I kind of want to call BS on this. Sure, a bad manager can crush an employee's motivation and will to work. But when an employee is crushing it, I am not sure how much of that is really because the manager "empowered" the employee - unless you mean literally just allowing them to show up and work on something of value to the company?
So you're a manager now
91–100 of 191 posts
Re: So you're a manager now
#92Some good advice. It’s missing one of the most difficult topics: Performance Management. Most first-time managers have already read a lot of advice about being humble, delegating, celebrating your team’s wins, and the other feel good topics. If you want to write internet advice that gets upvoted and shared you almost have to avoid the difficult conversation topics and assume that the team is full of perfect people th…
It's a good point but I'll add the problem is also the system/incentives of whatever org you are in.
Some shops its easy enough to manage someone out and bring in a new team member who will contribute more. This is a health environment and generally free of the boom-bust hire/fire cycle.
Other shops have very top down hire/fire cycles where if you fire someone now you have no ability to replace them, and worse yet.. when you HAVE to fire someone, you want the low performer around to hit your metrics..
So a lot of shops carry around a lot of dead weight for different reasons, as long as the person is not a net negative contributor.
Aside from that, yeah, how to deal with poor performers is as much an art as a science. I often find, aside from exceptional cases, most of them actually have some part of the job they prefer & are good at, so modifying the task allocation can go a long way.
Re: So you're a manager now
#93Some good advice. It’s missing one of the most difficult topics: Performance Management. Most first-time managers have already read a lot of advice about being humble, delegating, celebrating your team’s wins, and the other feel good topics. If you want to write internet advice that gets upvoted and shared you almost have to avoid the difficult conversation topics and assume that the team is full of perfect people th…
It also can be very awkward when you're chosen for a promotion over someone who has been there longer for you. Suddenly you're managing and giving reviews to someone who was sitting next to you for years. I went through this but was extremely lucky that I had a wonderful mentor. It wasn't a big deal, but the first performance review, while it went well, definitely felt strange.
Re: So you're a manager now
#94This was a great read! Saving this to re-read in the future. 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…
It sounds to me like your team is not super important (right now?) to the higher-ups in the company. Obviously I don't know the details, but they're very intentionally attritioning (? Attriting?) the team by any reasonable definition.
Without any other detail, from my experience (10 years doing Eng Manager/Senior Eng Manager roles) I'd advise you to start interviewing. Not necessarily because you're in jeopardy, you'd know that better than me anyway. But think of what you want out of your job: One thing should be professional growth -- going from a new EM to a great EM and being set up for future promotions. You won't get that here without a major mindshift from your boss (and probably up the reporting chain from them too).
Interview and when asked why you're leaving when you just became an EM, say "I love my new role and the team, but XYZ Co seems to be deprioritizing or phasing out the ABC team and I find myself without the resources we need to be successful."
Re: So you're a manager now
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be clear, it's simple for a *company* to fire someone. It often can be a pain in the ass for a *manager* to do it. For instance, a process like this: 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 c…
Yes, if that's your process then that's what you're being paid to do. OTOH, why shouldn't your team be able to say you're a bad manager and just get you fired? There is rarely a simple process to do that. They're the productive ones so this seems a little backwards. At any rate I definitely don't see why a managers job should be made easier to avoid the realistic implications of firing someone. If they can't cope wit…
I agree with you and upvoted you but:
IMO the problem from a management perspective isn't really the bad performer staying too long.
Also, dealing with HR as a manager is mostly fine. They actually respect you.
And just having someone that sucks on your team for one extra year is not really much of a burden. Sure you have to do extra paperwork, adjust morale, but that's just the job.
The problem IME is when this is used against you. When timelines are tight and the C-Level complain that "you already have N reports", but you can't fire or transfer the person who's disruptive, doesn't delivery or is clearly doing a second job instead, and the C-Level is too lazy to check what's going on.
