rungs available, maybe still more “technical leadership”/less writing code but without a team of direct reports? Depends on company size and culture, though.
posted by atoxyl at 6:06 PM on September 27, 2023
I have personally watched a great tech worker slowly get promoted up to being a manager, watched them become a well-loved manager, then seen them get promoted to Director, followed promptly by them having a nervous breakdown because they had zero support, training, feedback, or encouragement. Only demands, all the time, from everywhere, only now with insults (because I guess you can still make insults and slurs when you're high enough up?)
...anyway, point being, it was tragic, unnecessary and detrimental to everyone within a half mile. We found a great leader, and then set her on fire and shoved her off a cliff. She grew a team from 2 to 35, grew profit from (I am not joking, this is BigTech after all) 100M to 2.3B for her group, and then she got set on fire and shoved over a cliff while the Senior Directors walked the other way, washing their hands as they went (and, obvs, taking credit for the 2.2B add).
Companies do this all the time, because Companies are profoundly stupid and dysfunctional.
posted by aramaic at 6:11 PM on September 27, 2023 [10 favorites]
...anyway, point being, it was tragic, unnecessary and detrimental to everyone within a half mile. We found a great leader, and then set her on fire and shoved her off a cliff. She grew a team from 2 to 35, grew profit from (I am not joking, this is BigTech after all) 100M to 2.3B for her group, and then she got set on fire and shoved over a cliff while the Senior Directors walked the other way, washing their hands as they went (and, obvs, taking credit for the 2.2B add).
Companies do this all the time, because Companies are profoundly stupid and dysfunctional.
posted by aramaic at 6:11 PM on September 27, 2023 [10 favorites]
there seem to be more super-senior IC rungs available, maybe still more “technical leadership”/less writing code but without a team of direct reports? Depends on company size and culture, though.
Inexplicably, I'm told we have several people in tech lead senior rungs with direct reports. Which.... seems odd.
posted by pwnguin at 6:13 PM on September 27, 2023
Inexplicably, I'm told we have several people in tech lead senior rungs with direct reports. Which.... seems odd.
posted by pwnguin at 6:13 PM on September 27, 2023
It always amuses me to point out that when you break out GMAT scores by undergraduate major, management students score the lowest.
Selection bias might be at play, and if they could understand what that meant they'd be very upset with me.
posted by pwnguin at 6:19 PM on September 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
Selection bias might be at play, and if they could understand what that meant they'd be very upset with me.
posted by pwnguin at 6:19 PM on September 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
I took our annual supervisor training today. It had actors portray various situations at a generic company and demonstrated how good coaching solves all the problems and allows the team to come up with a new phone app that their customers love. It is so far removed from my job that the only way it is useful is for me to contrast our situation to this made-up one and explain to myself what I would really do. If someone I supervised was afraid to do an important presentation, would I ever say to them "Don't think of yourself as scared, think of yourself as EXCITED"? No. I would say "Bring a bottle of water with you and take a gulp when you feel scared."
Some years the training is better; some years it is worse. At least it tries.
posted by acrasis at 6:40 PM on September 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
Some years the training is better; some years it is worse. At least it tries.
posted by acrasis at 6:40 PM on September 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
One thing that always stands out to me, thinking as someone born into a military family and married to a health care worker, is the notion that management absolutely has to be synonymous with career progression. We don't do this in either of those two fields: there are two totally different career tracks in each, one angled towards ultimate big-picture decision-making and strategy, and one angled towards on-the-ground hands-on implementation.
Now, profit qua profit isn't involved in either enterprise and I've personally never worked for a for-profit institution. But I've often contemplated how good it would be if academia, which is my industry, contained permanent tracks for both skilled workers who enjoy implementing complex problems and broader big-picture thinkers focusing on grantsmanship, allowing each to specialize according to preferences without sacrificing stability or pay to do so. I know so many people who loved grad school because they lived the implementation but hated the managerial aspect of academia; on the other hand, I really kind of like the management aspect and don't love the hands on parts.
What if it was the norm in the field for researchers to work in partnerships, with parallel structures for--let's call them grantwriters and lab managers? In my experience, two people who work well together and are each keeping a close eye on their shared direct reports work better than a single supervisor anyway; it's just that the "work well together" clause is important.
I like management. I don't know that you have to have perfect expertise over what everyone on your team is doing to be effective at it; for many people, as long as you know enough to know what to meaningfully praise or how to identify someone struggling, a supervisor's job doesn't require that much technical expertise. What's more important in my experience is spending enough non-intrusive face time with people to let them feel easy and comfortable telling you that they're struggling and why, while also not interfering with their ability to get work done on their own and praising them in ways that matter to them when they do. And finding out what those ways are really involves more listening and paying attention than anything else.
posted by sciatrix at 7:06 PM on September 27, 2023 [15 favorites]
Now, profit qua profit isn't involved in either enterprise and I've personally never worked for a for-profit institution. But I've often contemplated how good it would be if academia, which is my industry, contained permanent tracks for both skilled workers who enjoy implementing complex problems and broader big-picture thinkers focusing on grantsmanship, allowing each to specialize according to preferences without sacrificing stability or pay to do so. I know so many people who loved grad school because they lived the implementation but hated the managerial aspect of academia; on the other hand, I really kind of like the management aspect and don't love the hands on parts.
What if it was the norm in the field for researchers to work in partnerships, with parallel structures for--let's call them grantwriters and lab managers? In my experience, two people who work well together and are each keeping a close eye on their shared direct reports work better than a single supervisor anyway; it's just that the "work well together" clause is important.
I like management. I don't know that you have to have perfect expertise over what everyone on your team is doing to be effective at it; for many people, as long as you know enough to know what to meaningfully praise or how to identify someone struggling, a supervisor's job doesn't require that much technical expertise. What's more important in my experience is spending enough non-intrusive face time with people to let them feel easy and comfortable telling you that they're struggling and why, while also not interfering with their ability to get work done on their own and praising them in ways that matter to them when they do. And finding out what those ways are really involves more listening and paying attention than anything else.
posted by sciatrix at 7:06 PM on September 27, 2023 [15 favorites]
“You manage things, you lead people.”—Rear Adm. Grace Hopper
posted by ob1quixote at 8:31 PM on September 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by ob1quixote at 8:31 PM on September 27, 2023 [4 favorites]
thinking about my animation career and how I went from “flash animator” to “flash animation director” with absolutely nobody giving me any advice on how to handle a team working below me, just here you go, good flash animator, now you have people under you, it didn’t help that I was at a famously dysfunctional studio run by a Bad Boy who openly disdained any interference from those nasty Executives, and that things were falling apart on multiple levels so even if anyone with actual experience noticed my unit grinding to a halt because the Bad Boy held an episode up in layout for the entire time it was supposed to be in animation they were too busy with their own fires to offer me any sage advice
It certainly taught me a few things and if I ever find myself in a similar position I will have ideas of what to do, but I think it taught me that I have zero desire to be in a similar position if at all possible, and it has been possible for decades now,
posted by egypturnash at 8:46 PM on September 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
It certainly taught me a few things and if I ever find myself in a similar position I will have ideas of what to do, but I think it taught me that I have zero desire to be in a similar position if at all possible, and it has been possible for decades now,
posted by egypturnash at 8:46 PM on September 27, 2023 [2 favorites]
I'm well into my career and I can count on two fingers the number of truly excellent managers/bosses I've had in 20 years. And I'm in a human-centered field! So few leaders really understand the brief that managing is about nurturing and developing others and enabling them to do the best work they can, in service of whatever the team exists to do. A big part of that is providing safety and trust and open communication within your team. But that's really hard to do when those above the manager are not also supporting the manager in kind. People leadership really starts—and ends—at the top.
