9 ms·

>The benefit of having a highly competent boss is easily the largest positive influence on a typical worker’s level of job satisfaction This is one of those gr

>The benefit of having a highly competent boss is easily the largest positive influence on a typical worker’s level of job satisfaction This is one of those great discoveries that is hardly surprising and makes you wonder why it hadn't be seen before. Honestly some of my worst work experiences were getting jerked around by a superior who completely failed to understand the work required to do my job.

yomly 10y ago
I suspect it is a comparatively new phenomenon in the workplace which is in part attributable to the recent surge (5-10 years) in knowledge work. When I worked in bigco as an analyst, the director and even managers were from a different era. The better ones knew excel to some extent but had no idea how to do sql or even excel automation which was a large part of what the analysts were required to do. Part of this is a rapid almost stepwise change in the work that is done, part of it is due to tech companies recruiting from a diverse set of industries. In other industries like law, finance and accounting, most people start at the bottom and slowly work upwards so the skillset is more of a continuum up the hierarchy so it is feasible that your bosses can still do your job. It used to be the same in other industries but that is fast changing. For instance, the top level accountants will have been studying at a time where bookkeeping was literally done in paper books...
- TheCowboy 10y ago
  Another phenomenon is the development of management as a science. People can end up in positions of oversight where they have a deficient understanding of the tasks people below them are performing. Study of management and processes is not without merit, and the rants against MBAs can be one dimensional by not recognizing the benefits. But if that was all that it took, then the economy wouldn't "waste" medical doctors or highly skilled engineers in administrative functions.
  - yomly 10y ago
    I think that is true, although people have been doing MBAs for a much longer time than the tech boom has been around for: e.g. doing an MBA was viable a route into Finance since at least the 80s. Though MBAs have certainly been growing in popularity over the past few years.
    - TheCowboy 10y ago
      I think that longevity is why people can feel so bitter about it. It has become strongly embedded in a lot of corporate cultures where management can find itself in a homogeneous bubble. This can serve to limit mobility of non-management level workers who could excel if provided the opportunity to take on managerial functions, which means that is lost economic potential. It's not constant across the board, as there are plenty of IT companies that seem to be doing a decent job at promoting engineers. But then I read a lot of people here talking about "up or out" views of engineers who are above a certain age. It's complicated.
    - msandford 10y ago
      > doing an MBA was viable a route into Finance since at least the 80s. That makes sense to me actually, since you need to have a high level understanding of how businesses work and what stuff the C-suite needs to be doing in order to understand how to value a business. The C-suite might be the one place where the "generic management skills" might actually be really useful. But middle management and day to day supervisory functions? You can't manage what you don't know, and if you don't understand the processes of the people you're managing you're blind.
      - sbov 10y ago
        It seems like MBA schools recognize this to some extent - my brother got an MBA with a focus on software project management. They even had to learn to do some coding and worked on a couple software projects as a team in order to apply what they were learning.
      - battlebot 10y ago
        In my personal take on all this, it is those people who have wrecked this entire country. They bear incredible blame for many massive failures that cost billions of dollars and millions of jobs. It is that level of a tragedy. But somewhere, some few people pocketed billions of dollars.
  - wageslave2 10y ago
    In my experience who ever makes this argument is incapable of coding and hence went to management. Some are really nice people but still they can be misled due to their I capability to understand he nature of work.
  - battlebot 10y ago
    If management was a science, 98% of the managers would not be able to understand it.
- mox1 10y ago
  I would be willing to be those people still knew how to do the job, just without Excel. They fundamentally understand the reason for "analyzing" things and the output generated by that. It's when you put a recent MBA grad with 0 domain knowledge as the manager of these people where problems start. And again, with the accountants. The crusty 60 year old accountant will still be able to read a report generated by a fresh college grad. He could even open the books and spot problems. Issues arise when you put someone who isn't an Accountant in charge of the other accountants.
  - yomly 10y ago
