This is the basic unsolvable quandary everyone ignored at Google during my 10 years there.
What these silly advice columns actually are selling is “how to drain over producers until you can discard them”
Some of my best managers weren't really as technical as I was, or were experts in completely different domains.
The job of a manager isn't being a "better developer", it's to remove blockers and isolate reports from annoyances, so that they can do their best work.
Nobody, not even the best, is perfect. Even if they are perfect today, things constantly change, and they need to grow to accommodate change. A good manager will have different context (e.g., from being in more meetings than high performers have capacity for) and be able to synthesize information for them. They will see what is working for other high performers more deeply and share that. They will be a good sounding board. They will be someone who can listen. They will be someone who will be honest about what they are seeing. And they will know when to get themselves and others out of the way.
Also, part of being a great high performer is learning how to collaborate with a manager on growth. A manager can't do nearly as much to help if the high performer is not being reflective, looking for opportunity, willing to change / grow, and being vulnerable enough with the manager to share all of that. People who are really good at this can get more out of all but the worst managers.
That doesn't mean there aren't a lot of terrible managers just getting in the way. But there are great managers too, even those who weren't the highest performers as ICs.
You wrote a lot here and got the metaphor entirely wrong at a base level. The NBA is a tournament of entirely high performers.
But you don’t. Like most on this forum these days it’s low Level Randos commenting with little insight or knowledge
This is kitchen table economics talk.
High performers will be good enough to fundamentally question leadership decisions at an exec level and will have good reasons to. They will not just he fast at their work. They will be so good at it that it makes you almost unnecessary in the equation.
High output just does the work you assign them well.
I've managed multiple people like that and had them request weekly one-on-ones with me years after I retired (I gladly do it because they are amazing to talk with). I was a highly successful IC for almost 25 years, but nowhere near their level. It turns out some people can coach / manage / mentor well above their own levels.
I mention all that because my style had a lot in common with who you are responding to. Nowhere did they say that their reports get 1% ahead of their own abilities and stop there - there is no ceiling.
> You likely again have never seen a true high performer
I'm not sure why you think you know what everyone else has experienced. Isn't it possible that your experience is less than universal?
I’ve seen hundred million dollar retention packages. Not random engineers getting 100k more because they made a c suite happy once.
Also a x billion dollar company amounts to maybe What a few hundred people.
Come on you’ve not seen the major league even yet.
No one has. ;)
> [You] are confusing them for high output.
Not really. I agree that high performance is more than just high output. When I said this:
> My job is to make sure they have clarity on the team and organizational goals, make sure my management has visibility and confidence in our team, and create a healthy, high trust environment that allows my team members to work at their best.
I was thinking specifically about empowering them to be effective across the management hierarchy. That's the point of creating clarity around goals: so that team members can make autonomous decisions that don't rely on me to be the arbiter of quality/truth/whatever. I'm going to describe the target, not prescribe the path. And yes, even that description of the target is open to reevaluation. Facilitating healthy communication and bringing clarity is one of the fundamental purposes of the management role, in my opinion. As an organization grows the sheer number of conversations happening becomes too much for everyone to keep track of. Managers should function as clearing houses for important communication (not bottlenecks) so that other don't have to spend all of their time doing it. But the purpose of this is to make sure that people that have the skills/context/responsibility/ability have everything at the ready.
It's also why I said
> [I expect they] eventually grows to be better at their job than I am at their job
High-trust management is in many ways a different and orthogonal role. But you likely have never seen a truly high-trust manager.
If the high-performer is "so good [..] that it makes you almost unnecessary in the equation," great! Let's promote them to Staff/Principal/Distinguished and have them report directly to the VP/C-suite, whatever.