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What role do you see managers playing in an organization? What do you mean by "His job is to make himself not needed"? It seems like for any organization, som

What role do you see managers playing in an organization? What do you mean by "His job is to make himself not needed"? It seems like for any organization, some structure is required just for information dissemination. So making an enormous assumption that corporate leadership trusts their people to do the job and do it well, what does a structure that is not a "giant human machine" look like? Thank you

bkeroack 12y ago
(not the OP) The job of a manager is to lead as a natural outgrowth of deep domain knowledge and industry experience. The best bosses I've ever had were those from whom I learned new things every day, and I was glad to take guidance and instruction from them. The trust goes both ways--the manager trusts in his/her people to make the right decisions because he/she has led them well. In that way they don't need to be involved in the day to day of their reports and are only called upon in moments of uncertainty or conflict. On the other hand, I've had bosses where I was 95% certain I could do their job better than they could, and the only reason I had to subordinate to them was because they got there first. These were also the type of people to micromanage to 'prove' that they had organizational value (probably also because they feared losing any control). You then have a few choices: either shut up and submit, or play the political game of positioning yourself either as a lackey of the boss or as a potential replacement should they fail (there's obviously some incentive there to secretly engineer situations to make them look bad/incompetent to the rest of the org). Neither is a particularly good option--that's when I know it's time to seek better opportunities elsewhere.
- mmanulis 12y ago
  I'm not convinced that leading is the job of a manager, at least not all managers. As an example, a line manager, someone who manages the work of several developers, is more of a Project Manager / People Manager and less a leader. Maybe this is getting too much into semantics. A leader, as I tend to think of that position, is about setting direction, guiding the vision, dealing with the culture, more strategic in whatever they are leading. This could be a company or a project or a product, doesn't have to be high-falutin, can be as simple as leading a project to completion. The focus, however, is really about the strategic view of whatever it is that's being led. A manager is the tactical view. Making sure people have enough work and that work fits the project. Making sure that the people doing the work are the right ones to do that work (some crossover into leadership here, can't help that). A manager is really part communication traffic cop (in a positive sense, not "give you a ticket" sense), part nanny (reward & punish behavior), part mentor and part canary for the upper management of things going wrong. As a side note, this is why I found 1-1s valuable at all levels of managing. When I was running several teams, making sure my leads were having 1-1s with their people and talking about how their teams are doing gave me a view I would not have had otherwise. I'm still learning about this though. Part of my thinking about the original comment was about the role of management in an ideal scenario. If you remove the "human machine" from the conversation and look at what most of the time managers at all levels are doing, it's communication management. Yes, this is an overgeneralization to a great degree, but it helps me to think about management in that way. If your manager built his/her interactions with you around things you need to know (communicating vision, direction, business needs, etc.) from above and took your feedback and communicated it up, then you get lots of conversations and feedback loops. This requires the upper management to listen to what the people on the ground are saying, which is rare in my limited experience. Incidentally, what you get is managing the what and not the how, letting individual contributors deal with the how. Which opens up a whole can of worms for corporations and, sometimes, from a legal perspective too - think SOX & HIPAA as examples. Bottom line, I believe management is to leadership as tactical view is to strategic view. Genuine communication is what management is all about, makes our work interactions human and makes it easier to give and receive feedback across the entire org. Of course I just described a utopia, but it's nice to work towards that, even if it's just a person approach.
michaelochurch 12y ago
Well, let me back up from that and make this analogy. In a perfect world, there'd be no need for police because there'd be no criminals. There are good cops and bad cops but we can all agree that, in a perfect world, the job wouldn't need to exist. In practice, police can't do the job so well that they're no longer needed because the world is so big. There are always new criminals, and there are many sources of crime, and that's not the cops' fault. With management, whether that is true depends on the size and competency of the organization. With a small team, a good manager can get everyone aligned and then step back. With hundreds of people, maybe not. There will always be conflicts to resolve and problem employees to watch. A manager's job is "protect, direct, eject". The strong employees need to be steered away from and shielded from ("protect") the political messes that earnest high performers often fall into, and from the resentment that being good at their jobs (and being rewarded for it) may attract. They also need to be able to take risks and spread their wings. The average ones need to be kept on track ("direct"), and the incorrigible problem employees need to be fired ("eject"). If you do the job well, you won't have many problem employees (the "eject" category) because the corrigible or previously-unlucky ones you can fix, and the rare incorrigible ones you should fire. The mediocre employees (the "direct" category) will be mentored until they're good, and therefore in to the "protect" category, as well. So two of the three jobs (direct and eject) are finite and temporary (except for when the team acquires more people). As for "protect", who do high-talent employees need to be protected from? Executives and other managers; basically, anyone else who can hurt them. So, yes, in an ideal world there wouldn't be the "manager" job. In practice, it's different and you actually need them. Too many managers fall in love with the "direct" part of the job. They like telling people what to do. They ignore the "protect" part of it (because it can put them at personal risk, and because it's hard to do) and no one (except for a psychopath) enjoys the "eject" aspect. They get good at that one aspect and develop an approach that works reasonably well for middle-of-the-road employees but (a) doesn't handle the extremes, and (b) doesn't really allow for growth or progress (as in Scrum, where there's no allowance that one might graduate out of having to justify small amounts of one's own working time).