I also think it's a missed opportunity not to create different types of advanced roles, so that being a manager isn't the only way to progress in one's career (ie, ability to be a technical or subject matter leader without having to become a people manager). It all comes down to how we design work. Is it possible to have chains of accountability without hierarchy? There's lots of work that's been done on looking at high performing teams and what contributes to them. But I think there's a level of organisational maturity that's required that you just don't find in the average workplace.
posted by amusebuche at 10:50 PM on September 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
I also think it's a missed opportunity not to create different types of advanced roles, so that being a manager isn't the only way to progress in one's career (ie, ability to be a technical or subject matter leader without having to become a people manager). It all comes down to how we design work. Is it possible to have chains of accountability without hierarchy? There's lots of work that's been done on looking at high performing teams and what contributes to them. But I think there's a level of organisational maturity that's required that you just don't find in the average workplace.
posted by amusebuche at 10:50 PM on September 27, 2023 [5 favorites]
(It’s sad and borderline delusional but I still wish she was my boss. She basically postponed her breakdown in order to make sure the promotions of two of my superiors went through first. Christ, my current boss barely knows who I am and wouldn’t skip lunch to save my bacon. Like, really, shiiiiiiit, ma’am, is there anything I could have done to save you?)
posted by aramaic at 11:09 PM on September 27, 2023
posted by aramaic at 11:09 PM on September 27, 2023
I'm not sure you necessarily can train bad managers to be good managers. So much of the job is soft skills of the kind you can't easily teach or learn that way.
The one simple truck that would, in my experience, help immensely is being willing to demote, fire, or move sideways into non-management positions people who turn out to be terrible managers. In my entire life, I have seen this happen once, when a dozen people, being the majority of the manager's resorts, all called in sick at the same time, citing the bullying behaviour is said manager. Reader, they took two weeks to move him to a different shift. Only when that shift all did the same (well, the ones who hadn't quit) was he fired.
For some reason, incompetence is not a firing offense at most workplaces in my experience, especially not for management. Small wonder that we're awash in bad managers then.
posted by Dysk at 12:04 AM on September 28, 2023 [7 favorites]
The one simple truck that would, in my experience, help immensely is being willing to demote, fire, or move sideways into non-management positions people who turn out to be terrible managers. In my entire life, I have seen this happen once, when a dozen people, being the majority of the manager's resorts, all called in sick at the same time, citing the bullying behaviour is said manager. Reader, they took two weeks to move him to a different shift. Only when that shift all did the same (well, the ones who hadn't quit) was he fired.
For some reason, incompetence is not a firing offense at most workplaces in my experience, especially not for management. Small wonder that we're awash in bad managers then.
posted by Dysk at 12:04 AM on September 28, 2023 [7 favorites]
I've been a manager at a mega-corp for many years, done the MBA thing at a global top 50 school, yada yada.
Cynically, I think about it like a giant playground. Why do kids voluntarily follow a leader?
See, at work a leader can suck, but their direct reports don't have a choice in the matter - your employer just assigns you a leader. But what if staff had the freedom to choose? Then only the best managers would be able to attract staff, and if no one picks you as their manager, well, you obviously suck, so we're going to demote you. That would be great, lol. We actually tried this system for awhile, where we gave employees unfettered freedom of movement within the company, and managers would advertise roles in their teams and had sole hiring discretion, basically if you sucked as a manager you'd have to hire external and train people from scratch because no one internally would voluntarily work for you.
My thinking is very much influenced by the years I spent leading raid groups in MMORPGs. I think that's an even tougher challenge than work, because at least at work the lowest ranking person in my team is paid $100,000 per year to show up, while when I'm leading a raid group in an MMORPG, I'm literally expecting 9 hours of intense effort per week from them and I can't pay them anything except promising that it will (probably) be fun, educational, rewarding and socially stimulating. This is like being paid in exposure, lol.
Well, not only are my direct reports paid between $100,000 to $140,000 per year, I'm ALSO promising them it will be fun, educational, rewarding and socially stimulating. And the work is much easier and less frustrating than defeating the hard mode raid bosses. What a deal!
As a top tier raid group, your best members are constantly at risk of being poached by stronger raid groups. And your best members aren't going to stay if you have underperformers leeching off them in the team - which means you have to actively improve or fire the underperformers in order to retain your best performers. It's easy to end up in a downward spiral, where the best performers constantly jump ship and you're left with just the worst performers who know they can't get into a different group, and you dont't even have good options to hire because of your declining quality, so you hire lower quality candidates, and suddenly the people who started out as your worst performers are looking like your better performers now.
That's the part I think most managers in real life fail at - in trying to hit THEIR metrics, the path of least resistance is to lean on their best performers and produce some top quality work that gets them and their top performers recognized and promoted. If you start out with a top 80% rated employee and you boost them to top 90% and they're promoted, you're a hero. Literally no one is going to reward you for spending time with the worst performers and helping them improve from a bottom 10% performer to a bottom 20% performer, or even firing them and hiring someone who performs at the median level. So the tendency is to stick their head in the sand and pretend the problem doesn't exist. There are so many incompetent underperformers that exist in organizations because their managers don't want to engage with the problem, until the problem becomes so severe they're dragged kicking and screaming into a PIP along with the employee in question.
If your team of 4 people is being weighed down by 1 underperformer, no one gets to do good quality work, because the remaining 3 are being overworked.
(this is not even ironically how I got hired, in the interview I talked about the challenges in MMORPGs in forming, leading and sustaining teams and how to get people to follow you)
(and yes I am developing a personal brand of, you will get promoted fast because this manager is really good at training and development, or fired because this manager isn't actually afraid to quickly show you the door unlike the other managers.... which actually means I am more likely to attract the better employees)
posted by xdvesper at 1:24 AM on September 28, 2023 [4 favorites]
Cynically, I think about it like a giant playground. Why do kids voluntarily follow a leader?
See, at work a leader can suck, but their direct reports don't have a choice in the matter - your employer just assigns you a leader. But what if staff had the freedom to choose? Then only the best managers would be able to attract staff, and if no one picks you as their manager, well, you obviously suck, so we're going to demote you. That would be great, lol. We actually tried this system for awhile, where we gave employees unfettered freedom of movement within the company, and managers would advertise roles in their teams and had sole hiring discretion, basically if you sucked as a manager you'd have to hire external and train people from scratch because no one internally would voluntarily work for you.
My thinking is very much influenced by the years I spent leading raid groups in MMORPGs. I think that's an even tougher challenge than work, because at least at work the lowest ranking person in my team is paid $100,000 per year to show up, while when I'm leading a raid group in an MMORPG, I'm literally expecting 9 hours of intense effort per week from them and I can't pay them anything except promising that it will (probably) be fun, educational, rewarding and socially stimulating. This is like being paid in exposure, lol.
Well, not only are my direct reports paid between $100,000 to $140,000 per year, I'm ALSO promising them it will be fun, educational, rewarding and socially stimulating. And the work is much easier and less frustrating than defeating the hard mode raid bosses. What a deal!
As a top tier raid group, your best members are constantly at risk of being poached by stronger raid groups. And your best members aren't going to stay if you have underperformers leeching off them in the team - which means you have to actively improve or fire the underperformers in order to retain your best performers. It's easy to end up in a downward spiral, where the best performers constantly jump ship and you're left with just the worst performers who know they can't get into a different group, and you dont't even have good options to hire because of your declining quality, so you hire lower quality candidates, and suddenly the people who started out as your worst performers are looking like your better performers now.
