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Learning to be managed

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Re: Learning to be managed

#11

Post by IshKebab »

Aurornis wrote: post #6

Great managers will feel natural to work with. You won't have to learn how to work with them because they'll meet you as a person and guide you toward succeeding in your role as needed. Unfortunately, many managers are not natural managers but have instead learned how to "manage" from books, blogs, podcasts, and trying to imitate people they see as powerful. My biggest lifehack for dealing with these people is to lea…

Genius idea, though I feel like you shouldn't have to do that in the first place. Like, I've been criticised by people for editing "their" code without talking to them first (in a shared project that we're all working on). My boss's ideal solution is for me to kowtow to their egos so he doesn't have to deal with it. No thank you. You go and tell them to stop being possessive of code that they don't own; they just happened to write. It's not my job to deal with their issues.

Re: Learning to be managed

#12

Post by zigman1 »

mettamage wrote: post #9
tomcar288 wrote: post #8

the management techniques mentioned in the article are all valid but i'm going to play devils advocate here and say that not getting that promotion isn't necessarily a failure, rather the goal was not realistic. Don't assume that whether or not you get a promotion is always in your control. Don't assume your performance rating is entirely in your control or even mostly in your control. sometimes you can perform reall…

I did my best at not being promoted. Promotion equals change. I really liked my salary and remote position. Any extra responsibility would require me to do more work. Sure, I'd get paid more but the stress would outweigh the pay. If you're ever down with not getting a promotion, just know that there are ways to think about it that might be constructive.

Cool, but I’m not sure that’s the topic of conversation.

Re: Learning to be managed

#13

Post by [deleted] »

mettamage wrote: post #9
tomcar288 wrote: post #8

the management techniques mentioned in the article are all valid but i'm going to play devils advocate here and say that not getting that promotion isn't necessarily a failure, rather the goal was not realistic. Don't assume that whether or not you get a promotion is always in your control. Don't assume your performance rating is entirely in your control or even mostly in your control. sometimes you can perform reall…

I did my best at not being promoted. Promotion equals change. I really liked my salary and remote position. Any extra responsibility would require me to do more work. Sure, I'd get paid more but the stress would outweigh the pay. If you're ever down with not getting a promotion, just know that there are ways to think about it that might be constructive.

[deleted]

Re: Learning to be managed

#14

Post by nine_zeros »

Aurornis wrote: post #6

Great managers will feel natural to work with. You won't have to learn how to work with them because they'll meet you as a person and guide you toward succeeding in your role as needed. Unfortunately, many managers are not natural managers but have instead learned how to "manage" from books, blogs, podcasts, and trying to imitate people they see as powerful. My biggest lifehack for dealing with these people is to lea…

> whenever I really needed him to use his position to do his job

This is exactly what a large number of managers (and corporate ladders) miss.

Managers (and layers above them) are given organizational authority - not merely to coach people, rate people, calibrate people - but to use the authority to solve problems of organizational type in their domain

As an example, if a project is running behind schedule:

- A poor manager tries to hide the real status and tries to PIP and manage reports on that project out.

- Whereas, a good manager tries to bring people together and understand how the team can handle this together, sometimes with borrowed staffing, sometimes with cut scope, sometimes with negotiation of timelines, sometimes with abandoning the project altogether.

Re: Learning to be managed

#15

Post by Havoc »

These are good high level points, but personally I found the key one to be much more low level.

An employee saying I'm not following what you want me to do. Sure sometimes an individual is just dumb as rocks, but when I hear anything along those lines my working assumption is that I as manager fundamentally fucked up. Things should fail at execution stage, not at me giving instructions stage.

...employees that just nod and walk away confused on the other hand...that's my textbook definition of failing to "Learning to be managed" because it fundamentally robs me as manager of the opportunity to fix an imminent trainwreck.

Re: Learning to be managed

#16

Post by alphazard »

This is a little too rose tinted for my tastes.

In a high-performing small company, managers aren't necessary. Someone has to be responsible for hiring and firing people, but you can't afford people that don't get what the company's trying to do. If someone has to be managed, they aren't a good fit. If you've never worked at a place like this, or don't believe me, I'd recommend giving it a try.

In a large company, management is essential to the adversarial system. Workers can and should take advantage of the company's inability to tell who is contributing. Here management is essential to creating stress and getting any sort of productive output.

The idea that most managers have something to teach you, are good judges of your flaws, or can give better advice than you would get from a senior peer is ridiculous. These are great traits that you should seek out in a mentor, but to claim the median manager anywhere has them is insane. In practice managers you encounter in the wild offer none of those things.

Promotions, raises, growth, performance reviews etc. is all a psyop to get you to stay for longer and do more work. It's about what you can negotiate, what that promotion would signal to your peers, how much of a flight risk you are. It's never to incentivize good choices concerning how to hone your craft, get rich, or do work you consider meaningful.

