1000x this. Much of the time, people in management were promoted there because they were complete shit at line / front of house / customer or client-facing work and someone up top didn't feel like firing them that day. After all, if you were good at line work, why would they promote you away from it?
It makes perfect sense that they'd be complete shit at managing teams, too -- remote or in-person.
Because while it‘s super easy to ramble about managers, they‘re essential to any company that‘s larger than a dozen people.
Management attracts scorn. I have to ignore it as people who don‘t see the importance have no clue what it takes to build a winning team and company.
And while I‘m still trying to learn how to manage a remote team and getting good feedback, I hate it. As in, I utterly, completely despise it and I‘m close to burnout and think about leaving the profession to just do engineering on my own.
Maybe I still haven‘t figured it out, but I feel like I have the choice between still trying to connect to humans and suffer from Zoom fatigue — or go all-in on async, having the feeling that I‘m chatting all day with a black box of meaningless, replaceable NLP models.
It‘s lonely, it‘s tiring and I‘m so looking back to connecting to real humans. If you have tips, I welcome them.
Buy "High Output Management" by Andy Grove. Read it. I've read it cover to cover 6 times now and still find gold each time I review it.
It is hard to know everything about your situation from you post, but your more emphasized issue is you seem to be missing a 'real connection to real humans'. Yes, of course a manager needs to be connected to the team, and that empathy/earned respect is essential.... but it can be built using remote means as well as in person. You show respect through words and actions, those can be written as well as spoken. Maybe you personally put a lot of emphasis on the immediate feedback of face to face to feel that connection? Truth is, while that immediate feedback feels great and helps you tune your message, it isn't the foundation. The foundation is the thing you are getting the feedback on.
If the message is "Team, here is the goal for the week and why it matters", the foundation is that each person sees the goal and how their effort contributes to it. It is great when everyone high-fives around the room, but high-fives without the understanding are a false signal.
You are correct that managers are essential to building a winning team. You probably have a list of what roles/jobs/tasks a manager does to achieve this.
You could write down that list, and for each item write your current process for achieving it. You could then think about how you can map that process to a remote work framework.
I agree as well and just for the record, I wouldn't say I'm ineffective. We 10x'ed our revenue and tripled the team during the pandemic. I'm getting top notch reviews from my peers and I've got a kick-ass team around me that I really like.
It's just that my job itself went from an onsite one that I loved to a remote one which I absolutely hate, and I'm at loss about what to do with that or what I'm doing wrong.
I'll definitely check out your book suggestion though.
Also impressive that you have the professionalism to continue this despite your low mood.
Wish I could help more with the 'what you are doing wrong' bit. I wouldn't use those words, you probably aren't doing anything wrong. It sounds like you just miss being in the same room as your team. I get that, the human contact is real, and on-line is a thin and stale version of it.
You can be an effective leader either way, but yeah, emotionally there isn't a substitute for getting everyone in the same room.
Mentoring in a pair/XP style feels a bit harder over Zoom but the tools are getting better.
Planning meetings (or any type of open discussions) are much more grating to me with the Zoom lag and cross talk.
Heads down, ticket based work has less distractions though.
Maybe I just suck but I feel much more adept at in person interactions than remote interactions and its not about appearances.
[1]: please read David Graeber, may he rest in peace.
this seems to be saying that remote management is easier than normal management without the ability to observe people during the course the day.
maybe this seems counterintuitive to me because I don't really know much about management; perhaps you can expand?
Take any number of "fundamentals" of management: having regular 1-1s, regular reviews, having planning meetings with the team, long term goal setting, operations reviews, etc, etc (yes, management is a lot of meetings).
If an office setting, you can feel like you're doing these on an ad hoc basis, and maybe you or others can do successfully this in an ad hoc way (although if this is the general way of doing things, and your org is large enough, I would guarantee there is a manager that isn't doing this well). But this way of managing completely falls on its face when people start going remote. If you aren't regularly scheduling this stuff then it's just not happening, or people are getting left out.
So I would say that remote management isn't easier, but it makes it very apparent who is doing the management basics, and who is not.
If a manager is struggling with a remote team, that’s usually a sign that they’re generally incompetent as a manager. There may be a few cases of good overall managers that struggle with remote. But they’re few and far between.
The vast majority of bad remote managers are bad because they’re plain bad managers. It’s not a lack of training. Remote management is pretty much nothing more than basic management 101. Mediocre operators prefer in-office because it’s easier to kludge something that gives off the appearance of actual management.
When a team transitions to full remote, it’s like the tide going out and finding out who’s swimming naked. If companies were sensible, they’d embrace full remote because it quickly reveals where the weak points in the org chart are. And rather than capitulating to demands, any middle manager lobbying for a return to the office is probably a good candidate to trim the fat.