I wish there was a way to share this list with a manager without seeming like a dick.
What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
11–20 of 152 posts
Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
#12Problems I found with the top answer: Performance management: It is highly unlikely as somebody new to the team, and brand new to management, that you can work out who the high performers are and who the under performers are within the first few weeks. If you get it wrong then by making it official and documenting by email you will get the entire teams backs up. Not explicitly managing resources: Really bad advice. H…
I think he was one of the team who was promoted and immediately started settling scores. Like you say, bad advice.
Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
#13I wish there was a way to share this list with a manager without seeming like a dick.
Print and leave on desk.
Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
#14I 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 team. They are worth it.
Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
#15In other news, Quora doesn't blur out the second answer and ask for you to log in?
Because the submitter added ?share=1 to the link edit: I personally use https://github.com/sindresorhus/quora-unblocker in Chrome to do this for me so I don't have to think about it. I also made https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quora-share/ to do the same thing in FF.
Interesting I just close the tab.
In other news is anyone else still put off by the site even when it isn't all blurred? Its kinda weird I still get a gut rench feeling looking at their logo. They got a ways to go I guess.
More seriously, thanks, sometimes they are useful and the share hack will come in handy.
Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
#16I wish there was a way to share this list with a manager without seeming like a dick.
I've felt this way several times in the past.
What I've found is that its a good indicator of when I need to launch a new job search.
Under good management, I usually don't feel the need to share a list like this. If I do, then I can usually have a 5 minute chat with the manager to get things worked out. If that doesn't work, a longer discussion can be in order.
Under bad management, I usually feel like any attempt at change is more likely to hurt me than help me. I once took the risk of sharing the netflix culture slide deck [0] (a quick and insightful must read) with a manager. His response was that, if I was attracted to that sort of culture, then maybe I should get a job at netflix. Fail. You can probably guess at the number of management discussions we had after that.
Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
#17I 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.
Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
#18Good 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…
> dishing out unreasoned mandates to solve things one way or another
This is the problem I've run into most often with management: the command to do things using method or technology A instead of B, not because A is better (in fact, B usually is the better choice both for development and for internal user support), but because A is the pet preference of a manager not involved in the work and who doesn't actually work with any of the people who will be using or supporting the end result.
Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the submitter added ?share=1 to the link edit: I personally use https://github.com/sindresorhus/quora-unblocker in Chrome to do this for me so I don't have to think about it. I also made https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quora-share/ to do the same thing in FF.
Interesting I just close the tab. In other news is anyone else still put off by the site even when it isn't all blurred? Its kinda weird I still get a gut rench feeling looking at their logo. They got a ways to go I guess. More seriously, thanks, sometimes they are useful and the share hack will come in handy.
I definitely dislike the blurred answers scheme. I think I even had Quora blocked from my searches when that was possible (without a plugin). Sometimes, though, they look like the only hit likely to provide useful info to a question I'm really interested in at the moment, so I eventually gave in and just removed the friction of reading the site by installing/making plugins for it.
Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
#20A 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 don't know what is going on, and when issues do come to their attention those issues have been festering for quite a while.