4 ms·

I skimmed the paper. It's pretty ambitious IMO. They took a bunch of people (two sets of n=20) and did some tests on them, by the sounds of it, the task was to

I skimmed the paper. It's pretty ambitious IMO. They took a bunch of people (two sets of n=20) and did some tests on them, by the sounds of it, the task was to do something that sounds to me like a math or IQ test. People were tested individually and in groups. They then made little groups of three where the manager tries to coordinate who does what in terms of the tasks, and then they give the group a score. All these numbers are then correlated with some indicators, eg age, ethnicity, social skill score, and so on. I guess the big issue here is whether the lab task is representative of a real-world project. The big one for me is that in the real world, you don't often have an objective measure of success, and whatever you do have is not going to be independent of the environment that you're operating in. Sometimes you get to grade your own effort, other times you get graded by some fool who gets it wrong. The team changes over time. Goals change over time.

legitster 2y ago
> They then made little groups of three where the manager tries to coordinate who does what in terms of the tasks, and then they give the group a score. Honestly, this sounds exactly like what a group of graduate students who have never had a real job in the corporate world would come up with as an assessment of management skills. I feel like you would need 6 months at least to really assess management.
hinkley 2y ago
One of my soft skills is people logistics. It's obvious to me when other people don't have it, and some days I wonder why everyone else doesn't see it. If you treat people like cogs you're always going to be disappointed in their output. For the duration of a study I don't know how you could possibly do otherwise, and get disappointing results. You have to know something about people to figure out how to divide the labor so people are generally near their comfort zone but routinely pushed a little bit out of it for purposes of growth. I'm not even a manager, just a lead dev, but I am what some people might call an 'informed consumer' of management skills.

legitster 2y ago

> They then made little groups of three where the manager tries to coordinate who does what in terms of the tasks, and then they give the group a score. Honestly, this sounds exactly like what a group of graduate students who have never had a real job in the corporate world would come up with as an assessment of management skills. I feel like you would need 6 months at least to really assess management.

hinkley 2y ago

One of my soft skills is people logistics. It's obvious to me when other people don't have it, and some days I wonder why everyone else doesn't see it. If you treat people like cogs you're always going to be disappointed in their output. For the duration of a study I don't know how you could possibly do otherwise, and get disappointing results. You have to know something about people to figure out how to divide the labor so people are generally near their comfort zone but routinely pushed a little bit out of it for purposes of growth. I'm not even a manager, just a lead dev, but I am what some people might call an 'informed consumer' of management skills.