All their direct reports just seem to accept this lot in life, everyone else does their best to avoid drawing their ire. I imagine that maybe something will happen and they will get the picture and actually grow as a leader. It's growing old though and I miss being on a team wherein this wasn't the day to day morale.
Maybe they'll read this. Maybe it's you. Please take this seriously. You could do better.
If you love technical work, QUIT being an exec, a VP, a manager... do the work.
You WILL have a crazy time getting back into tech work, after 10 years, even if you were hands on the whole time.
Management / CTO and everything in between is best served by people who are technical, and are ready/aware/willing to move into a deeply political and financial driven domain.
I hated it, but it took me a years to really let that sink in and feel it hurting me.
If you can short circuit that wasted time. Do.
Being on the other side of the fence has really helped me move around, I still to sysadmin/DevOps type work but mostly moved into product and I've found it really helps.
Too many C level see product as only UI/UX and the teams I manage appreciate my understanding of the pain points for everyone
Be proactive, send them a link.
Equally a good manager with average tech skills can do everything opposite to this list with the help of technical advice.
Sure we'd all like a great tech guy who somehow is also a fantastic manager. But let's accept those are rare.
Next best is a great manager (emphasis on good, not bad) who listens well and takes advice regarding pure tech matters. Over time their tech will improve (remember, good manager) but in the meantime IT flourishes.
Only then comes a great tech guy with poor management skills. Frankly poor management will kill a team faster than good tech skills can save it.
So yeah, as the article suggests, a great all rounder would be the best option. But I feel there aren't enough of those to go around. In that case I'll take a good manager over a good techie all day long.
There are a lot of "person who did everything" types who end up in leadership positions who try very hard to continue doing everything of any importance instead of appropriate delegation and leadership instead of control. I've had that problem, it's hard to let go.
Fully agree on everything else. Additional caveat, I have a supply chain and logistics ops background, so a completely different environment to design and development.
I explained every piece of rationale I could come up with for why the team chose to do things the way they did. I offered to schedule team discussions for her to try and convince the team to adopt other strategies, with the understanding that if the team didn't want to do things her way that would be the end of the discussion.
It wasn't the end of the discussion for her though, she kept complaining. Eventually I just had to say "that's the way we do things here so you have to get on board". It's awfully close to "because I said so", and I hated saying it, but I exhausted every other avenue I could think of.
She wound up giving her notice, so I guess we were on the same page because I was working with my manager on letting her go. But if she had been able to keep her head down and do the work we would have kept her for sure. She was a good coder, good systems knowledge, just really didn't like writing unit tests I guess.
Most people, given explanations, will accept them even if they don't agree with them. And quite often they will realize that there is more to the issue than they originally thought.
Good leaders know to tell those appart, and professionals can accept it. Unfortunately, this combination, good leaders being in charge of professionals, is rarer then I'd prefer.
Raw dominance is the dynamic governing primitive social animals.
Chimps are a bit smarter, and would collaborate as a group to beat up alphas that they hate.
There is one exception that comes to my mind with "real" Alphas and those are Gorillas.
The group is smarter, than an individual's dominant strategy.
They'll collaborate as a group to embarrass and undermine and quit that scene.
A coach that never played can't teach.
As well, the requirement for "must hit X bar of quality", where X is some arbitrarily high level, is nonsensical. If they're so good at building quality products...then why aren't they doing that in the first place. Necessarily, your best builders should be builders, and your best managers...should be managers.
> motivate their players
These are made so much easier if you have "played the game" that you pretty much end up back to the original argument of it being a requirement if being "a coach" to remain competitive. There of course will be outliers to this, like your aforementioned "coach that never played", but why deliberately base your point on an outlier?
> "must hit X bar of quality", where X is some arbitrarily high level
Quoting myself, I said "of quality", i.e. something that is reputable and, relative to some reasonable and well-known industry standard software development principles and benchmarks, of quality. I wouldn't say it's totally arbitrary.
The shitty ones:
- Either never built trust or broke trust.
- Were impulsive and reactionary.
- Didn't rely on the expertise and skills of their reports as much as they told them what to do because they already knew everything. Didn't ask questions. Gave orders.
- Literally used the words, "because I said so".
- Believed that they were the only one doing any real work. Used the words, "easy" to describe work that was assigned to their reports.
- Were very insecure - questions were often received as challenges to authority.
- Set in place policies which they were the first to violate.
- Their actions and their words disagreed.
- Lost their best people within a year.