One of the issues I've had that isn't mentioned here is the value of mutual trust. Communication and trust are the two cornerstones of a really solid manager <-> managee relationship in my experience. Whether that lack of trust manifests itself as micro-management, constant check-ins, or a constant threat of surveillance it can easily turn an above average performer into an apathetic and demoralized employee.
I used to work remotely for a company that spanned more than a few timezones, with a wonderful daily team manager and a not-so-great weekly department manager. Learning that my minutes and output were constantly monitored completely destroyed my trust with the latter, and had me searching within the week. My reaction to that was so strong I actually considered it a fortune when I was laid off for unrelated reasons rather than having to quit.
I would be reprimanded for signing on five minutes later than usual despite being on a team of individuals that spanned multiple countries, and would get a questioning ping if I was offline for more than 10 minutes (especially problematic if you're the type of programmer to write or plan code on the whiteboard / paper first). Extremely draining to deal with that sort of nonsense and mistrust.
Please, managers of the world, trust your employees! You have performance metrics for a reason!
IME this kind of experience comes when you have a manager who has no fundamental understanding of what it is that they are managing and has no particular reason to trust you.
A manager who can monitor your output by reading your pull requests simply won't engage in this type of behavior whereas a manager who can't will usually instinctively gravitate to terrible metrics like "does he show dedication by being in at 9am rather than 9:05am"?
Managers should form a very deep understanding of whom to trust and why or understand on a very deep level what it is that they are managing.
Managers who cannot do either of those things should be terminated with prejudice.
>You have performance metrics for a reason!
As far as developing software goes, every single performance metric is terrible.
An old co-worker of mine used to work for a company that made flight simulators. He said his manager would stand in the front foyer on the 2nd floor and make notes of who arrived after 9:00am.
This is very true in india. Almost most of the managers go in to management because they can't code and to evalulate an employee they take every metric other than looking in to the commits.
But also for teams to be successful, employees have to be able to trust their managers. I just quit a job after a month because, within that short time, my manager twice misrepresented the scope of a task so he could either leave early or have the day off.
I knew after those incidents that there was no point in continuing. It would be foolish to trust someone in any larger way who would casually treat a new employee in that fashion.
I think this article misses an important point, which is that managers, or at least line managers, are often the messenger for decisions made in upper management.
If I think back on the jobs I've had in the past, it's very rare for me to have issues with line managers. However, I had serious doubts about the competency of upper management in multiple companies that I've worked for.
In this case, unless upper management recognise the problems that the line manager is highlighting, there's often not much more the line manager can do. Seeing as upper are (in my experience) frequently out of touch with the repercussions of their decisions, line managers should accept that they can only do what they can with what they're given (either that or leave).
As manager in the middle you often feel helpless. You want to help your people but you have nothing to offer. Can't give raises, no place to promote people, top management doesn't support your initiatives. It's a difficult place to be in.
I worked as CTO for a startup, even as CTO I couldn't do anything to help the team, and I had to focus on writing more code than managing. The CEO always had the last word. In the end, I told him that I just want to be a software developer and you can come to me when you're in trouble. The big perk, no more long hours... The bad, I no longer feel any ownership for what I do.
Can relate too. I'm going through this right now and it kills me. I'm not a real manager but I have a number of devs I oversee in some aspects and it's obvious to me some are underused, undervalued, or underchallenged. The problem might be that as a lead I empathize /too much/, but it drives me crazy that in the end I'm just a proxy for communication with very little power for change. I feel like I'm always making up excuses for the company's decisions and that's not good either.
Middle management people are the graphite control rods of a nuclear reactor, they slow down the process enough to be useful and act as sacrificial elements in the power plant.
"Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves."(Don't get too attached to the names used, Rao intentionally makes everyone into a miserable cog in the machine)
While I agree with your analogy, graphite is actually a moderator which (in a nuclear context) accelerates reactions. This was a factor for Chernobyl [1] where the rods had graphite tips, so a scram had a momentary rapid increase in reactivity. This burst of reactivity caused temperature to momentarily spike. The heat produced steam which increased pressure and the vessel exploded.
