Conscious unbossing
robertwalters.co.uk
robertwalters.co.uk
https://www.robert-walters.ca/insights/news/blog/Concious-un...
https://www.robertwalters.co.uk/insights/news/blog/conscious...
They both have comments ostensibly from "Lucy Bisset, Director of Robert Walters North" and "Martin Fox, Managing Director of Robert Walters Canada". But the two have eerily similar thoughts on these result:
>Lucy Bisset, Director of Robert Walters North comments: “Gen-Z are known for their entrepreneurial mindset – preferring to bring their ‘whole self’ to projects and spend time cultivating their own brand and approach, rather than spending time managing others.
>Martin Fox, Managing Director of Robert Walters Canada comments: “Gen-Z are known for their entrepreneurial mindset. They prefer to bring their ‘whole self’ to projects, focusing on building their own brand and approach rather than managing others.
> Lucy concludes: “It’s clear mid-level management remains a lynchpin of any organisation, and to keep these roles filled employers need to innovate their strategies to make them more attractive ...
> Martin concludes: “It’s clear that mid-level management is a cornerstone of any organization. To fill these roles, employers will need to rethink their strategies to make them more appealing ...
And no by-line on the article - no actual human is claiming responsibility for writing this.
I was a high-ish level product manager in a medium sized company once, and they would put P.R. "articles" out all the time that "quoted" me by name saying things I never said or wrote. Internally, P.R. would just E-mail me and ask if they could use my name in a press piece, and I said sure. Suddenly I "said" this and was "quoted" with that.
These kinds of articles get copy-pasted in different publications and only the name gets changed.
Another source for that information is greg’s own blog, note the domain name too: https://firstinline.wordpress.com/2007/06/26/hello-world/
The "party line" is very obvious as long as you're willing to see it. If party line is too political, then the sports version is that the playbook has been well studied.
Good team leads and second line managers can make or break an organization. But they are the least respected roles at a company and gets thrown under the bus first. Most companies don't invest anything in training new managers or setting clear roles and responsibilities for managers.
Senior management never faces any accountability but can make big massive changes to an org without consideration for implementation.
Depends what you mean by senior management, of course. I'm thinking mostly the "VP / SVP of Engineering" type role, and to a lesser degree, one hop down, the "Senior Director" folks, who seemed to be subject to the same phenomenon but on a slightly slower cycle.
The higher up the rank you go in my company, the more recognizable the faces are from 10,15,even 20 years ago.
Sure, they shuffle the deckchairs, but the turnover and redundancies below them is orders of more chaotic, and I dont understand what it takes to clean house at the senior management level.
Of course this acts as a filtering mechanism to refine psychopathy and their decision tree about how to treat their labor force, the communities their corporations exist within, their customers, and even their investors reflect how they've treated people to get where they are already: exploit and discard.
Once you reach a certain level, you get treated with kid gloves. Even with the sword hanging over you, they don't out right fire you, they work out a deal where you "wanted to spend more time with family".
Basically, if you're rich, you're a "real person" and if you're not you're an ant.
I’m reminded of a recent HN article talking about how bad abstractions are actually just indirection and complicate things whereas good abstractions hide complexity and make things neat and modular
I have also had managers who are great at linking the wider strategic goals of the organisation to their team's work. They were rare and worth their weight in gold.
Some recent teams I was on the middle managers spoke clearly and directly, but the frontline managers equivocated, were evasive, or even told lies. TBH I think it was just another case of Peter Principle. The middle managers were good managers who got put in charge of organizations, but they couldn’t train or develop good managers below them.
But we know there are hard problems, where the group itself doesn't have a solution or agree on the same solution. Keeping groups together is a hard problem.
This has not been my experience most places I’ve worked - you’ve gotta get a couple rungs up the management ladder (director or such) before the pay scale gets above staff and sr staff.
(It’s how we wound up with a few people at a previous gig managing teams as staff engineers - they didn’t want to take the pay cut for the title.)
Had you been granted the authority to oversee a critical responsibility/project/initiative you might have been imbued.
It's very exciting, like a drug, to be given responsibility for which you know that you are immediately shit canned (by your friends no less) if it doesn't go well or rewarded handsomely if you get it over the finish line. You have to hold key peoples' (founders/investors/executives) trust to get those roles because your success/failure ripples into them right quick.
If you’re not C level and somebody reports to you, you’re a middle manager though.
You’re a middle manager if you’re not in “upper management”, but managers report to you. It’s called “middle” management because it’s between upper management (C-level and VPs, probably) and first-line management / frontline management. Start with all managers, select the ones in the middle, that’s middle management.
The Gervais Principle suggests that you keep a few of these around in case upper management tries to mark their territory by asking for consequences (usually for their own decisions) so you have someone to throw under the bus. I don’t think that’s wrong, but conservation is often very different from thriving. It’s an artificial state that is still precarious and lacking agency for the subject.
line managers are a bit like NCO's (sargeants, corporals, non-commissioned officers) in the military; they have experience doing to the thing that they people they oversee do. The officer they report to may not.
GP's definition matches common usage: To people not invested in this game, if you are manager at a large company and not C-suite, you're a middle manager.
You probably could just call them "managers" with little loss of meaning. But the term "middle management" can connote a kind of useless that makes them different from "front line managers". The difference seems to depend on how useless your front line managers appear to be.
Is this a reference to Ursula LeGuin's short story?
Even though I despise middle management, that is the only path I see forward if I want to continue being employed once I’m in my 40s.
False.
> You get paid more
So what? Getting paid more was far from my primary concern when working at a big company. I wanted interesting work with people I respected and liked. The pay was more than good enough as an IC.
