The places where I've seen the worst middle managers are:
* VP hires a middle manager who's a bad fit, but VP doesn't want to admit it
* A manager is promoted into a higher role primarily as a retention mechanism, rather than because a true business need exists
* A manager is promoted into a higher role in an organization that rewards following processes over getting results
* A middle-management layer used to be necessary, and has grown less necessary, but the org is reluctant to do away with it
* There is a perceived need for the middle manager to prove themselves fast and hard both upward and downward, and there's an inherent conflict in how to do that
None of these necessarily reflect the skills of the middle manager; rather, they represent organizational problems.
I don't know if I'd be able to characterize the places I've had bad managers at by the existence of them, but some common elements among those bad managers are that they're anxious, passive, stressed out people who go from IC to Director, but can't then stay out of the kitchen, and aren't great communicators.
The best manager I've ever had engaged me on a technical level and asked for my help outside of my immediate responsibilities just frequently enough, had been through the same shit code I now had to deal with and left me to it, and was forthcoming, transparent, and collaborative during 1:1s.
The worst manager I've ever had tried to repeatedly trick me into admitting fault regarding some inane pet issue they were clearly stewing on, failed to identify any kind of clear success criteria for any given task, and possibly just put me on mute during 1:1s.
"Failing upwards" - I thought it was like the tooth fairy, santa or the boogey man that they tell kids to scare them.
Then I went to work on a high performing team in a high performing organisation and discovered that even in that environment there were people promoted to get them away from stuff they were a) terrible at and b) had made a total mess of.
That's the same with politicians, isn't it? The best people to run a country are those that know what they are doing, but usually tend to have a serious paying job, while in practice most people in places of power are career politicians - inept and removed from the real world.
The similarities of a company run by average MBAs and a country run by career politicians is a concept sadly not explored very much, for how topical and catastrophic it is.
I actually agree with you, I didn't want to go full anarchist with my comment. No one gets into positions of power for selfless love of the people and undying belief in the res publica, or if they do, they don't go too far in their career.
A huge part of being a manager in a large company is basically playing politics, but the point of the article (and common knowledge at this point) is that great managers excel in other skills rather than just "politicking."
My bias might be showing, but what is politicking other than being in the same room with "influential" people, exchanging favours and licking boots when necessary? One would agree that a great manager does more than just appeasing their boss and trying to climb the ladder of power.
Please Enlighten me because this sound exactly like what sales is.
Like being real estate agent are just like car salesmen that happen to sell house instead of car. They show you the product try to use your emotion to manipulate you into buying it and collect a commission :-)
First - who are you selling to? Does your product fit their needs or are you wasting everyone's time? How do you find who to sell to? Is there a feature that keeps getting requested that you can bubble up to the product team?
How do you close a sale, or even know who the decision maker is? Is the price too high or too low? Is there a way to work around financing or timing issues?
There is a lot that goes into sales that bleeds into product, marketing and user experience. Not every sale needs all this attention but a salesman needs some sense of all these things to make those extra sales and not waste extra time/money on dead ends.
Flip side would be saying making websites is just making product designs clickable and tying all expected functionality together. Technically true, but it ignores scaling, user flow, bugs, logging, robustness, optimization, etc.
When something looks simple you may be looking too narrowly at something that connects to lots of other areas.
Running local government can be assigned by lottery, in the manner of jury duty. How about CEOs too ? Select people by lot from the shop floor / cubicle farm. Then stand back and watch the magic happen.
Unfortunately, exists another side of problem. Many people, may be even most people, avoid to hire initiative people, to feel safe.
Yes, this is real issue with job market, that most managers are cautious about somebody, who looking initiative, as they are usually "well-fed and satisfied", and don't like people like Jobs itself, who said "stay hungry".
And yes, in many cases, established business need predictability, not innovations. But this is truth of market, especially marketing, especially good seen in Search Engine Optimization, when you invest into innovations (or in case of marketing into your market, or into your site in case of SEO), if successful, you will once see good grow, then things become into plateau, and then appear unavoidable shrink, and tops need regularly start new circle of grow with new idea (or may be with few good ideas).
And real talent of Jobs, that he without special education, somehow understood this truth.
Steve Jobs was right. There are a lot of bozos in middle management and it seems that the Dilbert and Peter principle applies, but somehow in the sense that people are promoted to cause the most damage possible.
