The best thing you can do is work for a good manager. If you have a crappy manager find a way out to get under another manager or otherwise just outlast them.
Design Patterns for Managing Up
41–50 of 69 posts
Re: Design Patterns for Managing Up
#42Concise articulation, and valuable. My comment is that this is happy-path advice. Corporate culture has changed to where instead of handling conflict according to principle (e.g. Harvard negotiation project, getting to yes, principled negotiations etc), today people are trained to out-passive each other, and marshal political campaigns to isolate opposition. (salience, political survival, working the ref, etc.) The m…
You're higher up the food chain than the audience of that article. Just keep doing your job better than they do their job and vent to allies behind closed doors. There's a guy on our team who does #1 one in the article ALL the time. NNP who slows the team by 25% probably. No one knows how to make him stop. Everyone is politely tapping on his fishbowl and it hasn't worked yet for like months.
I'm not sure I understanding you but I'm curious to hear more. What is an NNP? And are you saying that a colleague following the advice in part 1 of the article is slowing down your entire team? If yes, how so?
Re: Design Patterns for Managing Up
#43Concise articulation, and valuable. My comment is that this is happy-path advice. Corporate culture has changed to where instead of handling conflict according to principle (e.g. Harvard negotiation project, getting to yes, principled negotiations etc), today people are trained to out-passive each other, and marshal political campaigns to isolate opposition. (salience, political survival, working the ref, etc.) The m…
Sometimes when the "knives are out" you can't win or why would you want to?
"why would you want to"
you want to if you have a mortgage payment each month, or there are people in your life who depend on you for food and clothing.
Re: Design Patterns for Managing Up
#44Concise articulation, and valuable. My comment is that this is happy-path advice. Corporate culture has changed to where instead of handling conflict according to principle (e.g. Harvard negotiation project, getting to yes, principled negotiations etc), today people are trained to out-passive each other, and marshal political campaigns to isolate opposition. (salience, political survival, working the ref, etc.) The m…
You're higher up the food chain than the audience of that article. Just keep doing your job better than they do their job and vent to allies behind closed doors. There's a guy on our team who does #1 one in the article ALL the time. NNP who slows the team by 25% probably. No one knows how to make him stop. Everyone is politely tapping on his fishbowl and it hasn't worked yet for like months.
The real power play is to confidently and assertively state “I don’t know, I’ll get back to you in X hours with an answer” and be on point with the timing. Someone that promises and delivers on time causes people to melt and program managers to fall in love.
Re: Design Patterns for Managing Up
#45Question for the crowd: how to manage up a politically savvy skip manager that routinely trivializes engineering effort? They couch it in sarcasm, something like "oh you can build that in like 2 minutes, it's just an SQL query and 3 lines of python, right?"
Re: Design Patterns for Managing Up
#46Is there any similar themed advice for managing same-seniority coworkers handballing their responsibilities? Person A owns task Person A: I don't know much about task, but person B seems like an expert. Person B, please take over task Person B is no more or less qualified at task than person A
Person B should probably accept but present the trade off. Allow the manager to decide what matters. Confidently state what options are possible within timeframe X
Re: Design Patterns for Managing Up
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well you at least don't want to bring a pillow to a knife fight.
Actually, wouldn't a pillow be a reasonably effective way to deflect a knife?
I usually think of the metaphor in terms of bringing a knife to a pillow fight as a play on "that's like bringing a knife to a gun fight" in which case my formulation is about having an innocent bit of fun and then someone going way overboard and doing something absolutely inappropriate. I sort of picture it in my head like everyone is having fun and then someone whips out a knife and then everyone starts to get very terrified.
I never really considered how a pillow would actually hold up against a knife in a fight. My money would still be on the knife, but I take your point.
Re: Design Patterns for Managing Up
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's not suggesting "Guess and pass it of as true". Instead, the idea is to say "Well, I am not sure. However, If I had to guess, I'd say X" where X is your best guess. You can follow up with "If needed, I could find out for sure in {time-frame}"
Fair clarification. I don't appreciate that approach either. Just go find out what the problem is and report back. Unless someone specifically asks you to guess, you are just wasting everyone's time. And in a meeting with clients and upper management, that could add up to $$$ thousands per hour. "If I had to guess". You usually don't have to. So don't do it. Just my $0.02. Maybe other managers see it differently. EDI…
You sound like a person who has difficulty operating in an uncertain environment.
Sometimes certainty is expensive. In fact, in my experience with complex systems, it usually is. Depending on what you're uncertain about, you may need to modify the system to measure it. Resolving uncertainty can take a long time, particularly if the thing you're trying to be certain about is a rare event or cannot easily be isolated.
When certainty is hard to achieve, making probabilistic decisions sooner and falling back to more costly decisions with more expensive certainty only after those have failed, is a better general strategy, even if you're sometimes wrong. Analysis paralysis is real. Someone who always acts the way you suggest has too much fear of being wrong, IMO.
It could be warranted in other situations, where human life is on the line. I think it's not a fast enough process for most businesses though.
Re: Design Patterns for Managing Up
#49So, when a decision is made that doesn't make sense to you, here are the steps:
2. Don't disagree;
This sounds like a recipe for a toxic work culture where everyone is walking on eggshells and fearful not only of stating their opinions - but in many cases, making simple statements about objective reality.
Re: Design Patterns for Managing Up
#50Question for the crowd: how to manage up a politically savvy skip manager that routinely trivializes engineering effort? They couch it in sarcasm, something like "oh you can build that in like 2 minutes, it's just an SQL query and 3 lines of python, right?"
Find another job.