> I think this article misses an important point, which is that managers, or at least line managers, are often the messenger for decisions made in upper management.
You are 100% correct on this. In many, if not most companies, though definitely not all or everywhere, line managers have limited freedom as to what they can decide to do with their teams in terms of people, process, and technology without having to "get permission" or have the blessing of more senior leaders. Certainly hiring new people to the team, the line manager will have nearly full control over a yes or no, barring some extenuating circumstance. Although with firing a team member, it is quite the process, not just because of the corporate HR and legal red tape but also because frequently senior leaders will be interested in or meddle in the the decision and process of letting a team member go.
Finally, as you said about the messenger role, it is very common for senior leaders to have their weekly or monthly or bi-weekly or whatever meeting with their managers where they cover issues of policy or process and certain decisions will get made there and then need to be funneled down to individual teams. It is here where line managers, even if they don't agree, may be forced to deliver a chance (and the associated announcement of said change) to the team and there is little, if anything, they can do about it.
On the other hand, there are strong line managers and weak line managers. Strong line managers will be move actively involved in cross-cutting team concerns, particularly those that may affect their own team. And as such, they may be influencers themselves, in which case they do have a lot more sway because in many cases, they will have been the proponent or even instigator of a change that does get rolled across and out to multiple teams. Weak line managers, on the other hand, may suffer from lack of experience, poor peer relationships, or some other factors that leave them in the lurch and that means their role is much more marginalized in the context of the wider organization.
I am this exact situation. I love my manager, simply one of the best i've ever worked with. But he is simply is messenger for poor decisions that are made by couple of incompetent people above him.
I am not sure what can be done about incompetent people being promoted to position of power where they make horrendous misinformed decisions. Often its too late before the magnitude of their fuckups is visible, usually these people move on to different orgs with their pumped up resumes while lower level people scramble to undo the damage.
There's a director-level IT manager where I work which has made my personal job a hassle for years.
There's a follow-on business process to our main process, which was a terrible mess. I wrote a program in a year and a half which vastly simplified the process. The director is mad, because his team of 10 contractors has been unable to write a successful version for 4 years now. (Hundreds of people use my software every day. There are still no production programs using his.) I even told his team's manager how to fix what's broken about their program, and they wouldn't listen. (And then the director fired that manager.)
He wants to own the process because it's important. He needs it to line his nest. So he finally got moves made to put a sympathetic middle manager in place to force me (and my direct boss) to hand over the program to his team to maintain. As they say, if you can't code it, take it over and act like you wrote it. (And charge internal groups $1000/user/year for the privilege of using it.)
Now my job involves improving another follow-on process that's also horribly broken, even worse than the first. And I just found out at lunch today that the director MADE HIS BONES, fifteen years ago, by IMPLEMENTING the horrible process that makes all these other follow-on processes both necessary and nightmarish.
<Queue the Obama WTF GIF>
So my new quote is: "Never attribute to incompetence what can be explained as ruthlessness driven by an inferiority complex."
I'm tired now, so I won't go into how I saw this behavior distort correct outcomes and delay business improvement for personal gain, a long time ago, at another Fortune 250.
> I am not sure what can be done about incompetent people being promoted to position of power where they make horrendous misinformed decisions.
A lot of the time this is because of the Peter Principle.[1] There are ways to combat it, though. A friend a Google explained to me that to get around this there, before being promoted you have to take on the responsibilities of the position you are looking to advance to for a few (or six?) months. Once you've proven that you can do the job passably well, they'll consider you for the promotion.
The idea is that you prevent advancing someone from an engineering role to a managerial role only to find you've lost a good engineer and gained a crappy manager, which is a double blow (ignoring for this example that engineering and managerial tracks are separate at Google AFAIK, and managers actually get paid a bit less at the same level).
