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A study finds that bosses can be useful but also sneaky

economist.com

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Re: A study finds that bosses can be useful but also sneaky

#11

Post by ebiester »

goatinaboat wrote: post #5

Most companies could chop an entire layer of middle management, perhaps many layers, and get an instant boost in productivity and happiness. I wonder if there’s any mechanism for workers and senior management to make this happen and share the rewards.

I've said this before, but a manager's work is split into thirds:

1/3 is in service of the team. Some of this is bureaucratic (approving expense reports, hiring/firing/promoting), and some of this is being a team facilitator. In meetings, watching that everyone is talking and that one person isn't dominating. Helping with conflict management. Pulling together people from three teams for a meeting and leading it.

Again, that's about 1/3 of the job. Half of this could be done by team members, but these are skills that require knowing tech but aren't tech.

1/3 is getting senior management what they need. Does the project need another developer? What is the high level status of the team? Is there technical debt that needs prioritizing that requires more than what the individual team can commit to? These are things that can be done by developers, but it's going to look a lot like what the manager does, and someone is going to be pulled off of more and more development work to do these.

And the last third is to the rest of the management team. These are the work to make the department run that people don't notice.

I worked at a place that had a very lean management:worker ratio, and instead developers ended up doing a lot of the management work, effectively becoming managers without the pay bump or recognition.

Re: A study finds that bosses can be useful but also sneaky

#12

Post by magashna »

Sure, but a good manager is the one who's sneaky on your behalf. Telling stakeholders a longer timeline than necessary, boosting your accomplishments so you get a raise, taking the bullet from execs, those are all kinda sneaky but I sure as hell respected the managers who did that for stuff for me.

The manager you don't want throws you under the bus, over promises and demands crunch, takes the credit for your work. Equally sneaky, but selfish.

Re: A study finds that bosses can be useful but also sneaky

#13

Post by magashna »

awillen wrote: post #10

Calling this a study of managers is quite a stretch... it's an arbitrarily designed game theory problem in which some people are labeled "managers" and others "workers" with no real relationship to those titles in the real world. But yeah, managers can be useful and/or sneaky. They can also be sleepy, hungry, boring, sociopathic and all of the other things humans can be.

Or grumpy, happy, dopey, sneezy, and bashful. One might even be a doctor.

Re: A study finds that bosses can be useful but also sneaky

#14

Post by juliansimioni »

segmondy wrote: post #8

"... when it is difficult to measure what managers do, it can be tricky to design incentives to reward them." Why would it be difficult to measure what managers do? Measure the total output of their team. That's it.

It's difficult because almost every word in your answer is a minefield that cannot be handled simply:

measure: how does one truly measure anything related to a team or individual? Just as lines of code is a bad measure of a developer, even very quantifiable things like sales numbers don't tell the whole story. A salesperson who hooks clients on promises that can't be kept is not doing a good job, no matter how it might look in one quarter. Goodhart's law exists for a reason.

total: a team that appears to be high performing but depends on the output of a small portion of that team, or that is high performing despite several team members, is not a success. People who carry a team often leave for better compensation or challenge. People who appear to have high output themselves at the expense of others should be removed from the team. People who are ineffective on a particular team should find a new environment where they can achieve more success.

output: Not all teams exist to produce specific output. An IT department might replace 50 broken keyboards across the company in a quarter, but it would be foolish to ask "what can we do to get that number to 75?"

their team: A manager usually exists both to help direct reports do a better job, but also to provide timely and pertinent information to other teams, and many organizations have teams that primarily serve "internal customers". An operations team could be given a goal of "zero new bugs or outages" and freeze all new deployments to achieve it. But the development teams would obviously be upset, and the entire company would likely suffer.

Re: A study finds that bosses can be useful but also sneaky

#15

Post by shantly »

segmondy wrote: post #8

"... when it is difficult to measure what managers do, it can be tricky to design incentives to reward them." Why would it be difficult to measure what managers do? Measure the total output of their team. That's it.

If you have a good, repeatable, accurate, cheapish way to measure team output you should start a consultancy.

Re: A study finds that bosses can be useful but also sneaky

#16

Post by romanovcode »

goatinaboat wrote: post #5

Most companies could chop an entire layer of middle management, perhaps many layers, and get an instant boost in productivity and happiness. I wonder if there’s any mechanism for workers and senior management to make this happen and share the rewards.

I think you don't understand the reason for middle-management. Let me paint you a picture where if you'd be CTO (or any other top-management) you'd be greatful for middle-management.

Imagine you are CTO of a pretty successful eCommerce company.

