Good managers realize they have to be <i>managers</i> and can't do an effective job of engineering (this is certainly true of a first-level manager with more than a few reports).<p>The best managers I've had have sighed wistfully and wished out loud that they could do engineering, but made a conscious decision not to. The really good managers will be very interested in how you are getting along with your career, and it will often not come as a surprise to them when it comes time for you to leave ("time to go, grasshopper").<p>The bad managers were bad for numerous reasons, but many of the worst were micro-managing, getting in the way, having technical <i>arguments</i>, dishing out unreasoned mandates to solve things one way or another, or generally trying to be Boss Engineers without actually being part of the team. Sucked hard. The times I've switched jobs underneath these bozos, I've called it "Firing my boss."
Those answers are great, but they're also very high level and general.<p>One of the best pieces of advice, badly paraphrased below, I've heard from a military context.<p><pre><code> "Any time you instruct a subordinate, you must be
prepared to deliver the same instruction every single
time they perform that action, and expect it to be
performed in that way until otherwise instructed."
</code></pre>
This is a warning about micromanagement, flippant decisions and how to delegate. For example, if you tell someone off-hand not to bother you with X, be prepared to <i>never be bothered with X again</i>. If you tell someone how to shine their shoes, be prepared to tell them how to shine their shoes <i>every single day</i>.<p>Again, this is an a military context where orders flow downhill, but the same applies in other areas of business. An experienced manager knows where they need to set the boundaries within which their staff operate, with as much autonomy and initiative as possible. An inexperienced manager doesn't understand how to balance this equation.<p>PS if anyone has a better formulation of the above, please share =D
So at one point I took on a management job, stepping up from a (lead) developer. I felt like the whole thing was kind of a train wreck and I am still slowly analyzing the black box recordings from it. This was my first time having direct reports that were not one or two interns and managing a team of seven other highly intelligent people was quite a chore in itself. What bugged me is that I could never tell if the problem was the environment or something I was doing. I tried to be fair. I mentored people when I could help. I tried to not be overbearing when I had nothing to add. I present challenging problems to the people who I thought would find them interesting. I advocated for my guys to the upper management, trying to improve working conditions. I insisted on being flexible, discarding what was slowing us down, and adopting what was good. None of that seemed to help: my dev team learned to resent me for delivering the bad news (for example the dev team was the fallback for doing data entry for weeks on end when nobody else could handle it and we had no time to finish better data entry tools because of it), and my boss(es) learned to resent me for not delivering what they expected.<p>I know that there were quite a few problems above me. Lack of leadership carries far and wide and there was a disconnect between what the products did and what the management thought it did. Lack of money (think lack of compensation, lack of tools, lack of time for anything but immediate returns) did not help either. I do keep questioning whether I was doing all the wrong things or if I was put in a situation designed for me to fail, or perhaps both.<p>After I left I understand the company hired three different people to replace me: a manager, a dev lead, and a support engineer. I suppose that's some kind of a sign that I was trying to do too many things at once. Most of the engineering team also left after I did. The least I could do is give them the great recommendations they all deserved so all of them moved onto exciting new pastures. However, I cannot help but feel like I failed at this task that I felt sure I could tackle and I don't understand why.<p>Please excuse the rant. These types of topics always trigger those same feelings in me.<p>Edit: now I work as a developer on 2-3 person teams. I have no reports. I get to be productive again! I can write code that doesn't have to suck to compensate for poorly chosen deadlines. This is good for the soul. I do miss leading a team though; not managing but really leading. One of my proudest moments was when I was allowed to follow a system of estimates and sprints I put together and for 8 weeks my team delivered on schedule and exactly what was promised. That was one of my more joyful moments.
the top answer is really well done, but lacks the gem from the second answer: "One of the major rookie mistakes I have made and see many others make is the assumption that human motivation is tied to economic outcomes"<p>put another way - you might have a personal ambition to have a title like "VP of Engineering" or make $500k a year, but most others don't. so if you project your motivations / world view on those who work for you, you will have a bad time building a great team with a great culture. knowing what your people value is really important and will help you get the best work from your team.