Re: Learning to be managed

#17

Post by spangry »

zemike wrote: post #5
tra3 wrote: post #4

That's an interesting post, especially in the context of being promoted. After being in the industry for many years, I'm just now becoming aware of this stuff, particularly as it relates to the promotion culture and "making impact". Google is famously known for shipping, but not maintaining. "Managing up" is a useful concept for how to interact with your managers. Post from a few years back that has useful sources: D…

Thank you for sharing these sources with me! I will have a look. I would not say I am trying to "manage up", but I am definitely trying to be a lot more active in my growth process. In the past I kept waiting for things to happen, and thought my manager would have all the answers. Now, I want to be an active part of that conversation and find the right path.

This is a very good thing to do. Managers have to split their attention multiple ways across multiple people and so they end up neglecting you by default. They're also time poor.

You will actually be helping them if you can package up "asks" in a way so that all they have to do is hit reply on an email, type "approved" and hit send. There's often an asymmetry between the value you get vs. the cost to your manager which you can exploit. For example, where I work they provide financial support for certain forms of further study (e.g. master's degree) in certain domains. If one of my direct reports sent me an email explaining they want to study X and the policy covers them studying X, here are the details etc. etc. I will say "approved" pretty much every time. The money doesn't come out of my budget anyway, so it's free additional remuneration frommy perspective. Heck, even when it is my budget I often don't care because it's not personally coming out of my own pocket, and we lose that money anyway once the next financial year ticks over, so better to spend it while we can. But if they just sit there quietly hoping that I'll one day come to them with an offer for them to do further studies in X, they're going to be waiting forever. I want to give my team members stuff but I've got 50 billion other things to content with so I don't have the time to plan their career for them. The worst are the people who think I'm their mother and they come to me with "I want this thing, now you go figure out how to do it for me." The thing is, I'm lazy: I like to do easy things, and I don't like to do hard things. And that request sounds like a lot of hard work to me. Easier to just say no.

So remember: (1) If you don't ask you don't get, (2) It's almost never my money anyway, and (3) If you make it easy for me to say "yes", I almost certainly will.

Re: Learning to be managed

#18

Post by ZephyrBlu »

If you want to be promoted, every single thing you discuss with your manager should center around that goal.

Any conversations about things going well, feedback, etc should always be framed as "am I getting closer to Senior?".

You really need to understand what the delta between where you currently are and where you are aiming for looks like, and make everything about closing that gap.

Many people do not even pass step 1, which is defining the delta with your manager. This can actually be fairly difficult, because it requires your manager to both understand your current level and have a strong understanding of what Senior looks like so they can explain the areas where you are lacking.

Once you have a delta you need to figure out what success looks like. If I'm currently bad at X, what does being good at X look like? Ideally you should be able to demonstrate and discuss progress between every 1:1. If you can't, your feedback loops are probably too short and it will take you a long time to improve.

I think SMART goals largely don't fit with skill growth, because operating at the next level is about learning new behaviours. They tend to be highly contextual, not specific. They do not tend to be measurable. They do not tend to be things that you can set timelines for, like "I will operate like X in 1mo". It's a holistic change in the way you function. Level matrices are extremely poor representations of the behaviours for each level. They tend to describe the outcomes of the behaviours, rather than the behaviours themselves.

Also, the reason this takes time is exactly because it's about learning new behaviours not following a checklist of things that Seniors do. You need time to make them habitual and build the intuition associated with them.

Re: Learning to be managed

#19

Post by 082349872349872 »

alphazard wrote: post #16

This is a little too rose tinted for my tastes. In a high-performing small company, managers aren't necessary. Someone has to be responsible for hiring and firing people, but you can't afford people that don't get what the company's trying to do. If someone has to be managed, they aren't a good fit. If you've never worked at a place like this, or don't believe me, I'd recommend giving it a try. In a large company, ma…

> If you've never worked at a place like this, or don't believe me, I'd recommend giving it a try.

+1

> Here management is essential to creating stress and getting any sort of productive output.

I had friends whose company went from "high-performing small" to "large", and the way they described the transition was "we thought adding management was going to be like adding an internal skeleton, a structure that'd help get all the functional parts of the company pulling in the same direction. Instead it turned out to be like an exoskeleton, a carapace that served mostly to constrain and put hard limits on the functional parts of the company."

Re: Learning to be managed

#20

Post by ZephyrBlu »

alphazard wrote: post #16

This is a little too rose tinted for my tastes. In a high-performing small company, managers aren't necessary. Someone has to be responsible for hiring and firing people, but you can't afford people that don't get what the company's trying to do. If someone has to be managed, they aren't a good fit. If you've never worked at a place like this, or don't believe me, I'd recommend giving it a try. In a large company, ma…

> The idea that most managers have something to teach you, are good judges of your flaws, or can give better advice than you would get from a senior peer is ridiculous. These are great traits that you should seek out in a mentor, but to claim the median manager anywhere has them is insane. In practice managers you encounter in the wild offer none of those things

Have you ever had a good manager?

Assuming equally competent people, feedback from a senior peer is likely to not be as good as someone who's full-time job is to be a people manager. Good managers are very aware of the strengths and weaknesses of people in the team. Senior peers do not have to be aware of this and as a result, don't tend to be able to articulate these kind of things. They may be able to give good task-specific feedback, but holistic and personal feedback is difficult.

The median senior is just as poor at giving feedback as the median manager, and management in large companies isn't inherently adversarial. It's very environment dependent.

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