That's the part I think most managers in real life fail at - in trying to hit THEIR metrics, the path of least resistance is to lean on their best performers and produce some top quality work that gets them and their top performers recognized and promoted. If you start out with a top 80% rated employee and you boost them to top 90% and they're promoted, you're a hero. Literally no one is going to reward you for spending time with the worst performers and helping them improve from a bottom 10% performer to a bottom 20% performer, or even firing them and hiring someone who performs at the median level. So the tendency is to stick their head in the sand and pretend the problem doesn't exist. There are so many incompetent underperformers that exist in organizations because their managers don't want to engage with the problem, until the problem becomes so severe they're dragged kicking and screaming into a PIP along with the employee in question.
If your team of 4 people is being weighed down by 1 underperformer, no one gets to do good quality work, because the remaining 3 are being overworked.
(this is not even ironically how I got hired, in the interview I talked about the challenges in MMORPGs in forming, leading and sustaining teams and how to get people to follow you)
(and yes I am developing a personal brand of, you will get promoted fast because this manager is really good at training and development, or fired because this manager isn't actually afraid to quickly show you the door unlike the other managers.... which actually means I am more likely to attract the better employees)
posted by xdvesper at 1:24 AM on September 28, 2023 [4 favorites]
Dysk: I'm not sure you necessarily can train bad managers to be good managers. So much of the job is soft skills of the kind you can't easily teach or learn that way.
This has always been a sticking point with me as, several jobs ago, I got put on a committee to explore a reviving of our company’s leadership training program (hastily renamed from the “management training program” on the insistence of legal). The committee was split from the start on that exact point: some believed that you could train/coach good line employees to become managers and others believed that managers had an “it” factor that made them leaders, you have “it” or you don’t. Nobody was going to take orders from Mealy Mouth Mark who got glowing performance evaluations but Fratbro McDude who everybody seems to gravitate towards and hang on every word of would have that “it” factor that doesn’t get captured in metrics.
In the end, we compromised on some objective criteria like overall review scores, 360 feedback, department goals, etc and got some decent candidates that we wouldn’t otherwise have seen if we went with handpicking the “it” people.
posted by dr_dank at 3:39 AM on September 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
This has always been a sticking point with me as, several jobs ago, I got put on a committee to explore a reviving of our company’s leadership training program (hastily renamed from the “management training program” on the insistence of legal). The committee was split from the start on that exact point: some believed that you could train/coach good line employees to become managers and others believed that managers had an “it” factor that made them leaders, you have “it” or you don’t. Nobody was going to take orders from Mealy Mouth Mark who got glowing performance evaluations but Fratbro McDude who everybody seems to gravitate towards and hang on every word of would have that “it” factor that doesn’t get captured in metrics.
In the end, we compromised on some objective criteria like overall review scores, 360 feedback, department goals, etc and got some decent candidates that we wouldn’t otherwise have seen if we went with handpicking the “it” people.
posted by dr_dank at 3:39 AM on September 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
something Peter Principle something
I bring this up every time someone tries to foist a management position on me. If they persist, I move on to anecdotes of the misery I caused during a brief tenure as co-owner of a bar/restaurant in the downtown core of a major city. That always shuts then down.
posted by CynicalKnight at 4:52 AM on September 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
I bring this up every time someone tries to foist a management position on me. If they persist, I move on to anecdotes of the misery I caused during a brief tenure as co-owner of a bar/restaurant in the downtown core of a major city. That always shuts then down.
posted by CynicalKnight at 4:52 AM on September 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
(a) let’s not call the skills needed to be good at interacting with people “soft skills”. the phrase implies they are easier or somehow less important than, say, skills specific to some subject area (eg on softwafe / tech, programming). in my experience those skills are, if anything, harder for folks because they are devalued.
(b) management skills are absolutely learnable / trainable. maybe you won’t find it to be your passion — coaching and leading a group of folks who are delivering results effectively IS different than doing that work yourself. I know because I’ve had to be half-time manager multiple times in my career. I also know being a good manager is trainable because I’ve had to “level up” my own skills rapidly, coach managers when they were flailing (I am most often in roles as a “tech lead” with a manager as my semi-peer and overlapping skills and responsibilities to the team), have had managers who improved dramatically with coaching, and also have had genuinely good managers from starting to work with them (in some cases who I know started as entry level non-manager roles years before!)
The article itself is painful because it really is the case that companies don’t want to invest in coaching and training. If you’re motivated and humble you’ll find many people within your organization or network who will help you learn the skills, give you advice, plan for hard conversations, etc. But you have to know you need it and seek it out most of that time. It’s baffling given how costly (both in terms of money and human impact) it is to have teams where folks are unable to work effectively or quitting regularly.
posted by R343L at 5:25 AM on September 28, 2023 [8 favorites]
(b) management skills are absolutely learnable / trainable. maybe you won’t find it to be your passion — coaching and leading a group of folks who are delivering results effectively IS different than doing that work yourself. I know because I’ve had to be half-time manager multiple times in my career. I also know being a good manager is trainable because I’ve had to “level up” my own skills rapidly, coach managers when they were flailing (I am most often in roles as a “tech lead” with a manager as my semi-peer and overlapping skills and responsibilities to the team), have had managers who improved dramatically with coaching, and also have had genuinely good managers from starting to work with them (in some cases who I know started as entry level non-manager roles years before!)
The article itself is painful because it really is the case that companies don’t want to invest in coaching and training. If you’re motivated and humble you’ll find many people within your organization or network who will help you learn the skills, give you advice, plan for hard conversations, etc. But you have to know you need it and seek it out most of that time. It’s baffling given how costly (both in terms of money and human impact) it is to have teams where folks are unable to work effectively or quitting regularly.
posted by R343L at 5:25 AM on September 28, 2023 [8 favorites]
Yeah, I think coaching and mentorship work a lot better than what I meant by training for learning the requisite skills. And I do not call them soft skills to denigrate them, or suggest they're easy, quite the opposite. I just don't think you can learn them in the same way from a textbook or corporate training slide deck.
posted by Dysk at 5:30 AM on September 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Dysk at 5:30 AM on September 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
I used to get asked if I'd given any thought to moving into management during performance reviews (which my organization doesn't do anymore), and I always politely deflected the question. Personality-wise I know I'm just not suited to that sort of job, but also as I stated earlier in the thread I've seen others make that move and either get destroyed by the other managers or turn into one of the people doing the destroying. For seven figures I'd think about it, maybe.
posted by The Card Cheat at 5:49 AM on September 28, 2023
posted by The Card Cheat at 5:49 AM on September 28, 2023
I come back to this Crooked Timber article now and then, which argues there is such a thing as a general skill of management:
As long as the pervasive (and made-up nonsense) belief that the primary responsibility of any corporation is "shareholder value", rather than the long term success and sustainability of the company, then this mediocrity death-spiral will continue. Training and mentoring people to become better is really expensive! It's really just very expensive and hard to do right (and more importantly, consistently) and difficult to measure.
So, like "maintenance" - and management and leadership training is a maintenance function - it's hard to measure when you're doing it right and it's hard to measure when you're doing it wrong, so it's the first thing that gets throw overboard when times get tight.
posted by mhoye at 5:51 AM on September 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
"... the kernel of my argument for the existence of a general skill of management is that it is pretty obvious that there is a general deficit or “negative skill” of mismanagement, which equally obviously appears to work in roughly the same way in a variety of fields, and that therefore an opening stab at a definition of the general skill of management would be that it’s the absence of this deficit."I think that the linked article gives away the crux of the problem very early, though it's not quite spelled out: that doing this right is "a significant investment of time and money that most organizations simply don’t want to make."
