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Managing People

klinger.io

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Re: Managing People

#81

Post by cturner »

hnfong wrote: post #74
cturner wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A difficulty with marxism is that it is thoroughly old fashioned about bucketing people into categories. In a feudal society you were born into a life where you were a serf, or a craftsman, or an aristocrat. Marxism massages the labels but essentially accepts this worldview. The primary handle on each person is a class label, assigned at birth. Talent is irrelevant. One of the challenges of management after feudalism…

> My view is that capital is nearly irrelevant in mainstream technology now beyond achieving bootstrap Wasn't that true for traditional businesses as well? Beyond bootstrap, the company itself (revenue streams, assets, etc.) is the capital. I mean, if I wanted to be a landlord in the middle ages the only capital I need is a bag of gold coins to buy enough land and build a fort and "bootstrap" my lordship... (and mayb…

"Beyond bootstrap, the company itself (revenue streams, assets, etc.) is the capital."

Thanks for this correction.

Re: Managing People

#82

Post by count »

okl wrote: post #48
Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #14

> Don't load your work onto others in the company. I've seen this at companies small and large, especially where you might have a "politically" appointed manager, rather than someone a bit more useful. It's also a favourite ploy of sociopathic but useless individual contributors, find someone to do your work for you, then repackage it as your own!

> Don't load your work onto others in the company. So as manager don't delegate work? Some of those points are written like a horoscope: You can understand them whichever way fits your own experiences best.

Your work and 'the work' are different things. You delegate 'the work', but make sure you do 'your work' as the manager. Don't delegate/offload 'managing'.

Re: Managing People

#83

Post by exceptione »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #37
wreath wrote: post #13

The author mentions firing people in almost every point. Is firing people in the US so easy that it is a go-to solution to solve these problems?

I've fired some people in an EU setting; and have also been let go myself (layoff round, I never took it personally). It's true that countries outside the US have more legal checks and balances around this topic. But it's not true that it's impossible to fire people. Basically, those checks and balances are mostly for good reasons. And I've noticed that better employers in the US tend to use them as well even if they…

> This usually happens after you've created plenty of opportunities for the person to improve. Often that just doesn't happen

Doesn´t that mean you the employer failed too? It could be that someone is really not well fit for the role, but it could also be that the employer has no clue how to lead someone to success. As you say

> I'm often pleasantly surprised to see that people moved on and improved themselves

This is for me an indication that the employer lacks critical skills and needs improvement. Being a checklist manager and demanding improvement is the easy part, but making people grow in the direction you want is the hard part.

Re: Managing People

#84

Post by thaneross »

gwbas1c wrote: post #70

> Avoid back and forth > Processes are expectations made explicit Processes should avoid back-and-forth. They need to ensure that clear communication happens when work is handed off from one person to another. Assuming you're working on tickets, do you need to ask 200 questions every time you get an incoming ticket? That's a process problem; the process should ensure that whoever created the ticket puts in the inform…

That sounds like a pretty siloed way to work. Conversations with the people involved is much high bandwidth and full-duplex which increases the odds of understanding the underlying problem and building what people actually want.

Re: Managing People

#85

Post by gwbas1c »

thaneross wrote: post #84
gwbas1c wrote: post #70

> Avoid back and forth > Processes are expectations made explicit Processes should avoid back-and-forth. They need to ensure that clear communication happens when work is handed off from one person to another. Assuming you're working on tickets, do you need to ask 200 questions every time you get an incoming ticket? That's a process problem; the process should ensure that whoever created the ticket puts in the inform…

That sounds like a pretty siloed way to work. Conversations with the people involved is much high bandwidth and full-duplex which increases the odds of understanding the underlying problem and building what people actually want.

> Conversations with the people involved is much high bandwidth and full-duplex

That's impossible when working with people in different timezones, or when working with customers.

Specifically, regarding support: The people in support need to know how to support their product, and that includes knowing what information to collect if they believe they will need to escalate. They just can't randomly pull engineers into a support call.

