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From decades of experience, his is what I came to believe: The best managers I met tended to be those that if the circumstance required it, could do the job of
by PeterStuer 6y ago
From decades of experience, his is what I came to believe:
The best managers I met tended to be those that if the circumstance required it, could do the job of those two levels below. So they could actually do the job of the people that are managed by those they manage.
- dragonwriter 6y agoIf you can't do the job of the people up to about three levels down the org chart at least at a basic level, you probably can't effectively manage the organization they are part of, either. Now, it's true that there are lots of managers that have that problem even at one level down, but incompetent management is a widespread problem (especially because managers are often chosen by incompetent managers that believe that management is an independent and sufficient skill set without domain knowledge, either because they think you don't ever need domain knowledge because you can get by with generic management skills or because they think domain knowledge is easy to pick up by osmosis. The latter is true for a small minority of people—basically, the same people that, if they started with domain knowledge, management skills would be trivial to pick up—but neither is generally true.)