> How many managers do you know who studied to be managers of people?
Isn't this one of the aims of officer training in the armed forces?
You're barely managing
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Re: You're barely managing
#32Throwing in my own random list:
- Negotiation
- Communication skills (verbal, written, and listening). I've found only a few managers to be good at this. If things are happening without your knowledge, or if your employees don't talk much to you during 1:1s, then there is a trust gap (warranted or not), and you need the skills to break down that barrier.
- Influence
- Social dynamics (yes, I know this is overly broad). So much of the behavior at big companies falls into this category. An example is understanding empire builders, and how they almost always are poor managers. Understanding that having 15 direct reports probably means you're not managing them, and why despite this (I dare say) common knowledge, it is still quite common. Understanding why poor behavior amongst both staff and employees is tolerated, with almost absolute impunity.
- Some amount of psychology. Psychology of motivation, etc. Obviously, a lot of the research on this topic is flawed, but some of it is quite "obvious" at the work place.
- Cognitive biases in evaluating others (still very common to reward the firefighter handsomely, sadly). (As an aside, understanding why almost all companies have little interest in evaluating their employees, but they all act as if they do).
Re: You're barely managing
#33> How many managers do you know who studied to be managers of people? > I mean more than a couple of one-day courses; I mean someone who studied to be a manager the way someone studied to be a software engineer or doctor. > I personally don’t know anyone, and while those degrees definitely exist, it’s got me wondering: of the total managers in the world, how many of them have those qualifications? Is it even 1%? ...…
I agree on the solution posed being the same as the problem claimed. "but none of them has offered me, in the end, more credibility as a manager." Spoken like a true manager. Is credibility/credentializing the point? I mean, it's certainly used everywhere like requirements of having an MBA (which often include leadership/management classes). But I don't know if any training really makes someone a good people leader w…
Talent and inclination. I actually got an MBA at one point and while I rather enjoyed the whole experience and it was a rather useful credential at the time I decided I had very little interest in becoming a manager.
Re: You're barely managing
#34Managing is hard because it is a top down problem. If the top is leaking then the middle can't do much, or rather, leaking tops usually attract leaking middles.
How many companies have good tops? Few I know of and None I worked for.
Re: You're barely managing
#35> 1. Bad managers are the cause of a lot of employee unhappiness.
> 2. Bad managers are the cause of a lot of workplace failure, i.e., late projects, subpar products, and unmet goals.
> 3. Managers are one of the most under-supported cohorts of employees on the planet.
Agree on the first two, but for #3: managers are perhaps the most OVER-supported cohorts of employees on the planet. Much of the time, simply by being a manager, you're qualified to be a manager somewhere else. The single most important aspect of hiring a manager is ensuring that they're not an asshole and that they've demonstrated an ability to deliver.
In terms of actually delivering after being hired, depending on level, a manager gets a ton of slack in terms of demonstrating their skills compared to an IC. I've seen devs fired on their start date for not being able to hire, but bad managers can weasel their way around for more than a year before they're shown the door. It gets even worse at the director, VP, SVP level, and they're usually never outright fired — it's usually framed as they "decided to prioritize time with their family" or similar.
Like any set of skills — if you want to develop management skills, the onus is on you to make sure it happens. Most of the time, nobody is going to hold your hand into becoming a staff+ engineer, and the same goes for management.
Re: You're barely managing
#36> How many managers do you know who studied to be managers of people? > I mean more than a couple of one-day courses; I mean someone who studied to be a manager the way someone studied to be a software engineer or doctor. > I personally don’t know anyone, and while those degrees definitely exist, it’s got me wondering: of the total managers in the world, how many of them have those qualifications? Is it even 1%? ...…
The vast majority of literature in management (definitely in the tech sector) is essentially a long form opinion of a single person. I personally only started to take more seriously the writing of people who a) have been managing for a long while successfully, and b) regularly sync up with other managers so that their pieces aren't a sample size of 1.
Because I apparently have an infinite appetite for masochism: do you have any recommendations for authors you've read and liked?
Re: You're barely managing
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some the absolute worst managers I've ever had were the ones who were also "management coaches" or trained by them. They just read a bunch of books and blindly applied it to everything and taught others to do the same.
I guess I understand your point, but please consider that competent managers do not fall fully formed from trees. Sure, some are better suited to the role then others, but an average person can become an average manager with time any time. Managers, like programmers or any other professional, start out as novices and get better through experience. Applying book-knowledge to real life and seeing what works and what do…
Agreed; I think that's the key point - we often don't consider "Manager Skillset" the same way we do "Technical Skillset":
1. It takes a lot of learning
2. It takes a lot of practice
3. It's a complex landscape of skills (coaching well-performing employees, coaching under-performing employees, planning & managing a project & timelines, obtaining & managing a budget, managing client expectations, reporting at executive level, supporting technical design, etc etc are all wildly different skills and not every manager will have all of them at same level, just like not all techies will be expert in database and front end and back end and data analytics and enterprise architecture and infrastructure and networking etc:)
Re: You're barely managing
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's my general perception as well, but I'm not sure what the alternatives are. I suppose I shouldn't have narrowly focused on business school - what I really mean is just what the author describes. Someone who has specifically trained to become a manager.
Do attorneys have managers? No, they have senior partners, that are also attorneys. They have clerks to handle the mundane stuff. The wrong model is being applied to software. Managers are redundant.
But attorneys usually don't work in large teams.
Re: You're barely managing
#39It's interesting. I agree with everything in that article. At the same time , I also agree with similar but opposing articles complaining about people who did train to be managers (by going through university program) now leading technical people without having a clue on what those people are doing, how their problems are solved, etc. I think this is a generalized class of frequent hiring / placement problem: I have…
"In other words, do I hire person with A and train them on B? Or do I train a person with B and train them on A?" The real question is where are these places that are supposedly training people? The companies I've seen don't do any real training and expect people to just be proficient at everything.
Depends on company and team I suppose; note there are many aspects to "training":
1. Formal training classes, internal or external - many large companies do offer them
2. "Self-serve" internal training - videos and documents etc; again, many large companies do offer them
3. Informal coaching and mentoring - e.g. my boss is constantly providing feedback and mentoring, sometimes in tiny bitesize chunks you can easily miss and not categorize as training, sometimes in larger nuggets of wisdom. In turn, I do dedicates sessions when a person joins my team on what project is about overall, what their role and place is, what are the challenges and expectations; and then provide feedback and mentoring on continuous basis
4. Self-learning. As individuals we too have responsibility / ownership to train. Just like in my techie days, I'd devour e.g. Oracle DBA or AWS books for fun & profit, in principle, as a manager now, I should similarly read books on coaching and management (I must admit I find them less exciting; but other people feel differently:)
Re: You're barely managing
#40> We're going to be a big company, we thought. So let's hire "professional managers." We went out and hired a bunch of professional management, and it didn't work at all. > They knew how to manage, but they didn't know how to do anything. > You know who the best managers are? They're the great individual contributors who never, ever want to be a manager, but decide they want to be a manager, because no one else is go…
Exactly. Had 3 managers in this company and the only good one is the one from high level IC. He knows everything, can guide us, but eventually goes back to IC due to frustration.