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I know this is suppose to be self-soothing for a managers ego, but unfortunately you are responsible for their failures if their failures result in projects goi

I know this is suppose to be self-soothing for a managers ego, but unfortunately you are responsible for their failures if their failures result in projects going over budget or over schedule. You are responsible for creating an environment in which they can thrive AND also not f-up momentum for others. Thats a tricky task with a lot of nuance. At the end of the day, as a manager, you are responsible for the teams success and failure. You don't really get to say "sorry we delivered late and/or over budget, a single contributor on our team is failing to execute well and thats not MY problem". A manager is responsible for a projects failure or success which, yes, means being responsible for employees who seem to be failing at the task. What being responsible means is the more complicated question completely brushed over in this article. Do you fire them? do you 'create a better environment' - how and how do you do it without impacting the team, projects, or budget. Being a manager is an extremely nuanced social and political task that i dont think a large majority of people are skilled to do. Being highly technical or having decades of experience doing the technical part of the job will not prepare you for managing people, unfortunately.

LaserToy 3y ago
Managers are responsible for project failures, that is true. And they have a mechanism of achieving it: hiring and firing. The author is right, managers are not responsible for individual’s success, their ability to persevere, time manage and so on. We work with adults, they have their parts to do.
KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
> Being a manager is an extremely nuanced social and political task that i dont think a large majority of people are skilled to do. Being highly technical or having decades of experience doing the technical part of the job will not prepare you for managing people, unfortunately. This is me, and I completely agree. I'm on the road back to an IC role. I could continue with being a manager; I'm okay at it, and there's enough room for me to grow into the role. I've been given clarity on a career path and confidence that I can take that path. But I'm not _good_ at it, not really, and a lot of that badness is in the disjoint of skills that I didnt bring over from technical leadership. Those skills I'm actually quite poor at and, while I can continue to improve, I don't want to because I don't enjoy exercising them. One example of this is that I love coaching and mentoring but I hate performance reviewing. And I'm bad at it. I wrote a promotion case for someone that was lauded as one of the best of the cycle, but my reviews of substandard reports were met with harsh but fair critique. I'm a fairweather manager and as a result I don't think I can be a good manager without living with a lot of discomfort and accepting a lot of deficit in my skills that will be more difficult to overcome given this discomfort.
- MonaroVXR 3y ago
  > One example of this is that I love coaching and mentoring but I hate performance reviewing. And I'm bad at it. I wrote a promotion case for someone that was lauded as one of the best of the cycle, but my reviews of substandard reports were met with harsh but fair critique. I'd rather have this, I might the only person, otherwise things are going to take longer and you end up not being that good. I harsh to myself because of this, It's not fun I know. but otherwise....
  - KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
    It's definitely preferable and the right thing to do, I wouldn't suggest that doing things my way was the right approach just because of my own discomfort. One way I've thought of it recently is in terms of Radical Candor and it's concept of "ruinous empathy": if it means changing myself so significantly in my core beliefs and feelings, I think I'd rather be ruined by empathy. Equally, I need my own manager to not be ruinously empathetic, so I appreciate it makes me a bit of a hypocrite.
svilen_dobrev 3y ago
first rule of Leadership - "Everything is Your Fault" . YES. but leadership is not management. And i fully agree that management is "nuanced social and political task" . And politics is contradictory to most structured stuff, esp. software. But still, if someone does not want to know/grow, no point pushing. It's painful at both sides. May need completely different approach, mostly outside the scope of team.

LaserToy 3y ago

Managers are responsible for project failures, that is true. And they have a mechanism of achieving it: hiring and firing. The author is right, managers are not responsible for individual’s success, their ability to persevere, time manage and so on. We work with adults, they have their parts to do.

KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago

> Being a manager is an extremely nuanced social and political task that i dont think a large majority of people are skilled to do. Being highly technical or having decades of experience doing the technical part of the job will not prepare you for managing people, unfortunately. This is me, and I completely agree. I'm on the road back to an IC role. I could continue with being a manager; I'm okay at it, and there's enough room for me to grow into the role. I've been given clarity on a career path and confidence that I can take that path. But I'm not _good_ at it, not really, and a lot of that badness is in the disjoint of skills that I didnt bring over from technical leadership. Those skills I'm actually quite poor at and, while I can continue to improve, I don't want to because I don't enjoy exercising them. One example of this is that I love coaching and mentoring but I hate performance reviewing. And I'm bad at it. I wrote a promotion case for someone that was lauded as one of the best of the cycle, but my reviews of substandard reports were met with harsh but fair critique. I'm a fairweather manager and as a result I don't think I can be a good manager without living with a lot of discomfort and accepting a lot of deficit in my skills that will be more difficult to overcome given this discomfort.

MonaroVXR 3y ago
> One example of this is that I love coaching and mentoring but I hate performance reviewing. And I'm bad at it. I wrote a promotion case for someone that was lauded as one of the best of the cycle, but my reviews of substandard reports were met with harsh but fair critique. I'd rather have this, I might the only person, otherwise things are going to take longer and you end up not being that good. I harsh to myself because of this, It's not fun I know. but otherwise....
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
  It's definitely preferable and the right thing to do, I wouldn't suggest that doing things my way was the right approach just because of my own discomfort. One way I've thought of it recently is in terms of Radical Candor and it's concept of "ruinous empathy": if it means changing myself so significantly in my core beliefs and feelings, I think I'd rather be ruined by empathy. Equally, I need my own manager to not be ruinously empathetic, so I appreciate it makes me a bit of a hypocrite.

svilen_dobrev 3y ago

first rule of Leadership - "Everything is Your Fault" . YES. but leadership is not management. And i fully agree that management is "nuanced social and political task" . And politics is contradictory to most structured stuff, esp. software. But still, if someone does not want to know/grow, no point pushing. It's painful at both sides. May need completely different approach, mostly outside the scope of team.