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Some mistakes I made as a new manager

benkuhn.net

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Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#81

Post by Joel_Mckay »

First of all, being in a managerial role is usually not enjoyable (expect manipulative antics). Here are a few styles/philosophies on how to accomplish a profitable department:

1. The Dictator: Follow orders, report regularly, or you are fired. If productivity under-performs, than do fire someone in case people forget who is in charge

2. The Coach: How do we win as a team, who has the best skill/will to take on the big challenges, and if individuals bring down our team they are fired

3. The Cult leader: Listen to the customer, how can we serve the customer better, how can we indoctrinate our brand into people lives, and if you violate our doctrine you are fired

4. The Con/Sociopath: Make money at any PR cost, scam the consumer/shareholders/departments, and if you won't break ethical norms you are fired

5. The Masochist: How should I manage the team, what should we be focused on, why are we burning budget and still failing, you are victimizing me with costs, so we had to cut costs and you are fired

6. The Idealist: An irrational infatuation with the impossible makes all other features irrelevant, and everyone still gets fired when the budget expires

Depending what the company does, each role’s style has its strengths and weaknesses.

Have a wonderful day =)

Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#82

Post by alex_lav »

chrsig wrote: post #18

> You upset them so deeply that they respond by unleashing the incredibly vicious-yet-perceptive tirade that they’ve been stewing on since the incident, reducing you to tears. Congratulations on hiring someone in the bottom ~2% of professionalism? At least your conscience can be clean at this point I guess. "Well your reaction was bad, so it doesn't matter what I did" This sort of discounts what the manager did to pi…

> This sort of discounts what the manager did to piss the person off

I don't agree at all. Short of legitimate, open malice, this type of behavior is pretty much never warranted.

Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#83

Post by lifeisstillgood »

Wow. the level of mistrust and fear shown by reactions here is ... at least I am not alone :-)

We (most of us) live in democracies with clear rules of law and strong defence of individual rights.

But we work in feudal hierarchies with arbitrary rules and love by whim of the powerful.

I think that's the first thing to chnage rather than hoping the training middle management to be "better communicators" will improve things. Would Britain still have a colony in the US if we had handled that Tea situation better?

Some experiments to try:

- executive management (C-suite) to be elected annually by all FT employees voting anonymously.

- annual project plans (do we build a new CRM or do we fix the existing one) again voted for by employees (one is referendum one is representative elections?)

- stop remote working. I am fairly convinced the best most effective e means to build software is to put the right developers in the same room as the right business owners and let them fix it. Every step away from that, each time the business owner has to go to a different project, the time zones mean that a daily stand up is communication, every step back is a cut in efficiency. just stop it

Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#84

Post by alex_lav »

I spent some time as a manager and decided I'd never do it again. Many of the places I've worked and observed have directors, principals, architects etc who've never been a manager, and do not include managerial experience as a component of hiring for those roles, so I personally have moved on from thinking it's a required step in the Path to Engineer Leadership. In my experience (a decade, many companies including multiple consultancies) Manager is very directly a "Middle Manager" type position. Meaning, mostly, there is no leadership or autonomy but instead a position derived purely from all the administrative "did you do your job" type checks and balances. "Did you update Jira", "Did you respond to Steve", "Are you stuck?" Everywhere I've worked, the actual "software" or "engineering" components of "Engineering Manager" are handled by someone else.

I am glad I spent the time, though, as I have a much better understanding of workplace politics and interpersonal scheming. Telling someone something specific that is also almost-untrue, just so they get out of your business. Having different narratives for different units of work, depending of who's asking. The ridiculous concept of "dotted line managers". The process was pretty illuminating, both in terms of how unnecessary most workplace hierarchies are and how low the bar can be for individual contributor competency.

After writing all of this, I think it'd be easy to say "Well this person just did a terrible job as a manager", but I received extremely positive reviews from both my reports and my superiors. Once I gave up trying to do a "good" job and just kind of let the ridiculousness flow, everything improved dramatically (on paper; my mental health plummeted).

This has turned into a bit of a rant, and I suppose I apologize in advance for what turned into kind of a scathing venting.

Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#85

Post by riffraff »

This is a good article, and matches my experience and my mistakes :)

I would argue that the workload part ("delegate or drop what you can't do") is not ideal tho.

IMHO your default should be to delegate, and only do what the rest of your team can't do, or what you can do much more efficiently (e.g. manage a tricky stakeholder, gather information at the management level).