    But when your boss has never even made a model, let alone tried to fish data out of a database, then the kind of work he can imagine, his idea for time duration for work are all off. More importantly, what he values in the team (for when it comes to promotions) is also likely to be off. And hence, you can end up in a situation where you don't get promoted despite being very good at your job.
zzalpha 10y ago
This is one of those great discoveries that is hardly surprising and makes you wonder why it hadn't be seen before. Well, the traditional view of "management" is that it's a distinct job from "doing". Therefore, so the thinking goes, there is a distinct difference in skillsets, and thus the manager should be good at the managing bit, and the doer should be good at the doing bit. The reality is that in order to effectively manage, you have to understand what the doers are actually doing. Interestingly, this relates to a topic that came up yesterday about product managers (who are not "managers" in a traditional sense). Every time I see complaints about PMs, the root cause often starts with the PM not understanding how software is built and how developers work. Thus they disregard practical technical realities. Those folks describe as a "good" PM are often those with a technical background... who could, as it happens, do your job if needed.
- hueving 10y ago
  >The reality is that in order to effectively manage, you have to understand what the doers are actually doing. There is an important distinction. An effective manager should understand the general process and what can be time sinks, but they don't have to understand extremely specific details of what each worker is working on at any given time. For example, a manager of a software team doesn't need to understand the idioms of the programming language used by the team or even be that effective of a programmer. Some of my best managers have been ex-software devs that understood architecture, requirements distillation, etc really well but wrote the ugliest code you would ever see. :)
  - coredog64 10y ago
    My best manager was an ex-Air Force fighter pilot who had a general idea of what we were doing. He understood his role wasn't to do what we were doing but instead to enable it. Some of the worst bosses I had were technical people who had been promoted to upper management and couldn't let go of the tech stuff. My attitude towards them was that if they wanted to code then they could take a demotion (and give up those huge equity grants) and get down in the trenches. Otherwise they could STFU.
- 10y ago
martincmartin 10y ago
Because what your boss does, day-to-day, is very different than what you do. So it seems natural that they'd need different skills. I'm a software engineer, and hiring managers has been a problem at every company I've worked at. You want someone who has written software earlier in their career, and has a degree in software engineering or similar. In other words, people who have chosen to spend a lot of time with computers -- devices that are very logical and literal. But you also want someone who has good people skills. In other words, someone who chooses to spend a lot of time organizing other people, maybe was on the yearbook club in high school, that sort of thing. And you don't want their knowledge of software construction to not be too out of date. So you want someone at a very specific point in their career, i.e. a few years after giving up coding.
- christophilus 10y ago
  In my experience, this part isn't true: "And you don't want their knowledge of software construction to not be too out of date." One of my best bosses was largely a C programmer (from back in the 80s). He'd still tinker with things from time to time, but I think the fundamental principles of software engineering haven't changed a whole lot since then. A software engineer who could have written a book like SCIP or Programming Pearls back in the day but were in management now, would probably make excellent managers.
  - dahauns 10y ago
    > I think the fundamental principles of software engineering haven't changed a whole lot since then. Not sure I agree with that. A lot of todays best practices and workflows (and the tech to go with it), especially considering team and release management, simply weren't around or at least widespread even twenty years ago. You know, stuff like CI, TDD, DVCS etc. etc.
    - throwaway729 10y ago
      > CI, TDD, DVCS Are any of these concepts particularly difficult to understand for a seasoned developer? I have a really hard time imagining that a C and SVN expert couldn't learn how to use git "well enough" in an afternoon, and effectively within a few days, for example. In particular, the freaking author of git is an 80's C programmer and SVN expert...
smrtinsert 10y ago
It must have been somewhat surprises for you to have gone through it several times. I'm not quite convinced. My best bosses have been extremely hands off and my worst one was a techie through and through.
gdulli 10y ago