At some companies, it is almost impossible to even raise concerns about a middle manager's performance. It should be much easier, especially if a group of people would rather work for one of their own than certain "bozos".
A “working manager” usually has a higher chance of being a better manager. They are usually busy enough with their own work and they don’t have enough time for the management stuff.
A manager that only does management stuff? Well, what do you think they are going to do?
Also, managers that aren't proficient in the field they are managing also doesn’t usually work well and I thought was always disrespectful to the team.
This article seems to confuse leadership and management. They aren't the same thing. You can be an awesome leader without being a manager and an awesome manager without being a leader. In practice you need both; preferably both awesome of course!
I totally disagree. I really struggle to think of an awesome manager that cannot lead in stressful situations, or a great leader that is terrible with people.
The epitome of the terrible manager is one that panics, runs like a headless chicken or throws their hands in the air when their subordinates are stuck with too short a deadline or a massive hurdle, for example. The great leader is the one that assesses the situation and say "OK, leave it with me, I'll go talk to the boss that this ain't working," raising the morale of the entire team. What's the point of the manager otherwise?
Management and leadership are the one and the same thing, the big problem in many companies is the belief they're not.
Leadership is essentially setting a vision: it's setting a direction people want to follow. Management is about ensuring people are doing the right things.
A talented engineer can be an amazing leader, even if they have no management responsibilities.
A good manager can form a high functioning team and develop their staff, without setting the vision.
So I disagree they are the same things, even if the combination could be particularly powerful.
>Leadership is essentially setting a vision: it's setting a direction people want to follow.
>Management is about ensuring people are doing the right things.
This is all completely incoherent to me. What are "the right things"? What is "setting a vision"? It really sounds like you just listened to some motivational speakers. It's just silliness.
Parent is exactly right. You can't do any of these things well and sustainably without doing both, and taking responsibility for both. Trying to do one or the other is just a scam.
Management is a job function. If someone has decided that X needs to happen, then a managers job is to ensure that X happens. They may or may not have influenced whether X is the thing that needs to happen.
Leadership is convincing people to go in a certain direction. It can happen on many different levels, from the overall direction of a company, to choosing certain technologies to use, to adopting some practices, or whatever. It's more of a quality that anyone can have, rather than a job function.
I’ve heard another definition, if you can and will help out your teammates with the assigned tasks, then you are a leader. If you are just doing the “meta”, you are a manager.
I think that the other side of this argument is basically that management is tactics and leadership is strategy. They are kinda-sorta-distinguishable, but only by virtue of the labels we choose, and they are always two faces of the same coin.
This tracks with my experience: I have worked places where the day-to-day was fine (management) but the year-to-year was not (leadership).
You can be a leader in a large organization without managing anyone.
And when overseeing a group of people in static but important cookie cutter functional roles, you can be a great manager of people, without taking them anywhere new.
Those are the extremes, but there are two poles. Even if most influential people in an organization have varying degrees of responsibility and talent for each.
aol.com - wow, it's been many years, the better part of a decade almost, since I've seen that domain or any content on it. Had no idea it was still around.
Yahoo and some other domains that are from that time period still show up in search results, but I don't think I've seen aol.com articles in a long time now.
Well, my worst manager was a developer that got forced into it. He was passive aggressive, petty, and If I didn't initiate meetings with him, we would have no meetings with me at all (but sit there angry in silence about something I never asked about). I tried so hard to dance around his issues. He never stopped working or took vacations. If I took one (unpaid, I was a contractor), I would get passive aggressive comments for a week in our daily standups from him.
The last straw was right before a pre-planned vacation (3 hours before, to be exact), he wanted me to merge our Jr developer's branch into mine. I merged it, and pushed it to the repo (not master or live, but backed it up to our repo server for when I got back).
Another note here is that they refused to use Git. Didn't even know how to pronounce it correctly and stuck to his guns about SVN. We ran into merging issues constantly.
When I was flying home, he sent me this nasty email saying that I'm not a 'senior developer' and that there were bugs in my code, etc, etc. A month prior to this, I was getting praise from the entire team and company bosses about a brand new extension I had written with no issues. He didn't want to hear that all of the bugs were incompatibility issues with the JRs code.
One other issue I ran into frequently was that the original code base (which he wrote), was so buggy, I would need to fix 5-10 bugs before I could even start working on a new feature. It was also filled with LOTS of security vulnerabilities, which were ignored. If I mentioned any of this in a constructive way, he would raise his voice in front of everyone at the meeting.