In corporate IT, it is an accepted practice to promote people who don't have hands on experience, or who did the job 20 years ago and haven't followed up on the industry trends. They have a hard time admitting that they don't know and refuse to listen to the competent people in their teams. They don't even know who is competent and who is faking it.
Save up a lot of money and build a large network of contacts with whom you have a reputation for being a badass...then you will have no fear of repercussions for speaking out frankly about things.
Eventually it will go to your head and you'll be viewed as a brash, arrogant, out-of-touch upper manager who throws their weight and ego around without appreciation for the repercussions of their horrendous misinformed decisions.
You either die a hero or live to see yourself become the problem.
Isn't it then incumbent upon your manager to challenge the incompetents above him, or work round them? There has to be a large body of literature and practice on this problem.
The article is based on data that includes, among other points, that the individual manager accounts for 70% of the variance in employee engagement, and that 50% of Americans had left their job because of the individual manager. If you want to argue that the individual managers are not important and the bad effects come from higher up, you'd have to show some counter evidence to these points. (I am personally about to leave a job because of my individual manager, so I'm inclined to believe the article and study pretty easily).
Well, 30% that's not from the individual managers still leaves plenty of people who have never seen this even once in their careers. So there's plenty of, if not exactly counter evidence, then... counter experience?
I once had a manager who had a bunch of people leaving. They were not leaving him, the manager; they were leaving the situation the division was in that put the engineers in difficult working conditions. But the manager had HR interview several of his people, to see if he, the manager, was the problem. He said, "I had to know." (Of course, if he's that honest and that willing to look, you have a pretty good idea that he's not the problem, even before HR comes back with the results.)
> "If you want to argue that the individual managers are not important and the bad effects come from higher up, you'd have to show some counter evidence to these points."
I'm not here to dispute the figures that were shared in the article, I'm suggesting that the interpretation of those figures was off, as it overlooks the aspects of management that are out of the control of the line/middle manager.
Furthermore, I'm not disputing your own reasons for leaving, as I'm not suggesting the competency of line managers can't be the reason people leave their job.
If the individual manager is bad enough for long enough to make people leave, that in and of itself means there is a supervision problem that extends at least 2-3 levels above that manager.
I came here to make this exact point. I would further state that in tech businesses, tools shift, interests shift, and markets shift. Smart employees respond to that regardless of how amazing their manager might be.
It's probably easier for managers to overrate their skills and performance because the problems they cause are often not overt; if parts of their team are underperforming, the knee-jerk assessment is that "there's something wrong with Joe" rather than "there's something wrong with our process" or "there's something wrong with what I'm doing."
Some of my worst experiences with management involved cases of serious micromanagement. I'd say if you're micromanaging, there's a 99.9 percent chance that you're a bozo and you don't belong in the position you're in even if you had initially earned it. You have trust issues with your employees and you've failed to build a team and environment that allows people to effectively manage themselves.
The best mangers I've known are the ones who are minimally involved. People who are given the space to make choices, be creative, and fail every so often, will often figure out how to manage themselves.
I'd argue that people usually leave both managers and companies because companies too often fail to recognize the broken patterns of managers. This is anecdotal, but I worked at one place where more than half of the development team(those with the most talent) quit within a span of 2 weeks, and somehow upper management decided it was not the fault of our tyrannical manager and instead replaced those positions with junior developers they could underpay and abuse. It's all the more insulting when you can point out the problems and provide actual solutions, and the aloof men in suits on Mount Olympus allow the problem to fester. I might have stayed for another year had they booted out our manager.
The fact that most people have stories of terrible management is astounding, and it doesn't say very much for whatever training managers receive(if any?).
The trust and minimal involvement are really key here, the best managers I've ever worked with have been enablers rather than taskmasters. Managers that remove roadblocks, provide you with exactly the tools you need, insulate you from unnecessary cross-chatter, and just let you kill it with as few distractions as possible.
Those sorts of enablers are how you not only maintain, but increase the output of your developers.