I've had bosses who couldn't do my job but trusted me and didn't get in my way and gave me the exact environment I needed to work in. Those were the best work experiences I ever had. It's the bosses who can do my job I have to worry about, they feel like they need to get involved with it and that hurts my job satisfaction. I need a boss with complementary skills to mine, not the skills I already have. People have all different values and making absolute statements about them is folly.
- vthallam 10y ago
  That would be great, as long as the employee is motivated and smart enough to do great work, else it would be difficult for the manager to gauge employee's quality of contribution.
  - jacobush 10y ago
    Which I think can be compensated for if the manager focuses on just that, more humane issues. Of course, this can be done badly...
  - gdulli 10y ago
    Right, employees have different values and different capabilities and should be managed differently. Saying "Employees are happier when [x]" always breaks down because employees aren't homogeneous.
brbrodude 10y ago
Just because some dudes in suits or some bureaucracy academic had not talked about it yet it doesn't mean it's now been "discovered", don't fall for this trap. Everyone's who's experienced a virtuous workplace also "discovered" this as it's a self-evident truth(when it happens). How many times will we "discover" human nature again? Depending on psychologists, economists, administrators and business gurus, infinite times(corollary: we will keep on 'discovering' the same things because we never actually learn). Edit: To try and make it clearer: we are all human yet we systematically neglect our nature/ignore it in others and treat it as if it's a million pieces puzzle we can't figure out. Seems we're just looking at stuff ever more fractioned, we take 1/2, make it 1/10 and act like we made a +8 advancement in knowledge, but we haven't. Holism and shit. To me it's an example of the stupidity of modern thinking.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Indeed. So much of it comes down to behaving in a natural manner. It gets jumbled up because we've constructed artificial institutions on top of human society that don't comport with our natural behaviors. Everyone understands these things fundamentally, but they pretend like they don't because we've set up a farcical structure and told them to play along or lose their well-being. It's obvious that everyone wants a leader who has been in substantially similar shoes and done an acceptable job. That's the only way to have the credibility to boss someone around. That HBR pretends this instinctive truth is a revelation is typical of the haughtiness that makes people hate the bourgeoisie. Humans are evolved to stay in fixed family units that expand only by marriage and child birth and contract only by death. The permanence afforded there allows humans to cooperate while also behaving naturally. The survival benefits of remaining in the tribe easily surpass emotional/personal benefits that could be had by fracturing off. There is no credible fear that expressing your feelings or otherwise behaving naturally will get you fired from your tribe. It turns out people are quite fickle, and that if circumstances don't compel them to work together, lots of things get broken quickly. The modern corporation is a poor stand-in for the tribe.
- kirse 10y ago
  Just because some dudes in suits or some bureaucracy academic had not talked about it yet Well, as you know, things aren't true or factual until Science™ has confirmed it as such with a statistically significant quadruple-blind placebo trial. After all, many anecdotes from employees that they are happier with a competent and capable leader most certainly do NOT equal data. There could possibly be some outside factor, like a competent and capable leader ensures the water-cooler filter is actually being changed on a monthly basis, which is really the reason for all that employee happiness. I've always wondered if I can start a mgmt consulting company that exclusively focuses on doing Science™ that researches facts that are already known to be true to just about everyone outside the skeptical academic bubble. Just sit back and let the grant money roll in while I spend it producing papers and managerial books on things like "Can more advisers help your plans succeed?" or just about any other applied statement from the Biblical book of Proverbs.
taeric 10y ago
This is also one of those "discoveries" that raises the suspicion hairs on the back of my neck. Survivor bias will play large into this. In particular, people often assume teams that failed had failed members. That goes up to the leadership. So, it is likely that people were happy on successful teams. This will be a post-hoc explanation for why they were successful. Which will also be a post-hoc for why the members are happy. I want to give this research the benefit of the doubt. So, please take my post as an overly pessimistic view of the landscape. Hopefully this will help persuade me otherwise.
6stringmerc 10y ago
And, as I can attest first hand along with more than a couple other employees, a highly incompetent boss can result in talent fleeing and the collapse of an entire functioning team responsible for millions in project bids annually.