As long as the pervasive (and made-up nonsense) belief that the primary responsibility of any corporation is "shareholder value", rather than the long term success and sustainability of the company, then this mediocrity death-spiral will continue. Training and mentoring people to become better is really expensive! It's really just very expensive and hard to do right (and more importantly, consistently) and difficult to measure.
So, like "maintenance" - and management and leadership training is a maintenance function - it's hard to measure when you're doing it right and it's hard to measure when you're doing it wrong, so it's the first thing that gets throw overboard when times get tight.
posted by mhoye at 5:51 AM on September 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
Literally no one is going to reward you for spending time with the worst performers and helping them improve from a bottom 10% performer to a bottom 20% performer, or even firing them and hiring someone who performs at the median level. So the tendency is to stick their head in the sand and pretend the problem doesn't exist.
The alternate strategy in large organizations is to find a way to internally transfer that underperformer into someone else's group. Often that is far easier than going through the firing process and no one has to look like the bad guy. (The humor at several points in The Wire comes from people being handed teams composed entirely of those rejects from other units, for example.)
I had a previous supervisor who was incredibly conflict-averse and so wouldn't fire anyone, even people who were doing so terrible that they needed to be shown the door. He'd just passively and incrementally cut their hours and cut their perks; eventually people would get frustrated enough to quit. But it took forever, which meant you had these people who were unhappy and who were aware that they were being passively pushed out, but still working there for months or even years. It was horrible for everyone's morale.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:40 AM on September 28, 2023
The alternate strategy in large organizations is to find a way to internally transfer that underperformer into someone else's group. Often that is far easier than going through the firing process and no one has to look like the bad guy. (The humor at several points in The Wire comes from people being handed teams composed entirely of those rejects from other units, for example.)
I had a previous supervisor who was incredibly conflict-averse and so wouldn't fire anyone, even people who were doing so terrible that they needed to be shown the door. He'd just passively and incrementally cut their hours and cut their perks; eventually people would get frustrated enough to quit. But it took forever, which meant you had these people who were unhappy and who were aware that they were being passively pushed out, but still working there for months or even years. It was horrible for everyone's morale.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:40 AM on September 28, 2023
let’s not call the skills needed to be good at interacting with people “soft skills”. the phrase implies they are easier or somehow less important than, say, skills specific to some subject area (eg on softwafe / tech, programming).
"Soft skills" is actually an industry term, is it not? It's not meant to suggest they are less important, but rather that they are skills that have to do with interpersonal relations with your team as opposed to "do you know how to program in COBOL" or whatever.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:06 AM on September 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
"Soft skills" is actually an industry term, is it not? It's not meant to suggest they are less important, but rather that they are skills that have to do with interpersonal relations with your team as opposed to "do you know how to program in COBOL" or whatever.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:06 AM on September 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
In my field (I'm a librarian), the only way you can make a decent salary is by being promoted until you wind up managing people. So our libraries are full of people who aren't managing because it was their dream to be a leader or because they have any leadership skills, but because they needed to figure out how to stay in the field and also afford a mortgage and a car payment. We all desperately need training and mentoring and it's vanishingly rare to get more than a perfunctory HR slideshow or a one-hour training. I'm grateful to the public library where I started my professional career, who gave me the opportunity to attend a ten-week leadership training where we spent every Friday talking about managing for eight hours (and also had homework). I've been in academic libraries for eight years now, three different libraries, and have yet to be offered any kind of training or support for management (and management has been <90% of my job this whole time).
Because I have been very successful at leading teams and building relationships, at every single one of my academic libraries I've found myself doing a ton of mentoring of other managers -- both because I care about good leadership and because, well, what else is there? We make our own training programs because it's filling a void. (I don't think this is limited to support for management skills, by the way; most workplaces will set expectations and assign tasks with very little support for those expectations and tasks, and people make do and muddle through because they want to succeed.)
And, like TFA says, it's such an investment to do it any other way, why would they do something that impacts the bottom line directly when they can do nothing (which also impacts the bottom line but not in an easily measurable way)? This is capitalism.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 7:22 AM on September 28, 2023 [7 favorites]
Because I have been very successful at leading teams and building relationships, at every single one of my academic libraries I've found myself doing a ton of mentoring of other managers -- both because I care about good leadership and because, well, what else is there? We make our own training programs because it's filling a void. (I don't think this is limited to support for management skills, by the way; most workplaces will set expectations and assign tasks with very little support for those expectations and tasks, and people make do and muddle through because they want to succeed.)
And, like TFA says, it's such an investment to do it any other way, why would they do something that impacts the bottom line directly when they can do nothing (which also impacts the bottom line but not in an easily measurable way)? This is capitalism.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 7:22 AM on September 28, 2023 [7 favorites]
Literally no one is going to reward you for spending time with the worst performers and helping them improve from a bottom 10% performer to a bottom 20% performer, or even firing them and hiring someone who performs at the median level. So the tendency is to stick their head in the sand and pretend the problem doesn't exist.
There's a lot of stuff said here that's a head scratcher, but isn't this literally what hiring managers do? I mean, you all talk about how important building up managers is but in the next breath about only hiring the most capable employees straight out the gate. Somebody has to train up the new people - or if you are only hiring the very best, you are part of the problem for society.
Also, everyone here is posting like people don't get old, their skills don't degrade, they don't get sick, they don't have more important priorities or a side hustle. You actually cannot hire the best performers and expect them to be the best forever.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:43 AM on September 28, 2023
There's a lot of stuff said here that's a head scratcher, but isn't this literally what hiring managers do? I mean, you all talk about how important building up managers is but in the next breath about only hiring the most capable employees straight out the gate. Somebody has to train up the new people - or if you are only hiring the very best, you are part of the problem for society.
Also, everyone here is posting like people don't get old, their skills don't degrade, they don't get sick, they don't have more important priorities or a side hustle. You actually cannot hire the best performers and expect them to be the best forever.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:43 AM on September 28, 2023
In Stack Ranking scenarios (a Jack Welch innovation!), savvy managers keep that bottom 10% performer on by design, letting them be the sacrificial lamb that gets culled, protecting the rest of the team.
posted by dr_dank at 7:58 AM on September 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by dr_dank at 7:58 AM on September 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
I'm an IT employee that has had to deal with two consecutive managers that have left their positions within a year. The first one fled within a year and the second was terminated. Both seemed to have taken the job because they had an MBA and MBAs can do anything... except they didn't want to handle the politics of an IT department and they didn't actually want to plan for department work and tried to punt it off to us employees to plan for them. My current, temporary manager is beginning to tighten the ship to protect our staff and has a decent perception of what our plans should be and to enforce contractual relationships against other departments.
The people in the article appeared to be technical qualified managers, so they may have had doubts about their ability, but it appears they could at least hold a conversation with their staff, and be on the same wavelength as them. The article appeared to hint that "maybe we should not promote people from the work unit they came from", but I don't believe there's any evidence "soft skill" only managers do better in running a department. There was some evidence collected that doctor led hospitals perform better than manager led hospitals.
I do agree with @rabbitrabbit that it's concerning that the only way to receive wages that match inflation is to attempt to seek a promotion.
posted by DetriusXii at 8:02 AM on September 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
The people in the article appeared to be technical qualified managers, so they may have had doubts about their ability, but it appears they could at least hold a conversation with their staff, and be on the same wavelength as them. The article appeared to hint that "maybe we should not promote people from the work unit they came from", but I don't believe there's any evidence "soft skill" only managers do better in running a department. There was some evidence collected that doctor led hospitals perform better than manager led hospitals.
