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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I’m gonna say something pedantic and perhaps obvious.

You don’t manage people. If you do, you’re a bad manager. You manage problems and projects and enable people to do their jobs well. You facilitate conversations and make sure they have what info and tools they need.

People are not robots you control. You are not better than them. You aren’t above them. In fact you’re usually far easier to replace than them.

Maybe I have a chip on my shoulder but this is core to bad managers: they think their reports are their subjects to lord over.

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It's fine to feel that way, but it's not a particularly effective approach in my opinion and in fact quite the opposite of what I look for in a manager. A good manager manages people; they understand people's strengths, weaknesses, goals, how to motivate and reward people, how to resolve potential conflicts, how to delegate, and how to help people grow. These are all people things. People are not robots which is exactly why they need to be managed. After all you typically do not manage robots, the point of using robots is that they're autonomous.

Problems are not things you really want to manage, maybe in the short run you can try to manage a problem, but ultimately the goal is to solve a problem as opposed to managing it. The goal of a manager is to assemble a team of people who can work together to solve problems.

Your issue is conflating management with superiority, you seem to think that someone who coaches a basketball team feels superior to its players. That couldn't be further from the truth. While Michael Jordan's coach was in his time a competent basketball player, he would never claim to have ever been better than Michael Jordan, and yet both he and Michael Jordan had an excellent working relationship without either of them feeling superior to the other [1].

The issue you have about superiority has nothing to do with solving problems or managing people. You could be a lawyer working entirely independently from developers and feel you are superior to them (or vice-versa). A good manager can cross multiple projects and multiple problems, because a good manager understands people first and foremost and lets competent people work on solving problems, as opposed to trying to manage problems.

[1] https://www.netflix.com/title/80203144

> Your issue is conflating management with superiority...

Your issue is not realizing that many managers feel this way. They think that being a manager puts them above the people they are managing, and that their job as a manager is to boss people around (thus the genesis of that term).

Edit: I'll see your Phil Jackson and raise you Bobby Knight.

Are you arriving at this conclusion from a place of jaded bias or from actual data? Some managers feel that way sure, but your statement implies that its essentially the norm to be expected which is not the case.

Why is this argument so easy to make for politicians that get corrupted by power, but not for managers that might suffer from the exact same human weakness?

> implies that its essentially the norm to be expected which is not the case.

I deliberately chose words which do not draw a conclusion about "the norm" because I, just like you, don't know what that is. There is no such dataset, all anyone can do is assemble anecdotes.

Bobby Knight led the Hoosiers to three national championships and 11 Big Ten championships. I'm not sure the definition of "bad manager" would fit succeeding at the most important metrics in sports - championship wins.

Isn't this exactly the point GP was making? That managers conflate the team's wins with their own 'succeeding'? It's not the manager that wins the championship, it's the team that is comprised of the manager also. Why is this so hard to grasp for managers? Is it the power? Is it the disconnect from the actual work?

As someone involved in both the technical and business side, but heavily biased towards tech, it's amusing to me just how cliché the management parties after a 'big win' on a 'visible' project are. It's almost unbearable to be around save for the brilliant food.

A college team churns ever 4 years at most. Consistent wins in that space is all about management, as the talent is fleeting.

Why would a college team need to preselect players if it's all about the management? Couldn't they just pick random players?

Thinking about this more, I find it hilarious to imagine that you would expect the same results from A and B given the same set of performant managers:

A - team of highly unmotivated, undisciplined players

B - team of highly motivated, disciplined players

Do you watch college sports? Or are you just talking about what you imagine to be true? It’s not the same thing as a team of mid 20s+ trained professionals working in the context of a tech org. Indeed, The excellent talent skips college, goes to the pros, where talent matters much more than the org management.

I watch college soccer. There are talented players, talented coaches, shit players and everything in between. There are people who go on to become pretty known and there are people who die out in college soccer. I've never seen a single championship won by a team that doesn't have synergy going on between the players also, and not just a great top management.

Anecdotal:

There's a huge team here, wins most of the high level championship because they have a lot of money and end up buying worldwide players, so their access to the talent pool is broader. They also have the best coaches money can buy.

One year, one of the most famous players we've had decided to start up his own academy and create a new soccer team, with local people. He worked on it for a couple of years and came in and took first spot in the championship. Brilliant games.

They sold players due to their win, for a lot of money, and started the roster again. Next year, and since then, they have yet to achieve such a victory.

I would blame this situation on the synergy of the team and find it hard to imagine your world where the top management gets to decide who wins and who doesn't.

