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How do you find a good manager?

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Re: How do you find a good manager?

#21

Post by ZenMikey »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #13

Yet another perfect example of not even understanding that there are other ways to run an organization All of the things mentioned are in service of the existing model of capitalism. That model is: There are people who do work that leads to the direct creation, maintenance or support of a customer who is paying them. There is a separate group completely independent from this group who view the firm as a form of finan…

Just my anecdotal two cents: what you're saying simply does not match my life experience. The model bit is debatable, but the predicted outcomes are demonstrably false for me and a lot of people I know.

Re: How do you find a good manager?

#22

Post by huitzitziltzin »

“ The method requires repeated random assignment of managers to multiple teams and controls for individuals’ skills.”

That’s an extremely extremely demanding condition very unlikely to be satisfied in practice, IMO. Even conditionally exogenous given covariates is hard to swallow.

Re: How do you find a good manager?

#24

Post by jiiam »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #13

Yet another perfect example of not even understanding that there are other ways to run an organization All of the things mentioned are in service of the existing model of capitalism. That model is: There are people who do work that leads to the direct creation, maintenance or support of a customer who is paying them. There is a separate group completely independent from this group who view the firm as a form of finan…

In game theoretic terms all of this looks a lot like a Nash equilibrium to me and, as such, fells inescapable

Re: How do you find a good manager?

#25

Post by glitchc »

jhatemyjob wrote: post #23

You find a good manager the same way you would find a good IC: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QplyFXgIx7Q

That's great, but the video goes on to say that he hired a trained manager (an MBA) with zero experience in manufacturing to manage the Macintosh manufacturing team...

So, do as I say not as I do?

Re: How do you find a good manager?

#26

Post by bluGill »

JofArnold wrote: post #19
GoToRO wrote: post #15

The problem is the nobody is actually looking for good managers.

We do. It can take months and months of interviews to find them though. Which might be why.

What makes you think your interview practice is producing good managers?

You might be looking for them, but my conclusion after reading many "how we hire/interview" posts is most people do something and conclude it works - instead of testing. What if instead you put all the names of potential managers in a hat and drew one - what makes your process better (at least the hat selects for "lucky" people)

Re: How do you find a good manager?

#27

Post by granularity »

willmadden wrote: post #8
worldvoyageur wrote: post #2

" Good managers have roughly twice the impact on team performance as good workers. People who nominate themselves to be in charge perform worse than managers appointed by lottery, in part because self-promoted managers are overconfident, especially about their social skills. Managerial performance is positively predicted by economic decision-making skill and fluid intelligence – but not gender, age, or ethnicity. "

They did an adequate job on experimental design around randomness within their test population, but they did a completely inadequate job randomly selecting the population pool itself. You really can't extrapolate their findings to the general workforce because of this.

Exactly:

> Participants were recruited from the Essex University Economics Lab sample pool. ... The median participant was a graduate student with two years of work experience.

Hard to see how econ grad students play-acting boss says much about the kinds of long-term relationships / group dynamics that appear in the wild.

Re: How do you find a good manager?

#28

Post by lordnacho »

I skimmed the paper. It's pretty ambitious IMO.

They took a bunch of people (two sets of n=20) and did some tests on them, by the sounds of it, the task was to do something that sounds to me like a math or IQ test. People were tested individually and in groups.

They then made little groups of three where the manager tries to coordinate who does what in terms of the tasks, and then they give the group a score.

All these numbers are then correlated with some indicators, eg age, ethnicity, social skill score, and so on.

I guess the big issue here is whether the lab task is representative of a real-world project. The big one for me is that in the real world, you don't often have an objective measure of success, and whatever you do have is not going to be independent of the environment that you're operating in. Sometimes you get to grade your own effort, other times you get graded by some fool who gets it wrong. The team changes over time. Goals change over time.

Re: How do you find a good manager?

#29

Post by Narhem »

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #22

“ The method requires repeated random assignment of managers to multiple teams and controls for individuals’ skills.” That’s an extremely extremely demanding condition very unlikely to be satisfied in practice, IMO. Even conditionally exogenous given covariates is hard to swallow.

With coding it takes time for teams to sync. Let alone being brought up to speed on an already worked on codebase. Without what basically amounts to as handholding the process becomes more drawn out.

Managers who don't realize you have to basically baby new hires until they are up to speed probably won't be very effective.

Re: How do you find a good manager?

#30

Post by apwell23 »

Tangential.

i have too much pride, introversion and embarrassment to 'suck up'. This has greatly hindered my career ( and my earnings). I know what the sucking up process is and how to execute it but have psychological block actually doing it.

Any advice from ppl who've dealt with this?

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