Re: So you're a manager now
#96Some good advice. It’s missing one of the most difficult topics: Performance Management. Most first-time managers have already read a lot of advice about being humble, delegating, celebrating your team’s wins, and the other feel good topics. If you want to write internet advice that gets upvoted and shared you almost have to avoid the difficult conversation topics and assume that the team is full of perfect people th…
For anyone struggling with this: https://www.manager-tools.com/map-universe/hall-fame-highly-... This podcast has made me a 10x better manager. Good starters: - https://www.manager-tools.com/2007/04/effective-hiring-set-t... - https://www.manager-tools.com/2008/03/the-management-trinity... - https://www.manager-tools.com/2010/01/how-manage-arrogant-pr... - https://www.manager-tools.com/2008/02/the-management-trinity.…
I found the older manager tools podcasts to be more consistently helpful than the newer ones. I see 3/4 of your links are to old episodes, which tracks with my experience.
I sampled some newer episodes in the past few years and was not impressed. One episode was just the host and guest ranting about how remote work isn’t real work and how everyone needs to get back to the office, which was wholly unhelpful for me as a remote manager.
Re: So you're a manager now
#97One thing I struggled with when I was a "manager" before going back to individual contributor is that at every job I've had this far - I have never worked directly for my manager nor when was I a manager did I directly oversee my reports. 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 th…
> I'm not even sure I would call my experience "management" except companies kept naming it that.
What is a manager anyway? I've been in this industry for multiple decades and I honestly still have no clue. They are never willing to assert what they are working on, or what blockers they have, during standups. They aren't striking deals with clients. They aren't building the product. They demonstrate no visible function. What, exactly, are they doing behind the scenes?
That's not to imply they aren't doing anything. I just can't figure out what it is and I'd love to know more. The article says "Learn from them.", but I have never seen anything to learn from. It is all shrouded in mystery.
Re: So you're a manager now
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> it winds up being a gigantic pain in the ass and almost always better for the company to simply pay them $200k as a settlement to said lawsuit. And that comes out of the budget of a department who doesn't have $200k to spare.
Lawsuits like this are more common than I expected before I got a peek behind the curtain, but in my experience companies aren’t rolling over for $200K settlements frequently.
The last time I was at a level in a billion dollar company to have some visibility into this, the company had a small team of corporate counsel who were pros at handling these cases. They would get a lot of suits from people hoping to get a quick payday and then spend a minimal amount of time actually engaging them. This either made them go away when the other side realized it wasn’t an easy win, or made them change their tune and ask for a very small settlement (four or five figures, not six).
And I’ve never heard of a company paying these settlements out of the budgets of small departments. That’s weird.
Nevertheless, even paying $200K to separate from a toxic employee would be a long term win relative to paying $200-300K (fully loaded cost with benefits) for multiple years while also risking them making your good team members leave and damaging your product.
Re: So you're a manager now
#99I kind of want to call BS on this. Sure, a bad manager can crush an employee's motivation and will to work. But when an employee is crushing it, I am not sure how much of that is really because the manager "empowered" the employee - unless you mean literally just allowing them to show up and work on something of value to the company?
This seems like a "glass half full/empty" question: The top quintile (or so) of developers need little but to be given a mission statement or overall goals and commit access, but some managers bog down those people with improper use of meetings, process that gets in the way, too much 'digital paperwork' (did you fill out all 15 fields of the Jira ticket? etc), etc.
The bottom quintile never get anything done and hopefully you have fired them or convinced them to stop being bottom-tier. For the rest, to accomplish good work they need (A) to give a shit, which often is directly under your influence: how much they think their boss appreciates and cares about them is important. (B) to know what their strengths and weaknesses are so that they can improve, and (C) to be allowed to focus on the important things and not be pulled in 100 directions, which a good manager constantly keeps aware of and constantly tries to tune. A bad manager fails to do A, B, and C, and as such their teams are less likely to accomplish things.
Re: So you're a manager now
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious to know why my comment received a downvote / downvotes.
Being an agile coach isn’t management
Off topic, but:
It's interesting how everyone thinks they're "managers" in "agile" teams.
Scrum Masters, Product Owners. I've even had Designers and QAs trying to make decisions on behalf of the team.