They are even less useful without power.
Problem is most of the managers are junior in their position. They don't have leadership experience. Often just got a promotion and come up from a different background and only have a few years of experience on management position. Or, they have some experience at different scale. So when they start on a bigger organisation, they are just like junior employees in my opinion.
Proper leadership requires lots of experience and skills.
The way it works best in my experience is the team helping them to work efficiently. If they (managers) are not informed enough, they start micromanaging everyone and everything around them because they feel nothing is aligned or everything is out of control.
Same story when they are misinformed. If the information is negative they panic and start direct communication with every team member. And when it is just false positives, they may look very unaccountable or impulsive.
The best is to inform them before they seek for information and updates. And use their powers to solve team problems. They have power to provide the support or remove impediments.
If managers are getting things done by wielding their authority from the org chart, odds are they aren't great leaders to begin with.
In most organizations, leaders arise naturally, and they don't always match the org chart. Wise managers let those people shine, and help them succeed. Then the informal leaders help the team succeed, and the manager gets what they want because they did the cliche of hiring smart people and then letting them do what they do best.
In such a scenario, managers may ask what they are doing... because the team is doing it all without much help. But that is a good thing. The manager did their job, of building an effective team.
Two points I see here.
1. managers are placed above the real leaders artificially 2. leaders arise without any formal process
The first point is what systems like Holocracy want to eliminate. The second point is what Holocracy leads to, some people following leaders and nobody really knows who that leader is.
My idea was to decouple the orga/bureaucracy stuff from management and create a new team assistant role, so things can go on orderly and there is someone to talk to.
The second part was creating some kind of process that helps to make decisions, so no "hidden leader" can wreak havok in the background.
Humans tend to fear competence more than incompetence. It’s the same cognitive bias as loss aversion.
Agree. If an organisation has power distance between managers and others, perhaps they have more fundamental problems to begin with.
By power I meant the privileges and rights that comes with their responsiblities and tasks. A simple example would be rights to ask for more resources or budget.
I miss having more people with official power when discussions go on and on without reaching a conclusion, and when there is work that everybody agrees needs doing but nobody wants to do.
Mind you - have had awful managers as well - but fortunately not very many and not for a long time.
Edit: I should also add that I've certainly been an awful manager at times....
I was just thinking if the system in place could be improved in a way that it worked even if some of them aren't good.
My role is to help them focus when they start to drift, shield them from politics, and most importantly give a cerimonial ratification on their ideas, if they match the values of the company.
So all 4 non developers are essentially assistants. I hope to soon be able to step out and leave the team working happily with a 10 to 1 ratio of dev to non-dev.
Given a six-month check-in and annual review once a year for each report, you'd have a total of 60 such events a year, meaning you'd have at least one annual review or six-month check-in every single week. You'd have to keep up with the unique performance characteristics of 30 different people in order to conduct these reviews in any reasonably useful and professional way that actually encourages real growth. If there's any sort of interpersonal conflict or unexpected project complexity, this could easily burn through enough of your time that you'd have to blow off nearly 30 people in the meantime.
Nowadays I do 1-on-1s with the dev lead, the assistant, and the product owners (senior devs and architects), so only 5 people.
Still, that would mean the dev lead would need to do 25 1-on-1s, so we have a structure of peer mentorship, with two phases: a formal and an informal. The formal is to maintain quality of information gathering and fairness. The informal is to allow for rapport and flexibility in the part of the mentor. We started this recently, we'll see how it goes.
I worked at a company that tried this, more or less. It worked well for a few months, until the bad apple employees realized that managers had no power to correct their bad behavior. Then it become a free for all.
Counterintuitively, it created far more bureaucracy than ever before as people started hoarding information, refusing to grant access to shared resources, claiming others' work as their own, and other selfish behaviors.
Bureaucracy is largely reflected through managers, but this experience taught me that bureaucracy isn't necessarily created by the managers. The power structures will organically assemble themselves as people compete for what they think are limited opportunities for raises, promotion, and advancement.
Having healthy management in place to deal with formalized and visible bureaucracy is much better than letting the bureaucracy grow organically in the shadows while pretending it doesn't exist.
Your people manager stays with you as you transition from project to project. They never have more than six direct reports. They are the person that handles all the bureaucracy for you and helping you through the org.
Your team lead is sometimes a people manager but probably not yours. They change based on the project you are on and are responsible for it's success. Their focus is on delivery not your career.
I'm interested in seeing where this goes as it breaks the responsibility up without breaking the career progression. There isn't a "technical path" ... yet.
How do you figure it does this? What you describe just seems like a basic, run-of-the-mill, cross-reporting model to me.
There's a post on joelonsoftware about this, and I think it constitutes most of the first few chapters of the book peopleware.
In my opinion the problem is just that managers are seen as people in positions of power, this needs to go away.
Creating a new role with new naming would get rid of all the baggage.
Managers necessarily have influence, or quickly grow it, by the nature of being a good manager.
Unlike some of the fad "flat"/structureless stuff that just eliminates managers, Holacracy focuses on decentralizing those management functions that still need to exist (because management is needed, even if there are no managers) in roles and processes, and reducing the "Lead Link"/"Circle Lead" role in each team to something that takes ~10% of a person's time and is focused around the garbage collection for the team and helping the team get problems out of their way.
It's hard to find a good one because execs don't like the idea of ICs having assistants, which is one of the perks that execs use to make themselves look better by getting credit for someone else's work without spending their own salary on it.
“Manager” is somewhere in the middle. “Insane bad manager” is the extreme, not the mere existence of a management structure.
I don’t agree that separating this as a distinct inficator variable would actually be useful.
I just put in my 2 week notice at a shop that I've been working at for 6 months, and what I've found is that effectiveness isn't the goal. Having done freelance for the past 8 years, I was actively shocked by how ineffective and wasteful the processes were here. I once witnessed a discussion about whether to CC multiple people or send each person their own copy that took over a week and eventually involved a VP.
I put in my 2 week notice this Monday. It took me all of 2 days to start filling my time again once I made the decision, and I can't even tell you how much I'm looking forward to going back to working for myself. It feels like having a straight jacket removed.
I'm sure there are shops out there that end up using agile and don't become these ridiculous monstrosities, but I feel like those shops would be successful with or without agile.
I think that's the key. Agile isn't a silver bullet, it's just a tool. If your problems are screws and you grab a screwdriver, you're probably in good shape. It works great for my team, because we all trust each other and genuinely take the quality of our product to heart. It doesn't work for our neighboring team because nobody gives a fuck besides getting credit for all of the good stuff and deflecting blame for all of the bad stuff.
I don't have a whole lot of faith in "there's one way to run a team/be a leader and you do it like this" sort of thing. The style of leadership I was taught in the military would not fucking fly on my team, but honestly, it would serve my neighboring team fairly well. Their problems are nails.
Why can't we have something in-between?
Like, instead of a manager, we have a team assistant. Someone who does burocracy and orga, but hasn't any power and the power is exercied in some way by all of the team members.
This would remove the "if all do it no one does it" problem and still prevent single people decisions.