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I'll add that those decisions I have to support as a manager are not necessarily wrong, but I am limited in the tools to even analyze them. Or at least in the

I'll add that those decisions I have to support as a manager are not necessarily wrong, but I am limited in the tools to even analyze them. Or at least in the past, in the face of a challenging problem with no right answer, my tendency would be to discuss, to put forward an opinion, to see feedback and challenges to that opinion, etc. And to watch other people doing the exact same thing about other hard problems, often saving me the effort. Good decisions coming from above don't relieve me of the need to understand and assimilate those decisions. On the positive side, when I do have the opportunity to assimilate those decisions and the motivations behind them, I feel suddenly far more powerful – then I can engage positively both up the chain and down. Which makes the impasse a middle manager so often finds him or herself in so disappointingly counterproductive – my imaginative self feels there must be another way.

lemdj 12y ago
One way to address this is to have an explicit commitment as an organization that managers at all levels will regularly explain to their teams the context in which their piece of the organization is operating, and a process to make that happen. [This is a concept I first heard about in Elliot Jaques' thinking around what he calls Requisite Organizations... I don't agree with all of his thinking, but this context-setting piece has always seemed crucial to high-performing larger organizations] This has two big benefits: first, it should make it easier to assimilate higher-level managers' decisions and understand the motivations behind them and second, it puts everyone in a position to make better-informed decisions on their own. As a simplistic (and not particularly realistic) example, if I am a dev manager trying to decide whether to devote time to new feature development or a refactoring effort, making the 'right' decision is dependent on knowing whether we have things in place to put a marketing push behind new features and generate new sales, whether we are at risk of losing existing customers due to latency issues that the refactoring would resolve, etc. If the right context-communication process is in place, I know that answer and can easily both make my decision and communicate to the team why it is the 'right' one.

lemdj 12y ago

One way to address this is to have an explicit commitment as an organization that managers at all levels will regularly explain to their teams the context in which their piece of the organization is operating, and a process to make that happen. [This is a concept I first heard about in Elliot Jaques' thinking around what he calls Requisite Organizations... I don't agree with all of his thinking, but this context-setting piece has always seemed crucial to high-performing larger organizations] This has two big benefits: first, it should make it easier to assimilate higher-level managers' decisions and understand the motivations behind them and second, it puts everyone in a position to make better-informed decisions on their own. As a simplistic (and not particularly realistic) example, if I am a dev manager trying to decide whether to devote time to new feature development or a refactoring effort, making the 'right' decision is dependent on knowing whether we have things in place to put a marketing push behind new features and generate new sales, whether we are at risk of losing existing customers due to latency issues that the refactoring would resolve, etc. If the right context-communication process is in place, I know that answer and can easily both make my decision and communicate to the team why it is the 'right' one.