What you need to oversee as a CTO:

- iPhone and Android application

- Front-End Website application

- Back-End Website application

- SAP (Or something similar) integrations for billing and documenting

- BI infrastructure and reporting via tool like Tablou/Salesforce or similar integration with replica read-only DB

- DevOps (AWS, Azure, GC, or similar) maintanence and R&D

- Bonus: A lot of meetings with other top-management regarding company stuff (structure, plans, vision, etc..)

Now, how many people (Developers, QA, DevOps, BI, ...) do you think work under you - at minimum 30 (bare in mind I'm talking about successful stable company, not a 2-man garage startup).

Do you really think one guy will want to deal with all the 1-1 bullshit, day-to-day operations, everyoen asking raises, people leaveing, people coming (hiring)? It is literally impossible.

Re: A study finds that bosses can be useful but also sneaky

#17

Post by k__ »

arethuza wrote: post #6
k__ wrote: post #2

People often talk about the extemes. Managers or no managers. Why can't we have something in-between? Like, instead of a manager, we have a team assistant. Someone who does burocracy and orga, but hasn't any power and the power is exercied in some way by all of the team members. This would remove the "if all do it no one does it" problem and still prevent single people decisions.

I've had a few really good managers over the years and in all cases I wouldn't have wanted their jobs - yes they had power over me, but they always communicated clearly and asked for my input when appropriate, set clear goals and (most importantly) acted as a political shield while the rest of us were doing our jobs of getting stuff done. Mind you - have had awful managers as well - but fortunately not very many and…

I'm not saying managers are all bad people.

I was just thinking if the system in place could be improved in a way that it worked even if some of them aren't good.

Re: A study finds that bosses can be useful but also sneaky

#18

Post by k__ »

codingdave wrote: post #7
stunt wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone who does burocracy and orga, but hasn't any power They are even less useful without power. Problem is most of the managers are junior in their position. They don't have leadership experience. Often just got a promotion and come up from a different background and only have a few years of experience on management position. Or, they have some experience at different scale. So when they start on a bigger organi…

> They are even less useful without power. If managers are getting things done by wielding their authority from the org chart, odds are they aren't great leaders to begin with. In most organizations, leaders arise naturally, and they don't always match the org chart. Wise managers let those people shine, and help them succeed. Then the informal leaders help the team succeed, and the manager gets what they want becaus…

"leaders arise naturally, and they don't always match the org chart. Wise managers let those people shine"

Two points I see here.

1. managers are placed above the real leaders artificially 2. leaders arise without any formal process

The first point is what systems like Holocracy want to eliminate. The second point is what Holocracy leads to, some people following leaders and nobody really knows who that leader is.

My idea was to decouple the orga/bureaucracy stuff from management and create a new team assistant role, so things can go on orderly and there is someone to talk to.

The second part was creating some kind of process that helps to make decisions, so no "hidden leader" can wreak havok in the background.

Re: A study finds that bosses can be useful but also sneaky

#19

Post by stunt »

codingdave wrote: post #7
stunt wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone who does burocracy and orga, but hasn't any power They are even less useful without power. Problem is most of the managers are junior in their position. They don't have leadership experience. Often just got a promotion and come up from a different background and only have a few years of experience on management position. Or, they have some experience at different scale. So when they start on a bigger organi…

> They are even less useful without power. If managers are getting things done by wielding their authority from the org chart, odds are they aren't great leaders to begin with. In most organizations, leaders arise naturally, and they don't always match the org chart. Wise managers let those people shine, and help them succeed. Then the informal leaders help the team succeed, and the manager gets what they want becaus…

> If managers are getting things done by wielding their authority from the org chart, odds are they aren't great leaders to begin with.

Agree. If an organisation has power distance between managers and others, perhaps they have more fundamental problems to begin with.

By power I meant the privileges and rights that comes with their responsiblities and tasks. A simple example would be rights to ask for more resources or budget.

Re: A study finds that bosses can be useful but also sneaky

#20

Post by adrianmonk »

shantly wrote: post #15
segmondy wrote: post #8

"... when it is difficult to measure what managers do, it can be tricky to design incentives to reward them." Why would it be difficult to measure what managers do? Measure the total output of their team. That's it.

If you have a good, repeatable, accurate, cheapish way to measure team output you should start a consultancy.

Depends on the industry. For grunt work it's pretty easy. If you're manufacturing widgets, count how many widgets you make per employee hour while staying below a certain defect rate. For professional jobs where the task is never the same and your contribution is applying your intelligence to defining, understanding, and solving new problems in the best way, it's not easy because developing a test of productivity can be nearly as hard as doing the work, maybe even harder.
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