Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielHB | Hacker News Reader

I dunno most CEOs I have been under of seem to work really hard and try to get stuff done in a sane manner, it is usually the middle management that fs up.

CEO is, of course, partly responsible for having that middle management in the first place. However if I were the CEO I don't even know how I would be able to smell the rats with the top-down view that CEOs have (they can't be in every meeting and decision making of their subordinates).

If you have the right underlings (or inherit them) you might actually not need to do anything at all and succeed. Then again if you have the wrong underlings (or inherit them) then your job is hella-difficult.

View on HN

Interesting. I have had mostly the opposite experience. CEO(s) that changed strategy + focus every month and the middle management having to pick up the pieces. Keep people motivated and deliver.

I've been in a situation where I had to work directly with a good CEO (plus board, C-Levels, and a lot of middle-management) and problematic middle-management was the actual problem.

It was almost like parody:

- CEO wanting people to leave at 5 sharp, middle-management inventing work and forcing people to do overtime and telling people "he's the CEO, he can leave at 5, he doesn't know we have a lot of work to do".

- Bureaucracy and inefficiency, with everyone complaining about it, but whenever CEO pushed back on that same bureaucracy, the discussion would be hampered by one or two people fillibustering the meeting to force the status quo.

- People going to golf courses or resort trips paid by vendors and then pushing for a vendor that costs 100k/year. This one was so blatant that I was surprised said person wasn't fired.

- CEO and C-Levels taking suggestions from the trenches, and the board loving it, but middle-managers laughing about the suggestions behind the CEOs back, right after the meeting. This one stung because a few of those were suggestions I made and he presented as his own on my request.

This is the kind of stuff that HN people would go "Chesterton Fence" but was just fucking corruption and schoolyard bullying from middle-management.

Obviously the company didn't grow in the period, and the CEO resigned and left for much greener pastures.

In the end the only lesson I learned is that the CEO should have laid-off those people.

And that the CEO should make more money because childcare is hard work.

Funny thing is that I'm a middle manager myself.

Yeah this is what I have seen in the orgs I been in too (although not as bad as you pointed out), I have also seen CEOs fail by inaction like you pointed out (not laying off people doing bad things).

Although I am more afraid of the middle manager who hides information than the CEO who doesn't act on it.

I'm no MBA (insert joke here about that being good or bad), but my general opinion is that leaders should delegate and then be held responsible. Details (beyond enough for the higher leadership to be effective) should be relatively minimal. Having some cross-functional accountability (eg security/financial audits, etc) is fine, but in my experience the vast majority of corporate dysfunction comes from micromanaging. This gets compounded when middle management also has to interpret and implement said micromanagement. Obviously people need to learn and make mistakes; mistakes are fine so long as they're not repeated! There is a reason that some of the best, most effective leaders I've ever worked under shield those under them from the politics of the organization.

I appreciate that in the real world a lot of nepotism means that people under higher leadership are the ones to be held accountable/scapegoated, though. Grifting has become a massive problem in the modern corporate world. You see it all the time when failed CEOs get such lucrative golden parachutes.

Sounds like those middle managers needed to be fired, not laid off.

>qIf you have the right underlings (or inherit them) you might actually not need to do anything at all and succeed. Then again if you have the wrong underlings (or inherit them) then your job is hella-difficult.”

I think this paragraph is right on the money, but the ‘leader’ has more influence on their ‘underlings’ than you give them credit for. In this vein, I highly recommend “Turn the Ship Around!” by Marquet, which is the only good book on leadership I’ve managed to find.

Yeah if new CEO gives the middle management mission in the lines of - we need high productivity, lets be nice and supportive to our teams to get the best out of them since we believe core of our employees are smart hard working folks, it trickles down into thousand little (and not so little things).

Reverse also trickles some brown stuff down. CEO who doesn't care about that leaves stuff to middle management, who are often over-eager to please for the carrot on stick in form of bonuses.

Yeah it is that old saying, the best person to wield power is the one that doesn't want it. High pay and bonuses get rats into the ship, low pay makes no competent sailor want to join your crew.

Decided to check this book out because of this and it is actually extremely interesting. Thank you for mentioning it. Have you ever read “Failure is not an option” by Gene Kranz? It’s about turning NASA into a fully functioning organisation, and your book reminded me of it.

Yes, I enjoyed Kranz’s book as well, though I thought it was quite different. If you liked that, I might suggest “Moon Lander” by Thomas J Kelly, which was the basis for the “From the Earth to the Moon” episode “Spider” (also excellent). You may also enjoy “More than My Share of it All” by Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson, about the early history of Lockheed’s Skunk Works.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com