That's a great way of summing up what I've heard called "managerialism".
There's a theory behind, e.g., the MBA that a competent manager can manage anything. That what one manages makes no difference as long as you're a real manager. One of the corollaries of that theory is that all one has to do is find the right short-term metrics and make them go up and to the right.
I don't think this theory makes much sense when you examine it. But it's excellent at justifying a caste system, one where all workers are controlled by wise managers, and where there's a stable hierarchy of executives above that. I note that the hierarchy established is basically equivalent to those of feudalism. It also has the handy property of justifying high compensation for managers and executives; since workers are cogs and higher-ups do the important thinking, all gains should flow upward.
There are other ways of organizing things, of course. But this has become such the default that people have a hard time even imagining alternatives.
exactly. the managerial class claims dominion over the rest of us, and then swiftly constructs a rigid social system that locks in their position on top of it. this necessarily includes promulgation of unfounded myths and beliefs taken on faith to support the ossification of the system.
a.k.a. neoliberal economics
Things like metrics, values, and re-orgs might seem like Dilbert-esque corporate speak (a view I used to share), but they're incredibly important once you're trying to get a bunch of people to do something with excellence and speed.
Certainly some aspects can: keeping politics away from your group so that they can work, focusing work tasks by eliminating extraneous ones, advocating for people in the company. However, once you start getting into things like values and metrics it starts becoming a lot more grey. On the one hand metrics are a great idea, a tiny step towards making management more science driven. But on the other, the metrics so often used are such a poor and overly simple representation of a very complex system that it's often hard to see how they provide an accurate view of any given work place.
Goals and values are often completely lame. We value hard work! Your goal is to do your job! Somehow managers must know that they are ridiculed for this. After all entire movies are made doing so. Yet they still seem to want to believe this rhetoric works.
Your skepticism based on who's speaking is warranted. After all, you shouldn't ask your barber if you need a haircut. Yet, maybe your hair stylist has the most expertise. Should you trust your dentist on how often you should get your teeth cleaned?
As long as there are regulations and lawsuits over this sort of stuff, there will be metrics.
The better managers translated the quantitative metrics into qualitative guidance for their teams. The worse managers provided no such buffer and instead made their teams achieve metrics by any means necessary.
This seems like a key insight.
Metrics are key to good management – but metrics are for the managers, not for the teams. Managers that pass metrics directly down to their teams as goals aren't doing their jobs; they're trying to make their team do their job.
Maybe. Thoughts?
Making middle managers accountable for the failure of executives to manage their company, effectively just insulates those people who made decisions from those who know they are terrible decisions.
I was a middle manager who had to do this very thing, and even though my company was happy due to making gobs of money, every review I had was terrible because I wasn't hitting the metric of the month (that generally ended in horrible burn out and hiring even more replaceable people) and I was constantly warned that "You wont bonus this month."
I never got a bonus while I worked there, and yet was highly respected and valued by all my employees.
When I left the company the other great managers followed me, and the business folded, having hundreds of people lose their jobs.
So tell me, why would anyone want this or claim that this type of decision making is "good management"?
Why setup a system that punishes those that help the business and deliver actual value to customers instead of meaningless metrics?
This doesn't follow from the GP's comment. All we know from that comment is that Metrics + some managers = bad.
Maybe this is a matter of necessary but not sufficient? I have no strong opinion, I am just pointing at a grey area.
"Management purely by numbers is sort of like painting by numbers—it’s strictly for amateurs."
http://a16z.com/2011/07/19/when-employees-misinterpret-manag...
I'm not saying good management is unnecessary. I'm saying that managerialism is basically the opposite of good management. Metrics can be valuable if used very carefully. But they so rarely are, because a lot of the drive for metrics is really is in service of a cultivated shallowness. Simple metrics allow somebody to swoop in, jerk some levers, provide apparent gain, and then jet off to something else, never mind the consequences.
1. People can't self-manage (to some degree) 2. Performance is the end goal of management
I think both of these are wrong, or at least unfounded. I work in a more-or-less self-managed environment, and performance is actually pretty good. I get to pursue about 50% of my work independently and the other half is either collaborative and in line with a coworker's needs, or is one of those "must-dos". I don't see a possible world where I'd get more work done over the average day if there were artificial metrics like "time spent at desk", "lines of code written" or "number of tasks completed" dangled over my head - I'd probably just fuck off more and come up with clever schemes to break the game. This problem can be seen in academia as well - give a bunch of smart people a matrix of rules and yell "GO!". Watch them optimize.
