What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make? • Hacker News Board

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#31

Post by TwistedWeasel » Mon, May 19, 2014, 10:40 PM UTC

The hard part for me was that managing engineers takes a lot of time and energy, it's not possible to be a full time engineer and a full time manager.

Over time your understanding of the technical details of the work your team is doing will atrophy and where once you may have been an expert on all aspects of the system you must now rely on the judgement of the senior members of your team when making decisions. This is hard for a lot of people, to know that you don't know enough to make a decision and then to trust your team enough to help you make the right one.

Building that trust is important, because without it you'll make bad (or at least uninformed) technical decisions. it's easier if you moved up into a managerial role from a team you worked on instead of being hired to manage a team you just met.

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#32

Post by bane » Mon, May 19, 2014, 10:49 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #27

So at one point I took on a management job, stepping up from a (lead) developer. I felt like the whole thing was kind of a train wreck and I am still slowly analyzing the black box recordings from it. This was my first time having direct reports that were not one or two interns and managing a team of seven other highly intelligent people was quite a chore in itself. What bugged me is that I could never tell if the pr…

welcome to low/mid-level management. You get squeezed from the top and bottom. Everybody will hate you, so you just try and hit deadlines.

It also sounds like a typical story where the larger organization was trying to keep management lean, without realizing that it really did take multiple people to do the job.

One place I worked at ground through three managers in 6 months (with 120 people under them) before finally getting the clue and hiring a proper team of 7 to do the job.

It's not uncommon at all and it really is the upper management's responsibility to properly staff their low/mid management teams.

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#33

Post by jevanish » Mon, May 19, 2014, 10:49 PM UTC

incision wrote: post #25

I surely agree with most of what's posted there - a majority of it is straightforward common sense that's barely even specific to management. "Don't procrastinate, communicate clearly" are to management what "eat less, exercise" is to losing weight or "only buy things you need, spend less than you earn" is to saving money. The problem isn't managers that they haven't read this compilation of checklists or its equival…

It seems like a number of newer, growing startups are making sure there are individual contributor paths for growth. What would you like to see as a solution?

Also - do you think it's that their overwhelmed, under-trained for the new demands of the role, or something else that causes so many managers to fail?

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#34

Post by jevanish » Mon, May 19, 2014, 10:55 PM UTC

lugg wrote: post #28

ryanburk wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"share praise, take blame" has worked really well for me in the past. folks who fail at learning this tend not to last long or at least don't advance since no one will want to work for them.

Does anyone know more about this particular fun fact of humans? Is it some kind of defense mechanism? Insecurity? Those are the only plausible reasons I can come up with. I guess its all office politics (something else I despise.)

I think it's fear. How do you measure that a manager is doing a good job?

If you only judge by the team shipping on time or hitting their number, then a dictator/slave driver looks pretty good early on.

If you judge by employee morale, someone that misses numbers but doesn't overstress their team can look good.

Unfortunately, things like employee churn are lagging indicators, so if a manager wants to look good, the temptation will always be there to take credit for themselves out of self-preservation, even if it's all in their head that they're in any danger of losing their job.

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#35

Post by jevanish » Mon, May 19, 2014, 11:01 PM UTC

ryanburk wrote: post #3

the top answer is really well done, but lacks the gem from the second answer: "One of the major rookie mistakes I have made and see many others make is the assumption that human motivation is tied to economic outcomes" put another way - you might have a personal ambition to have a title like "VP of Engineering" or make $500k a year, but most others don't. so if you project your motivations / world view on those who w…

One of the amazing things I've learned as a manager is how much you can get out of asking people what they want.

Many people haven't really thought about it and so you end up going on a fun journey helping them figure it out. Usually, you discover over time that there are a lot of things more important than money. Being the manager that helped them figure out what they really want (and hopefully get closer to it) builds awesome loyalty and motivation on the job.

Once you have the minimum amount to live comfortably (which in places like SF is actually a non-trivial amount), I've found raises and bonuses have only very short-term happiness that wears off in a week or two. It's feeling fulfillment in your job and making progress on your long term goals that really brings career happiness.

