Dick is a bad manager
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Let's not forget the rest of the story: Dick is not a dick by accident. He chooses this management style to keep his people on edge. Do you recognize any of these other things...
1. Dick will omit one or two critical considerations about the task that you have no way of knowing. You're expected to gain this knowledge by osmosis or through the ether. It's your fault, not his, if you don't.
2. Dick assigns no priorities to any of the tasks he assigns. Since by definition, there will always be something not done, he will choose that thing to delve into. You can't win.
3. Dick waits until 4:55 to start a conversation. Once is an instance. Twice is a coincidence. After that, it's a pattern.
4. Dick only uses first names. If you don't know who he's talking about, you're the idiot.
5. Dick will pull his people off partially finished projects all the time for the emergency du jour. Then he will act as if he never did this when the bumped project is not done. Again it's always your fault, not his.
6. Dick will always find some outlying case no one has ever thought about and drill down 8 levels deep until he's the only one who knows what he's talking about. Everyone else is an idiot.
7. If Dick wants something, he yells. If he doesn't get it, he yells louder. If he still doesn't get it, he cusses.
8. When you least expect it, Dick is manic. The greatest guy in the world, as happy as can be, and everyone's buddy. Don't worry, things will be back to normal tomorrow.
9. Dick never uses formal functional specifications and rarely commits to anything in email. That way, when things are not built exactly the way they are needed, he can't be pinned down. It's always someone else's fault.
10. People come and people go, but Dick is still a dick and always will be.
Your items are Machiavellian indeed -- misguided "cunning duplicity" to "keep his people on edge" by deceiving or manipulating for his personal gain.
In some environments, a close eye is required on an employee or two. Never everybody. When Dick appears, he is a sign that a company is already trending downhill.
you're wise beyond your years.
Their second product was a much larger engineering effort than the first, probably 4x as many engineers working on it. I had friends working on it, they had lots of stories about poor management. In the end, it was many years late and over budget, and a year or two after the financial crisis hit, the launch partner pulled out, and the company now had a reputation of not delivering, so nobody else would touch them. (Protected industries are generally conservative, they were lucky to find one customer willing to take a chance.)
tl;dr: good hackers don't know much about management, so when left to choose managers, they're likely to choose bad ones.
That sounds almost the exact opposite of almost every decent hacker I've known.
"Management" at Sun was pretty tight. It's just that it didn't require that sort of management.
You can say that firing the Slacker is the solution. Unfortunately it's hard to find the Creative and most of the time that person will ask for more money than the Slacker. Plus the Slacker is able to do the job just fine with just a little bit of pushing.
If a Creative is working for Dick it's only natural for him to realize that he is not a right fit for the organization and leave. Eventually leaving only Slackers in the organization, the way it should be.
The problem comes when Dick is a manager in an organization that _requieres_ creativity, then you are doomed.
One of the characteristics of "bad management" that's shown here is Dick constantly hovering. At my company, we've arranged the cubicles so that they still offer privacy (walls are about 6 feet high), but that anyone walking by can see what's on the computer screen.
Would you qualify this as hovering? We generally have no issues with casual gchatting, facebooking, stock picking, and have never really reprimanded anyone for that. We also don't do any sort of Internet monitoring.
Two of our employees, however, have taken it upon themselves to re-arrange their desks so that no one can see their monitor. One of them flipped their whole desk setup around (probably spent a good morning working on it), and another employee has turned his monitor 45 degrees - to compensate he has to crane his body at such an odd angle for 8 hours a day that I wonder if I'm going to get a workman's comp claim soon.
Is it bad management if I insist that they go back to their original configuration? I wonder if they think they're trying to pull a fast one over me - do they think I'm an idiot and do not realize what they're doing? Am I a "Dick" manager for wanting to know what they're up to whenever I walk through the room?
I can't speak for all the deaf people out there, but personally, I find it uncomfortable to leave my hearing aid in all day, which means I'll often remove it if I'm just working at my desk, and won't hear someone come up behind me.
My last job had an environment where everyone had their backs to the entrance of their cube and I would constantly be startled by people walking up behind me without me hearing or seeing that they were there. It's very unpleasant and actually started making me a little neurotic. It didn't help that the floor in that office was kind of shaky, so you'd also feel it whenever someone walked by.
My current job still has cubes, but the desks aren't attached to the cube walls (we mostly use IKEA Galants) and pretty much everyone has their cube set up so they face out. It's a much more pleasant environment to work in, and since we work in a converted factory it means I look up to a fantastic view of downtown Akron through a bank of windows. I'm much less neurotic now (at least about this... ;)) and all the natural light has actually done a lot to help my sleeping patterns, too.