I'd also argue that if it's only performance you're looking for, you're both ethically and intellectually off base. Good managers do increase performance/productivity - bad managers do not. But to assume that, as with teachers, academics, or software engineers, you can measure and reward behaviors without causing adverse affects on your workplace then you're dreaming. My manager is good because he backs off when needed, leaving me and a coworker to argue about an implementation design. My manager is good because he sets up an area of focus and says "ideas, go!". My manager is good because he will let people take a week or month to pursue a new solution that he personally doesn't understand, but trusts them to solve it aptly. My manager is not good because his team excels in certain metrics - his team excels in certain metrics because he is good. And last, my manager is good because productivity is not the end goal - employee happiness is. Happy employees do good work, and more importantly, they're happy for their own sake, which is much better than being surrounded by burnt out metric junkies.
So maybe my takeaway is that if we're going to do any kind of metric gathering it should probably be sub-perceptible and not be treated as a golden calf. If my CEO wants to devise a clever way of using me as a science experiment in pursuit of better management practices then I encourage that. But to tell people "here's what we're tracking now go off and do good work instead of that" is really fraught with problems.
But I don't see the difference being systems and metrics. I see it much more as interpersonal relationships, respect, and caring about the people that work for you. The manager's competence in the domain itself is also important.
Selecting the right person for the job is also vital, but you are specifically addressing different performance by the same team with a different manager.
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Correct me if I'm wrong but this is a minority view in management circles
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair
The need for this sometimes seems to be, itself, an aspect of managerialism. Sure, if you're going to the moon on a tight timescale you probably do need to marshal a larger number of people than can usefully self-organise in the available time. But most projects are much smaller scale. A feature of managerialialist organisations is that there's rarely any consideration of the possibility that a give project could be done by a self-organised group (let alone a single smart individual). Everything starts with managers assigning a "team", which then inevitably ends up requiring management.
Professional managers can of course learn about different jobs, but there is a massive and largely unpleasant difference between being manged by someone who's been promoted for their domain competence and someone who has been parachuted in because of their expertise in ordering people about. Since it's virtually impossible for junior workers to fire a manager they dislike then what appears to be efficiency is often achieved through exploitation. To know this and perpetuate that pattern is to disavow moral agency, converting what is nominally a cooperative enterprise into a zero-sum game.
The problem however, is that they all tend to be absurdly compensated whereas logic would support paying only the first group in that manner.
I suppose if you value employees who are trained by rote and operate in a manner reflecting that training...
So it is a choice we make, tell everyone what to do from an early age and allow them to focus, or try and teach all the things to everyone, using standard testing to make sure everyone is at least keeping their head above water.
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Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. I agree that metricising performance is only as good as your metrics, and in my personal opinion, metricising knowledge work is a fool's errand (too many variables to accurately capture performance). That is _separate_ from having managers though. Managers can often triage work effectively, help engineers unblock their work, help identify people in the org that contain the domain knowledge necessary to help one of their direct reports, etc etc.
I think the whole urge to track velocity and points and stupid things like that to be absolutely dumb, though. Also I'm an IC and am coming up to the point in my career where I have to figure out a way to not be pushed into management.
I agree that metricising knowledge work is a mistake. But I think it's also true for other kinds of work. In colleges I worked in a factory and there was no end of trouble that came from managing via metrics.
i could be wrong, but i believe in 'real' professions like medicine and law, there's some kind of board/bar rule that prohibits being managed by someone who never had the actual job they're managing. any one know if that's accurate?
To be fair, academics can also be childish, vindictive, sexist. There is also a real problem of hiring one's friends and students. BUT inter-organizational competition helps to some extent with these problems. Regardless, they justify administration and associated costs.
There's something disturbingly paternal about the idea that unusually clever and/or creative people can't be trusted to act like adults and therefore need adult supervision from people with authority over them.
What you describe is how I've seen software dev management properly work, managers are a support structure for the workers, like Admin. They have important and useful skills, but don't get the position of metaphorical aristocracy.
When you have MBA style dated general management they operate by putting the devs subordinate to their management "expertise" and then they don't "triage work effectively, help engineers unblock their work, help identify people in the org that contain the domain knowledge necessary to help one of their direct reports, etc etc." because it's not really in their interest to do so.
It's not just incentives either, there is a huge cultural component, which is why it's so easy to parody "tech management" and have the caricature be recognizable around the world.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
My friend and I have internally renamed the roles "producers", "regulators", and "harvesters" in an attempt to remove the negative connotations. Feel free to use that in your own discussions also.
