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The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

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Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#151

Post by AstralStorm »

GuB-42 wrote: post #143
etempleton wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardworking and stupid make great employees though. The problem is for doing such a great job as cogs in the machine they get promoted into positions of authority and then it is hard to fault them too much because at least they are hardworking.

I think that here, lazy means "do as little as possible" and hardworking means "always do something", it doesn't mean people do or don't do as they are told. Lazy stupid is fine because these people will execute the order to the letter and then slack off. If the order is clear, there is not much damage they can do. Hardworking stupid will try to do more and mess things up. So if the order is to clean the toilets and…

You do understand that cleaning a damaged toilet is an invitation to a flood of excrement? Sometimes just touching a leak is enough to get the thing to explode.

So anyone not calling the plumber (or skilled at being one) who tries to clean it may end up in the dumps. An actual plumber will clean it after fixing or during fixing.

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#152

Post by AstralStorm »

nr2x wrote: post #142
etempleton wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardworking and stupid make great employees though. The problem is for doing such a great job as cogs in the machine they get promoted into positions of authority and then it is hard to fault them too much because at least they are hardworking.

Ugh, no way! Those people create messes that need to be cleaned up and don’t follow directions. The WORST

Then there is a special category of people being just smart enough to get themselves into a situation they cannot handle. They tend to be hardworking but average or below average talented, not outright stupid.

These people tend to cause debt to accumulate, orders to get blocked or stonewalled, infinite delays, legal costs etc.

A stupid person generally will fail early and obviously, an average person, especially in skill or experience, will get themselves beyond what they can handle before they recognize being insufficient.

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#153

Post by AstralStorm »

kenjackson wrote: post #126
civilized wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my company, the project manager is essentially just there to report progress to management. Why is it necessary to report progress to management? I'm not sure; as far as I've seen, nothing is ever done with the information, except to propagate it further up the chain. I can only speculate that, without progress reporting, management would seem to have too little work to do to justify its headcount.

If you don’t known what is done with reports on progress, you probably shouldn’t comment on such things and should instead go find out.

Usually what is done with that information is scheduling or sales. Typically overly optimistic scheduling or selling a thing one does not possess (a future).

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#154

Post by AstralStorm »

dimitar wrote: post #32

I think the solution is to hire both, because there is also the Peter principle: "promoted to incompetence". The professional managers should be in a deputy position to the promoted ICs. This way they can bring their skills and expertise in management and empower the promoted ICs who understand the business or problems deeply. The professional managers can be pretty useful if they don't have people reporting to them…

The person responsible for paperwork is called an accountant, a secretary or officer, not a manager. A person handling presentations is usually a salesperson. The person with deep knowledge about how a particular business runs and steps required to do so is called a business analyst.

Many so-called professional managers are actually salespeople who have leveraged themselves - sold themselves as managers regardless of how good they are at actually managing. The closest equivalent is politicians.

Sometimes an owner is actually forced to take on multiple such roles at the same time, especially in a small company or a startup. Then they tend to fail thanks to their shortcomings unless they get or hire help.

For example Jobs was not particularly any good manager. He was a salesman and a designer. He hired good managers. When he managed directly he got abject failures, that only his skill in sales partly covered.

The article described a case where someone hired a manager to actually do the job of a process quality engineer/quality officer.

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#155

Post by AstralStorm »

plint wrote: post #138

There's some game theoryish ideas such as the Peter Principle which might explain why meritocratic promotion may not work out in the long run for organizations. See: https://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0455 which won the parody Ig Nobel prize, but I don't really understand why, as I thought it was at least as interesting as Robert Axelrod's simulation of successful strategies in the iterated prisoner's dilemma. In fact, I thi…

Peter Principle only applies to hierarchical organizations or ones where role changes are hard. Even if the depth of hierarchy is 2.

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#156

Post by AstralStorm »

the-printer wrote: post #9

We should all be leery of those who actively and openly declare and pursue positions of leadership.

Leadership is the art of getting people to do what they don't want to and keeping morale up.

Way too many people end up in decision making who have no business being there - as strategists/tacticians - only thanks to their presence (mostly sales). That is a different technical skill.

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#157

Post by AstralStorm »

TrackerFF wrote: post #145

A fundamental problem at most organizations is that if you want more pay, then sooner or later you _must_ be promoted to, or apply for a leadership position. If you want to keep on working in a 100% technical position, with little to no leadership duties, well, the options tend to be few...if any. So what can you do?

Again conflating leadership with sales or strategy... MBAs caused a problem in this regard. One can be a leader without managing anyone, strategizing or selling, or making deals, or designing products.

It only requires personal qualities and emotional skills, so-called human, personal touch. Ability to engender respect. Rare, I know. Sales sometimes involves that, but is usually more adversarial.

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#158

Post by nr2x »

AstralStorm wrote: post #152
nr2x wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, no way! Those people create messes that need to be cleaned up and don’t follow directions. The WORST

Then there is a special category of people being just smart enough to get themselves into a situation they cannot handle. They tend to be hardworking but average or below average talented, not outright stupid. These people tend to cause debt to accumulate, orders to get blocked or stonewalled, infinite delays, legal costs etc. A stupid person generally will fail early and obviously, an average person, especially in s…

Yeah that’s more what I mean - the ones that take a shovel and dig a big hole in the wrong place. Then you have to fill in that hole AND dig the original one, and now you’re behind schedule.

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#159

Post by nr2x »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #150
nr2x wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if that’s why Google has so many badass ICs in Germany.

Since when is Google a German company?

Very big engineering presence in Munich, also Zurich (which I realize is not Germany).

Re: The best leaders are great individual contributors, not professional managers

#160

Post by plint »

AstralStorm wrote: post #155
plint wrote: post #138

There's some game theoryish ideas such as the Peter Principle which might explain why meritocratic promotion may not work out in the long run for organizations. See: https://arxiv.org/abs/0907.0455 which won the parody Ig Nobel prize, but I don't really understand why, as I thought it was at least as interesting as Robert Axelrod's simulation of successful strategies in the iterated prisoner's dilemma. In fact, I thi…

Peter Principle only applies to hierarchical organizations or ones where role changes are hard. Even if the depth of hierarchy is 2.

Aren't most organizations operating in the market hierarchical, and role changes difficult? Why did you say even if the depth of hierarchy is 2? In fact, the difficulty of role change could also be a parameter in model, like how Nicky Case models stuff in some of their things, for example: https://ncase.me/polygons/
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