I do agree with @rabbitrabbit that it's concerning that the only way to receive wages that match inflation is to attempt to seek a promotion.
posted by DetriusXii at 8:02 AM on September 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
See, at work a leader can suck, but their direct reports don't have a choice in the matter - your employer just assigns you a leader. But what if staff had the freedom to choose? Then only the best managers would be able to attract staff, and if no one picks you as their manager, well, you obviously suck, so we're going to demote you.
See, from the managerial end, you also have to have some kind of cap on how many people a given manager can manage, because hooo boy do I have visions of getting handed more and more people working with me until my ability to listen to them and know how to work with them is completely underwater and fucked. Again in academia, I have also watched a number of PIs accept more students than they actually have time to lead and mentor, usually with disastrous results for everyone.
I do agree with @rabbitrabbit that it's concerning that the only way to receive wages that match inflation is to attempt to seek a promotion.
Seriously. In order for any kind of dual-stream system to work, you have to have promotion and advancement opportunities that don't require management, and you also have to have some kind of system for handling the situation of a 'managerial' employee that is much less experienced and skilled than the 'implementation' employee they're theoretically directing: you're going to have conflicts there as the inexperienced management-track person fucks up and the experienced implementation person works to try and keep the whole enterprise from going to shit. You know, the thing where young stupid doctors try and give experienced nurses bad orders, or where wet-behind-the-ears lieutenants start trying to make veteran NCOs do stupid shit. It's a known problem and I think it's part of training anyone to lead: the first time you start trying to do that, you are going to fuck up, and you are going to make bad choices that more experienced people under you are going to catch and raise questions about. Ideally, if you can't handle that shit without melting down and throwing your implementation expert to the wolves, you get handily ejected from command tracks... but we all know how that works in actual practice, too.
There are absolutely problems with divorcing seniority from leadership, not going to lie, but I think that letting people specialize along the lines of what they actually enjoy doing and are good at, with commensurate increases in wages and stability, is incredibly important. There has to be a stream that pays a comfortable living wage for everyone, or you're going to continue to get shitty management performed by people who hate it in order to get that economic stability and comfort. And that's a hard thing to sell in a lot of organizational environments.
posted by sciatrix at 8:15 AM on September 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
See, from the managerial end, you also have to have some kind of cap on how many people a given manager can manage, because hooo boy do I have visions of getting handed more and more people working with me until my ability to listen to them and know how to work with them is completely underwater and fucked. Again in academia, I have also watched a number of PIs accept more students than they actually have time to lead and mentor, usually with disastrous results for everyone.
I do agree with @rabbitrabbit that it's concerning that the only way to receive wages that match inflation is to attempt to seek a promotion.
Seriously. In order for any kind of dual-stream system to work, you have to have promotion and advancement opportunities that don't require management, and you also have to have some kind of system for handling the situation of a 'managerial' employee that is much less experienced and skilled than the 'implementation' employee they're theoretically directing: you're going to have conflicts there as the inexperienced management-track person fucks up and the experienced implementation person works to try and keep the whole enterprise from going to shit. You know, the thing where young stupid doctors try and give experienced nurses bad orders, or where wet-behind-the-ears lieutenants start trying to make veteran NCOs do stupid shit. It's a known problem and I think it's part of training anyone to lead: the first time you start trying to do that, you are going to fuck up, and you are going to make bad choices that more experienced people under you are going to catch and raise questions about. Ideally, if you can't handle that shit without melting down and throwing your implementation expert to the wolves, you get handily ejected from command tracks... but we all know how that works in actual practice, too.
There are absolutely problems with divorcing seniority from leadership, not going to lie, but I think that letting people specialize along the lines of what they actually enjoy doing and are good at, with commensurate increases in wages and stability, is incredibly important. There has to be a stream that pays a comfortable living wage for everyone, or you're going to continue to get shitty management performed by people who hate it in order to get that economic stability and comfort. And that's a hard thing to sell in a lot of organizational environments.
posted by sciatrix at 8:15 AM on September 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
What is a good manager? (short answer: their job is to improve the system).
Examples of sub-optimization...
Incentive pay
Pay for performance
Management by results
Management by imposition of results
Quotas
posted by Brian B. at 8:25 AM on September 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
Examples of sub-optimization...
Incentive pay
Pay for performance
Management by results
Management by imposition of results
Quotas
posted by Brian B. at 8:25 AM on September 28, 2023 [3 favorites]
I'm an IT employee that has had to deal with two consecutive managers that have left their positions within a year. The first one fled within a year and the second was terminated. Both seemed to have taken the job because they had an MBA and MBAs can do anything...
There's a classic paper on the influence management has on products and systems they manage, Melvin Conway's How do committees invent?:
posted by pwnguin at 9:16 AM on September 28, 2023
There's a classic paper on the influence management has on products and systems they manage, Melvin Conway's How do committees invent?:
The basic thesis of this article is that organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. We have seen that this fact has important implications for the management of system design. Primarily, we have found a criterion for the structuring of design organizations: a design effort should be organized according to the need for communication.So everyone in charge of hiring or building an org chart is in some way influencing the design of the system. Some have gone on to characterize a corollary, "Conway's curse" -- the design will reflect to some degree every iteration of the org chart. So reorgs must be done carefully and sparingly, or components will lose clear ownership and nobody will be able to remember why things are the way they are (in the same way nobody remembers how things were 5 reorgs ago). This pretty clearly lays out the danger of non-technical management, beyond the inability to supervise and train.
posted by pwnguin at 9:16 AM on September 28, 2023
Brian B.: Examples of sub-optimization...
Incentive pay
Pay for performance
Management by results
Management by imposition of results
Quotas
Linking anyone’s compensation to metrics like that practically begs for “creative management solutions” to tip the scale and make that money. Years ago, my nephew got an after-school job at a mall sneaker store. After putting away multiple pairs shoes that a demanding customer had him running back and forth to the stockroom to get, he noticed that one pair was missing. The customer had paid cash for a cheaper pair and apparently walked off with an expensive pair in the confusion. His shift supervisor told him that he would have to pay for them himself since they were his customer, explaining that the area manager has a zero tolerance for shrink and will fire the entire shift of employees for theft if something went missing. The area managers bonus was tied to shrink and profit numbers, so he stood to make his max bonus shaking down college kids for the cost of doing business. Corporate didn’t seem to care that he was doing this since it was all word-of-mouth and a mass firing for theft wasn’t out of the realm of possibility for retail.
Not sure how it ended for that area manager in the long run, but stands a great chance at a successful career in corporate America.
posted by dr_dank at 9:22 AM on September 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
Incentive pay
Pay for performance
Management by results
Management by imposition of results
Quotas
Linking anyone’s compensation to metrics like that practically begs for “creative management solutions” to tip the scale and make that money. Years ago, my nephew got an after-school job at a mall sneaker store. After putting away multiple pairs shoes that a demanding customer had him running back and forth to the stockroom to get, he noticed that one pair was missing. The customer had paid cash for a cheaper pair and apparently walked off with an expensive pair in the confusion. His shift supervisor told him that he would have to pay for them himself since they were his customer, explaining that the area manager has a zero tolerance for shrink and will fire the entire shift of employees for theft if something went missing. The area managers bonus was tied to shrink and profit numbers, so he stood to make his max bonus shaking down college kids for the cost of doing business. Corporate didn’t seem to care that he was doing this since it was all word-of-mouth and a mass firing for theft wasn’t out of the realm of possibility for retail.
