Re:Head of Remote Work
by BlargMcLarg on Sunday December 27, 2020 @05:35PM
(#25554864)
There is a difference between the management many people endure, and the management that both you and the GP strive for, which doesn't become apparent if you only look from the angle of "no management to start with".
The management GP refers to is the one that tends to develop from people attempting to keep their jobs. Bureaucrats, like most people, are primarily about self-preservation, not about making themselves obsolete.
When one finds a method that allows half the management layer to do all the work, do you really think most of those managers are willing to just give up their cushy jobs? Of course not. Allen Hobub commented on this in "The Death of Agile": if all of us truly were agile, and managers would find themselves in this position, they would shift their job to deliver value in a different form (read: less management activities). Instead, we encourage Scrum, which largely rebrands managers and keeps them around, just with a different name. The real danger is that of cargo-culting, which is just stuff being there for the sake of it, or for self-preservation.
Having someone who controls for results is good. Having 10 people do the work of 1 person is horribly inefficient, and in case of technically-deficient managers, often to the detriment of the executing layer: they can't help you do your task, only act like a secretary (and often they just relay the message to you anyway. So much for that.)
The management GP refers to is the one that tends to develop from people attempting to keep their jobs. Bureaucrats, like most people, are primarily about self-preservation, not about making themselves obsolete.
When one finds a method that allows half the management layer to do all the work, do you really think most of those managers are willing to just give up their cushy jobs? Of course not. Allen Hobub commented on this in "The Death of Agile": if all of us truly were agile, and managers would find themselves in this position, they would shift their job to deliver value in a different form (read: less management activities). Instead, we encourage Scrum, which largely rebrands managers and keeps them around, just with a different name. The real danger is that of cargo-culting, which is just stuff being there for the sake of it, or for self-preservation.
Having someone who controls for results is good. Having 10 people do the work of 1 person is horribly inefficient, and in case of technically-deficient managers, often to the detriment of the executing layer: they can't help you do your task, only act like a secretary (and often they just relay the message to you anyway. So much for that.)