51–60 of 191 posts
I feel like a discussion of management without those components is missing something critical. Maintaining high performing teams requires that you get really good at this. This article makes it seem like the job is really just talking to people and making sure they're motivated, but in my experience that's the easiest part of the job.
This seems to be fairly common in tech and consulting. How am I supposed to succeed at a manager if I have no fucking clue what my reports are going to be working on?
I feel like this is a failure in either companies not knowing how to setup management for technical roles, or I was given 0 training on this and it resulted in me not knowing what the hell to do all the time with my reports.
The claim in this article is that my job was no longer to do work, but in every role where I reached manager I absolutely was still expected to do my own work. I just also had to vaguely guide some other person and give them reviews and feedback while never having worked with them in my life.
Maybe I was unlucky but these stints at management left a sour taste. I'm not even sure I would call my experience "management" except companies kept naming it that.
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In today's corporate world, it can be difficult or impossible to fire people. It's important to understand that actually removing someone from the organization is a totally separate problem from managing the performance of the team. People who don't contribute or cause problems need to be sequestered as much as possible. Don't let them bring down the rest of the team. I think "managed out" is the term that's being us…
> In today's corporate world, it can be difficult or impossible to fire people Really? In the US you can fire an employee for any reason at any time (aside from a few illegal reasons: union activity, racism, etc.).
That's why it's so hard.
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> In today's corporate world, it can be difficult or impossible to fire people Really? In the US you can fire an employee for any reason at any time (aside from a few illegal reasons: union activity, racism, etc.).
> In the US you can fire an employee for any reason at any time On paper, yes. In practice, especially in a larger company? It's often a long journey that involves a lot of energy on the part of the manager. And then of course you may not get a backfill rec. So then one needs to ask themselves: is this person truly a net negative when compared to the energy that'd be required to jettison them *and* replace them with…
In fact every difficulty I've seen is simply that someone didn't follow the clearly defined procedure.
It's literally written out for you. You don't have to think or care how you feel, just follow the process and you're done. If the process says someone should stay then you got something wrong. Simple as that.
Your new job is to make other people successful, which sometimes means slowing down, asking questions instead of giving answers, and being okay with solutions that aren't exactly what you would have built.
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People will start to tune out things you don't repeat enough very quickly.
Leople will also tune out repeated things because they're often unidirectional conversations. Cool that you want this done today, but "we" are not doing that. Tell the client it's going to take another day instead of planning a scoping meeting and interrupting my dev time
One question I have though is what are you supposed to do if as a new manager you aren't allowed to... well, do your job? I haven't been able to find a lot of resources on what to do in such a situation.
I'm a new engineering manager (~8 months in) and my boss isn't letting me hire full-time devs to replace consultants whenever they leave or their contracts are up and I am not allowed to replace any developers who leave either due to a company-wide hiring freeze. I have lost 4 of my most senior engineers in the last 6 months since I can't replace the consultants or hire anyone new. I'm down to 2 senior devs on my team when we used to have 6, with the same amount of work. They have also implemented mandatory return to office clearly frustrating my team. In addition, I am not allowed to promote any of my team members to try and encourage them to stay.
The heck am I even supposed to do? What is the point of being an EM if you quite literally are not allowed to do your job? I can't hire, I can't promote people, and I need to continue delivering at the same capacity with a significantly scaled-down team. My boss just tells me to try my best to encourage the team through this tough time.
I haven't found any resources on how to handle this kind of situation as a new EM. If I knew this is what was in store for me I would have never taken the job.
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> In today's corporate world, it can be difficult or impossible to fire people Really? In the US you can fire an employee for any reason at any time (aside from a few illegal reasons: union activity, racism, etc.).
the "few illegal reasons" are able to be leveraged by almost any employee to write a letter and/or lawsuit suggesting they were fired for the wrong reasons. if you didn't internally document -- exhaustively -- how bad they were, and also assuming they didn't expertly document -- exhaustively -- how great they were and how unfairly treated they were as an employee -- it winds up being a gigantic pain in the ass and al…
Even then who knows. I once had to deal with an employee who filed a claim without a leg to stand on. The powers that be had already decided from the get-go I was at fault, even though they clearly didn't even bother to look at what I submitted. When questioned about it they couldn't even speak to it! They initially sided with the worker, but after weeks of phone calls that basically amounted to "read what I gave you already", eventually they relented with "Oh yeah, you are right. I have revised my decision." If it had been a slightly more biased/lazy person instead...
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This is really nice. I've been doing this for quite a while (and also ping pong ic-em and back). Oh and I've also been "the" poor performer. A couple of observations: 1. Performance management is never easy and I don't think it should be. I don't mean the technique or process of it bit the mental weighing of it. You are affecting a person's livelihood so you don't want to approach it robotically always (despite what…
> I've seen really strong performers drop and fail because of personal situations and not being able (or rather not given the space and bandwidth to recover organically). And similarly those with a poor perf in one company go to a supposedly "higher tier" company and really thrive and sky rocket. I have, too, but this is the bias I was talking about: We like reading and writing about the situations where managers wer…
Now coachability could mean different things - Are they absolutely unreceptive to feedback? Were they actually hired in the wrong role? fantastic interviewers but terrible on the job, mislevelled, completely wrong area, passion etc? Record of toxicity?
Arent these (except may be the mislevelled bit) grounds for a PIP to begin with. Ive felt these situations were easier to manage in FAANG?MAANGO etc precisely due to the highly process driven cultures. Also i think the "emotion" of it goes away because hiring is extremely generalized and pipelined (best case you see a candidate's interview feedback if you are the HM and usually you only do that if you are happy with the "numeric rating"). Generalized hiring has its own problems but that's another story. Again this may be different at various companies so just trying to job my memory.
Btw I loved this:
> I have, too, but this is the bias I was talking about: We like reading and writing about the situations where managers were able to convert a low performer to a star performer. Similarly, when a high performer becomes a low performer we like reading about how management was at fault.
Often managers are demonized without recognizing that managers themselves are part of the machine that is the company and the culture (and I feel this actually has become so by design).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In the US you can fire an employee for any reason at any time On paper, yes. In practice, especially in a larger company? It's often a long journey that involves a lot of energy on the part of the manager. And then of course you may not get a backfill rec. So then one needs to ask themselves: is this person truly a net negative when compared to the energy that'd be required to jettison them *and* replace them with…
I can't speak to a US perspective but in the UK and some EU countries I've experienced, firing someone is incredibly simple. In fact every difficulty I've seen is simply that someone didn't follow the clearly defined procedure. It's literally written out for you. You don't have to think or care how you feel, just follow the process and you're done. If the process says someone should stay then you got something wrong.…
1) Need to set up a clear paper trail over a period of time. For instance, a track record of being marked as an underperformed in their reviews with concrete complaints. In places that require this to be tied to the review, and f they only have annual reviews, this can take a LONG time.
2) Bring HR into the process, where they'll do the equivalent of "did you turn it off and on again?" for quite some time
3) If they let you, set up a PIP, which itself will take several weeks
4) Finally the person is let go