You also can't have a support organization that expects "high bandwidth" communication with a customer. (IE, support can't go back to the customer for every ^%$#^#$ question the engineer asks.)

Re: Managing People

#86

Post by etempleton »

When you are a manager you need to learn to put your ego to the side. Everyone thinks they can do this, but most people can’t.

You have look at some one else’s work and say, “I wouldn’t do it like that, but that is okay their approach is valid and good too.” Sometimes it isn’t or you could provide valuable feedback on how to do something better, but often you just want it done the way you want it done and that is waste of everyone’s time.

Another way to say that you manage process not people is to say your job is to remove challenges your employee might have in accomplishing their job. You aren’t managing them, not ideally, you are acting as a producer making sure they have what they need to succeed. Doesn’t matter what that is. One minute it could be advocating on your team’s behalf, the next it could be making sure there is a clear process for how to handle a project.

First time managers often think they need to provide their vision for every piece of work, or tell others how they want the job done.

Re: Managing People

#87

Post by fsociety »

jimmyvalmer wrote: post #71

Typical of most management primers: 2,000 words of hand-wavy psychobabble, none of it actionable, all of it music to other psychobabblers.

What words do you consider psychobabble here? It was written in a plain and simple manner.

Re: Managing People

#88

Post by darkerside »

NAHWheatCracker wrote: post #72
frankgrimesjr wrote: post #33

> It's hard to get people to own a problem space fully At least in my experience this is because a manager doesn't want to give their reports full ownership over something. That is, responsibility for the outcome and (much more importantly) decision making authority for how they deliver results. Managers (almost) always want people to take responsibility, but don't want to give up authority.

I've come to think that the words "responsibility" and "ownership" usually means "blame" in a corporate setting. The words only get used when something isn't going well and the managers don't want to look bad.

I don't think this is typical. I'm sure there are dysfunctional organizations where it is true. Please consider including nuance in a statement like this, or you end up with self fulfilling prophecies.

In many organizations, taking ownership and responsibilities are indicators of individual contributors stepping up, and are pathways to greater success, promotions, and results.

Re: Managing People

#89

Post by starky »

wppick wrote: post #80
biren34 wrote: post #21

I see a lot of comments about firing and chaos, but the single most important point to me is "you manage processes and lead people". So many managers get this wrong that just fixing this one thing probably gets most startups 60% of the way there.

I wonder how much of the "managing processes" part could be delegated to software tools? How many of these processes could be automated, or "managed" by some sort of workflow software. Would it be possible with the right software product to essentially distribute the role of manager across the team/company?

The problem is that a lot of processes still leave a lot to interpretation, or many scenarios have grey areas on how to apply a process. The author mentions it a few sections later, you don't want the processes to have a ton of overhead, rather make it clear the expectations on how to interpret the situation or know they should come to the manager to provide direction.

Re: Managing People

#90

Post by ahonhn »

okl wrote: post #63
afdsasdfe wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you find no value in this at all? Let's take this then > Common Sense usually means Big Hairy Ball of Experience-Grounded Implicit Knowledge I don't agree, here's some very straightforward 'common sense' statements that I've seen not followed at so many companies Don't micromanage. Do trust, but verify. Treat your staff like humans, not like crap. If the staff you employed know more than you, listen to them. Focus…

> Treat your staff like humans, not like crap. That statement is vacuous because no decent human being would say: "I want to treat my staff like crap". It is easy to agree with your points because they are universal but don't provide any meaningful way to differentiate, e.g., what is and what isn't "treating your staff like crap".

I would point out that there are plenty of people in managerial positions who do absolutely want to treat their people like crap and derive great pleasure and satisfaction from doing so.

The world would be better without such people, but they certainly exist and seem to have a habit of floating to the top.

For such people it might not actually occur to them that treating people like crap may be counterproductive to other goals like profit. Years ago I recall a family member telling me about their then boss proudly stating something along the lines of "if my workers are happy then I'm not managing them properly, employees need to be miserable to be productive".

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