Not sure how it ended for that area manager in the long run, but stands a great chance at a successful career in corporate America.
posted by dr_dank at 9:22 AM on September 28, 2023 [2 favorites]
The article appeared to hint that "maybe we should not promote people from the work unit they came from", but I don't believe there's any evidence "soft skill" only managers do better in running a department. There was some evidence collected that doctor led hospitals perform better than manager led hospitals.
posted by DetriusXii at 10:02 AM on September 28
I think part of this is, doctors do receive some training in how to be a human being who cares about other human beings. Bedside manner, giving patients bad news, exploring end-of-life planning with patients, etc are all things a lot of doctors are explicitly taught (at least at our institution these are often MM&I topics and my understanding is that residency teaches a lot of these things too though I'm not directly involved there so don't know for sure if that's a thing at all acadmic hospitals or if it's just the culture at my department) -- presumably those soft skills are at least somewhat transferable to managing people.
posted by joannemerriam at 10:24 AM on September 28, 2023
posted by DetriusXii at 10:02 AM on September 28
I think part of this is, doctors do receive some training in how to be a human being who cares about other human beings. Bedside manner, giving patients bad news, exploring end-of-life planning with patients, etc are all things a lot of doctors are explicitly taught (at least at our institution these are often MM&I topics and my understanding is that residency teaches a lot of these things too though I'm not directly involved there so don't know for sure if that's a thing at all acadmic hospitals or if it's just the culture at my department) -- presumably those soft skills are at least somewhat transferable to managing people.
posted by joannemerriam at 10:24 AM on September 28, 2023
doctors do receive some training in how to be a human being who cares about other human beings
Not surprising but studies show that doctors with higher levels of empathy and better people skills get sued for malpractice a lot less than those with poor interpersonal skills. So this skill is not only good for patients and the people that work with the doctors, but it also helps to keep malpractice insurance rates lower. Win win!
posted by ensign_ricky at 11:07 AM on September 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
Not surprising but studies show that doctors with higher levels of empathy and better people skills get sued for malpractice a lot less than those with poor interpersonal skills. So this skill is not only good for patients and the people that work with the doctors, but it also helps to keep malpractice insurance rates lower. Win win!
posted by ensign_ricky at 11:07 AM on September 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
I kind of like this topic, so apologies if I'm responding to multiple threads at once!
> See, from the managerial end, you also have to have some kind of cap on how many people a given manager can manage,
Technically, the CEO is responsible for potentially thousands of employees under them. That's kind of what I'm getting it - how great would it be if literally thousands of people voluntarily want to work for their CEO because they're such a great person? So you'd get to the point where, well, a manager can really only manage 10 people, but 50 people want to work for them, so we'll promote them to a director and they manage 5 managers each with 10 people under them, so on and so forth.
> There's a lot of stuff said here that's a head scratcher, but isn't this literally what hiring managers do? I mean, you all talk about how important building up managers is but in the next breath about only hiring the most capable employees straight out the gate. Somebody has to train up the new people - or if you are only hiring the very best, you are part of the problem for society.
Sorry if that was confusing! That was exactly what I meant - spending time training your underperforming staff (or firing them) is something I learned was very important on my own, but I don't see this done at all in the workplace because there's not much incentive to do so.
In our industry I understand there that hiring managers aren't a thing.... the people accountable for the work (managers) go out and interview and hire their own staff. HR has no idea how to evaluate for aptitude or personality, they just do paperwork and compliance. (and I'll talk about what "performance" is a bit further down)
> Linking anyone’s compensation to metrics like that practically begs for “creative management solutions” to tip the scale and make that money.
This is exactly the problem. One of the management paradigms we work under is we reward "performance" - think of it like being an actor in a movie or a play who is "performing" a role. This is because trying to reward "outcomes" is a fools errand - the outcome in a highly competitive and unpredictable business environment is often more to do with pure luck than your actual performance. No one in 2018 drawing up their 5 year business plan predicted Covid-19. Worse, if you try to reward an outcome, you will be incentivizing some employees to simply cheat and lie to fake those outcomes. So what do you want to reward? You want to reward behaviors and skill development - integrity, discipline, innovation, communication, continuous improvement. That's what we discuss with our employees, the outcomes may be sometimes used as evidence for the effectiveness or failures of those behaviors, but the outcomes aren't the main point.
posted by xdvesper at 4:57 PM on September 28, 2023 [4 favorites]
> See, from the managerial end, you also have to have some kind of cap on how many people a given manager can manage,
Technically, the CEO is responsible for potentially thousands of employees under them. That's kind of what I'm getting it - how great would it be if literally thousands of people voluntarily want to work for their CEO because they're such a great person? So you'd get to the point where, well, a manager can really only manage 10 people, but 50 people want to work for them, so we'll promote them to a director and they manage 5 managers each with 10 people under them, so on and so forth.
> There's a lot of stuff said here that's a head scratcher, but isn't this literally what hiring managers do? I mean, you all talk about how important building up managers is but in the next breath about only hiring the most capable employees straight out the gate. Somebody has to train up the new people - or if you are only hiring the very best, you are part of the problem for society.
Sorry if that was confusing! That was exactly what I meant - spending time training your underperforming staff (or firing them) is something I learned was very important on my own, but I don't see this done at all in the workplace because there's not much incentive to do so.
In our industry I understand there that hiring managers aren't a thing.... the people accountable for the work (managers) go out and interview and hire their own staff. HR has no idea how to evaluate for aptitude or personality, they just do paperwork and compliance. (and I'll talk about what "performance" is a bit further down)
> Linking anyone’s compensation to metrics like that practically begs for “creative management solutions” to tip the scale and make that money.
This is exactly the problem. One of the management paradigms we work under is we reward "performance" - think of it like being an actor in a movie or a play who is "performing" a role. This is because trying to reward "outcomes" is a fools errand - the outcome in a highly competitive and unpredictable business environment is often more to do with pure luck than your actual performance. No one in 2018 drawing up their 5 year business plan predicted Covid-19. Worse, if you try to reward an outcome, you will be incentivizing some employees to simply cheat and lie to fake those outcomes. So what do you want to reward? You want to reward behaviors and skill development - integrity, discipline, innovation, communication, continuous improvement. That's what we discuss with our employees, the outcomes may be sometimes used as evidence for the effectiveness or failures of those behaviors, but the outcomes aren't the main point.
posted by xdvesper at 4:57 PM on September 28, 2023 [4 favorites]
For the first time in 29 years of software/data development, I finally have a great manager. It makes such the difference in job satisfaction.
posted by mmb5 at 7:04 PM on September 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by mmb5 at 7:04 PM on September 28, 2023 [1 favorite]
It may be true that you can't train someone to be an amazing leader but you can sure train someone to be reasonably competent.
Simply effective management is so rare that simply applying the most basic principles of organisation consistently basically makes you top quartile if not better in many organisations.
But in our for profit corporate world, any guiding principle of management science would quickly devolve into a somewhat obfuscated for PR purposes version of 'first, last and always, do anything and everything to maximize shareholder value' with an utter disregard for negative consequences for even the corporation itself beyond a five year horizon, and the resulting practice would be extremely inhumane at best.
Even from a shareholder value point of view - most managers are effectively managing even to the notional goal of "this quarter's profits" which the shareholder value maximisers are accused of over-emphasizing. So even if you think that is shitty, they aren't even doing that right.
It's actually amazing that almost nobody ever sits down and thinks about whether the system they are managing is actually any good, everyone is just turning the handle as fast as their hot little hands can crank it.
It always amuses me to point out that when you break out GMAT scores by undergraduate major, management students score the lowest.
Most managers are not people with management degrees. I would actually be much more interested in whether those people are effective managers than what their GMAT scores are. Unfortunately I suspect not.