They'd probably argue that you have to pay well for a good administrator. How do you measure a good administrator? By how much money they save. So the less the academics are paid, the more the administrators save and so therefore the more they are paid - and we're there.
It used to be academics took turns at administrating for a couple of years, this was before the rise of the professional manager, and they insinuated themselves everywhere.
All the credit for his work goes to him, of course. But one can easily imagine him completely flaming out with a different department head and advisor.
It is precisely because people are not cogs that managers can either be a force multiplier or an unmitigated disaster.
EDIT: on rereading, that guy isn't saying all management is like this but that his hypothesis explains certain managers. All right. That makes my comment a non-sequitur.
I think most managers would enjoy hiring the best people and then having greatness occur. But the reason these things are in place is because you're not always going to be hiring the best people (or someone might be great in some categories, but terrible in others you didn't know). Saying "hire good people" isn't much of a solution.
I think being overly measured in a job makes a job about maximizing the metrics at any cost. And a lot of people will cave into that pressure and take shortcuts in areas that are not measured in order to maximise their measured performance.
For example over estimating, less testing, less documentation if the metrics is about meeting estimates.
Whereas without the metrics they might just do what they think is best given their experience in any given situation.
There is never going to be zero metrics, as managers need to know where the money and time is being spent, but I prefer things on the lighter side.
Also, you're clearly laying out metrics: communication ability and timeliness. They're just somewhat generic metrics.
Basically, this promotes a system where metrics are given by how your peers and managers feel about you.
Perhaps while our metrics aren't perfectly capable of predicting how good a worker will turn out or judging it's progress, we shouldn't rely too much on them in place of peer judgement.
But indeed let's not fool ourselves that coworker judgement is perfect. It needlessly introduces a whole body of biases, unnecessary politics, and social engineering that can be as bad if not worse than a metric-only system, which at least are objective.
Video: The surprising truth about what motivates us
Controlling is that sort of BS. And I had seen it so much early in my career that I thought that's all there was.
Supportive process is bottom up, done to improve consistency and reliability. E.g., by my door I have checklists for going running and swimming, because I was tired of going out to exercise and realizing I had forgotten something.
I say this because I think process can be amazingly helpful if it's done bottom up, if the workers are the ones who design and improve it. But that only happens if managers have another thing that Toyota talks a lot about: "respect for people" [1]. That's what I think is really missing in these metrics-driven, people-are-cogs schemes.
Toyota do not have that kind of response though, as being Japanese in origin the leadership have a bit of Giri left in their thinking.
In some European nations after WW2 it was not uncommon to have enough worker representatives in the board room that they could affect a vote.
These days its been stripped down to a token union man that has little to no chance of affecting the decisions.
MBAs effectively look at any organization as if it is a pin factory.
I believe you've mistaken these systems as being for reform purposes, rather than existing as a way to weed out bad actors who want to enjoy the substantial benefits of tenure or a large salary without doing the work which justifies them.
When you reject metrics, the insidious thing is that you lack tools to catch bad actors who, due to oft-present subjectives like better than average lying ability, being liked by their team despite being largely ineffective, and exploitation of people's desire to not create conflict, the organization will never hear about them until long after the damage is done, they've made off like bandits, and you can no longer fix what they've done, since you didn't know when it happened.
Metrics cut through these specific subjectives and are therefore effectively necessary.
You can be a dirty academic, but published paper number metrics mean fakers now need to be, minimum, good enough to fake doing the job of a real academic well enough to publish, which means at least theoretically they could reform. Code reviews, pull requests, and similar programming measures do the same, leaving a clear and auditable point at which failure can be caught and later reversed. They further make it necessary to be good enough at programming to not only survive the interview, but also fake a long-term progression of source code which means to cheat you at least need to know how to program well enough to get away with it, which is within spitting distance of actually coding something useful anyways.
Admittedly, I don't think metrics create good incentives a lot of the time, but if you're thinking about the very long term and want to prevent your company's bottom from solely being a feudally structured nepotism contest, metrics are the only way to do so.
Honest question - how do we know who is better at what if not by some measure/metric? How do we know who the right people are? Is it just a matter of 'expert opinion'? And if so, how do we prevent cliques and nepotism?
Metrics do complicate cliques and nepotism; but they can also be used to reinforce them. Rarely is performance as clear cut as speed in a race. Metrics that boil down to approval from coworkers -- how helpful was this person? how professional (1-5) was their communication? -- often do more to conceal bias than prevent it.
