11–20 of 102 posts
" Good managers have roughly twice the impact on team performance as good workers. People who nominate themselves to be in charge perform worse than managers appointed by lottery, in part because self-promoted managers are overconfident, especially about their social skills. Managerial performance is positively predicted by economic decision-making skill and fluid intelligence – but not gender, age, or ethnicity. "
Hate to be that guy but none of this really matters. We all know managers get picked by kissing the right ass and siding with the right boss. Which of course makes (most, yes MOST, but not ALL) managers incompetent, or at best barely mediocre by happenstance.
All of the things mentioned are in service of the existing model of capitalism.
That model is: There are people who do work that leads to the direct creation, maintenance or support of a customer who is paying them. There is a separate group completely independent from this group who view the firm as a form of financial instrument aka “investors.”
Then there’s a third group, and this third group is “management.” Management is hired by the investors - not the employees and is generally given more equity in order to convince the manager that they are actually closer to an investor than a worker.
The true job of management is to prevent labor from having more power and more control of the financial vehicle than the investors do - find me a manager that’s empowering their employees in a way that shifts power from investors to employees and I’ll find you a manager with no job.
This is why CEOs carry the weight of all of this bullshit because investors point to them as the scapegoat person for anything that goes bad on the labor side, and employees look to this person for direction and guidance for what to do on behalf of the investors - so they pull the “I’m paid only if the company does well” smuggling in this concept that the company doing well benefits everyone (hint: it doesn’t and if the options are homelessness or death you don’t actually have options)
In cases where “investors” create the org (EIR, VC spinout etc…) they are intentionally creating a demand signal for labor, and a process for which you can grovel to them for them running a max-min algorithm to ensure they don’t pay anything more than they legally have to - going so far as to now make it a religion where it’s unethical to do anything other than this
Alternatively if a group of engineers gets together to create something, the second that they have success on it, the capitalist investors will direct all their existing financial instrument companies to go and try to capture that new market away from the small group - typically via ruthless competition, but sometimes acquisition becomes the mutually minimum cost outcome. This is all with the idea that if you can acquire your way to market dominance in a monopoly type scheme this is the ideal for investors. It is a very predictable line of income and that’s all they care about.
As long as you live inside of this model, there is no possible world where you will ever have a manager who cares about the people underneath them or the customers for more than a very brief period while the rest of the organization figures out that this manager is a threat to the owners.
If you wanna be successful as a “manager” in a capitalist profit driven organization, there is no option other than to align yourself with investors and do everything you can to prevent your employees from becoming more independent (typically by granting unvested “options” that have zero value outside of the organization)
" Good managers have roughly twice the impact on team performance as good workers. People who nominate themselves to be in charge perform worse than managers appointed by lottery, in part because self-promoted managers are overconfident, especially about their social skills. Managerial performance is positively predicted by economic decision-making skill and fluid intelligence – but not gender, age, or ethnicity. "
The problem is the nobody is actually looking for good managers.
Yet another perfect example of not even understanding that there are other ways to run an organization All of the things mentioned are in service of the existing model of capitalism. That model is: There are people who do work that leads to the direct creation, maintenance or support of a customer who is paying them. There is a separate group completely independent from this group who view the firm as a form of finan…
Well stated, somebody's clearly done their reading on Marxist theory :)
I've been struggling recently with limitations on "managing upward" I've seen thus far in my career -- eventually incentives become aligned such that no "good" manager that represents their employees well to leadership and says "no" when necessary has stuck around very long. I suspect it's largely systemic but I appreciate the way you've highlighted why.
The only cases I've seen where incentives align in favor of the rank and file employee tend to be ambitious projects as "growth" opportunities -- but of course this tends to be more often than not in the form of "experience" rather than necessarily higher "pay". Good managers still try to proactively find opportunities and make sure the team keeps growing. Eventually you "fix" the pay part by switching jobs, but I do wish we had a better system where I could just be "loyal", grow expertise in a relevant area, and be fairly compensated without having to worry about basic things like healthcare.