The one simple truck that would, in my experience, help immensely is being willing to demote, fire, or move sideways into non-management positions people who turn out to be terrible managers. In my entire life, I have seen this happen once, when a dozen people, being the majority of the manager's resorts, all called in sick at the same time, citing the bullying behaviour is said manager. Reader, they took two weeks to move him to a different shift. Only when that shift all did the same (well, the ones who hadn't quit) was he fired.
True, but managing people who are themselves managers is what the higher level people in the organisation do, right? They're not good at their jobs either most of the time for the exact same reasons.
I'll also say that a dynamic here is the tension between: should a manager be a good supervisor and a hands-on expert who can do the job of the people that they oversee and improves the quality of a team's work by contributing their expertise. VS should a manager be a good strategic leader who knows how a team should work and they focus less on the day-to-day tasks and more on the overall dynamics of the team and how their teams work with other teams?
We don't even have a great vocabulary for talking about management. One task is that of the first-among-equals line supervisor who spends a great deal of their time "doing" and the rest providing direct quality control and short-cycle feedback on quality. Another task is to manage and coordinate outputs over time and between people, another is to think about team structure and focus and yet another is people management - selecting the right people to fill these tasks and keeping them happy.
Many people start their management jobs as immediate supervisors of work and don't realise early enough that they should not be doing the supervision / feedback stuff after they do "their own" work but that in fact, this is "their own" work and their individual contributor roles are now secondary. Likewise, many managers who should be considering their team's structure and composition spend all their time checking outputs.
posted by atrazine at 7:09 AM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
Simply effective management is so rare that simply applying the most basic principles of organisation consistently basically makes you top quartile if not better in many organisations.
But in our for profit corporate world, any guiding principle of management science would quickly devolve into a somewhat obfuscated for PR purposes version of 'first, last and always, do anything and everything to maximize shareholder value' with an utter disregard for negative consequences for even the corporation itself beyond a five year horizon, and the resulting practice would be extremely inhumane at best.
Even from a shareholder value point of view - most managers are effectively managing even to the notional goal of "this quarter's profits" which the shareholder value maximisers are accused of over-emphasizing. So even if you think that is shitty, they aren't even doing that right.
It's actually amazing that almost nobody ever sits down and thinks about whether the system they are managing is actually any good, everyone is just turning the handle as fast as their hot little hands can crank it.
It always amuses me to point out that when you break out GMAT scores by undergraduate major, management students score the lowest.
Most managers are not people with management degrees. I would actually be much more interested in whether those people are effective managers than what their GMAT scores are. Unfortunately I suspect not.
The one simple truck that would, in my experience, help immensely is being willing to demote, fire, or move sideways into non-management positions people who turn out to be terrible managers. In my entire life, I have seen this happen once, when a dozen people, being the majority of the manager's resorts, all called in sick at the same time, citing the bullying behaviour is said manager. Reader, they took two weeks to move him to a different shift. Only when that shift all did the same (well, the ones who hadn't quit) was he fired.
True, but managing people who are themselves managers is what the higher level people in the organisation do, right? They're not good at their jobs either most of the time for the exact same reasons.
I'll also say that a dynamic here is the tension between: should a manager be a good supervisor and a hands-on expert who can do the job of the people that they oversee and improves the quality of a team's work by contributing their expertise. VS should a manager be a good strategic leader who knows how a team should work and they focus less on the day-to-day tasks and more on the overall dynamics of the team and how their teams work with other teams?
We don't even have a great vocabulary for talking about management. One task is that of the first-among-equals line supervisor who spends a great deal of their time "doing" and the rest providing direct quality control and short-cycle feedback on quality. Another task is to manage and coordinate outputs over time and between people, another is to think about team structure and focus and yet another is people management - selecting the right people to fill these tasks and keeping them happy.
Many people start their management jobs as immediate supervisors of work and don't realise early enough that they should not be doing the supervision / feedback stuff after they do "their own" work but that in fact, this is "their own" work and their individual contributor roles are now secondary. Likewise, many managers who should be considering their team's structure and composition spend all their time checking outputs.
posted by atrazine at 7:09 AM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
don't realise early enough that they should not be doing the supervision / feedback stuff after they do "their own" work but that in fact, this is "their own" work and their individual contributor roles are now secondary.
Often that's because THEIR managers do not in fact consider the IC role secondary, at all. I have been unable to do a single professional development course or conduct a single set of personnel reviews/feedback in my 5 years in management. Nobody cares. But if I blow a single IC deadline, hooooooo boy am I gonna hear about it.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:12 PM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
Often that's because THEIR managers do not in fact consider the IC role secondary, at all. I have been unable to do a single professional development course or conduct a single set of personnel reviews/feedback in my 5 years in management. Nobody cares. But if I blow a single IC deadline, hooooooo boy am I gonna hear about it.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:12 PM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
So few leaders really understand the brief that managing is about nurturing and developing others and enabling them to do the best work they can, in service of whatever the team exists to do. A big part of that is providing safety and trust and open communication within your team.
I think this is the fundamental reason so many managers are bad at their jobs. Managing is a support role, but almost no one sees it that way, because managers are bosses. Bosses have authority and control, so it is our purpose to support them, not theirs to support us. Bosses are in charge, bosses are dominant, bosses are certainly not support. The hierarchy and top-down culture of most work places can't cope with the idea that managers should actually be working for their staff and fulfilling the needs of their staff.
I've refused management roles for years because the management culture where I work is a toxic soup. I'd be good at it, but I'm never going to do it as long as the expectations are what they are. I'm therefore making less than and being managed by people who have a fraction of my experience and expertise. To me, the management salary bump isn't worth the damage to my mental health, my daily work life, and my relationships with my co-workers. It's a hard choice, though, and I've seen other good people go into management and suffer for it.
posted by Mavri at 4:47 PM on September 29, 2023 [7 favorites]
I think this is the fundamental reason so many managers are bad at their jobs. Managing is a support role, but almost no one sees it that way, because managers are bosses. Bosses have authority and control, so it is our purpose to support them, not theirs to support us. Bosses are in charge, bosses are dominant, bosses are certainly not support. The hierarchy and top-down culture of most work places can't cope with the idea that managers should actually be working for their staff and fulfilling the needs of their staff.
I've refused management roles for years because the management culture where I work is a toxic soup. I'd be good at it, but I'm never going to do it as long as the expectations are what they are. I'm therefore making less than and being managed by people who have a fraction of my experience and expertise. To me, the management salary bump isn't worth the damage to my mental health, my daily work life, and my relationships with my co-workers. It's a hard choice, though, and I've seen other good people go into management and suffer for it.
posted by Mavri at 4:47 PM on September 29, 2023 [7 favorites]
I may as well chip in my own (thankfully brief) experience as a manager. I moved to a small city in a rural setting to be with my then-wife, and couldn't find a librarian position within reasonable commuting distance, so I went to work for a drug/alcohol treatment/counseling agency, and was put to work as the manager of the residential program, despite having no particular qualification or experience for the job--I got my bachelor's in psychology less than a decade earlier, and had volunteered for a crisis hotline for some years, so there was that, I guess, but I didn't know how to manage squat. My predecessor had been booted out for something that I don't remember the specifics of, but if it wasn't an outright scandal, it was scandal-adjacent. Luckily, there was someone else who worked there who was qualified, and just needed to go through the interviewing and reference checking process for the big seat, but there were a couple of moderately hairy situations in the meantime that I just sort of bluffed my way through. I wasn't terribly surprised when, a few years later, while applying for another job, I found out that the agency no longer existed.