If you were an IC promoted to management you likely were good at delivering and proactive but this will bite back when you're a manager, cause your instinct is that you can do all that you were doing before, plus whatever your old manager was doing.

Taking the default stance that your team can handle things on their own helps with preventing the "I'm in the middle of the road" issue and at the same time reduce your risk of burning out.

Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#86

Post by shmde »

naet wrote: post #7

Using Twitter likes as a "thing to make you feel good about yourself" might give you a short term dopamine rush, but probably leads to long term unhappiness IMO.

People need validation. Its an inherent human trait. But I feel validation from living breathing humans in proximity of your life >>>> validation from twitter likes.

Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#87

Post by bheadmaster »

_adamb wrote: post #54
steveBK123 wrote: post #46

> I asked people for feedback. I found that if I just asked “do you have any feedback for me?” people often wouldn’t, but if I asked more granular questions—“was that meeting useful?”—I would usually learn a lot from it. This part is good. I think generally as engineers, a manager simply asking "do you have feedback for me" just feels like a trap. I don't know man, there's plenty of things you do that annoy me but li…

I find the pattern of "How are you feeling about X, 0-10?" followed up by "What would get you to a 10?" very useful. Almost nobody ever says 10 and when they do, when you pressure test it, "So, everything is 100% perfect and you want it to stay the same forever?" it gets revised down appropriately. "What would get you to a 10" is as very constructive way to think about it as well. It's not just complaining, it's arti…

We have a similar feedback system at work, and I'm always wary of giving my true opinions, mostly because of the "beware what you ask for, you might get it" possibility.

What if other people don't give feedback, and my feedback stands out, and in turn management makes decisions based on my feedback and everything gets worse? I don't want to be responsible for management failures, even if only indirectly.

Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#88

Post by alex_lav »

29athrowaway wrote: post #8

Always remember: as a manager you are still an employee, and you are still required to observe the law. Being a manager does not mean you are correct by default. It does not mean you cannot receive feedback from your managees. Also, a brief refresher: lying about someone is defamation. If you defame people's performance and cause them to lose money you are personally liable for damages. We should sue managers more, w…

> Being a manager does not mean you are correct by default.

It means the company you're working for is giving you the autonomy to decide paths forward for yourself and those that report to you. "Correct" is not binary.

> Also, a brief refresher: lying about someone is defamation.

If you believe something, is it a lie? If you get fired because your manager _believes_ you're bad at your job, even if you believe you aren't, who's lying? Are there any lies?

> We should sue managers more, when they indulge in bad habits such as lying about performance and making false accusations.

This feels like you're speaking from a very specific position (ie, on the wrong end of perceived lies about performance). "Performance" is subjective (and is usually defined by one's manager).

I was going to go on but honestly this post feels very very....I don't really know, delusional? By this same logic a manager can (and should) sue an employee over workplace performance. The whole concept is just ridiculous (and as another person claiming to be a lawyer said below, just plain stupid).

Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#89

Post by ryanjshaw »

_adamb wrote: post #54
steveBK123 wrote: post #46

> I asked people for feedback. I found that if I just asked “do you have any feedback for me?” people often wouldn’t, but if I asked more granular questions—“was that meeting useful?”—I would usually learn a lot from it. This part is good. I think generally as engineers, a manager simply asking "do you have feedback for me" just feels like a trap. I don't know man, there's plenty of things you do that annoy me but li…

I find the pattern of "How are you feeling about X, 0-10?" followed up by "What would get you to a 10?" very useful. Almost nobody ever says 10 and when they do, when you pressure test it, "So, everything is 100% perfect and you want it to stay the same forever?" it gets revised down appropriately. "What would get you to a 10" is as very constructive way to think about it as well. It's not just complaining, it's arti…

This honestly sounds exhausting. I'm okay with things not being perfect, nothing is.

Re: Some mistakes I made as a new manager

#90

Post by User23 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #46

> I asked people for feedback. I found that if I just asked “do you have any feedback for me?” people often wouldn’t, but if I asked more granular questions—“was that meeting useful?”—I would usually learn a lot from it. This part is good. I think generally as engineers, a manager simply asking "do you have feedback for me" just feels like a trap. I don't know man, there's plenty of things you do that annoy me but li…

It's the snafu principle at work. People in positions where they can ruin other people's lives will generally get told what those other people think they want to hear.
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