yomly 10y ago

I suspect it is a comparatively new phenomenon in the workplace which is in part attributable to the recent surge (5-10 years) in knowledge work. When I worked in bigco as an analyst, the director and even managers were from a different era. The better ones knew excel to some extent but had no idea how to do sql or even excel automation which was a large part of what the analysts were required to do. Part of this is a rapid almost stepwise change in the work that is done, part of it is due to tech companies recruiting from a diverse set of industries. In other industries like law, finance and accounting, most people start at the bottom and slowly work upwards so the skillset is more of a continuum up the hierarchy so it is feasible that your bosses can still do your job. It used to be the same in other industries but that is fast changing. For instance, the top level accountants will have been studying at a time where bookkeeping was literally done in paper books...

TheCowboy 10y ago
Another phenomenon is the development of management as a science. People can end up in positions of oversight where they have a deficient understanding of the tasks people below them are performing. Study of management and processes is not without merit, and the rants against MBAs can be one dimensional by not recognizing the benefits. But if that was all that it took, then the economy wouldn't "waste" medical doctors or highly skilled engineers in administrative functions.
- yomly 10y ago
  I think that is true, although people have been doing MBAs for a much longer time than the tech boom has been around for: e.g. doing an MBA was viable a route into Finance since at least the 80s. Though MBAs have certainly been growing in popularity over the past few years.
  - TheCowboy 10y ago
    I think that longevity is why people can feel so bitter about it. It has become strongly embedded in a lot of corporate cultures where management can find itself in a homogeneous bubble. This can serve to limit mobility of non-management level workers who could excel if provided the opportunity to take on managerial functions, which means that is lost economic potential. It's not constant across the board, as there are plenty of IT companies that seem to be doing a decent job at promoting engineers. But then I read a lot of people here talking about "up or out" views of engineers who are above a certain age. It's complicated.
  - msandford 10y ago
    > doing an MBA was viable a route into Finance since at least the 80s. That makes sense to me actually, since you need to have a high level understanding of how businesses work and what stuff the C-suite needs to be doing in order to understand how to value a business. The C-suite might be the one place where the "generic management skills" might actually be really useful. But middle management and day to day supervisory functions? You can't manage what you don't know, and if you don't understand the processes of the people you're managing you're blind.
    - sbov 10y ago
      It seems like MBA schools recognize this to some extent - my brother got an MBA with a focus on software project management. They even had to learn to do some coding and worked on a couple software projects as a team in order to apply what they were learning.
    - battlebot 10y ago
      In my personal take on all this, it is those people who have wrecked this entire country. They bear incredible blame for many massive failures that cost billions of dollars and millions of jobs. It is that level of a tragedy. But somewhere, some few people pocketed billions of dollars.
- wageslave2 10y ago
  In my experience who ever makes this argument is incapable of coding and hence went to management. Some are really nice people but still they can be misled due to their I capability to understand he nature of work.
- battlebot 10y ago
  If management was a science, 98% of the managers would not be able to understand it.
mox1 10y ago
I would be willing to be those people still knew how to do the job, just without Excel. They fundamentally understand the reason for "analyzing" things and the output generated by that. It's when you put a recent MBA grad with 0 domain knowledge as the manager of these people where problems start. And again, with the accountants. The crusty 60 year old accountant will still be able to read a report generated by a fresh college grad. He could even open the books and spot problems. Issues arise when you put someone who isn't an Accountant in charge of the other accountants.
- yomly 10y ago
  But when your boss has never even made a model, let alone tried to fish data out of a database, then the kind of work he can imagine, his idea for time duration for work are all off. More importantly, what he values in the team (for when it comes to promotions) is also likely to be off. And hence, you can end up in a situation where you don't get promoted despite being very good at your job.

