The Much Maligned Manager

Overasked and undersupported

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EHLO! Before we get going this week I want to point you to some bonus content! The ever amazing Aline Lerner from interviewing.io asked me to write an article for their website. It’s about why and how interviewers (not candidates) aren’t always as amazing as we need them to be and what to do about that. It’s called The Other Half, which is a nod to a decent song from my favorite band. Oh, and as always with that band, don’t forget to read the lyrics. With that out of the way, let’s move on to the scheduled programming…

There is probably no corporate professional group about who people complain as much as about managers. I got some first hand experience of that again recently when I was talking to a friend and they spent the entire time ranting about their manager and all the ways in which they sucked. Terrible people skills, weak technical leadership, bullying, gender based discrimination, favoritism, indecisive, inflexible, not transparent, you name it. Everything was wrong with them. After rants like these, you'd be forgiven for thinking that most managers crawled out of Satan's armpit with a standing OKR to make reports' lives miserable.

That event was in no way unique. Over the years I have talked to many, many people who had similar complaints. I have also seen more than one of these stories play out before my very own eyes. On more than one occasion I have rescued a colleague from a terrible manager by helping them switch teams. In at least one case, their bad manager was about to fire them, the need for which became somewhat uncertain when this colleague went on to kick ass in their new team.

The stories about bad managers are so pervasive that there must be something going on, but what?

I can speak from personal experience here because I was a manager once; a halfway decent one at first, and then, unfortunately, a less than halfway decent one later. “What changed?”, you might ask. The answer: Circumstances. However, I am running ahead of myself a bit.

In the olden days, there were two main drivers that triggered people to want to become a manager. The most obvious one was that if you wanted to keep on growing in salary, you eventually had to become a manager. Career opportunities for individual contributors were limited and you maxed out relatively early. This limitation gave us many bad managers because, well, it's obvious I guess.

The other driver was that when people started to become a bit bored with their jobs, becoming a manager was one of the few ways out. Second careers weren't really happening yet as retraining in a completely different field in the middle of your working life was not at all common. Switching jobs to become a manager was one of the few ways available to you to create new challenges while staying (nominally) in your field.

As drivers to become a manager go, these are not the best ones. But, there are worse ones. One of these is “cultural expectations”. I have worked with more than one colleague who wanted to become a manager because their family expected it. And of course there is the eternal driver: A desire for power.

Looking at these reasons to become a manager, it seems there are not a lot of people who want to become a manager because they have a deep-seated drive to take on the job of supporting a group of people and organizing their work.

And what a complex job it is! Being a manager is incredibly difficult, which makes it unsurprising that there is so much bad managing going on. Compare it with any other difficult job: How much great coding is going on in companies? How much great requirements gathering? How much great interviewing? How much great project management? So why would we expect a lot of great managing?

So it seems there is more need for great managing than there are great managers. What are we going to do? The answer is of course: Better selection, better mentoring, and better education.

Most managers I know became managers without any relevant education in the art and science of managing people. For most managers, it seems that one fine day, someone just threw them the baton of power and they started wielding it. Half-way decent existing middle managers might do some due diligence before making someone else a manager, and half-way decent companies might offer a one-day course on how to be a manager, but for the fact that this is an actual specialism that requires a whole range of skills and expertise, the barriers to entry are surprisingly low. And to the extent that there is some training, it seems to be most commonly about how to manage within the law.

When I became a manager we got a fantastic version of that course that was given by a labor law attorney who basically regaled us the entire afternoon with stories about cases he had litigated.

When I became a manager, I had some decent tech lead experience and my manager had talked with all members of the team to see if they could deal with me as their manager. And then one day I was declared the manager and that was it. It was probably the easiest on-ramp for a manager ever: I was in the team already, I had good working relationships with all the stakeholders already, and I knew what we were doing already. In essence I was taking the helm of a spaceship with a trained crew that was already on course and where I used to be the first officer. It's a bit like Riker taking the helm of the USS Enterprise; he still may have a lot to learn and lose some hair, but the crew is already a functioning unit of consummate professionals. Easy peasy. My job as a manager was mostly to be the organizational janitor: I made sure there were team meetings, that everyone had a desk after every space reorg, and that people who deserved it got promoted.

