All managers make mistakes; good managers acknowledge and repair

Someone posted a link on HN years ago to a set of google docs titled the "Mochary Method", which covers all sorts of management skills just like this. I have it bookmarked as it's the only set of notes I've seen which talks about this stuff in a very human way that makes sense to me (as a non-manager).

Here's the doc for responding to mistakes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AqBGwJ2gMQCrx5hK8q-u7wP0...

And here's a video with Matt talking about it in a little more detail: https://www.loom.com/share/651f369c763f4377a146657e1362c780

It's a very similar approach to the linked article although it goes slightly further in advocating "rewind and redo" where possible.

EDIT - The full "curriculum" is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18FiJbYn53fTtPmphfdCKT2TM...

IME the gap in management between ICs is accountability. It's easy to say you are sorry, or say things won't happen again but good management, and what I strive to do is hold myself accountable.

To me, that means 1. To identify the issue that occurred (especially when you caused it), and much more importantly, 2. Put systems into place that prevent it from happening again.

Employees can feel very clearly when a manager lacks accountability and as part of mid and especially high level management (if your goal is actually improving both output and quality of people's lives) to not just say you did something wrong, but actually put your skin in the game ensuring what happened will not happen again (usually it means being better at saying no or aggressively managing prioritization rather than heaping additional tasks on people).

I think this goes for Engineers as well. In fact, I say the biggest skill I want from a SENIOR developer regardless of years of experience is humility. Someone who "cannot do wrong" and is a toxic about it will poison the rest of the team with their toxicity. But the seniors who are more open to feedback even from Junior developers, those are the ones everyone else follows to hell and back because they're there with you through it all so you're there with them through it all too.

We are all humans, not robots. Heck, even the LLMs mess up.

As a former teacher / coach this is definitely the approach I took to build strong relationships with kids. Too often such relationships are all about "I'm the infallible leader...you are the flawed pupils" and that doesn't support really connecting and understanding their unique needs.

In any situation, I've always believed it is better to let people we're all human and it's ok to take risks and make mistakes.

Implementers are not babies and managers are not our mothers.

I think the management skill nobody talks about is how managers should realize they are part of a team and their focus should be on whatever the team's goal is, not in finding the perfect way to apologize. As the article says: "Your job is to ship working software that adds real value to users, to help your team grow, and to create an environment where people can do their best work."

I couldn't give a rat's ass if a manager doesn't apologize to me in a way that makes my eyes water, admitting his humanity in the process, if that manager doesn't insist on making the same mistake and getting in my way all the time.

I think the best skill is protection from executives. My best manager would tell the executives 'no' for ridiculous requests like cutting deadlines last minute or feature requests that didn't make sense. He also talked me up after an acquisition and I never ended up getting cut.

He was also close to retirement and didn't care about moving up the ladder. Many bad managers do and will sacrifice you and the rest of the team to make themselves look better.

The worst mistakes to acknowledge and remedy for me have always been bad hiring. I’ve always been in the camp of ‘I can make this person work well’ but I’ve found myself questioning this approach. As my team has grown, bad fits are taxing. And it also is on other team members. I’ve shifted from doing ‘the right thing’ by giving people many chances before escalating to PIP, decided that I am just making it tough on myself and the rest of the team and to be quicker to start the process. But still, for me, it’s so much easier to acknowledge tech mistakes than dealing with employees not up to it for whatever reason, especially when they are good people. It becomes easier when they turn out to be difficult people though for me, it’s still hard.

This is great advice. It will work for introspective, self-reflecting managers who honestly want to do better.

Such a manager is extremely rare.

Most will be oblivious to their own biases and cognitive short-comings.

I don't think most "bad managers," even know that they're bad at their job. There's no accountability, no metrics, no performance reviews, no studies on their productivity... mostly because their "job" is to be the proxy for the power of the shareholders.

I applaud anyone who finds themselves an engineering manager and wants to be good at what they do and work for their team. It's hard to find a good manager.

