The problem is the nobody is actually looking for good managers.
I’m reminded of the Gervais Principle when I read your message here.
How do you find a good manager?
31–40 of 102 posts
Re: How do you find a good manager?
#32Tangential. i have too much pride, introversion and embarrassment to 'suck up'. This has greatly hindered my career ( and my earnings). I know what the sucking up process is and how to execute it but have psychological block actually doing it. Any advice from ppl who've dealt with this?
Start your own business.
Re: How do you find a good manager?
#33This is a great discussion. Good managers can insulate you from bad companies and bad managers can ruin your experience in a great company. I would go as far as to say the person you work for is more important in some cases than the company you work for.
Here are some thoughts. Companies aren't always clear on who you would be reporting to during the hiring process. This isn't always intentional, but org structures are sometimes in flux as teams grow. You should at least ask who you're going to report to or who you could potentially report to and ensure you have a conversation with them.
Also when looking for jobs, instead of searching by company or job openings, look for managers you have gotten along with or would like to work for and literally contact them and tell them you're looking for a new gig and would love to work on their team. Manager's who may not be hiring right now generally are open to the idea of bringing a known quantity onto their team who want to work for them specifically, so if something opens up you jump to the top of the list.
Re: How do you find a good manager?
#34I skimmed the paper. It's pretty ambitious IMO. They took a bunch of people (two sets of n=20) and did some tests on them, by the sounds of it, the task was to do something that sounds to me like a math or IQ test. People were tested individually and in groups. They then made little groups of three where the manager tries to coordinate who does what in terms of the tasks, and then they give the group a score. All the…
> They then made little groups of three where the manager tries to coordinate who does what in terms of the tasks, and then they give the group a score.
Honestly, this sounds exactly like what a group of graduate students who have never had a real job in the corporate world would come up with as an assessment of management skills.
I feel like you would need 6 months at least to really assess management.
Re: How do you find a good manager?
#35Tangential. i have too much pride, introversion and embarrassment to 'suck up'. This has greatly hindered my career ( and my earnings). I know what the sucking up process is and how to execute it but have psychological block actually doing it. Any advice from ppl who've dealt with this?
Find a working environment that is less dependent on sucking up.
Re: How do you find a good manager?
#36This paper is super interesting and seems to agree with real life anecdata - most managers are crap and management is a hard skill that people are not trained for.
How to find a good engineering manager to work for:
1. during your interview you must learn something significant - can be technical, or about managing people or something.
2. they should not grate you even 1 second. The interview is where you and they are at your respective very very best behaviors. If they grate on you even for 1 second, you probably don't want to work for them. You should always come out feeling positive.
3. they should push you during your interview without you feeling bad about it. The job of a manager is to bring the best/most out of you. When you are on the job they will push you hard. Also they need to find the boundary of your abilities during your interview.
4. they must have better communication skills than you and you should look up to them. Everyone judges their boss and can't deal with a boss that is worse than them at their job.
Find a good manager to work for is very difficult. Because of the high stakes related to a job search - finding a good one will probably only happen by accident.
Treasure those bosses.
The worst thing that can happen (as it happened with me) is that your first boss is great at their job. Then every boss after that will be such a huge letdown. :)
Re: How do you find a good manager?
#37Tangential. i have too much pride, introversion and embarrassment to 'suck up'. This has greatly hindered my career ( and my earnings). I know what the sucking up process is and how to execute it but have psychological block actually doing it. Any advice from ppl who've dealt with this?
There's a difference between "sucking up" and being polite/courteous and respectful. For me, arrogance has always been a bit of a trigger. I can work with most people, but when someone is both arrogant and less than competent it irks me to no end.
My advice is try to always assume the best possible interpretation of any given person's motives in a workplace. Try to be friendly.
Re: How do you find a good manager?
#38Tangential. i have too much pride, introversion and embarrassment to 'suck up'. This has greatly hindered my career ( and my earnings). I know what the sucking up process is and how to execute it but have psychological block actually doing it. Any advice from ppl who've dealt with this?
The trap is thinking that management is about "sucking up" or "playing a game." The way I run my team is entirely in line with my personality and values. There's no fakery at all.
In a way, that's the key: you need to be in an environment where you can operate in a way that works for you and delivers value to the organization. I'm very explicit to my higher-ups about what I'm optimizing for, and that if there's a day when my organization no longer values that, I'll step back from this management role.
Re: How do you find a good manager?
#39" 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. "
How could anything be positively predicted by gender? More seriously, selection effects should be much stronger than gender, age and ethnicity, and yet there should still be some correlation in one direction or another, wish there were power and confidence values given
There are natural tendencies based on gender. That said, they tend to overlap between the two, but become more extreme at the edges of a given bell curve.
For example, in strength, if you take an equal group of men and women, then half of all men are likely to be stronger than all women and half of all women are likely to be weaker than all men in the group. Meaning half intermingle and overlap.
The same is true for some psychological traits. These aren't absolutes though. I don't think it should generally be a consideration for a given position myself, but there are absolute differences in most cases.
Re: How do you find a good manager?
#40I wonder as well how the performance correlates with the candidate's peers prediction of how they would fare, as this is also a big component of how managers are usually picked, and might or might not be a good indicator