Then we reorganized and I became the manager of a completely different team with new people, with a different mission, and with significant organizational challenges. Additionally, I lost my own manager and was now reporting to somebody else nine timezones away. To make it even more interesting, the company dialed up the politics to eleven by splitting up the local engineering teams into different pillars with conflicting goals. I was completely not ready for that challenge and was not coached on how to deal with that. I tried my best, but the results weren't great and I got out at the earliest opportunity, returning to an individual contributor role.

Herein lies the core of my analysis of most bad managers: They are typically undercoached and overasked, and sometimes in the job for the wrong reasons. 

Fortunately, most bad managers I know are not actually bad people. They are typically decent people doing a hellishly difficult job for which they are not skilled enough. And that is not a surprise: Managing requires a lot of knowledge, a very varied skill set, and a form of sixth sense that the Germans aptly call Fingerspitzengefühl (the sensitivity in the tip of your fingers). Getting all of that requires study, reflection, active mentoring, and experience. Companies normally don't give new managers opportunities to gather all of knowledge and experience. No time, too expensive, and the cost of bad managing is maybe not visible enough to warrant the investment.

My detractors will now say that their company offers all of this, pointing to management courses, experiential leadership programs, and internal mentors. The problem with that is that they might think they are doing a good job coaching new managers, but typically I find these programs are short and shallow learning opportunities. I am of the opinion that it takes years of study, experience, reflection, and active mentoring to get the hang of all of this. Most companies instead offer days of training and maybe some passive mentoring.

The difference between active mentoring and passive mentoring is the role of the mentor. In active mentoring, the mentor is there with you every step of the way and helps you see the things you don't see and helps you see the questions you need answers to. A passive mentor is someone who you can ask questions to once you have realized yourself that you have that question. The problem here is, of course, the unknown unknowns.

I co-facilitated quite a few engineering leadership programs that took 2-3 days each. They were very good and we did a lot of valuable work, but we always struggled to follow up on them. Most people I worked with wanted to be good at their job and so, given the time and space available to them, put in a really good effort to learn, think, and practice. But after that they were back in the hubbub and the daily grind, with its competing priorities and not enough time to think, study, and reflect.

One of the first things to establish when someone wants to become a manager is why? Why do they want to become a manager? Is it for the love of organizing the work of a group of people and a desire to help these people grow and develop? Or are there other factors at work?

In the early days of Google, when we interviewed someone for a management role, we always tried to establish why the candidate had become a manager. Was it for all the positive reasons mentioned above, or was it perhaps defensive move from a sentient codebase? We wanted our managers to be technical, because how are you going to support a group of great engineers if you were never at least a very competent engineer yourself? The responses of some manager candidates to our technical and coding interview questions were often epic. Our favorite was "I got people for that", which pretty much resulted in an immediate 1.0 strong no hire :-)

By the way I do not ascribe to the sometimes heard view that a great manager can manage everything, even if they do not know anything about the subject matter. This is maybe theoretically true in the limit case of the infinitely skilled manager with zero knowledge, but down here on planet reality it is impossible to get anything done without understanding the problem domain.

One of the wrong reasons for becoming a manager is that it gives you power. Yes it does, and if you want it, you are patently unsuitable for the job. As a manager you really do have power and that is why managers who are underskilled and overasked are so problematic: They wield the power, but not wisely, which gives rise to all sorts of problems.

Another suboptimal reason to want to become a manager is because of cultural expectations. I have worked with more than one person who wanted to become a manager because their parents thought they were morons for being in their job for five years already and still not a manager. "What is wrong with you? Your cousin has been in their job for four years and they are already a Vice-President!" This kind of pressure leads to people who want the title but not the job. I hopefully won't have to detail how that will work out once they get there...

In one case we dealt with this by asking that colleague what the most amazing bad ass car was that you could possibly own according to their status oriented family. The answer was some crazy luxurious Mercedes convertible. "Buy one", we told them, "we know what you earn, you can afford it..." It didn’t solve all their problems, but it did keep the family at bay for a bit.

Really if I had my way, first-time managers would be enrolled in a year long program of 1.5 days per week with half a day for study and homework and a full day of classes and practice sessions. I know it's expensive, but really, can you afford to have your managers suck?