I surely agree with most of what's posted there - a majority of it is straightforward common sense that's barely even specific to management.<p>"Don't procrastinate, communicate clearly" are to management what "eat less, exercise" is to losing weight or "only buy things you need, spend less than you earn" is to saving money.<p>The problem isn't managers that they haven't read this compilation of checklists or its equivalent in any of the thousands of management books out there.<p>The problem is the brokenness of management as a role in general.<p>Too many organizations are stuck in an broken structure which makes management the most direct if not only way to advance in terms of status, pay, autonomy or all three.<p>The end result are incompetent managers who need to be taught common sense or unhappy ones who are far better suited to other roles, but recognize them as dead-ends.<p>If becoming a manager stops being desirable for all the wrong reasons you won't have to remind your new, inexperienced managers not to be lazy or not to manage by intimidation.
The single most common mistake I see managers making is assuming that their job is to manage the people rather than the project, closely followed by trying to micro-manage the project itself. Trust and delegation are key to all of this.<p>A good manager looks after a project not its people, concentrates on the big picture while letting others deal with the small details. A good manager achieves this by delegation.<p>Assuming you've hired the right people in the first place you should be able to let people get on with their jobs — if you try to do their jobs for them you will fail through lack of expertise or lack of time.<p>I would add that iteration is also key - a manager should check on a regular basis that what has been planned is what is being done and that if not ensure there is time to change what is being done as early as possible. Good staff and good managers appreciate that some things will take a few iterations to get right but it is better to iterate than to take the first version of everything (and foolish to plan for this) - not iterating leads to over-design and slow progress as everyone desperately tries to second-guess all the situations their work might have to cover.<p>Iteration is also the best way to get a feel for individual workers' pace and abilities.
When I first started work out of college I kept a notebook of "things I like/don't like" about my managers, mostly as a training piece for myself. One of the top qualities one of my managers had was his comfort level with admitting to me "I don't know the answer to that, but I think I know where we can find it".<p>Probably summed up as something like "check your ego at the door".
This goes for not only managers, but any member of an organization -- pretending to know something when you really don't and being afraid to ask questions is a <i>huge</i> red flag to me for both managers and employees alike.<p>And back to the list, IMO that's a pretty good list, especially coming from one person's experiences.
Problems I found with the top answer:<p>Performance management: It is highly unlikely as somebody new to the team, and brand new to management, that you can work out who the high performers are and who the under performers are within the first few weeks. If you get it wrong then by making it official and documenting by email you will get the entire teams backs up.<p>Not explicitly managing resources: Really bad advice. How do you know what is important within the first few weeks? Often you will only have a high level view of what the team does within the first few weeks. Try and do this too quickly and again it can backfire.
There are some old IEEE articles on management for techies that, in my humble opinion, are simply brilliant.<p>Delegation: (usually the first failure I see)
<a href="http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/art5.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/art5.html</a><p>And the rest:
<a href="http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/index.html</a>
The hard part for me was that managing engineers takes a lot of time and energy, it's not possible to be a full time engineer and a full time manager.<p>Over time your understanding of the technical details of the work your team is doing will atrophy and where once you may have been an expert on all aspects of the system you must now rely on the judgement of the senior members of your team when making decisions. This is hard for a lot of people, to know that you don't know enough to make a decision and then to trust your team enough to help you make the right one.<p>Building that trust is important, because without it you'll make bad (or at least uninformed) technical decisions. it's easier if you moved up into a managerial role from a team you worked on instead of being hired to manage a team you just met.
What really always rubbed me up the wrong way was approaching me to come up with the question "OK, how long then?". Because "managers" tend to ask this when neither scope nor current state of the project are visible, and are then getting offended when one points out to them that it's an impossible question. They then usually proceed to ask you to just make something, clearly demonstrating that they don't want to improve the disaster state of the project or care for your opinion in any shape or form, but instead prefer some randomly made up number.<p>So whenever I hear this question in that very particular tone, I already plan my exit strategy because I know it's going to be a train wreck.
A number of the points in the top answer are really symptoms of not being aware of what is going on with your people. One of the fatal flaws (for the manager if not the company) I have observed in poor managers is a lack of spending time with the team members.<p>At least in tech, many managers are promoted from individual contributor roles and they only carve out a little time to be a manager. Usually that means they don't know what is going on, and when issues do come to their attention those issues have been festering for quite a while.
My experience is that the more experienced the manager, the more he will remove himself from all conversations, the rookies always talk about themselves.
The biggest mistake I see managers make is that they think they are there to deliver completed projects to upper management. They are playing project manager when they should be playing people manager.<p>A good manager's job is to make sure their direct reports have everything they need to get their job done. The proper information, tools, training, time, motivation, etc. If they have the proper staff the rest of the success will stem from that.<p>I have employed that as a manager and expect it as a direct report and have only ever seen success when it is employeed both in the military and the private sector.
