It's probably easier for managers to overrate their skills and performance because the problems they cause are often not overt; if parts of their team are underperforming, the knee-jerk assessment is that "there's something wrong with Joe" rather than "there's something wrong with our process" or "there's something wrong with what I'm doing."
Some of my worst experiences with management involved cases of serious micromanagement. I'd say if you're micromanaging, there's a 99.9 percent chance that you're a bozo and you don't belong in the position you're in even if you had initially earned it. You have trust issues with your employees and you've failed to build a team and environment that allows people to effectively manage themselves.
The best mangers I've known are the ones who are minimally involved. People who are given the space to make choices, be creative, and fail every so often, will often figure out how to manage themselves.
I'd argue that people usually leave both managers and companies because companies too often fail to recognize the broken patterns of managers. This is anecdotal, but I worked at one place where more than half of the development team(those with the most talent) quit within a span of 2 weeks, and somehow upper management decided it was not the fault of our tyrannical manager and instead replaced those positions with junior developers they could underpay and abuse. It's all the more insulting when you can point out the problems and provide actual solutions, and the aloof men in suits on Mount Olympus allow the problem to fester. I might have stayed for another year had they booted out our manager.
The fact that most people have stories of terrible management is astounding, and it doesn't say very much for whatever training managers receive(if any?).
The trust and minimal involvement are really key here, the best managers I've ever worked with have been enablers rather than taskmasters. Managers that remove roadblocks, provide you with exactly the tools you need, insulate you from unnecessary cross-chatter, and just let you kill it with as few distractions as possible.
Those sorts of enablers are how you not only maintain, but increase the output of your developers.
You often have micromanagement and abandonment at the same time. They are so busy micromanagement their people while they neglect making the decisions that they need to make. If somebody steps up, they push back. Everybody avoids moving and are just waiting until the micromanager has time.
> The best mangers I've known are the ones who are minimally involved. People who are given the space to make choices, be creative, and fail every so often, will often figure out how to manage themselves.
In those cases, did you feel you shared values with those managers? Or were they indifferent to your values, and just left you alone?
I've experienced both kinds of low involvement, but I was definitely referring to cases where we shared values.
A case of indifference is still preferable to tyranny, though it obviously comes with its own set of problems. The biggest issue I have with uninvolved managers is the conflict between knowing what's expected versus the level of autonomy I should have. This problem is not isolated, of course. But an uninvolved manager may grant a lot of autonomy while failing to make it clear to their employees what sort of decisions they cannot male autonomously. As an employee, I will only ask so many questions before deciding the system is ridiculous and then overriding it. That's just my nature. If something is so important to a process, like communicating with a bunch of anonymous suits on Mount Olympus before a major release of one particular product, that information should be handed down to me. I shouldn't have to pry every detail out of management to get my job done, and occasionally they'll be punished when I make an arbitrary decision.
A good manager should be able to provide relevant information and facilitate the product process while staying out of the way. If they're always too busy attending meetings outside the team, then they'll reap what they sow and have no one to blame but themselves.
By the way, I do not make character judgments on most managers. Most of the people who've managed me are great people outside the office setting.
I'd agree that micromanaging is a bad sign. Too often I get micromanaging about style critiques like "turn this into one if statement instead of nested ones and it's more clear", but absolutely no comments on the meat of a significant refactor. To be clear, I think style rules are important, but this is the same guy who writes 150+ character lines with ternaries like they're going out of style.
Some of my worst experiences with management involved cases of serious micromanagement. I'd say if you're micromanaging, there's a 99.9 percent chance that you're a bozo and you don't belong in the position you're in even if you had initially earned it. You have trust issues with your employees and you've failed to build a team and environment that allows people to effectively manage themselves.
The best mangers I've known are the ones who are minimally involved. People who are given the space to make choices, be creative, and fail every so often, will often figure out how to manage themselves.
I'd argue that people usually leave both managers and companies because companies too often fail to recognize the broken patterns of managers. This is anecdotal, but I worked at one place where more than half of the development team(those with the most talent) quit within a span of 2 weeks, and somehow upper management decided it was not the fault of our tyrannical manager and instead replaced those positions with junior developers they could underpay and abuse. It's all the more insulting when you can point out the problems and provide actual solutions, and the aloof men in suits on Mount Olympus allow the problem to fester. I might have stayed for another year had they booted out our manager.
The fact that most people have stories of terrible management is astounding, and it doesn't say very much for whatever training managers receive(if any?).