Am I the exception to the rule??
Beyond good and bad, I believe a lot of the fit or lack thereof is linked to behavior (which can be worked on), motivation (which is pretty hard to change so you better make sure it’s aligned with the job’s objectives) and communication (which you can never work on too much).
As a team member, understanding your boss’s objectives, pain points, and default behavior / failure mode is a good place to start. A great manager will spell those out to you when you join the team so you don’t have to guess at them; if not, I absolutely encourage you to ask these questions as early as you can (during the hiring process if you can).
Discovering MBTI has been tremendously helpful in figuring out manager-managed relationships. In particular, there are 4 sub-categories (NT, NF, SP, SJ) with markedly different behaviors, motivations, and managerial expectations. Reading about these and making connections to past managers (and the people in my team at the time) was a lightbulb moment for me. Often you can take a good guess at your future manager’s category in the course of an interview, especially if you know what questions to ask. Based on this info + your type and preferred way of working + the role you’re applying for, it’s possible to detect a potential misfit and steer clear.
Of course, all the items above assume a modestly competent manager to work with; they don’t do much good when you run into clinical cluelessness, unabashed douchebaggery or the aftermath of the Peter principle (although they do help you rationalize the situation).
Some of the people I manage/have managed seem to think I am great. My evidence for this is two-fold:
1) multiple people that I have managed before have moved on, and yet treat me as a friend/mentor: invite me to social events, still reach out to me on a regular basis with requests for advice, etc.
2) I get regular feedback via performance reviews as a manager that some people I am managing think I am great.
Likewise, some of the people I manage seem to think I could improve. My evidence for this is likewise, two-fold:
1) Some people tell me directly what I could do to improve in my style of managing them specifically.
2) Some people only give feedback on areas where I could improve anonymously via previously mentioned performance reviews.
Anyway, the point I am trying to make is that I am a mixed bag, but I am not universally terrible, and therefore my opinion shouldn't just be dismissed as "oh, you are just one of them". With that preamble out of the way:
What do we think of someone who, for example, says "I've never had anything but bad boyfriends / bad girlfriends". Well, the common wisdom is that if you are consistently having shitty personal relationships, you are at least part of the problem.
Likewise, If someone says "I've never had anything but bad managers", I apply the same pattern: you are probably not really putting in much effort into your professional relationships with your managers.
It's a pull relationship versus a push relationship from IC's to managers, these days it feels like IC's don't get anything unless they ask for it. This should be the other way around. There's no team building anymore, no more team spirit we're almost in competition mode with our colleagues rather than learning from each other.
There's a nice little theory (always messier in practice) around situational leadership by Blanchard and Hersey. 4 different leadership styles are needed to match employees in 4 different "states". Exceptional managers are able to match their style to their employees state. "Just good" managers usually default to 2 of the styles, and so don't always to well. Bad managers are either incomptent, or only use 1 style of management that mis-matches their team.
Check out https://online.stu.edu/articles/education/what-is-situationa... for more info.
Thanks!
Importantly, I’ve managed to have good relationships with my managers even when the rest of my team thought they were terrible.
The key has been figuring out what is important to your manager for them and their career and trying to align to that, as well as generally being empathetic and friendly to them, and delivering strongly on the work I do. Which, of course, are the same activities that I find make a great manager. It’s a two way street.
Then again there was the guy who gave 6/8 people on his team a bad review. That guy was just a clueless jerk.
I think that sums up pretty much everything. I don't believe it's the right approach at all for a manager and that's exactly what I mean by bad management. A manager is successful if his team is successful. The goal of a team is not to make a manager happy or to work for someone specifically. The goal of a team is to help the company achieve its business goals and a manager should be the one putting directional signs and building roads for people to help them reach their destinations.
An example of why investing understanding your managers world can pay off- a few years ago my team needed some servers for a reason I don’t recall. Our manager had said no because she (legitimately) didn’t have the budget. I knew there was a huge push to people in her role to utilize our cloud environment, so I reframed our request to get access to that.* She put in the request, we got our virtual servers, she got to check a box on her review, and everyone was happy.
Point being, while you can’t always have a amazing manager, you can still have a great relationship with an adequate manager that gets you close to what you’d have in the best circumstances. You just have to work at it more (although if your manager can’t do organizational politics you might be in for some hurt regardless.) And there are some truly awful managers out there who you just leave.
* Ok, it wasn’t just me who worked winning her over, but the story got weird writing in the plural.
My advice is to take the leadership as soon as you can. Don't fear the responsibilities. Better be in charge than have an average incompetent manager.
IME, larger companies have the worst quality employees.
Though you are totally right. In order to become a manager in a larger corporate, you have to push a lot of people to the side in order to make your way up. Meaning you're not necessarily the most friendly person to hang around.
The last smaller company I worked for knew they couldn't compete on salary, and knew they had to rely on training up novice coders. So, they made the environment as positive as possible, with weekly group training, pair coding, and round-robin technology presentations from the entire team.
I'm currently contracting at a large company, refactoring code that was clearly written by people with no time or motivation to learn their tools, who were just trying to get their feature to 'pass' the tests. New technologies are incorporated without fully reading the docs, and then never upgraded as fixes and improvements got published. Time for training and development? Nobody has making the time for refactoring. And, the source code is evidence that it has been this way for years.