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#36

Post by jevanish » Mon, May 19, 2014, 11:04 PM UTC

bjelkeman-again wrote: post #14

I probably have made all of those mistakes at one time or another. Some of the mistakes where bad enough to nearly sink a company. Hopefully I make fewer of them now. It is humbling to have a great team actually letting you manage them, especially when you mess up and the tell you and they let you learn from your mistakes. When you have teams like that it is easy to manage. If you do, take really good care of your te…

What kinds of things do you like to do to take really good care of them?

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#37

Post by jevanish » Mon, May 19, 2014, 11:05 PM UTC

edderly wrote: post #17

I think the biggest mistake new managers make is to forget that you are principally managing people. Even though day to day there's a lot of email, meetings, project management and office politics it pays to remember that you succeed through your staff as much if not more than through your personal efforts.

Do you manage anyone? How do you remember that?

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#38

Post by jevanish » Mon, May 19, 2014, 11:06 PM UTC

abdinoor wrote: post #20

A number of the points in the top answer are really symptoms of not being aware of what is going on with your people. One of the fatal flaws (for the manager if not the company) I have observed in poor managers is a lack of spending time with the team members. At least in tech, many managers are promoted from individual contributor roles and they only carve out a little time to be a manager. Usually that means they d…

I've always been stunned how few tech companies and startups do 1 on 1s. It's the single, easiest way to surface a lot of this. As long as you don't completely ignore what's brought up in them, you'll get in front of a lot of trouble.

@abdinoor - what tactics do you use to get in front of these issues?

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#39

Post by greenyoda » Mon, May 19, 2014, 11:07 PM UTC

kabdib wrote: post #9

Good managers realize they have to be managers and can't do an effective job of engineering (this is certainly true of a first-level manager with more than a few reports). The best managers I've had have sighed wistfully and wished out loud that they could do engineering, but made a conscious decision not to. The really good managers will be very interested in how you are getting along with your career, and it will o…

"Good managers realize they have to be managers and can't do an effective job of engineering..."

I can't agree with this strongly enough. When I was a manager (I've since gone back to being a developer), trying to do engineering work at the same time was probably my biggest weakness.

There will be times when there's an emergency (real or imagined) where your upper management wants you to come up with a fix for something right away, and you'll be tempted to drop everything you're doing as a manager and put out the fire. (One rationalization for this might be that you don't want to break the flow of your developers, who are working on important stuff of their own.) Resist this temptation. Not only will your management work remain undone, but if the people on your team don't get experience dealing with emergencies in parts of the code that they don't know much about, you'll be stuck doing this stuff forever and they won't learn these skills. Learn how to delegate, and learn how to set the expectations of your own managers so that they don't assume that every problem can be fixed instantly.

Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

#40

Post by justindz » Mon, May 19, 2014, 11:11 PM UTC

lugg wrote: post #28

ryanburk wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"share praise, take blame" has worked really well for me in the past. folks who fail at learning this tend not to last long or at least don't advance since no one will want to work for them.

Does anyone know more about this particular fun fact of humans? Is it some kind of defense mechanism? Insecurity? Those are the only plausible reasons I can come up with. I guess its all office politics (something else I despise.)

My experience has also been that managers at the "average company" these days are pretty much expected to both manage and be a fully productive individual contributor. Realistically, this means that they spend about 80% of their time working to hit their own goals, which directly point at them, and 20% of their time (at best) really working to enable their team to succeed, which can always be deflected from direct responsibility to some degree. Since most managers' managers are also in the same boat, they can't tell when someone is shooting their own team members for self-preservation because they are too busy to have any sense for the morale and culture they've created.

In my personal opinion, you get a healthier culture if you either 1) have managers and let them manage or 2) admit that you require them to be individual contributors and restrict their "managing" purely to part time HR initiatives and not to actual additive management (something more like extra-curricular mentoring and not talent management, career and skills development).

I should caveat that I've had good managers, bad managers and completely mediocre managers. So I do believe that, although rare, it can be done well and it can provide value to individual contributors' careers and to the company's value. I just don't assume it's automatically the right approach at every company.