When I am working on a nascent idea, I am often fanatical about privacy. I absolutely do not want my most trusted friends or colleagues to so much as look at what I am doing. Not because I am doing poor work or because they might disapprove. Rather, the mere knowledge that my work is being consumed puts me in the mode of communicating rather than creating. I begin naturally thinking in terms of clarifying and explaining and consolidating, whereas when a work is mine alone, I can freely explore and leave a mess. The effect is disasterous for poorly-formed ideas. I absolutely must explore until I understand the natural form of what I am trying to create. If I think about accomodating the eyes of others too soon, I will be hampered in my explorations and may not do my best work.
So, I don't think they've changed their setup only because they want to slack off or pull a fast one over you. It might just be a small neurotic habit on their side... As long as they do the work and are reliable, you shouldn't care about that...
No because you're clearly concerned about it so there is hope (Dick managers generally either don't care how they are or actively see it as a good thing), but yes because you seem not to trust them (you admit to wanting to know what they're doing).
The nature of trust is not trusting them to get on with their work eight hours a day to a format you think appropriate, it's trusting them to deliver what's been asked on time and to know how they want to work to achieve that.
You need to accept that there isn't a universal working pattern for programmers. Some are in at 8am, work diligently all day then head off. Others slope in late, are inefficient for large parts of the day but pull it out of the hat when it matters.
There is little point in asking programmer B why he can't work steadily like programmer A because quite simply he can't, that's not how his mind works. It may be that the inefficient time is how he mulls over the problem, it may be that he needs the rush of the approaching deadline, it maybe something else entirely, but these things are rarely as simple as Person X does this so it will work for Person Y.
Think of a programmer as a black box. You define inputs and outputs, they define what goes on inside the box. Your job is to give them the best inputs you can, monitor the outputs and generally leave the rest alone.
In terms of your current style a few questions you might want to ask yourself:
* What is it that means that you want to see what they're doing all the time?
* Why do they want to hide their monitors from you?
* What would you do if you saw them doing something completely non-work related?
* Have they done anything in the past which suggests that they're not committed to the project?
* How does your boss treat you and how do you feel about it?
I suspect the answers might help you identify any Dick traits you might have.
P.S. In terms of the guy craning - yes, you need to address that as you're likely liable for his working environment. But explain that to him and say he can have his cube how he likes so long as it's basically safe.
Do you want the rest of your team to learn that it's important to be productive? Or would you rather teach them that it's most important to be seen to be working straight through for eight hours?
From my perspective, it's a cultural thing - we have tried to foster a two-way culture of openness and communication. We have 70 employees - 68 of which are okay with our environment of trust. What makes those two think they're special?
Are they ex-military and therefore trained to react violently when people sneak up behind them? ;)
EDIT: My ex-CEO tells a story of a former employee and Vietnam vet who warned him not to surprise him as his fighting reflexes might kick in, so it apparently can happen in real life.
I've had incidents in my team where there are people I thought weren't productive who were genuinely engaged in a million minor support tasks I never knew about.
But in any case, talking to them like adults rather than spying on them is the way forward.
If it is mostly about the screen, it seems these employees don't trust you. Having them expose their screen to anyone walking by isn't going to increase trust.
Without knowing anything else about your situation, I'd suggest reading up about the "personal safety" parts of Crystal:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Clear_%28software_devel...
And Rands had a good post about 1 on 1s recently:
http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2010/09/22/the_update_...
Most people want to do a good job. You don't get very far programming if you don't like building things. If they aren't producing, this is a problem for you to debug. Are the unmotivated? Do they think the work is boring? Do they feel that they worked hard last quarter and weren't recognized for it? Do they think the project is likely to be canceled so what's the point of working on it? Have they been using Haskell at home and writing C++ seems like a make-work project for programmers?
Turning their screen away is a symptom. What's the underlying cause?
I always made it a policy that whenever I stepped behind someones desk that I asked first. You'd be surprised how far respect goes amongst professionals.
For wanting to know? Whenever you walk through the room? Yeah, you might be a Dick.
The only business reason to want to know "what they're up to" is if work isn't getting done. And if work isn't getting done, "what they're up to" is irrelevant.
wtf
I felt violated, for lack of a better word, in that environment. The reason was twofold. First, nobody can judge how productively I spend my time on my desk by what I was doing the moment they glanced at my screen. Making such claims is hypocritical, and taking work decisions about me on such claims is unfair. Secondly, not being allowed at least a little bit of privacy from any and all prying eyes communicates lack of trust from my manager's side.
I'm not sure whether I'd call it "bad management" because it might be working for you and your teammates, but it's not working for me.
