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.
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.