All was good though. They finally let me go because they 'ran out of money' a few weeks after I came back from vacation. The company folded within 6 months. Since then, I've had the best manager and contract I've ever had in my career and 3X my money over night.
Sometimes you need a shitty manager to appreciate the good ones.
To be fair, though, this manager you're describing sounds like they were a very poor IC to start with. Whereas Jobs's claim is that exceptional IC's make for good managers.
I had a manager that would cry about pre-existing bugs in a piece of code that I added to but then when I squash bugs they'd cry that I'm rewriting everything. They also refused to answer questions (would say shit like, "I guess we will find out when you submit it") but would send things back for rework and sure enough my review stated that I require rework too often. Some managers are incompetent or downright malicious.
This sounds like the person wasn't a particularly good developer either. Bugs not withstanding, part of the job description for a good developer is having communication skills.
Shit manager, great leader. Another comment above elaborated on this in detail.
I'm currently seeing this dynamic at my own company with my cofounder. I can manage things, projects and people, make them feel good about working at our firm, but I can't for the life of me inspire people to go above and beyond their job description. Meanwhile, my cofounder could rally the troops to cross the Somme in the midst of machine gunfire if needed.
The only management technique that works is not to have any. Keep companies small, below 50 people, and you don't need anyone with the title "manager". Instead of taking your best individual contributors and making them managers, as Jobs suggests, keep them as the leads. The problem is big companies, not how to manage people.
Then who does performance reviews, sets expectations, hires and fires, makes the case for raises, ensures you have all the support you need, acts as a point of contact for any issues, etc?
Coherent group of adults can hire, support, set expectations, evaluate contributions and resolve conflict among themselves. If someone really does a bad job, the group will build a consensus and escalate the problem. If you save on managers, you can pay more people that actually do the work, so they don't have to beg for reasonable compensation every month, make up bullshit to justify their employment, and waste time "being managed". Instead they can focus on doing what needs to be done. If there's no ladder to climb, performance reviews and internal competition, people who are not satisfied with the work itself, and just look for titles and promotions will just leave. The things that do sometimes need escalation, can be handled by the owners/leadership.
Reasonable high caliber people don't need to be "managed". You can manage people working in the restaurant, make them a schedule, make sure they show up, etc. In a creative and intellectually challenging industry like SWE, why would you hire most bright people to pay them lots of money and then think they require continuous "managing". They might need someone to report to and escalate when need arises but that should be very lightweight.
Generally managers are used for handling failure of culture and the cause of that failure at the same time. If you are running a shitty shop, full of crappy devs, who you want to pay crappily, then you need a manager for ~ every 8 people, to whip them and make sure they are doing their jobs, and get fired if they don't.
Yes. I work in 2nd one in my life currently, around 30 people, 15 technical/15 non-technical, remote. Not a single manager. I think we can scale it to 50. At some size I guess it would become harder, but I'd like to think it the spirit of it can be kept (lean and very low managers head count, just for coordination, HR and severe conflict resoultions stuff; let the people do their job and take accountability, pay them well and don't make them play carrier ladder games and internal competition trying to get promoted and destroying the cooperative culture).
First you hire more selectively, slower, with higher "fit" requirements (talented, flexible, aligned with technical choices), and everyone are well motivated, so it just doesn't happen that often. You just accept that people vary, some will have better ideas, more productive, go through things, etc. and that's OK. People should not have to constantly stress about their day to day peformance that much. But when there is a problem, multiple people talk about it with the top leadership over time and then it's eventually handled the usual way.
I have some fantastic leads who are great at tactical thinking but abysmal at the longer term, strategic planning. They are so bad they can't even entertain a 12 month conversation. I trust them absolutely to think is 3 month of less cycles. They cannot manage a a team for long and they don't want to, which is why the middle management layer exists.
* VP hires a middle manager who's a bad fit, but VP doesn't want to admit it
* A manager is promoted into a higher role primarily as a retention mechanism, rather than because a true business need exists
* A manager is promoted into a higher role in an organization that rewards following processes over getting results
* A middle-management layer used to be necessary, and has grown less necessary, but the org is reluctant to do away with it
* There is a perceived need for the middle manager to prove themselves fast and hard both upward and downward, and there's an inherent conflict in how to do that
None of these necessarily reflect the skills of the middle manager; rather, they represent organizational problems.