But the only recourse for an IC under a bad manager is to quit or find another team to work on.

I think the problem is that there's a difference between a good manager and a manager who keeps their job.

I think perhaps the largest change in American culture that I’ve seen over the last 50 years is that there’s nothing worse than being wrong. See it played out consistently in the public site and in the corporate world. I’m not sure what the solution is, but not allowing people to say I’m sorry and make amends and not holding those won’t say it accountable have been major pillars in a lot of our societal ills.

This is not just about management but life overall. You will mess up with the people you love -- and repair is the way to go there as well.

I have lived a life where I have to constantly be taking personal inventory, and when wrong, promptly admit it.

I think that helped make me a decent manager. At least, my employees seemed to think so.

But I could be wrong.

> I recently read “Good Inside” by Dr. Becky Kennedy, a parenting book that completely changed how I think about this. She talks about how the most important parenting skill isn’t being perfect — it’s repair.

Love this book! Just read it. Must read for parents, IMO.

The title is misleading.

It's not about management skills.

It's also impolite to use "nobody" in it.

People love to talk about management skills and how things should be, but in my experience the autonomy to have that freedom is greatly lost upon the manager. At every level of management you'll be barking down orders as a transitory and the main difference is how you do or do not get buy-in from your reports - and often it is next to impossible to gain that buy-in (more work! longer hours! emergency pragmatic fix for an administrative problem!), which is why you're the one presenting the task.

After reading just the title I was going to make a crack that the skills of parents and managers largely overlaps.[1] Turns out the author did also make that connection, and that's what spawned the article!

[1]: I even have a draft article on similarly transferred learning: https://entropicthoughts.com/transparent-leadership-beats-se...

> The ~~Management~~ Skill Nobody Talks About.

Getting on with people long term is often about making them feeling acknowledged and being clear about what makes them valued.

The real trick to 'repair' is not to make hollow promises. Managers can be perceived as failing when an external event happens and they haven't planned for it, or they bet against it happening. This can kick off a whole chain of events, including pushing team members into crunch time or 'impossible positions'. Its rare that you can stop the external event or a similar one from happening, so promising it won't is hollow.

The next hollow promise commonly made is 'when it happens I won't let X happen [to you]'. The problem here is often that you probably will. In two ways: either X happening is clear in hindsight but not with foresight, so you'll probably make similar decisions again; or, the team member ending up in an unhappy situation is the best of a bad bunch of options.

I've had to place people in positions where they had insufficient support and excessive demands. Sometimes I knew this going in, and sometimes I did not.

You also have to be careful about passing the buck - if you're the manager you need to be clear with yourself about what your job is and whose issue any given problem actually is. Do you help your team interact with third parties, or do third parties interact with your team through you? How much are you supposed to represent your teams needs to management (e.g. pushback) vs how much are you supposed to represent your management's desires to the team (e.g. pushdown).

If you are caught passing the buck to shirk responsibility by your reports or by management you will lose a lot of trust and respect very quickly. You can always pushback or pushdown harder to appear 'good' to one party, but at some extreme that is going to lose you your job. Its your choice how to play this - so own the choice.

Two things I learned. As you move up the management ladder, the problems get harder. If they were easy, they would be solved already.

Second, when things go poorly, accept responsibility. When things go well, give credit to the team.

Good advice. The same thing applies to parents - they make mistakes, but owning up to them is what makes a good parent. Same with peer relationships as well (but there is no power dynamic).

I've tried do this a couple of times in the last year, but it always seems to backfire, specifically with Gen Z. After I apologize, they seem to think of it as an opening to continue to shit on me and bring up more of my shortcomings -- which is just bizarre to me. Because of this, it's made me really second guess acknowledging when I think I've made a mistake.

The best managers I ever had were the ones they flat out said "I'm not an expert, what do you think?" or akin to. Being humble is such a skill. Those managers ended up building huge, amazingly successful teams. The managers that did it their way ended up failing up but at the expense of the team. Everyone who works with them is let go or fired or jumps ship.