The purpose of business consultants is to make money for business consultants. Pushing for standardized testing regimes is to pursue political goals and profit (for-profit charters, low-quality online education, re-segregation of schools). It's the same in academia. The question is always, "cui bono?"
But I don't think this true in the context of the modern US economy(why I qualified my statement as such). The political/economic situation is such that the efficacy of a given model is secondary to the viability of abstractions that make reference to it. How it performs in the meta-context of "salesmanship," re-inforcing acceptable political narratives, and social media, supercede its actual utility. The implosive (and false) model of finance, where the derivative of some object or system possesses more value than the thing which it references, has pervaded every aspect of our economy and culture.
Charitably, metrics are supposed to be a way to introduce objectivity and minimize implicit/unacknowledged biases in decision making, especially where performance is concerned. Even less charitably, it gives companies and managers cover for discriminatory practices by giving them objective standards to point at as justification for their decisions.
We'd all probably be much more comfortable with a less metric dependent world if we didn't also have the nagging feeling that it would lead to the same-old types of people scratching each others' backs.
It's harder for us to rely on systems that leave more room for personal judgement without oversight because we worry that decisions not attached to hard metrics are more likely to be subject to invidious biases. The charitable take is that the drive for metrics is motivated by a sincere attempt to mitigate these biases. The more cynical take I offered was saying that people use it as a way to cover their tracks against charges of discrimination.
The trouble is, if you've started from a fallacy of that scale, you're already doomed.
Introducing any form of measurement can in itself change the behaviour of the system you're trying to measure.
Introducing any form of target will bias a system towards reaching that target, but not necessarily without incurring costs elsewhere.
Introducing measurements and setting targets based on them is not only not an automatic win, it can easily become a significant loss.
Heh. My company calls that "agile".
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
The measure has to be concrete enough to not be manipulatable.
For example, aircraft mechanical failures or hospital infections are very clear and obvious metrics. And besides outright lying and manipulation, the metrics speak for themselves and can't be corrupted.
You can't, however, measure "education" or "intelligence". You can approximate it and the more you make depend on the results the worse the already bad metrics become.
Are you kidding? There are all sorts of ways for hospitals and doctors to manipulate this stuff, e.g., attract healthier patients (less compromised immune systems) or ones who are wealthier, younger, and more likely to follow instructions; give more prophylactic antibiotics; classify more patients as palliative http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-hospitals-... ; slant cause-of-death classification when there is ambiguity.
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-uncou...
They are far from very clear and obvious.
And not just in academia. Technology has allowed the collection of metrics and data to a degree unheard of previously, and it takes wisdom and restraint to know when they do more harm than good.
Unfortunately, I think the idea of collecting metrics and doing data-driven evaluation of people's performance has being one of those "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" things. It gets done unthinkingly because it's safe "conventional wisdom" regardless if it's the right call or not.
First to know what smart looks like you have to be smart yourself before you can hire more smart people. Second you have to be really cognizant to not hire more people like yourself because not all smart looks the same way. Third whatever position you're hiring for you need to understand well enough to recognize the same kind of skill in others but this kinda conflicts with the second point because expertise always introduces bias. Fourth you have to be ruthless when it comes to firing people because every so often you will make a mistake and hire a bozo that looked smart and people really don't like firing people.
Basically all the cards are stacked against you and what I've observed in most software organizations is that you'll be lucky if you manage to make 10% of your workforce satisfy the "smart" metric.
High quality pedagogy and quality scholarship are not necessarily correlated with who shows up to class or purchases books and journals. It's a separate part of the pipeline with different incentives.
1. Right now academia is both absurdly political and largely government funded.
2. Since you can't pay people tax money to do nothing, you need managers.
3. Academics in management roles also have their own reputations to defend or their own biases.
4. That leaves academia open for political manipulation and bias. This could have the result of limiting innovation (publish what you need to get tenure) or even limiting jobs for underrepresented groups (women in science and engineering, for example).
I don't have the answer here, but it does occur to me that objective measures can be a good thing for many people.
Absolutely, could not agree more. This is the only way to beat gamification of metrics in my opinion.
There is a worrying trend of treating staff as equally capable but untrusted cogs in a wheel, and metricising performance. I fundamentally believe that no amount of rules or metrics can turn a bad academic into a good one, an unsafe doctor into a safe one or a crooked politician into an honest public servant. We have to calm down with the metrics, accreditations and regulations, and accept that some people are better than others at certain things, hire the right people and trust them to do a good job.