* Gave me autonomy in execution
* Pushed responsibility on me
* Trusted me to be capable of doing things
Didn’t realize for a long time that I was volunteered for things. Advanced my career super fast.
Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
151–160 of 248 posts
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#152What I learnt from the best managers i have worked under - 1) Don't be a condescending ass 2) Give autonomy to your reportees 3) Listen carefully, give your attention to your team 4) Lead not direct 5) Go beyond office in terms of relationship 6) Give them a clear career path 7) Praise in front, give feedback in private, softly The rest of my WIP list is here https://www.theprohack.com/p/what-not-to-do-when-you-becom…
I have no idea what you mean by 'addressing "Track changes" and "comments" in the reports', care to elaborate?
These are features in MS Office which allows a user to track versions of documents with changes.
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#153At a previous company, I joined a team that had to deliver something a year before I joined. All previous teams assembled to deliver that had failed and had been fired. That the company didn't have that feature was deeply embarrassing, the competition mentioned having it in the first line of their marketing materials. The most influential engineers on the team didn't give a damn about deadlines and thought that being…
What little management experience I have (3 years as team lead for 2 different teams) tells me most people are masochists deep down inside and crave a dictator to order them what to do.
They want two things: someone to take all risk in determining what to do, and to force everyone else to do what they're supposed to do.
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#154Alternate wording: Why have you rationalized that it's OK for somebody to profit from your surplus labor while threatening you with homelessness and starvation?
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#155Honestly, my favorite managers were horrible. I got along with them on a very friendly basis, but in hindsight, I had poor job satisfaction.
The best managers aren't my friend. The three qualifications are, in order: 1: They shield me from the whims of upper management and the crisis of the day. 2: They give me autonomy to do my job as I understand the details better than they do. 3: (In their current role) They take pride in people management instead of technical achievement. 4: They are technically competent, and their past technical experience can be relied on from time to time.
Regarding "They take pride in people management instead of technical achievement". That's specific to their current role at their current time as a manager. (IE, a good manager shouldn't take pride in driving refactoring or implementing something like stylecop. Refactoring and things like stylecop need to be driven by the team members, and the manager just needs to guide such tasks as they fit into the schedule.)
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#156Alternate wording: Why have you rationalized that it's OK for somebody to profit from your surplus labor while threatening you with homelessness and starvation?
Why would any business hire someone that didn't generate a profit, or stand to generate profit in the future?
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
"shield you from management/bigcorp bullshit" I've heard that memorably described as managers either being "shit umbrellas" or "shit funnels".
What I ask myself is: why do corps allow to become places where shit is being thrown around, instead of productive work and cooperation.
You have to remember that giant corporations are actually many small teams trying to work on their own problems. So the “shit” to one team may very well be mission critical to another team. Part of the manager’s job is basically deciding when it makes sense for two teams to work together (I.e. let the “shit” through) and when it doesn’t make sense and shield the team so they can focus on their work.
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#158A technician in a factory where the management were all engineers. He rose through the ranks to run my group when nobody else could handle it. Never indecisive. Knew exactly what he wanted from us and trusted us to figure out how to make it happen. Sat through what I later discovered were absolutely hellish weekly managers' meetings where the directors would take turns raking the managers over the coals, individually and collectively. Didn't complain about it or take it out on his subordinates. When it was absolutely necessary to make us fall in line with B.S. from above, he was matter-of-fact about it. We were expected to abide by the policy, he was going to enforce it, but he wasn't going to expect us to like it.
When, in the end, office politics lead to him taking the fall for a large manufacturing incident, he accepted a lateral demotion gracefully. I worked for people with much more formal education both before and after, but he was both smarter and a better leader than any of them.
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#159He was me
Re: Ask HN: What made your favorite manager/supervisor/CEO so great?
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the wartime/peacetime leader conundrum. The tactics she used worked well because the situation was dire. They probably wouldn't have worked well in a company with a good culture. Winston Churchill is the most famous example of this. He was a great leader during wartime but terrible during peacetime.
Depends on who you ask. Winston Churchill was a racist bigot who starved 4 million people in India to feed his armies. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992...
It's not that Churchill was a different person in wartime than in peacetime, it's just that most people's morals change from wartime to peacetime. So the same atrocity could be viewed as an atrocity or heroic and brave depending on what the public at large feels like their situation was like at the time. That's the point being raised about the manager: every statement the parent made was basically an accusation, but because the team was desperate the success in the end overwrote the other things in everybody's mind.
If the team had failed in the end, all of the qualities that are presently being lauded would be held at fault. True morals may not be relative and situational, but the average person's mental implementation of morals sure can be.