off topic, but wow, quora is actually letting me read past the first answer without logging in. they are finally wising up after I ignore the call-to-signup for the umpteenth time?
Adding ?share=1 to the link helps.
What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
101–110 of 152 posts
Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
#102A handful:
Not delegating.
Not working through others.
Not managing a group's resources.
Promoting one's self while failing to support one's boss.
Appropriating others' work as one's own.
Not growing relationships with other groups in a non-protective, non-clique, non-silo'd way.
Following, rather than questioning, organisational policies (i.e. not managing upwards).
Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
#103Problems 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…
When I wrote the answer (that is currently top answer) I was thinking about a longer time window for the "new manager" period, perhaps a year instead of a few weeks. You're right that someone new to the team and new to management won't be able to accurately assess who the top and bottom performers are in their first few weeks. Same for how to allocate resources. If the "new manager" period is the first year of manage…
From a years (or even six months) perspective the points make a lot more sense. The question asked about the first few weeks as a manager :). Thanks for taking the time to clarify.
Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought the question was aimed at new to the role not necessarily new to the team? I found the advice about visibility pretty on the nose. I have yet to have a direct supervisor who hasn't stolen credit a few times. In contrast the guys or girls above them have all been really good at directing it downward. As far as my career has gone anyway.
"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.
While I agree with this, some of the best, most likeable, and longest-surviving managers I've worked with have had a Teflon-like quality when it comes to blame. It's not that they don't take blame, yet somehow it doesn't stick to them. They attend the meetings and post-mortems when things go wrong; but they have a superficial relationship with blame somehow. They take the issues seriously, yet it feels somehow like they're not actually to blame, even when they've been involved the whole way through. Then one day you look up and notice that they're smiling and chatting with someone on a different project team, they've moved on. Everyone will think their efforts were serious, well-intentioned, appropriate, etc. And the blame is palpably absent from them, while it clings to others like a bad smell. I'm still unsure about how it's done. I suspect it's a deeper personality trait; plain-old likeability perhaps.
Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
#105There are some old IEEE articles on management for techies that, in my humble opinion, are simply brilliant.
Delegation: (usually the first failure I see) http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/art5.html
And the rest: http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/index.html
Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comes up just before Paul does his sandworm trial.
Having not read Dune myself, I was rather hoping you would quote the relevant passage, so that I and those like myself can compare it to the aforementioned military quote, and perhaps derive some insight from it.
It's worth reading.
Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
#107Can't we ban links to the Quora website? It doesn't let people read the page without logging in.
[deleted]
Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having not read Dune myself, I was rather hoping you would quote the relevant passage, so that I and those like myself can compare it to the aforementioned military quote, and perhaps derive some insight from it.
It's worth reading.
You don't know how the GP spends his time. Maybe his day is full of saving people who stepped on landmines in Africa, in which case, it's very much not worth reading.
That answer is a bit useless when someone only asked for the relevant passage.
Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
#109I 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?
It probably varies a bit from what type of organisation you are running.
Then, listen to people, understand where they are at, offer something which means that they develop personally. Make sure everyone is really clear on what you are trying to achieve and then give them the rains to lead and achieve that together. My product development teams have a very strong idea of where we are going with the products and they do 95% of their work without any input from me.
Again, listen to people. Attend meetings, not to control things but essentially keep your ear on the ground for issues or friction then resolve it quickly with the person in focus. Also I attend meetings to inform people on what is going on in the rest of the organisation.
We run a very open organisation, so we discuss budgets and how we approach things very openly. Open discussions about how we are expanding are important. One effect of this is that we have very little in the form of politics in the organisation.
A lot of this can sound like clichés, and it is, if you don't do it well and with people in your focus. The organisation we run is there to support a great group of people doing great things. Not the other way around.
Re: What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I mentioned in another reply, this particular data entry job involved doing math at about college linear algebra level and writing SQL among other things. We got to this point by relying on one of the founders to do all the data entry. Suddenly three things happened: our system got more complex so the old tools no longer helped, we signed on a lot more customers, and the founder stepped away for a well deserved br…
Would it really have taken longer to automate it, then feed in the data than to do it by hand? I ask because I have, when presented with similar tasks, spent the time learning how to do it in WSH (sendkey), doing it, then doing more productive things while the script ran.
So without going into too much detail, yes it would have taken longer. The reason is that we were solving quite a few non-trivial problems in terms of updating geographic road data. Just as an example, a small part of the data entry tools ended up being a road router similar to the one provided by Google Maps, but tuned to our use case. This tuning took quite a bit of work. Another piece was splitting the graph of all roads at each intersection. The algorithm here was simple enough but figuring that this was the right solution took a while.