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No, you're forgetting the most important component of middle and senior management - the taking on of responsibility. We can all throw around anecdotes of CEOs
by aksss 5y ago
No, you're forgetting the most important component of middle and senior management - the taking on of responsibility. We can all throw around anecdotes of CEOs that never pay for crimes, but in the operation of a company if you can keep the machine moving smoothly, the job is actually not very demanding on a daily basis.
The catch is that you're absolutely on the hook when things don't run smoothly in ways that individual contributors never are. How do you fix processes, people, and tools to resolve immediate problems and improve effectiveness of processes over the long term? How do you liaise effectively with senior management to affect change? How do you tell someone or a group of people that their job is being eliminated? Those aren't frequent tasks, but when they happen they are highly demanding. In management you need to soak up responsibility like a sponge - for a good operations manager, their idle time isn't a function of being lazy, it's a function of having paid it forward in process design while ironically amassing liabilities each day for when shit hits the fan.
- Fricken 5y agoCEOs have to fuck up pretty bad to be in a worse position after getting fired than a burger flipper who also just got fired. They really aren't on the hook for much.
- aksss 5y agoThat’s why I tried to point out that my comment wasn’t about the typical anecdotal CEO.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mbrodersen 5y agoNope. A typical manager will simply blame somebody else when things go wrong, and take all the credit when things go right. You are right that good managers take responsibility. But good managers are rare to find.
- aksss 5y agoWhat can I tell you? You work around bad managers, not “typical” managers, IME. The typical productive ops middle manager is a pretty stressed out animal or left on the side of the road, the typical senior ops manager has an easier daily life punctuated by episodes of challenging and rewarding hardships. Good managers _are_ hard to find relative to good individual contributors. On that we agree. Most individual contributors who think they want to be managers quickly find out it’s not an easy or fake job - it’s a damn hard job to do correctly. Bad managers beget bad junior managers, but that’s rarely sustainable in the long term for an organization, again IME.