You often have micromanagement and abandonment at the same time. They are so busy micromanagement their people while they neglect making the decisions that they need to make. If somebody steps up, they push back. Everybody avoids moving and are just waiting until the micromanager has time.
> The best mangers I've known are the ones who are minimally involved. People who are given the space to make choices, be creative, and fail every so often, will often figure out how to manage themselves.
In those cases, did you feel you shared values with those managers? Or were they indifferent to your values, and just left you alone?
I've experienced both kinds of low involvement, but I was definitely referring to cases where we shared values.
A case of indifference is still preferable to tyranny, though it obviously comes with its own set of problems. The biggest issue I have with uninvolved managers is the conflict between knowing what's expected versus the level of autonomy I should have. This problem is not isolated, of course. But an uninvolved manager may grant a lot of autonomy while failing to make it clear to their employees what sort of decisions they cannot male autonomously. As an employee, I will only ask so many questions before deciding the system is ridiculous and then overriding it. That's just my nature. If something is so important to a process, like communicating with a bunch of anonymous suits on Mount Olympus before a major release of one particular product, that information should be handed down to me. I shouldn't have to pry every detail out of management to get my job done, and occasionally they'll be punished when I make an arbitrary decision.
A good manager should be able to provide relevant information and facilitate the product process while staying out of the way. If they're always too busy attending meetings outside the team, then they'll reap what they sow and have no one to blame but themselves.
By the way, I do not make character judgments on most managers. Most of the people who've managed me are great people outside the office setting.
I'd agree that micromanaging is a bad sign. Too often I get micromanaging about style critiques like "turn this into one if statement instead of nested ones and it's more clear", but absolutely no comments on the meat of a significant refactor. To be clear, I think style rules are important, but this is the same guy who writes 150+ character lines with ternaries like they're going out of style.
I have been managing large teams (Anywhere from 100 to 300 people) and in my experience I would phrase it differently.
1. In a going concern, which has found traction, a manager is often the _reason_ for people to leave the company.
2. In a company that is not finding traction, or the larger view of its direction is obfuscated, managers are the reason people _stay_ back to work.
This manager being the end-all of association comes from military knowledge that you fight because of allegiance to your battalion, cause and the country - in that order.
In an knowledge enterprise, these constructs exist, but with almost equal weightage.
The best manager cannot make an employee stay back if the company is not going anywhere, or if the cause is not evident.
The worst manager will lose employees even if the company is going bonkers.
Totally agree. If the company has enough traction and I have a decent shares/options package with a clear exit strategy in sight then I'd stay even if my boss was a wild baboon and my job mostly involved shoveling monkey shit.
If you're a manager in a high traction company and you're losing employees regularly, you should seriously consider finding another career.
This is a really insightful comment. I came here to say I'm the counter-example to the article, in that I left a pretty good manager at a company that was clearly failing.
This article feels like one of these things where someone's trying to fit something messy and human into a simple, clean narrative.
I didn't interpret their comment that way. It's common to have a handful of managers under you, but reference to their reports as your managees as well. That easily reaches 100-200 people.
At my previous job, I left due to the company, not the management.
My direct supervisor was great. He was a good manager on most levels.
I left because the company had no future, they weren't going bankrupt, but they weren't growing either. I never got a pay rise, probably never would. My benefits actually shrunk as time went on, staff social functions were cut (e.g. team lunches), use of networking funds became more restricted, and my work environment became less flexible.
In fact, the only reason I considered staying was my manager and coworkers.
People leave poor working environments, whether it's a company or a manager causing that poor environment.
Yea, its too easy to say people leave managers, but it was never in my case. I think it varies between industry. With the software companies, the churn is mostly due to folks looking out for better opportunities..
Me personally almost always looked outside due to availability of better opportunities. The argument that people leave managers makes sense only if you are in the best possible job/company you can get with your skill set (which is a very small %) and you somehow got a rift with the manager big enough to leave.
But it could be different in other domains/industries where people stick with the same company till their retirement..