In terms of people who have managed me who shouldn't have had their jobs, that's a fairly long list. Although the library school that I attended was the top-ranked one in the US at the time (and may still be), they didn't really teach library management, and a number of the people who I've reported to over the years were definite Peter Principle examples; the manager at my sole academic library position had never supervised anyone herself in her long career, and pretty much guaranteed that I'd never get another academic position again, and my first supervisor at the job after that was apparently undergoing some sort of corrective counseling herself as a result of the exit interviews of a couple of my predecessors, which did not stop her from making my life a living hell--the best way that I can put it is that she was worse than the worst parts of all of my previous supervisors (including the academic library one) put together. My subsequent managers have been much more chill, usually, so I've got that going for me, which is nice, but I was not terribly surprised when I was going through some of my old files and realized that I'd started sending out resumes looking for another job within three months of working for the Worst Manager.
Also, I wanted to pull this out from Mavri's comment above: "Managing is a support role, but almost no one sees it that way, because managers are bosses. Bosses have authority and control, so it is our purpose to support them, not theirs to support us. Bosses are in charge, bosses are dominant, bosses are certainly not support. The hierarchy and top-down culture of most work places can't cope with the idea that managers should actually be working for their staff and fulfilling the needs of their staff." Just this.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:18 PM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
In terms of people who have managed me who shouldn't have had their jobs, that's a fairly long list. Although the library school that I attended was the top-ranked one in the US at the time (and may still be), they didn't really teach library management, and a number of the people who I've reported to over the years were definite Peter Principle examples; the manager at my sole academic library position had never supervised anyone herself in her long career, and pretty much guaranteed that I'd never get another academic position again, and my first supervisor at the job after that was apparently undergoing some sort of corrective counseling herself as a result of the exit interviews of a couple of my predecessors, which did not stop her from making my life a living hell--the best way that I can put it is that she was worse than the worst parts of all of my previous supervisors (including the academic library one) put together. My subsequent managers have been much more chill, usually, so I've got that going for me, which is nice, but I was not terribly surprised when I was going through some of my old files and realized that I'd started sending out resumes looking for another job within three months of working for the Worst Manager.
Also, I wanted to pull this out from Mavri's comment above: "Managing is a support role, but almost no one sees it that way, because managers are bosses. Bosses have authority and control, so it is our purpose to support them, not theirs to support us. Bosses are in charge, bosses are dominant, bosses are certainly not support. The hierarchy and top-down culture of most work places can't cope with the idea that managers should actually be working for their staff and fulfilling the needs of their staff." Just this.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:18 PM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
Managing is a support role, but almost no one sees it that way, because managers are bosses.
If I could draw out the gaming analogy a bit more - in League of Legends and DOTA2 (which feature multi-million dollar salaries and prize pools) you play in teams of 5, with various roles depending on what part of the map you are assigned and what share of resources you are allocated. Almost without exception, the support role - the player expected to get by with the least resources by sacrificing themselves for others - is always the team leader. Because the other 4 roles have heavy individual contributor emphasis, it's only the support that has the zoomed out big picture and can make the critical play by play calls that the team follows.
Personally in my teams the way I see my role is that at an individual contributor level, I'm responsible for making sure we deliver to objectives, and if some disaster happened and all 5 of my staff called sick at the same day, I'm confident I can still deliver to objectives by calling in favors from other teams for cover, and of course putting in overtime myself which I then have the liberty of clawing back through days in lieu later, the process of which is fully self managed as a salaried employee.
As for my relationship with my team, I treat them less as working for me, but more like me working for them - they're just other employees in the company, who have been temporarily assigned to me, and my job is to provide them with a steady stream of work that supports their development objectives, and then supporting them by making sure they have access to knowledge and resources to complete those objectives. If they're competent, they will use the resources I've provided to do quality work. If they're not, we'll work on it together and they'll learn through osmosis. If they still can't learn, then we have to show them the door.
As a manager, I'm no longer judged on my individual contribution, but on my ability to elevate and train the staff working for me. Getting people promoted is one of my key objectives - and it's a team effort, because of the role I play - promotions occur through management consensus, and I have to "show off" my employee in the best possible light - which means protecting them by preventing them from making public mistakes, and elevating their best work. It's not my opinion, it's a collective opinion that matters, and we work together to achieve that.
posted by xdvesper at 8:29 PM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
If I could draw out the gaming analogy a bit more - in League of Legends and DOTA2 (which feature multi-million dollar salaries and prize pools) you play in teams of 5, with various roles depending on what part of the map you are assigned and what share of resources you are allocated. Almost without exception, the support role - the player expected to get by with the least resources by sacrificing themselves for others - is always the team leader. Because the other 4 roles have heavy individual contributor emphasis, it's only the support that has the zoomed out big picture and can make the critical play by play calls that the team follows.
Personally in my teams the way I see my role is that at an individual contributor level, I'm responsible for making sure we deliver to objectives, and if some disaster happened and all 5 of my staff called sick at the same day, I'm confident I can still deliver to objectives by calling in favors from other teams for cover, and of course putting in overtime myself which I then have the liberty of clawing back through days in lieu later, the process of which is fully self managed as a salaried employee.
As for my relationship with my team, I treat them less as working for me, but more like me working for them - they're just other employees in the company, who have been temporarily assigned to me, and my job is to provide them with a steady stream of work that supports their development objectives, and then supporting them by making sure they have access to knowledge and resources to complete those objectives. If they're competent, they will use the resources I've provided to do quality work. If they're not, we'll work on it together and they'll learn through osmosis. If they still can't learn, then we have to show them the door.
As a manager, I'm no longer judged on my individual contribution, but on my ability to elevate and train the staff working for me. Getting people promoted is one of my key objectives - and it's a team effort, because of the role I play - promotions occur through management consensus, and I have to "show off" my employee in the best possible light - which means protecting them by preventing them from making public mistakes, and elevating their best work. It's not my opinion, it's a collective opinion that matters, and we work together to achieve that.
posted by xdvesper at 8:29 PM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
To add to this - when I say I'm no longer judged on my individual contribution, I mean something like, oh there was a really rough patch but my team managed to deliver to our commitments.
Two possible scenarios.
1. The manager is brilliant technically and pulled an all-nighter to get things done
versus
2. The manager has great influence and respect in the organization and was able to call in the resources of several teams to get things done. Also because he has spent a lot of time doing people development, his team were able to deliver on something complex that other teams would struggle with. This guy is a candidate for a director role in the future.
... which is what I mean by no longer being judged on your individual contribution.
posted by xdvesper at 8:38 PM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
Two possible scenarios.
1. The manager is brilliant technically and pulled an all-nighter to get things done
versus
2. The manager has great influence and respect in the organization and was able to call in the resources of several teams to get things done. Also because he has spent a lot of time doing people development, his team were able to deliver on something complex that other teams would struggle with. This guy is a candidate for a director role in the future.
... which is what I mean by no longer being judged on your individual contribution.
posted by xdvesper at 8:38 PM on September 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
"When I looked for books to educate myself, it seemed to me the vast majority in the business section were not evidence-based in any way."
Next time try MBA program textbooks instead of popular nonfiction. My Organizational Behavior textbook was full of citations of peer-reviewed research on the effectiveness of different types of management techniques.
posted by Jacqueline at 8:44 AM on October 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
Next time try MBA program textbooks instead of popular nonfiction. My Organizational Behavior textbook was full of citations of peer-reviewed research on the effectiveness of different types of management techniques.
posted by Jacqueline at 8:44 AM on October 1, 2023 [2 favorites]
« Older Connecting people through the power of language | Antisemitism is rising. Time to summon a... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
Corporations long ago adopted the “must be able to hit the ground running” requirement for every damned job in the organization, top to bottom. A company that actually trains anyone, let alone managers, is a rare bird indeed.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:17 PM on September 27, 2023 [53 favorites]