zzalpha 10y ago

This is one of those great discoveries that is hardly surprising and makes you wonder why it hadn't be seen before. Well, the traditional view of "management" is that it's a distinct job from "doing". Therefore, so the thinking goes, there is a distinct difference in skillsets, and thus the manager should be good at the managing bit, and the doer should be good at the doing bit. The reality is that in order to effectively manage, you have to understand what the doers are actually doing. Interestingly, this relates to a topic that came up yesterday about product managers (who are not "managers" in a traditional sense). Every time I see complaints about PMs, the root cause often starts with the PM not understanding how software is built and how developers work. Thus they disregard practical technical realities. Those folks describe as a "good" PM are often those with a technical background... who could, as it happens, do your job if needed.

hueving 10y ago
>The reality is that in order to effectively manage, you have to understand what the doers are actually doing. There is an important distinction. An effective manager should understand the general process and what can be time sinks, but they don't have to understand extremely specific details of what each worker is working on at any given time. For example, a manager of a software team doesn't need to understand the idioms of the programming language used by the team or even be that effective of a programmer. Some of my best managers have been ex-software devs that understood architecture, requirements distillation, etc really well but wrote the ugliest code you would ever see. :)
- coredog64 10y ago
  My best manager was an ex-Air Force fighter pilot who had a general idea of what we were doing. He understood his role wasn't to do what we were doing but instead to enable it. Some of the worst bosses I had were technical people who had been promoted to upper management and couldn't let go of the tech stuff. My attitude towards them was that if they wanted to code then they could take a demotion (and give up those huge equity grants) and get down in the trenches. Otherwise they could STFU.
10y ago

martincmartin 10y ago

Because what your boss does, day-to-day, is very different than what you do. So it seems natural that they'd need different skills. I'm a software engineer, and hiring managers has been a problem at every company I've worked at. You want someone who has written software earlier in their career, and has a degree in software engineering or similar. In other words, people who have chosen to spend a lot of time with computers -- devices that are very logical and literal. But you also want someone who has good people skills. In other words, someone who chooses to spend a lot of time organizing other people, maybe was on the yearbook club in high school, that sort of thing. And you don't want their knowledge of software construction to not be too out of date. So you want someone at a very specific point in their career, i.e. a few years after giving up coding.

christophilus 10y ago
In my experience, this part isn't true: "And you don't want their knowledge of software construction to not be too out of date." One of my best bosses was largely a C programmer (from back in the 80s). He'd still tinker with things from time to time, but I think the fundamental principles of software engineering haven't changed a whole lot since then. A software engineer who could have written a book like SCIP or Programming Pearls back in the day but were in management now, would probably make excellent managers.
- dahauns 10y ago
  > I think the fundamental principles of software engineering haven't changed a whole lot since then. Not sure I agree with that. A lot of todays best practices and workflows (and the tech to go with it), especially considering team and release management, simply weren't around or at least widespread even twenty years ago. You know, stuff like CI, TDD, DVCS etc. etc.
  - throwaway729 10y ago
    > CI, TDD, DVCS Are any of these concepts particularly difficult to understand for a seasoned developer? I have a really hard time imagining that a C and SVN expert couldn't learn how to use git "well enough" in an afternoon, and effectively within a few days, for example. In particular, the freaking author of git is an 80's C programmer and SVN expert...

smrtinsert 10y ago

It must have been somewhat surprises for you to have gone through it several times. I'm not quite convinced. My best bosses have been extremely hands off and my worst one was a techie through and through.

gdulli 10y ago

I've had bosses who couldn't do my job but trusted me and didn't get in my way and gave me the exact environment I needed to work in. Those were the best work experiences I ever had. It's the bosses who can do my job I have to worry about, they feel like they need to get involved with it and that hurts my job satisfaction. I need a boss with complementary skills to mine, not the skills I already have. People have all different values and making absolute statements about them is folly.