As somberi commented awhile ago, people leave due to managers -> company -> cause, in roughly that order. So even good managers will lose people if the company has traction issues or the cause is unclear or there is no future. So it absolutely can happen and it is fair to say that a single manager's performance, in isolation, is not the only reason for retention.
You don't just leave a bad manager. You escape! Emotionally it is deflating, defeating, a real grind that affects your whole life if your work situation sucks.
No, people leave companies too. Using my throwaway account because I don't want my name attached to this.
I went contract-to-hire at my current job. When it came time to come on full-time, the offer they made was far too low to accept. The owner of the company made a big deal out of the bonus and at the time I believed him. I held out for $5k more before accepting.
Fast forward a year later and I'm really looking forward to this bonus. It was 5% of my salary, basically an extra paycheck. I was expecting at least three times that because of what he said during the negotiation. I started looking that day and am interviewing with two companies.
I've since realized that I just don't want to work for consultants anymore. You're being farmed out and your labor is being arbitraged. This incentivizes them to dick you on comp. I know in his mind it's just business, but I don't want that in my life anymore.
So while the thesis of this article may hold for a certain segment of the labor market, it certainly doesn't hold for all of them. Some segments just suck. Conflicts of interest in these segments invariably pit line workers against management and no amount of manager cordialness or professionalism will prevent turnover.
Sure there are a few workplaces that have ironed out conflicts of interest and so can attract the cream of the crop, these places can build nice engineer caves and then personal relationships rather than endemic conflicts of interest become the dominant cultural factor that drives turnover. But these guys trying to tell the rest of the world's managers how to run a shop is just profoundly naive.
I'm the blog author, Rich Archbold from Intercom. Just to clarify …
I wrote this blog, with the exaggerated / cliched title, to try to speak to the large cohort of over-confident, under-skilled and often lacking-enough-self-awareness, managers out there. I was (and often still am) a member of this cohort. Being a great manager all the time is really hard and almost impossible IMHO.
The goal was to hopefully try and generate some more self-awareness and introspection and thus make life a little fairer, more pleasant, more growth-oriented and hopefully more successful for all concerned.
I wasn't trying to deny or downplay that people also leave their jobs for all of the other reasons highlighted by folks here.
#1. People get hired for what they are good, their skills and then get promoted (to management) for same technical/IC skills not for the MGMT skills. No MGMT ramp-up. No MGMT tools. No MGMT framework. You are now tasked to lead a team. it's surely will fail.
#2. Next the mindset. Typical mindset when you move from technical (or any IC) role to MGMT and the higher you go in MGMT should completely change.... unfortunately its not so easy to give up the control. MGMT is about making others successful... giving up your control to others is very frightening and often causes identity issues... moving from do it all (as an IC) to ask_and_inspire is not easy...
#3. Assuming you overcome these two... typical problem of MGMT/leadership is they try to find, "What's the matter?" where as the focus should always be on "What matters to you (an individual/ICs in team)"
Readit News
I used to work remotely for a company that spanned more than a few timezones, with a wonderful daily team manager and a not-so-great weekly department manager. Learning that my minutes and output were constantly monitored completely destroyed my trust with the latter, and had me searching within the week. My reaction to that was so strong I actually considered it a fortune when I was laid off for unrelated reasons rather than having to quit.
I would be reprimanded for signing on five minutes later than usual despite being on a team of individuals that spanned multiple countries, and would get a questioning ping if I was offline for more than 10 minutes (especially problematic if you're the type of programmer to write or plan code on the whiteboard / paper first). Extremely draining to deal with that sort of nonsense and mistrust.
Please, managers of the world, trust your employees! You have performance metrics for a reason!
A manager who can monitor your output by reading your pull requests simply won't engage in this type of behavior whereas a manager who can't will usually instinctively gravitate to terrible metrics like "does he show dedication by being in at 9am rather than 9:05am"?
Managers should form a very deep understanding of whom to trust and why or understand on a very deep level what it is that they are managing.
Managers who cannot do either of those things should be terminated with prejudice.
