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Comment by selecsosi | Hacker News Reader

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).

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Mostly I agree with 2, but be careful not to get so many systems that nothing can get done anymore. Finding that balance is hard.

That, and be careful to avoid a "box-ticking" culture where people rely on systems over independent thought. Also a hard balance.

Mere "box-ticking" in the form of checklists have been shown to greatly cut deaths in clinical/hospital settings. This may or may not apply to your systems.

Doctors would implement self-healing and abolish checklists if they could! Be glad if you don't need a checklist.

The right boxes to check are good. However you have to be careful. A doctor who spends 15 minutes checking boxes before treating a heart attack just killed someone... That doesn't mean the doctor cannot check boxes, just that they need to be break early to treat things. (even here checkboxes will be good - there are things with the same symptoms as a heart attack where heart attack treatment is the worst thing possible - those have a high death rate because they are so rare doctors don't check for them until too late to treat correctly)

Same with pilots.

Checklists are the only reason I ever feel safe to takeoff

According to Atul Gawande that‘s not strictly true as stated. It‘s not the box-ticking itself, it‘s several factors including the decisions about what the list should contain and adjusting the dynamics of the operating team to actually see results.

I'm not against ticking boxes, but a culture that relies on it overly much.

The system in this case for me is usually building a stronger backbone or improving communication and elevating constraints to highly our strengths/weaknesses and capabilities to actually achieve the desired outcome.

I view it as more a single system of constant improvement and understanding ability to execute in the environment. Nothing hurts credibility more than late commms, and missed deadlines due to over commitments.

> Put systems into place that prevent it from happening again

In addition to what you said overall, I think bad managers can have all sorts of qualities, but imo the worst ones correct for mistakes to protect themselves or people's impressions of them, leaning highly neurotic, and can't deal with conflict well, so they put in arbitrary systems in order to indirectly deal with any one-off grievance or mistake. Bad managers won't evaluate or re-evaluate the systems they put in place because they put them there to protect their ego.

"Surely this employee is underperforming because I don't like how they're performing and we have a system for that!"

They struggle to adapt to their new job because to delegate sufficiently they need to be able to trust, and let that manifest as other people doing the tasks they might have once done without their hands in the pie directly. They might assume that part of the reason they got the job was because they're great communicators, and never consider that actually that it's just that nobody ever told them they have some growing to do.

Good systems thinking combined with an actual desire/incentive to continuously improve is a combo that results in good management.

Also why neurodiverse people often make exceptional managers.

The neurology often results in good systems thinking.

The diversity results in lifelong disciplined improvement of social interactions.

Neurodiverse can mean a lot of things. And many of these things are probably detrimental to the manager role.

Maybe. Maybe not. Both you and I are expressing personal opinions.

Will a manager that acknowledges his/her/their mistakes get promoted as frequently, as if when downplaying them?

Depends on if the managers above them are accountable or not. Accountability is the opposite of corruption and both need to come from the top.

True, in traditional corporate structures. I'm interested in how accountability flows in cooperative structures like Mondragon. (Accountability still flows down through those at the top, as far as I can tell, but there is an aspect of bottom up accountability too.)

My experience is that managers who acknowledge their mistakes are worse at office politics, so they will reach their peak sooner and lower than those that do not admit fault.

but that's anectdata, so grain of salt and all.

It hasn't unlocked a magical promotion track for me, but it has engendered support and respect from my teams that has allowed us to produce delivery exceeding what we thought we could because there was true buy in from the business around the definition of exceptional circumstances.

I'm not personally engineering my career in leadership around moving up, but building teams of people that can do exceptional things tends to be the driving factor that allows me to continue up the track.

There is unfortunately no formula for it, apart from, play the game that senior management wants to be played.

I’d say, stick to your guns and find a job that supports your morales, not the other way around.

Probably not, but some games it is better to lose.

I haven't seen it. What I have seen is the folks who lie and steal get promoted -- they all seem to be in a big club together. Blatant stealing, too. Here's an example: my team created a new product to address a time-constrained market opportunity. We basically did 99% of the work that two teams would normally do. A VP for those two teams then gets on stage and gives an award to his two teams for doing 100% of the work. My team is given no credit or mention.

Another VP gave an award to one of his teams for implementing a company-wide system. His team was actually one of the last adopters of the system that my team identified, implemented, refined, and delivered.

Anyways, they are running two different companies now.

A chief source of management missteps I've seen is not talking to people and just making consequential decisions because they think a jira board gives them insight.

The thing that makes someone trustworthy is taking accountability for your own self and actions, but having boundaries such that you don’t take accountability for the selves and actions of others. That’s basically all I want to see from a manager, a direct report, or a peer.

> Put systems into place that prevent it from happening again.

Also called wishful thinking... Often such measures do definitely not work. There is even an internet law named for this: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".

This is why you have to have skin in the game, and a backbone to say no to executives when it compromises delivery if there isn't escalated mediation.

Said another way, I don't say no a lot, I put prioritization up front and tell them that we are sacrificing other deliver items.

That is a decision that an exec can work with, mediate between teams, and builds mutual respect for senior leadership as you don't break promises you've already made, unless there is mutual agreement from the business.

Putting systems in place is organizational scar tissue. Be very, very careful with scar tissue.

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