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(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

(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.

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.