>You have performance metrics for a reason!
As far as developing software goes, every single performance metric is terrible.
To me being on time is just a very basic low level requirement of being a professional.
As the initial commenter said: trust goes both ways. Turning up on time is a good way to show your manager that you can be trusted.
Edit: Actually, turning up on time may not make your manager trust you more, but turning up late will definitely make them trust you less.
https://hbr.org/1998/03/the-set-up-to-fail-syndrome
https://sites.insead.edu/facultyresearch/research/doc.cfm?di...
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8166701
I knew after those incidents that there was no point in continuing. It would be foolish to trust someone in any larger way who would casually treat a new employee in that fashion.
If I think back on the jobs I've had in the past, it's very rare for me to have issues with line managers. However, I had serious doubts about the competency of upper management in multiple companies that I've worked for.
In this case, unless upper management recognise the problems that the line manager is highlighting, there's often not much more the line manager can do. Seeing as upper are (in my experience) frequently out of touch with the repercussions of their decisions, line managers should accept that they can only do what they can with what they're given (either that or leave).
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But I've given up on ever getting a decent raise from a company. I've been prepared to switch companies every two years.
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The Gervais Principle is a great lens with which to look at company hierarchies and all people in any large organization should know about it: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
"Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves."(Don't get too attached to the names used, Rao intentionally makes everyone into a miserable cog in the machine)
[1] http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub913e_web.pd...
You are 100% correct on this. In many, if not most companies, though definitely not all or everywhere, line managers have limited freedom as to what they can decide to do with their teams in terms of people, process, and technology without having to "get permission" or have the blessing of more senior leaders. Certainly hiring new people to the team, the line manager will have nearly full control over a yes or no, barring some extenuating circumstance. Although with firing a team member, it is quite the process, not just because of the corporate HR and legal red tape but also because frequently senior leaders will be interested in or meddle in the the decision and process of letting a team member go.
Finally, as you said about the messenger role, it is very common for senior leaders to have their weekly or monthly or bi-weekly or whatever meeting with their managers where they cover issues of policy or process and certain decisions will get made there and then need to be funneled down to individual teams. It is here where line managers, even if they don't agree, may be forced to deliver a chance (and the associated announcement of said change) to the team and there is little, if anything, they can do about it.
On the other hand, there are strong line managers and weak line managers. Strong line managers will be move actively involved in cross-cutting team concerns, particularly those that may affect their own team. And as such, they may be influencers themselves, in which case they do have a lot more sway because in many cases, they will have been the proponent or even instigator of a change that does get rolled across and out to multiple teams. Weak line managers, on the other hand, may suffer from lack of experience, poor peer relationships, or some other factors that leave them in the lurch and that means their role is much more marginalized in the context of the wider organization.
I am not sure what can be done about incompetent people being promoted to position of power where they make horrendous misinformed decisions. Often its too late before the magnitude of their fuckups is visible, usually these people move on to different orgs with their pumped up resumes while lower level people scramble to undo the damage.
There's a director-level IT manager where I work which has made my personal job a hassle for years.
There's a follow-on business process to our main process, which was a terrible mess. I wrote a program in a year and a half which vastly simplified the process. The director is mad, because his team of 10 contractors has been unable to write a successful version for 4 years now. (Hundreds of people use my software every day. There are still no production programs using his.) I even told his team's manager how to fix what's broken about their program, and they wouldn't listen. (And then the director fired that manager.)
He wants to own the process because it's important. He needs it to line his nest. So he finally got moves made to put a sympathetic middle manager in place to force me (and my direct boss) to hand over the program to his team to maintain. As they say, if you can't code it, take it over and act like you wrote it. (And charge internal groups $1000/user/year for the privilege of using it.)
Now my job involves improving another follow-on process that's also horribly broken, even worse than the first. And I just found out at lunch today that the director MADE HIS BONES, fifteen years ago, by IMPLEMENTING the horrible process that makes all these other follow-on processes both necessary and nightmarish.
