“But you inspire 6 people to work at peak capacity so that the team is as effective as 9 people, and they all say you give a shit about them, their growth, and doing the work that actually matters with guidance and appropriate comp adjustment. Be a manager.”
If you work with incompetent middle management, move. When you work for a great manager in a great team, you feel bulletproof.
I’m a manager, and this strip nicely brought out my main insecurities about the role. Thanks for pointing out that there are other things one may contribute with, despite losing (or never having) abilities in the three mentioned aspects. It’s not easy to let go of depth, and exchange it for width and longer term thinking.
I can respect a manager that can’t do these things, if they can delegate and choreograph people well. Sometimes being a good manager simply requires one to be able to corral and give support where needed. They can admit to not being capable of things and respect their reports that do those things well.
If they can’t do anything and just take a top down, demanding approach all the time, they’re useless.
Technically, neither of the skills mentioned are necessary for the job of making unreasonable demands and berating workers for exercising their rights 🤷
Completely agreed on the first point, but unfortunately the latter isn’t always the case.
It’s become almost the norm for both individuals and companies to achieve ridiculous levels of success through abusive cunning in spite of a near-total lack of expertise and effort compared to competitors and coworkers.
And, to be fair, successful engineers/whatever rarely want to be in management. They’ve identified they’re great at what they do and happy to continue doing it if the pay is right. A lot end up moving to management because the pay tends to be higher and then not being great and hating it.
Great managers are great at managing people and processes, not necessarily doing the processes. They understand human psychology to inspire, motivate, and bring teams together. That’s a rare find because that’s largely misunderstood, unfortunately. This is super frustrating because there are plenty of great books/seminars on how to identify and be great managers. The information is out there.
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