What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

This is the problem I've run into most often with management: the command to do things using method or technology A instead of B, not because A is better (in fact, B usually is the better choice both for development and for internal user support), but because A is the pet preference of a manager not involved in the work and who doesn't actually work with any of the people who will be using or supporting the end result.

I can't agree with this strongly enough. When I was a manager (I've since gone back to being a developer), trying to do engineering work at the same time was probably my biggest weakness.

There will be times when there's an emergency (real or imagined) where your upper management wants you to come up with a fix for something right away, and you'll be tempted to drop everything you're doing as a manager and put out the fire. (One rationalization for this might be that you don't want to break the flow of your developers, who are working on important stuff of their own.) Resist this temptation. Not only will your management work remain undone, but if the people on your team don't get experience dealing with emergencies in parts of the code that they don't know much about, you'll be stuck doing this stuff forever and they won't learn these skills. Learn how to delegate, and learn how to set the expectations of your own managers so that they don't assume that every problem can be fixed instantly.

If you're coming from a technical role, understand that your new job is not to be an engineer. If you're lucky and are good enough at your new job that you have some spare cycles, you might get to guide some architectural discussions

It can be rewarding to help guide a team towards something you could never accomplish alone, but you must resist the temptation to step and do "do things".

Disclaimer -- I moved up to a director-level position and realized within a year that to be good at it I would probably not be able to continue expanding my technical skills, at least not on company time. I moved on to an "individual contributor" role with a company that provides higher level career opportunities that don't involve having direct reports. The minutia of actual line management wasn't bad as long as there was a good team, but I definitely underestimated the people skills, budgeting, planning, and politics that goes along with being a good manager.

I don't know how to contact you, so if you ping me at [0] or [1] I can send you a link to my resume. Thanks!

edit: I'm a big dum-dum – it was quite easy to find your Fb profile, I sent you my resume there (check 'Other' messages). :)

0: https://plus.google.com/+AndreiSimionescu

1: my username at gmail

It also sounds like a typical story where the larger organization was trying to keep management lean, without realizing that it really did take multiple people to do the job.

One place I worked at ground through three managers in 6 months (with 120 people under them) before finally getting the clue and hiring a proper team of 7 to do the job.

It's not uncommon at all and it really is the upper management's responsibility to properly staff their low/mid management teams.

Sometimes even the greatest skippers can't keep a boat from sinking. It's helpful to consider how you could have made the situation better or worse. But, based on what I've read, you're putting too much blame on your own shoulders. Rather, remember that it took three people for them to replace you.

Wouldn't it be cheaper and better for morale to hire a couple of temps to do the data entry?

Wow, what? It sounds like you were doing the right things, but this is hard to comprehend. Wouldn't temps cost $12/hour for this? No wonder they were angry.

Your title doesn't impact your role on the team. You can easily make a big impact as a leader, without the people management aspect.

It is clear from what you have said that your people were overworked, deadlines were not reasonable and there were not enough proper employees. Yet management persisted with their existing paradigm and you got to be the one that bore the bad news to everyone so they all resented you.

The best you can do in that situation is exit. Which it sounds like you and others figured out.

Sleep well knowing you cared about the people and the results, it was upper managment that did not. They cared only about the money.

As a side note, I hear this excuse a lot, about how money will be lost if we don't do this bad thing or that. Money is brief, setting up the proper business practices is long term. Sure, there are temporary situations that require extra effort... but they are obvious and temporary.

Many people haven't really thought about it and so you end up going on a fun journey helping them figure it out. Usually, you discover over time that there are a lot of things more important than money. Being the manager that helped them figure out what they really want (and hopefully get closer to it) builds awesome loyalty and motivation on the job.

Once you have the minimum amount to live comfortably (which in places like SF is actually a non-trivial amount), I've found raises and bonuses have only very short-term happiness that wears off in a week or two. It's feeling fulfillment in your job and making progress on your long term goals that really brings career happiness.

Also - do you think it's that their overwhelmed, under-trained for the new demands of the role, or something else that causes so many managers to fail?