<Queue the Obama WTF GIF>
So my new quote is: "Never attribute to incompetence what can be explained as ruthlessness driven by an inferiority complex."
I'm tired now, so I won't go into how I saw this behavior distort correct outcomes and delay business improvement for personal gain, a long time ago, at another Fortune 250.
A lot of the time this is because of the Peter Principle.[1] There are ways to combat it, though. A friend a Google explained to me that to get around this there, before being promoted you have to take on the responsibilities of the position you are looking to advance to for a few (or six?) months. Once you've proven that you can do the job passably well, they'll consider you for the promotion.
The idea is that you prevent advancing someone from an engineering role to a managerial role only to find you've lost a good engineer and gained a crappy manager, which is a double blow (ignoring for this example that engineering and managerial tracks are separate at Google AFAIK, and managers actually get paid a bit less at the same level).
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
Eventually it will go to your head and you'll be viewed as a brash, arrogant, out-of-touch upper manager who throws their weight and ego around without appreciation for the repercussions of their horrendous misinformed decisions.
You either die a hero or live to see yourself become the problem.
I once had a manager who had a bunch of people leaving. They were not leaving him, the manager; they were leaving the situation the division was in that put the engineers in difficult working conditions. But the manager had HR interview several of his people, to see if he, the manager, was the problem. He said, "I had to know." (Of course, if he's that honest and that willing to look, you have a pretty good idea that he's not the problem, even before HR comes back with the results.)
I'm not here to dispute the figures that were shared in the article, I'm suggesting that the interpretation of those figures was off, as it overlooks the aspects of management that are out of the control of the line/middle manager.
Furthermore, I'm not disputing your own reasons for leaving, as I'm not suggesting the competency of line managers can't be the reason people leave their job.
Some of my worst experiences with management involved cases of serious micromanagement. I'd say if you're micromanaging, there's a 99.9 percent chance that you're a bozo and you don't belong in the position you're in even if you had initially earned it. You have trust issues with your employees and you've failed to build a team and environment that allows people to effectively manage themselves.
The best mangers I've known are the ones who are minimally involved. People who are given the space to make choices, be creative, and fail every so often, will often figure out how to manage themselves.
I'd argue that people usually leave both managers and companies because companies too often fail to recognize the broken patterns of managers. This is anecdotal, but I worked at one place where more than half of the development team(those with the most talent) quit within a span of 2 weeks, and somehow upper management decided it was not the fault of our tyrannical manager and instead replaced those positions with junior developers they could underpay and abuse. It's all the more insulting when you can point out the problems and provide actual solutions, and the aloof men in suits on Mount Olympus allow the problem to fester. I might have stayed for another year had they booted out our manager.
The fact that most people have stories of terrible management is astounding, and it doesn't say very much for whatever training managers receive(if any?).
Those sorts of enablers are how you not only maintain, but increase the output of your developers.
In those cases, did you feel you shared values with those managers? Or were they indifferent to your values, and just left you alone?
A case of indifference is still preferable to tyranny, though it obviously comes with its own set of problems. The biggest issue I have with uninvolved managers is the conflict between knowing what's expected versus the level of autonomy I should have. This problem is not isolated, of course. But an uninvolved manager may grant a lot of autonomy while failing to make it clear to their employees what sort of decisions they cannot male autonomously. As an employee, I will only ask so many questions before deciding the system is ridiculous and then overriding it. That's just my nature. If something is so important to a process, like communicating with a bunch of anonymous suits on Mount Olympus before a major release of one particular product, that information should be handed down to me. I shouldn't have to pry every detail out of management to get my job done, and occasionally they'll be punished when I make an arbitrary decision.
A good manager should be able to provide relevant information and facilitate the product process while staying out of the way. If they're always too busy attending meetings outside the team, then they'll reap what they sow and have no one to blame but themselves.
By the way, I do not make character judgments on most managers. Most of the people who've managed me are great people outside the office setting.