bkeroack 12y ago

(not the OP) The job of a manager is to lead as a natural outgrowth of deep domain knowledge and industry experience. The best bosses I've ever had were those from whom I learned new things every day, and I was glad to take guidance and instruction from them. The trust goes both ways--the manager trusts in his/her people to make the right decisions because he/she has led them well. In that way they don't need to be involved in the day to day of their reports and are only called upon in moments of uncertainty or conflict. On the other hand, I've had bosses where I was 95% certain I could do their job better than they could, and the only reason I had to subordinate to them was because they got there first. These were also the type of people to micromanage to 'prove' that they had organizational value (probably also because they feared losing any control). You then have a few choices: either shut up and submit, or play the political game of positioning yourself either as a lackey of the boss or as a potential replacement should they fail (there's obviously some incentive there to secretly engineer situations to make them look bad/incompetent to the rest of the org). Neither is a particularly good option--that's when I know it's time to seek better opportunities elsewhere.

mmanulis 12y ago
I'm not convinced that leading is the job of a manager, at least not all managers. As an example, a line manager, someone who manages the work of several developers, is more of a Project Manager / People Manager and less a leader. Maybe this is getting too much into semantics. A leader, as I tend to think of that position, is about setting direction, guiding the vision, dealing with the culture, more strategic in whatever they are leading. This could be a company or a project or a product, doesn't have to be high-falutin, can be as simple as leading a project to completion. The focus, however, is really about the strategic view of whatever it is that's being led. A manager is the tactical view. Making sure people have enough work and that work fits the project. Making sure that the people doing the work are the right ones to do that work (some crossover into leadership here, can't help that). A manager is really part communication traffic cop (in a positive sense, not "give you a ticket" sense), part nanny (reward & punish behavior), part mentor and part canary for the upper management of things going wrong. As a side note, this is why I found 1-1s valuable at all levels of managing. When I was running several teams, making sure my leads were having 1-1s with their people and talking about how their teams are doing gave me a view I would not have had otherwise. I'm still learning about this though. Part of my thinking about the original comment was about the role of management in an ideal scenario. If you remove the "human machine" from the conversation and look at what most of the time managers at all levels are doing, it's communication management. Yes, this is an overgeneralization to a great degree, but it helps me to think about management in that way. If your manager built his/her interactions with you around things you need to know (communicating vision, direction, business needs, etc.) from above and took your feedback and communicated it up, then you get lots of conversations and feedback loops. This requires the upper management to listen to what the people on the ground are saying, which is rare in my limited experience. Incidentally, what you get is managing the what and not the how, letting individual contributors deal with the how. Which opens up a whole can of worms for corporations and, sometimes, from a legal perspective too - think SOX & HIPAA as examples. Bottom line, I believe management is to leadership as tactical view is to strategic view. Genuine communication is what management is all about, makes our work interactions human and makes it easier to give and receive feedback across the entire org. Of course I just described a utopia, but it's nice to work towards that, even if it's just a person approach.

michaelochurch 12y ago

Well, let me back up from that and make this analogy. In a perfect world, there'd be no need for police because there'd be no criminals. There are good cops and bad cops but we can all agree that, in a perfect world, the job wouldn't need to exist. In practice, police can't do the job so well that they're no longer needed because the world is so big. There are always new criminals, and there are many sources of crime, and that's not the cops' fault. With management, whether that is true depends on the size and competency of the organization. With a small team, a good manager can get everyone aligned and then step back. With hundreds of people, maybe not. There will always be conflicts to resolve and problem employees to watch. A manager's job is "protect, direct, eject". The strong employees need to be steered away from and shielded from ("protect") the political messes that earnest high performers often fall into, and from the resentment that being good at their jobs (and being rewarded for it) may attract. They also need to be able to take risks and spread their wings. The average ones need to be kept on track ("direct"), and the incorrigible problem employees need to be fired ("eject"). If you do the job well, you won't have many problem employees (the "eject" category) because the corrigible or previously-unlucky ones you can fix, and the rare incorrigible ones you should fire. The mediocre employees (the "direct" category) will be mentored until they're good, and therefore in to the "protect" category, as well. So two of the three jobs (direct and eject) are finite and temporary (except for when the team acquires more people). As for "protect", who do high-talent employees need to be protected from? Executives and other managers; basically, anyone else who can hurt them. So, yes, in an ideal world there wouldn't be the "manager" job. In practice, it's different and you actually need them. Too many managers fall in love with the "direct" part of the job. They like telling people what to do. They ignore the "protect" part of it (because it can put them at personal risk, and because it's hard to do) and no one (except for a psychopath) enjoys the "eject" aspect. They get good at that one aspect and develop an approach that works reasonably well for middle-of-the-road employees but (a) doesn't handle the extremes, and (b) doesn't really allow for growth or progress (as in Scrum, where there's no allowance that one might graduate out of having to justify small amounts of one's own working time).