I agree, and would add that they're not even answering the specific question being asked (which happens a lot on Quora). The question they're all answering is:

"What is good general management advice?"

But the question that was asked is:

"What are mistakes specific to new, inexperienced managers, that are common for that particular class of managers?"

A responsive answer to that question will generally be expressible as,

"The manager will make it a policy/habit that <blank>, thinking that <poor recognition of group dynamics>. In reality, <mechanism happens> and so they encounter <failure mode>."

For example,

"The manager will start a policy of not tracking employee time, on the grounds that the group is responsible and trustworthy, not realizing that this will make it harder to demonstrate progress and efficiency to higher-ups, and result in less leeway being given to the group on important decisions."

[Please don't refute the logic there, I'm not offering it as valid, just showing the form that a responsive answer would have.]

Example I interviewed for a job I know I was qualified for, they kept asking questions about things I really had no idea about (all stuff I had never dealt with before - only similar things) they were so refreshed by the honesty and how I dealt with not knowing things they offered me the job despite pretty much what I thought at the time was tanking the interview.

As a subordinate, it was quite annoying to deal with one of the worst managers in my career - I call him the "pretender". I already have plenty to do, and no I don't want to spend time on "checking if too many ping requests from other machines caused harddisk space on this machine to get full" (not joking, true story). The "pretender" had a title of "senior project manager" and the only thing true about that was the "senior" part (nothing against competent seniors), hemmed and hawed in the meetings pretending he knew what he was talking about and basically dumped it all on me.

Once I moved up and stopped reporting to him, he had nobody to dump work on, got exposed and last I heard, left.

I found the advice about visibility pretty on the nose. I have yet to have a direct supervisor who hasn't stolen credit a few times. In contrast the guys or girls above them have all been really good at directing it downward. As far as my career has gone anyway.

If the "new manager" period is the first year of management then I stick by my answer on those points.

Yep. Much of management theory assumes that employees are passive, like cattle, and that the employee will cluelessly make nothing of the manager who's "documenting". In reality, that puts the person into war mode.

The old phrase about never pulling a gun unless you intend to kill someone? It also applies to HR practices and "documenting". You only do that if you're sure you're going to fire someone as quickly as you can, because there's absolutely no way to turn back once down that road. The best route is to fire same-day with a generous severance, but most middle-managers don't have that leeway (either to fire quickly or to give severances). Which gets to the crux of why being a middle manager sucks so hard. You have major responsibilities (hiring, firing, defining and canceling projects) but none of the power to do them properly. You often get stuck between self-serving, arrogant executives (MacLeod Sociopaths) and checked-out minimum-effort players (MacLeod Losers) and can very easily be cleaning up the messes of both.

edit: I personally use https://github.com/sindresorhus/quora-unblocker in Chrome to do this for me so I don't have to think about it. I also made https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quora-share/ to do the same thing in FF.

@abdinoor - what tactics do you use to get in front of these issues?

What I've found is that its a good indicator of when I need to launch a new job search.

Under good management, I usually don't feel the need to share a list like this. If I do, then I can usually have a 5 minute chat with the manager to get things worked out. If that doesn't work, a longer discussion can be in order.

Under bad management, I usually feel like any attempt at change is more likely to hurt me than help me. I once took the risk of sharing the netflix culture slide deck [0] (a quick and insightful must read) with a manager. His response was that, if I was attracted to that sort of culture, then maybe I should get a job at netflix. Fail. You can probably guess at the number of management discussions we had after that.

[0] http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

Lately I have felt the desire within me to lead, or to create employment for others as I see so many of my peers selling themselves short, slaving away for terrible managers who have no idea what managing is.

I'm grateful to see you and others in this thread who approach management with a 'what can I do for these people' attitude. Do you have any advice for a young guy like me who one day wants to be one of the 'good managers' or hire people under me but has zero management experience so far?

I'm thinking it might be good for me to run workshops or hackathon projects or short-term commitments to limit my faults so if I make a mistake it's over soon and I can reflect on it and do better next time. Do you think a lot of short-term projects would be like management training speed-dating, or is there a better way to work on these skills?