vthallam 10y ago
That would be great, as long as the employee is motivated and smart enough to do great work, else it would be difficult for the manager to gauge employee's quality of contribution.
- jacobush 10y ago
  Which I think can be compensated for if the manager focuses on just that, more humane issues. Of course, this can be done badly...
- gdulli 10y ago
  Right, employees have different values and different capabilities and should be managed differently. Saying "Employees are happier when [x]" always breaks down because employees aren't homogeneous.

brbrodude 10y ago

Just because some dudes in suits or some bureaucracy academic had not talked about it yet it doesn't mean it's now been "discovered", don't fall for this trap. Everyone's who's experienced a virtuous workplace also "discovered" this as it's a self-evident truth(when it happens). How many times will we "discover" human nature again? Depending on psychologists, economists, administrators and business gurus, infinite times(corollary: we will keep on 'discovering' the same things because we never actually learn). Edit: To try and make it clearer: we are all human yet we systematically neglect our nature/ignore it in others and treat it as if it's a million pieces puzzle we can't figure out. Seems we're just looking at stuff ever more fractioned, we take 1/2, make it 1/10 and act like we made a +8 advancement in knowledge, but we haven't. Holism and shit. To me it's an example of the stupidity of modern thinking.

cookiecaper 10y ago
Indeed. So much of it comes down to behaving in a natural manner. It gets jumbled up because we've constructed artificial institutions on top of human society that don't comport with our natural behaviors. Everyone understands these things fundamentally, but they pretend like they don't because we've set up a farcical structure and told them to play along or lose their well-being. It's obvious that everyone wants a leader who has been in substantially similar shoes and done an acceptable job. That's the only way to have the credibility to boss someone around. That HBR pretends this instinctive truth is a revelation is typical of the haughtiness that makes people hate the bourgeoisie. Humans are evolved to stay in fixed family units that expand only by marriage and child birth and contract only by death. The permanence afforded there allows humans to cooperate while also behaving naturally. The survival benefits of remaining in the tribe easily surpass emotional/personal benefits that could be had by fracturing off. There is no credible fear that expressing your feelings or otherwise behaving naturally will get you fired from your tribe. It turns out people are quite fickle, and that if circumstances don't compel them to work together, lots of things get broken quickly. The modern corporation is a poor stand-in for the tribe.
kirse 10y ago
Just because some dudes in suits or some bureaucracy academic had not talked about it yet Well, as you know, things aren't true or factual until Science™ has confirmed it as such with a statistically significant quadruple-blind placebo trial. After all, many anecdotes from employees that they are happier with a competent and capable leader most certainly do NOT equal data. There could possibly be some outside factor, like a competent and capable leader ensures the water-cooler filter is actually being changed on a monthly basis, which is really the reason for all that employee happiness. I've always wondered if I can start a mgmt consulting company that exclusively focuses on doing Science™ that researches facts that are already known to be true to just about everyone outside the skeptical academic bubble. Just sit back and let the grant money roll in while I spend it producing papers and managerial books on things like "Can more advisers help your plans succeed?" or just about any other applied statement from the Biblical book of Proverbs.

taeric 10y ago

This is also one of those "discoveries" that raises the suspicion hairs on the back of my neck. Survivor bias will play large into this. In particular, people often assume teams that failed had failed members. That goes up to the leadership. So, it is likely that people were happy on successful teams. This will be a post-hoc explanation for why they were successful. Which will also be a post-hoc for why the members are happy. I want to give this research the benefit of the doubt. So, please take my post as an overly pessimistic view of the landscape. Hopefully this will help persuade me otherwise.

6stringmerc 10y ago

And, as I can attest first hand along with more than a couple other employees, a highly incompetent boss can result in talent fleeing and the collapse of an entire functioning team responsible for millions in project bids annually.