The rest of this is machiavellian bullshit that most people don't care about.
They don’t care about it yet. When you need more money, get laid off a couple times, or stagnate in their careers, they start caring.
There are deep flaws with how hierarchical organizations are run and how incompetent people are put in the positions with most capacity to do damage. Those ideas most definitely need to be discussed, even if there is no clear winner in terms of how to definitively improve things.
Beside that, some people simply like the job. They like to manage people they actually know, without being too technical. Higher than that and you may lose human contact with people who are doing the job, lower than that and you are doing the job yourself.
Then, mixed in with those folks, are a few people who are good at working with upper management, understand how the machine works, and build a pipeline of projects.
And a few rare people who fix departments, create long-term programs, and know how to train managers. You don’t meet many in this last group, though.
I’m talking about the actual term “best practices”, and not the actual practices themselves. The term is an ineffective way to communicate something.
Managers and engineers alike should be able to explain what they do in terms that can be connected with concrete actions / concerns and understandable business goals. Terms like “best practices” are ineffective at doing that. Just like there are code smells, this is a “communication smell” and makes me suspicious that there are underlying problems or weaknesses in the speaker’s ability to communicate clearly. “Best practices” also implies some kind of independence of situation which is fictitious.
“This team doesn’t use best practices for deploying code” -> unclear.
“This team doesn’t use CI/CD, engineers spend too much time resolving merge conflicts, and we see too many regressions make it into production” -> clear. If you need to put it in a bullet point, you can say something like “improve velocity”, “ship fewer bugs”, or “less downtime”.
I’m a fan of ambiguous or unclear language, but “best practices” strikes an unfortunate balance of sounding like it means something but wasting your words saying not much at all.
If you, say, have 30 teams whose projects come together into a product with a 99.9% SLA, you can’t have each team make completely independent judgments of what practices are best for their situation. You can try to, and many growing companies do. What you inevitably find is that the aggregate set of problems is too large, even when every team has a plausible story for why their individual situation makes sense.
The only solution is to write down a “best practices” manual and insist that everyone must follow it, even if they don’t think some practice or another is necessary in their situation.
I would name the document something like “development standards” or something like that. I’ve this called “meeting the bar” or “engineering excellence”. I like “meeting the bar” because the implication is that you haven’t succeeded if you don’t do what’s described. I like “engineering excellence” because it implies that you’ve gone beyond the minimum. I don’t like “best practices”.
I also wouldn’t insist that everyone must follow it. You have minimum standards (everyone must follow) and a set of expectations which are higher than that (everyone should follow). I think it is a kind of common error to make long lists of standards that everyone must follow. It’s better to prioritize. The minimum standards should be short and connected to the most critical concerns like security, privacy, or legal liability.
IMO, 99.9% SLA is not really that hard anyway, but I get what you mean. That’s like 2 whole hours of downtime per quarter.
Alternative terms for your practices docs: just call it “development practices” or something. This makes it a little more clear that it’s not a dumping ground for every practice people think is good / best, but only for what people actually care about, which is the development practices that your team has adopted. You can say something like, “Best practices according to research is X, but our team is adopting Y because we believe Y is promising.”
The other is MBA grads/project managers who paid big bucks to be able to get a high paying job producing nothing but need a place in the company.
AIs will take over middle management simply because they're faster and have more bandwidth than humans. They don't have to be smarter, just better coordinated. As Patton once said, "A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week."
Programs already run lower management. At Uber and Amazon, the computer is the foreman.
In my experience these people also mostly are effective managers because they have practical domain knowledge on the projects/teams they are managing. I see it as a normal thing to progress into, if your people skills are up to the task. A senior IC role is also nice but can be harder to get in certain organizations (however may be significantly less stressful).
Even if "they are the most effective managers" initially, it won't last.
As the pressures to sit in endless meetings, tow the upper management line, create endless spreadsheets, they become less and less knowledgeable in their domain. I've had great managers who were "hands on" domain experts, and some who weren't. Luckily, the corporate trend seems to be towards so-called "flat hierarchies" and to fire these chair warmers.
I for one welcome our AI middle manager overlords.
Gen Z might just have a accurate self assessment of their management abilities.
48% of GenZ professionals want to be middle managers.
The dumbest chat bot provides comparable advice and is less demotivating.
Not that most middle managers are worth more than a bucket of spit, and many are actively harmful to a companies bottom line (e.g. see Board disagreements about Intel layoffs and the role of risk-adverse middle managers in tanking the once mighty Intel. Undoubtedly, a similar phenom tanked Nissan).
Time flies!
Experience is a wise teacher.
I suspect this number trends down over time.
Cos apparently* "double the amount (30%) would opt for a flat, team-based structure if given the choice" so team work is seen as important.
So what functions would people like in a team? Mentors? Facilitators? Which of these might they actually want to do themselves if it wasn't seen as tainted by the phrase "middle management"?
* I can't see any link to actual data or what questions were used, so we are all working of a thin PR statement which isn't the best.
If it were possible to interact individually with everyone in zero time, everyone could report to the king. Until then…
Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s my bad luck, maybe lots of things, but the only thing a middle manager has been there for was to push paper up to the equally clueless layer above them and actively interfere in good work getting done.
Maybe GenX youth and young Boomers before them also thought management was fuddy-duddy.
Hippies, hello?
It wasn't GenZ that produced the movie Office Space, The Office sitcom or Dilbert.
(Speaking of which, exposure to these kinds of cultural artifacts likely plays a role in the GenZ outlook.)
For as long as I can remember, corporate management has been ridiculed in popular culture. It's a set of common tropes.
A kindergarten kid saying they want to be a middle manager when they grow up can be predicted to be an instant howler.