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My personal view of status emails is that they are largely an artifact of engineering-driven companies in which managers, who must possess a given level of engi
by leroy_masochist 10y ago
My personal view of status emails is that they are largely an artifact of engineering-driven companies in which managers, who must possess a given level of engineering competence in order to have supervisory credibility, often have very poor social skills.
To be clear, I'm all for pushing stats to the central org. Every week when I was a company commander in the Marines, for example, we sent our battalion HQ a big Excel sheet with a summary of who was on light duty, who was going on leave, weapons count, etc -- that kind of basic accountability is fine to put in a weekly email IMO.
What is not fine is abdicating your responsibility as a leader by living within a Potemkin supervisory framework that reduces or even eliminates your need to have daily face-to-face (or telephone/VTC) conversations with the people you have the privilege of supervising in order to figure out what challenges are in their way and what you and the larger organization can do to help.
The straightforward way to do it is not weekly status emails, it's limiting the number of direct reports anyone has to a reasonable number and holding them accountable for everything their portion of the org does or fails to do. They in turn should be holding their people to a high standard of not letting bad news age and being forthright about what's not working.
- emmett 10y agoStatus emails are not a "Potemkin supervisory framework". They're a scalable way of communicating progress broadly in a way that can be referenced later, rather than an ephemeral way to communicate to one person.
- leroy_masochist 10y agoThat's kind of the point I was trying to make when I said that sending weekly stats is valid. I'm not saying that status emails are implicitly bad, I'm saying that they're poorly implemented. The problem is that status emails containing substantive subjective summaries of the challenges faced by the person writing them are often used by incompetent managers as a replacement for constructive dialogue between them and their direct reports. At least, this was the case at the two companies I worked at that had a required status email as part of the weekly drumbeat. And I've heard a fair amount of anecdotal evidence from friends at other places that the problem is widespread.
- mikeryan 10y agoIsn't that the whole point of the linked article?
- paulcole 10y agoPretty sure he didn't read it.
- leroy_masochist 10y agoNot really, I think the article is basically a how-to guide for good status emails and what I am saying is that even if they're well implemented they can be an impediment to effective management and intra-company communication.
- wahsd 10y agoI think it depends. I find the notion of centralized status updating far more useful. Simply have a central status reporting location that is part of the progress management process so you don't need to squander time on weekly emails and can look at the status of all projects whenever you want. The whole notion of emails being sent around seems like another one of those inherent contradictions of the tech world like co-location.
- lmm 10y agoInterrupting me with daily face-to-face/telephone conversations would just make me quit. I prefer to communicate by email (or rather by async chat e.g. Slack). If there's something you need to hear I'll tell you that; credit me with that much professionalism.
- leroy_masochist 10y agoI think async comms are fine. I even think that talking with some people predominantly over email rather than face-to-face is OK in some cases; what is not OK is reducing the manager-direct report feedback cycle to a fill-in-the-blank framework that, for the person filling it out, often becomes an exercise in instilling the impression that one is creating value.