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Comment by civilized | Hacker News Reader

This rings hollow because nothing "started" with this person.

He was dropped into a team inside a huge defense contractor to do a tiny technical task within the much larger purpose of that company. It's great that he liked and valued who he was working with, but it's not a condition he created or can advise others to create. His "who", however important it was to him, was nothing without the "why" of the company.

I have a manager who is extremely people-oriented. It's nice, but mostly in the sense of not doing harm. Team meetings are full of kindness and accolades, but people aren't engaged because the meetings lack substance and purpose. We have the meetings primarily to "feel like a team", rather than to engage in the purpose the team exists for.

You still need the why to generate meaning and self-respect.

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Yeah. Balance is important. I worked on a few teams where I really liked the people, but ultimately we were building a stupid product that existed only because some exec thought it would be a good idea, rather than because any users actually wanted it. (In one case, we were literally told "we have X huge website which we sell $$$ of advertising on - we want another site just like that, so go off and build one"!) Ultimately, the cognitive dissonance of building something we knew was pointless, but where nobody was willing to actually say it, felt utterly soul-destroying.

Now I'm working at a place where I really like the people, and I really like what we're building. The balance feels like it's much closer to the right place now.

The "who" is definitely what it's mostly about at the IC level. Just like soldiers in the trenches, they don't care about the ideals they are fighting for. They are trying to stay alive and keep their friends alive.

In both cases, you need leaders (not necessarily managers) to paint the vision you are trying to achieve in a way that can inspire the group to action. But once the march begins, that's quickly forgotten, and it's all about the Who.

Military teams are built around trust in underlying training and well-defined roles with well-defined hierarchy with clear paths of ownership and succession. Everybody knows who will take charge of the fire team if the fire team leader is dead, everyone knows who will take the squad if the squad leader is dead. The succession path is tested every time one of those leaders is away. The working leaders in fire teams and squads are the only word or authority that matters, most of the time.

This is the biggest thing I had to get used to in corporate environments. Software teams, even when you're a lead, really only have hierarchy starting with a manager. Managers, on the other hand, are rarely technical (or technical enough) and are oddballs in the example of a fire team. It'd be like throwing someone from admin into an engineering battalion and being like, "hey, here's a metal detector, you're in charge now."

And yet, for most of history, people didn't want to fight the enemy at all. Their biggest motivation was protecting each other.

I think that's likely a very rosey interpretation of history. In times of strife, and war, "protecting each other" and "fighting the enemy" are synonymous. Warrior cultures, past and present, generally have a fairly well defined escalation of force, which includes the time to fight and de-escalation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/b6k528/percentage_...

Most people don't want to fight. It's only recently we've gotten much better at indoctrinating soldiers into killing machines.

You need both. The most noble cause is still going to be a pain in the ass if you have to work with awful coworkers, but fun coworkers in a meaningless job with no direction is going to be hollow.

> I have a manager who is extremely people-oriented. It's nice, but mostly in the sense of not doing harm. Team meetings are full of kindness and accolades, but people aren't engaged because the meetings lack substance and purpose. We have the meetings primarily to "feel like a team", rather than to engage in the purpose the team exists for.

I recently left a role mainly because of the same situation. In short, there was no team in the true sense of the word. The meetings were listless, just people in a room / on a Zoom. The level of energy and engagement forever teetering on empty.

Simply put, this isn't management, it's bad management. Kindness to the point of mindless is not sustainable. Management can have many colors so to speak, but forgettable beige should not be one of them.

What do you think could fix this issue of low engagement during the Zoom meetings?

It's on the manager to put an end to shallow, robotic management theater and replace it with something meaningful or at least enjoyable. Don't do the round-robin project updates that are of no value to anyone - if you've set up the culture correctly, people will talk to each other when they need to. Use the time to do something that is of interest to everyone on the team, even if it's not directly related to the everyday work. If you can't think of anything, don't hold the meeting and think harder when you're planning for next week's meeting.

Ultimately, it's a symptom. But it helps to have an agenda. Perhaps an "assignment." It also requires someone - don't necessarily have to be the manager - to facilitate.

I get it. On-site teams to remote teams is work. But at this point, if leadership and management haven't figured it out then they're either negligent or incompotent.

How do you fix that? Either an excess in training or pink slips. I'm not saying someone should be sacked for being a bad manager. I'm saying they should be sacked for being content with being bad, and making no effort to fix that.

I guess good "who" included good "why". Good project leader transmits "why" onto others he works with, by just being who he is in the process of digesting "why".

For managers, the who is the why.

Yeah, but you also need a leader, and that role usually also falls to the manager.

Managers still get to negotiate their goals and/or what their team is supposed to do in the company. To me they are supposed to make the who and the why match, in any order it works for them.

> For managers, the who is the why.

For managers, the "who" matters only as a factor determining the velocity and success of delivering the "why".

To put it differently, no matter how well the "who" is going, if the manager cannot deliver the "why" then he will be an ex-manager. Not so much the other way around.

Can you explain a bit more? Sounds as if you're saying that management is about building a team, but that the manager wouldn't personally care much about if they succeeded with the assigned tasks? S/he'd leave that to the team, trusting they got the things done?

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