Managers are involved in choosing who is on their team

What does this argument even mean? Of course managers are involved in choosing who is on their team. That doesn't make them the team.

> That managers conflate the team's wins with their own 'succeeding'?

Is that actually conflated? I manage a few reports and try to succeed by setting them up to succeed but every management position I’ve had, I have had explicit OKRs/goals/metrics/etc stating that the success of the team as it’s own entity was something I was rated on.

If my team managed to succeed without me putting in any effort that was actually ideal as I got a free goal hit.

> Is that actually conflated?

It's literally in the post from GP I am responding to:

> Bobby Knight led the Hoosiers to three national championships and 11 Big Ten championships. I'm not sure the definition of "bad manager" would fit succeeding at the most important metrics in sports - championship wins.

This feels like it's conflated.

But even in that, presumably the owners have some compensation for him based on winning championships. I really can’t see how a good manager doesn’t believe that their team winning is a measure of their success

(edited for clarity) Given that successful coaches are regularly fired for being garbage human beings (including Bobby Knight more than once!) I'm going to disagree that the "most important metric" is championships.

This is exactly the response I was hoping/dreading to get, as it illustrates my point so perfectly. Bobby Knight absolutely believed that he was above his players, and repeatedly physically abused them for perceived disrespect. He was a terrible person at Indiana and at Texas Tech, and no amount of winning answers that.

People glorify managers/coaches who succeed at the organizations goals, be they profits or rings, at the expense of the humans that report to them. These people are terrible managers and should be immortalized as shining examples of what not to do.

You're correct about bad managers, but not about the idea that you shouldn't manage people. You summed it up:

> People are not robots

Exactly, people are motivated in different ways, have different backgrounds, aptitudes and weaknesses, the list goes on. A good manager takes these aspects into account to help people and teams do their best work. There is no generic template.

> You don’t manage people. If you do, you’re a bad manager.

People are not spherical beings in vacuum. Of course, you have to manage people.

My experience is that throwing projects at people and assuming that they are all interchangeable cogs that will be able to complete projects if they fit the project is just asking for problems.

Now, managing people does not have to be tantamount to standing there and pointing with your finger what they have to be doing next. "If you do, you're a bad manager."

But there are other more subtle ways of managing people and learning to be a manager means learning to be able to influence people to do what you want them to be doing as much as learning what they should be doing.

I was going to say basically this.

Let me add a thought. You manage something that needs managing, that is to say, problems. If you see people as problems, then you are the problem.

> You manage problems and projects and enable people to do their jobs well.

This is based on the assumption that people want and can do their jobs well, or at all.

Lucky you, if this sounds strange to you.

Isn’t there a standard process of dealing with employees who are unable or unwilling to do their job?

Most people in an organisation have, very roughly, the same desire to do their jobs well. There are outliers in either direction.

If most people in an organisation are not interested in doing their jobs well, then something about the organisation is incorrectly set up. Humans have intrinsic motivation driven by autonomy, mastery, and purpose. If the masses of people don't want to do their jobs well, the organisation has taken too much autonomy, mastery, and purpose away from their employees.

If most people in the organisation are willing to do a good job, but some outliers misbehave, there are, as another commenter mentioned, standard ways to deal with that. (Mentorship, counceling, retraining, warning, firing.)

But critically, the standard ways to deal with struggling individuals should not be applied if there's a large majority struggling, because then the problem is in the organisation, not the individual.

Thanks for the insightful comment.

If you think that your manager could improve...if only he'd read the Evil Overlord list* and really give that some thought, then your "manager" is actually an Evil Overlord (or wanna-be), and you might want to look for a new job. Working for a real manager.

*http://www.worldconquer.org/evil_overlord.html

> You don’t manage people [...] You manage problems and projects and enable people to do their jobs well.

This is, like, the definition of managing people. Let's call a spade a spade.

> People are not robots you control.

Control is not management.

> they think their reports are their subjects to lord over.

Bossing someone around is not management.

>> You don’t manage people [...] You manage problems and projects and enable people to do their jobs well.

> This is, like, the definition of managing people. Let's call a spade a spade.

That's not like. The definition of managing people. A project is some stakeholders (including the people you 'manage'), some wants, some resources (including the people you 'manage' as well as yourself) and some constraints. People are people.

>> People are not robots you control.

> Control is not management.

What does this even mean? If control is not management, therefore people are not robots you (not) manage, so, are they robots you do manage? I think GP was sort of leaning towards the 'people are not robots' part of that.

>> they think their reports are their subjects to lord over.

> Bossing someone around is not management.

It can be. If you're a shit manager. This 'is not management' thing feels very similar to 'is not Agile'.

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