1. In a going concern, which has found traction, a manager is often the _reason_ for people to leave the company.
2. In a company that is not finding traction, or the larger view of its direction is obfuscated, managers are the reason people _stay_ back to work.
This manager being the end-all of association comes from military knowledge that you fight because of allegiance to your battalion, cause and the country - in that order.
In an knowledge enterprise, these constructs exist, but with almost equal weightage.
The best manager cannot make an employee stay back if the company is not going anywhere, or if the cause is not evident.
The worst manager will lose employees even if the company is going bonkers.
If you're a manager in a high traction company and you're losing employees regularly, you should seriously consider finding another career.
This article feels like one of these things where someone's trying to fit something messy and human into a simple, clean narrative.
Dead Comment
My direct supervisor was great. He was a good manager on most levels.
I left because the company had no future, they weren't going bankrupt, but they weren't growing either. I never got a pay rise, probably never would. My benefits actually shrunk as time went on, staff social functions were cut (e.g. team lunches), use of networking funds became more restricted, and my work environment became less flexible.
In fact, the only reason I considered staying was my manager and coworkers.
People leave poor working environments, whether it's a company or a manager causing that poor environment.
Me personally almost always looked outside due to availability of better opportunities. The argument that people leave managers makes sense only if you are in the best possible job/company you can get with your skill set (which is a very small %) and you somehow got a rift with the manager big enough to leave.
But it could be different in other domains/industries where people stick with the same company till their retirement..
I went contract-to-hire at my current job. When it came time to come on full-time, the offer they made was far too low to accept. The owner of the company made a big deal out of the bonus and at the time I believed him. I held out for $5k more before accepting.
Fast forward a year later and I'm really looking forward to this bonus. It was 5% of my salary, basically an extra paycheck. I was expecting at least three times that because of what he said during the negotiation. I started looking that day and am interviewing with two companies.
I've since realized that I just don't want to work for consultants anymore. You're being farmed out and your labor is being arbitraged. This incentivizes them to dick you on comp. I know in his mind it's just business, but I don't want that in my life anymore.
So while the thesis of this article may hold for a certain segment of the labor market, it certainly doesn't hold for all of them. Some segments just suck. Conflicts of interest in these segments invariably pit line workers against management and no amount of manager cordialness or professionalism will prevent turnover.
Sure there are a few workplaces that have ironed out conflicts of interest and so can attract the cream of the crop, these places can build nice engineer caves and then personal relationships rather than endemic conflicts of interest become the dominant cultural factor that drives turnover. But these guys trying to tell the rest of the world's managers how to run a shop is just profoundly naive.
I'm the blog author, Rich Archbold from Intercom. Just to clarify …
I wrote this blog, with the exaggerated / cliched title, to try to speak to the large cohort of over-confident, under-skilled and often lacking-enough-self-awareness, managers out there. I was (and often still am) a member of this cohort. Being a great manager all the time is really hard and almost impossible IMHO.
The goal was to hopefully try and generate some more self-awareness and introspection and thus make life a little fairer, more pleasant, more growth-oriented and hopefully more successful for all concerned.
I wasn't trying to deny or downplay that people also leave their jobs for all of the other reasons highlighted by folks here.
Thanks, Rich.
#1. People get hired for what they are good, their skills and then get promoted (to management) for same technical/IC skills not for the MGMT skills. No MGMT ramp-up. No MGMT tools. No MGMT framework. You are now tasked to lead a team. it's surely will fail.
#2. Next the mindset. Typical mindset when you move from technical (or any IC) role to MGMT and the higher you go in MGMT should completely change.... unfortunately its not so easy to give up the control. MGMT is about making others successful... giving up your control to others is very frightening and often causes identity issues... moving from do it all (as an IC) to ask_and_inspire is not easy...
#3. Assuming you overcome these two... typical problem of MGMT/leadership is they try to find, "What's the matter?" where as the focus should always be on "What matters to you (an individual/ICs in team)"
I enjoyed the article and IMHO it did well in encouraging self-awareness and introspection. I hope it goes far.