Great managers are able to touch on our humanity, which should inspire us all to rise up to meet them.

I must be missing something - didn’t we all learn how to apologize and take responsibility in kindergarten? Granted, easier said than done.

And then get skewered for their mistakes by others and get level capped in a competitive work environment. Lose lose situation. You can come out looking better and sometimes that works, and sometimes people lose faith in you.

My mantras in management:

Love Your Errors

It's not a failure, it's an opportunity for improvement

No shame, no blame

The article talks a lot about appropriate management behaviors that come from humility, but I don't think humility is a skill. The skill is having an accurate and effective self-awareness. If you are (accurately) self-aware then humility (and confidence, where appropriate) is an inevitable side-effect. And that means stuff like...

Acknowledging what happened, taking responsibility, and reconnecting.

...is a reflex, not a tactic.

The worst managers leave an endless trail of new process, approvals, and checklists for anything that has ever gone wrong since they joined the company.

In Deming's Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, leadership often leaves off Study and Act of which "acknowledge" and "repair" are part of.

I think this is a basic “being an adult” skill to be honest.

We all know those friends that you can’t criticize because they’ll take it poorly.

Based on this description I've never experienced a good manager, not even once.

I wrote a list of dangerous things to look out for in toxic colleagues, trying to be objective, so as not to think anyone I'm annoyed by is "toxic"

Inability to apologize / repair was near the top of the list. Everyone makes a lot of interpersonal mistakes. Most people can apologize.

Another big one was "norms for thee, but not for me". As in the rules we create as a team don't apply to me. But apply to everyone else. The toxic person gets to use them as a cudgel, but they don't seem to be bound by them.

Another one is being very thin-skinned. Easily jumping into a kind of victim mentality (surprisingly common even in leaders) where they are the ones being put upon. Being a victim, they are justified in doing whatever it takes to correct the situation

Related to that last one, many of these folks feel like they're taking on more than their share and have to carry the team. They may have a narrative they are the brilliant person on the team that has to fix everyone else's screwups. Or the team can't live without their unique skills. Therefore they're "special" and get to act outside the rules / norms. And other leaders can feed into this when they think the special person is indispensable, turning a blind eye to their bad behavior.

Nah, obviously good managers don't need to repair because they don't make mistakes in the first place. And if they are really really good at not making mistakes they become executives, which are the closest we have to human perfection.

Reading comments. It seems like there are a lot of bad managers.

My first boss told me that it's the primary role of a good manager to keep bullshit away from your most competent staff and 'manage' everyone else. I've worked for a number of organizations with different ideas of management since then, but that has been my guiding principle.

Very seldom a German manager would ever do this.

Before my first job, I read many of these types of texts. When I entered the job market, I saw that the truth was very different. This is pure nonsense.

In my 26 years of experience, I see managers and HR professionals as company advocates, with a single mission: to protect the company's interests.

Whether managers admit mistakes or not is irrelevant; what matters is that they defend the company's interests, no matter the cost.

Mistakes are passed on to the people who can do the heavy lifting, and they respond with dismissal or legal retaliation (when possible).

Your HR exit interview is designed to find out if you harbor resentment toward the company and if there's a chance the company will be sued.

I've tried every imaginable technique I've read in modern books. Politics are more important than anything, and nothing works.

Great points, taken to heart thanks.

All people make mistakes…

s/managers/humans/g

Oh no. Not another LinkedIn insight from a new dad about how managing humans in corp is just like parenting. Just fucking enjoy being a parent and don't apply your obvious empathy epiphanies to your career out loud.

That sounds more like a daycare skill, not a management skill. Good managers don't get distracted by "favors" for other departments or navel gaze after making mistakes. They have a clear vision of what needs to be done and execute on it aggressively, and aren't afraid to make mistakes when pursuing a goal. Good team members love this, and the rest fail out.