Mistake #1: It's not about you, it's about them.
Mistake #2: Not having frequent one-on-one meetings with your direct reports. For this I recommend you listen to: <a href="http://www.manager-tools.com/manager-tools-basics" rel="nofollow">http://www.manager-tools.com/manager-tools-basics</a>. One-on-ones are considered the core of the management trinity.
Mistake #3: Not giving timely, frequent feedback.
Mistake #4: Not coaching your team to help them grow.
Mistake #5: Not wanting to let go of your individual contributor responsibilities.<p>Cheers!
OP lists all the issues from the point of view of management.<p>From the employee point of view, here are some common manager problems:<p>Employee comes in earlier, leaves earlier than manager: manager assumes employee is only working the hours they see; they act on this and insult/piss off the employee with their assumption of slacking.<p>Manager optimizes group for his own metrics e.g. maximize resources/minimize commitments to increase likelihood of meeting all objectives. Company loses (spending way too much for the minimal accomplishments); employee loses when manager won't permit taking on anything but the most mundane projects.<p>Manager cherry-picks opinions in group to justify the approach manager Wants to take, instead of letting the experienced employees make their own plan. Managers don't 'get to' make decisions; they are supposed to gather information to make the Right decision.
I think the biggest mistake new managers make is to forget that you are principally managing people. Even though day to day there's a lot of email, meetings, project management and office politics it pays to remember that you succeed through your staff as much if not more than through your personal efforts.
> <i>Lowering the bar - Inexperienced managers have low standards, or lower their standards, in an effort to make a hire. Good managers know that they're much better off keeping a high bar and waiting for the right candidate.</i><p>I'm facing this argument right now, and it's unclear to me on what my manager's opinion on this is. I'd rather not trade quality. While I agree with the quoted answer, I can't think of a good argument to back it up, and the answer doesn't provide one. Can someone give something more concrete here, especially something more concrete than, "well, a weak hire will cost you more in training / patience / bringing them up to speed / constant mentoring"? (or is that really the argument?)
Software development.
1. Don't have experience programming(medium is okay for fast debug).
2. Don't have experince in meeting room.Altitude
E.g don't play with your phone in meeting room
don't voice opinion.. It you don't talk how people would
knew it ?
3. Follow Up Client And Vendor .Some new born or over experience take think as simple.(Serious Issue).
4. No Money Manager.Just wanted to request people work for them without money(Serious issue).<p><i></i> There's a lot to write here.. but above seem important to me dealing with problematic manager.
"Thinking too small - A successful leader is going to create growth and opportunity for their team. A leader who thinks small is unlikely to do either. Instead of planning how to grow your business 100%, plan how to grow it 10x or 100x."<p>This attitude could potentially backfire. It can lead to a closed-loop that eventually results in dishonesty to meet unattainable numbers. Better to plan growth empirically and adjusting for things like regression to the mean at the team and company level.
I probably have made all of those mistakes at one time or another. Some of the mistakes where bad enough to nearly sink a company. Hopefully I make fewer of them now.<p>It is humbling to have a great team actually letting you manage them, especially when you mess up and the tell you and they let you learn from your mistakes.<p>When you have teams like that it is easy to manage. If you do, take really good care of your team. They are worth it.
Micromanagement is the #1 problem I've seen with inexperienced managers (and some experienced ones, too). I'm surprised the article didn't mention that, although a couple of the commenters did, at least.<p>You have to hire good people that you can trust to do the job, up front. Then you have to trust them to do the job. It's as simple as that.
A handful:<p>Not delegating.<p>Not working through others.<p>Not managing a group's resources.<p>Promoting one's self while failing to support one's boss.<p>Appropriating others' work as one's own.<p>Not growing relationships with other groups in a non-protective, non-clique, non-silo'd way.<p>Following, rather than questioning, organisational policies (i.e. not managing upwards).
One thing I didn't see on any of the lists is ethics. Truly world class managers and team builders are also very careful about ethics, and see it as more important than their project, job and career.
off topic, but wow, quora is actually letting me read past the first answer without logging in. they are finally wising up after I ignore the call-to-signup for the umpteenth time?
Not knowing when someone has to go or worse, having the confidence to make them go. Far too many cannot organize their thoughts properly to justify it to themselves or even HR.