Most people given the choice do not want to look at a wall or the person across the pod from them. They either want to be able to look out a window, or into an open room.
A previous boss liked to stand behind me and watch (and occasionally make inane suggestions) when I was trying to fix a particularly high-profile issue. It negatively impacted both the speed and quality of my work.
"There is a third kind of manager, who is typically a ‘nice guy’ who doesn’t have a problem with chicken suits or a bit of browsing or working time as long as the job gets done but micro-manages the crap out you stopping by every 15 minutes to see ‘how you’re getting on’, just like Dick. Micro-management sucks ass"
I think the third kind of manager is almost worse than Dick. Micromanagement makes getting anything done near impossible. I've taken to wearing headphones at the office and generally ignoring my manager due to him falling into the third category. The phrase "How are you doing over there?" makes my eye twitch these days.
It would be easier to stand up against Dick, assuming you have nothing to lose by losing the job. Usually the third category is the type to have his/her feelings hurt and resort to personal attacks should you question their management style.
Just my personal experience, I realize that's probably a sweeping generalization.
The manager doesn't always have to fit that description totally to be a bad manager. As the post suggests, if people are saying "You should check with ____ before doing that," that probably indicates some micromanagement tendencies, which are just as demoralizing and counterproductive, even if the manager is otherwise well-loved as a person by some/all members of the team.
Also, if a team member tells you: "If you want to make that change, just do it, because if you check with ____, it'll take a while or might never happen," that is a sign of an overly-political manager.
Finally, I'd like to add the "smiley"/"fake" manager attitude. It's one thing to have a fun manager, but at some point you expect that your manager is trying to get work done. If they seem always happy and poking fun at things, it can be really annoying and make you second guess why they are trying to make everything seem so fun (probably because it sucks).
Anyone have any suggestions for how to manage a team where some employees need me to be Dick and some don't? The obvious solution is to replace the employees who need Dick's management, but that's not always feasible.
Some may need more support, more monitoring and so on but no-one needs to be spied on.
Give them the freedom but have five minute chats with each one each morning so you can see if they're making progress. These aren't heavy things, they're quick informal updates, what are the problems, what's done that wasn't, can I see a quick demo and so on. Outside of that you leave them alone.
If you can't do this yourself because you don't have time then get each of your seniors to do a couple of the more junior guys.
If they're not making progress then they have a case to answer and ultimately moving towards a position where if they don't improve you are looking at getting rid of them (legally, even in the UK this is possible if you show they aren't performing given reasonable chances).
Monitoring progress is fine, that's management. Insisting on watching what someone is doing all the time is something else.
The other advantage of it being open is if they are messing about it's a very honest warning shot across the bows if they are being supported but are not delivering.
The drive for trust should confuse the fact that people are there to deliver software.
Also, they are dependent of their workers to make them look good. Usually they rose to a manager by doing a good job as an individual contributor, where their work was completely under their control. As a manager they need their team to get the work done. They can't do it alone anymore. It is not a simple thing to learn to give up that control, and convince others to work as hard as you had. Someone who has poor leadership skills and abilities is likely to compensate by micromanaging.
However, if a developer came in "high and wearing a chicken suit" I wouldn't care how much he got done. The chicken suit might be passable if it were casual Friday, but high - not acceptable. There should still be an element of professionalism and respect when you're working with other people, getting paid well, and clients are depending on you.
I think there's certain freedoms employees should have (especially in the development world) including what you wear, hours you work, working from home, etc., but I don't think professionalism should be compromised.
(I am personally not bitter about this. I wear whatever I want to work, and if someone has a problem, I'll just go work for the competition instead. Needless to say, nobody has a problem :)
- meshing with the Dick style of management
- being attached to your job
- having a thriving life outside of work
- being able to leave work baggage at work
I admit these aren't entirely unrelated. Being able to leave baggage at your desk mitigates the damage done by Dick. Having a thriving life outside of work helps you leave your baggage at work. If you don't have a thriving life outside work, you are more likely to be attached to your job.
However, in general these four things can vary independently. For example, I once had a Dick manager I hated, was apathetic about my job, was unable to leave work baggage at work, and had a personal life that varied from thriving to nonexistent during the time I worked for that manager.
http://www.amazon.com/Management-Secrets-T-John-Dick/dp/0970...
The book is fiction, and written from the point of view of the manager in question, but if you enjoy reading Dilbert, this book is a pretty good read.
Is this a bad thing somehow? Shouldn't we all strive to have separate thriving lives outside of work and to leave the company baggage behind when we go home?
Some people, however, see work as a place where they go to keep the chairs nice and warm during the day, and have no problem "turning it off" at the end of the day.
I think apples should lead apples and oranges should lead oranges.