What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

http://www.quora.com/Management/What-are-common-mistakes-that-new-or-inexperienced-managers-make?share=1

by asianexpress • 12 years ago

376 147 12 years ago

quora.com

klodolph2• 12 years ago

In other news, Quora doesn't blur out the second answer and ask for you to log in?

Fishkins3• 12 years ago

Because the submitter added ?share=1 to the link

edit: I personally use https://github.com/sindresorhus/quora-unblocker in Chrome to do this for me so I don't have to think about it. I also made https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quora-share/ to do the same thing in FF.

klodolph2• 12 years ago

Interesting. Removing the ?share=1 has no effect if you've already visited the site, but opening the plain URI in another browser blurs the answer as usual. It must use cookies.

lugg5• 12 years ago

Interesting I just close the tab.

In other news is anyone else still put off by the site even when it isn't all blurred? Its kinda weird I still get a gut rench feeling looking at their logo. They got a ways to go I guess.

More seriously, thanks, sometimes they are useful and the share hack will come in handy.

dang• 12 years ago

Because the submitter added ?share=1 to the link

That was us. Maybe we should make the software do it?

ryanburk4• 12 years ago

the top answer is really well done, but lacks the gem from the second answer: "One of the major rookie mistakes I have made and see many others make is the assumption that human motivation is tied to economic outcomes"

put another way - you might have a personal ambition to have a title like "VP of Engineering" or make $500k a year, but most others don't. so if you project your motivations / world view on those who work for you, you will have a bad time building a great team with a great culture. knowing what your people value is really important and will help you get the best work from your team.

btgeekboy• 12 years ago

Reminds me of this video, "The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

I've found its common in a new manager to assume that their people want the same things they want. Happens in relationships too, people act in a way they want to be treated, not in the way the other person wants to be treated.

Confusion• 12 years ago

I'd say it's common in a many people, much of the time, unless they have been made aware of this and are capable, naturally or after training, to consciously think of how people may differ from you.

I'm still stuck at 'training'.

jevanish7• 12 years ago

One of the amazing things I've learned as a manager is how much you can get out of asking people what they want.

Many people haven't really thought about it and so you end up going on a fun journey helping them figure it out. Usually, you discover over time that there are a lot of things more important than money. Being the manager that helped them figure out what they really want (and hopefully get closer to it) builds awesome loyalty and motivation on the job.

Once you have the minimum amount to live comfortably (which in places like SF is actually a non-trivial amount), I've found raises and bonuses have only very short-term happiness that wears off in a week or two. It's feeling fulfillment in your job and making progress on your long term goals that really brings career happiness.

ryanburk4• 12 years ago

this is really good advice.

I learned from a superb mentor Laurie Litwack who was a great program manager at microsoft that you should learn about each of your reports "heart, tree, star".

heart: what do you love? tree: what / where do you want to grow? star: how do you feel rewarded?

especially in an environment where you can juggle awards, this can be really helpful, if someone values a bonus and someone else values titles & public recognition, you can balance them out and make everyone happy. and hit a budget. ideally...

vidar• 12 years ago

My experience is that the more experienced the manager, the more he will remove himself from all conversations, the rookies always talk about themselves.

ryanburk4• 12 years ago

talking about themselves and taking credit are two of the big traps rookies fall into.

kabdib• 12 years ago

Good managers realize they have to be managers and can't do an effective job of engineering (this is certainly true of a first-level manager with more than a few reports).

The best managers I've had have sighed wistfully and wished out loud that they could do engineering, but made a conscious decision not to. The really good managers will be very interested in how you are getting along with your career, and it will often not come as a surprise to them when it comes time for you to leave ("time to go, grasshopper").

The bad managers were bad for numerous reasons, but many of the worst were micro-managing, getting in the way, having technical arguments, dishing out unreasoned mandates to solve things one way or another, or generally trying to be Boss Engineers without actually being part of the team. Sucked hard. The times I've switched jobs underneath these bozos, I've called it "Firing my boss."

zyxley• 12 years ago

dishing out unreasoned mandates to solve things one way or another

This is the problem I've run into most often with management: the command to do things using method or technology A instead of B, not because A is better (in fact, B usually is the better choice both for development and for internal user support), but because A is the pet preference of a manager not involved in the work and who doesn't actually work with any of the people who will be using or supporting the end result.

greenyoda• 12 years ago

"Good managers realize they have to be managers and can't do an effective job of engineering..."

I can't agree with this strongly enough. When I was a manager (I've since gone back to being a developer), trying to do engineering work at the same time was probably my biggest weakness.

There will be times when there's an emergency (real or imagined) where your upper management wants you to come up with a fix for something right away, and you'll be tempted to drop everything you're doing as a manager and put out the fire. (One rationalization for this might be that you don't want to break the flow of your developers, who are working on important stuff of their own.) Resist this temptation. Not only will your management work remain undone, but if the people on your team don't get experience dealing with emergencies in parts of the code that they don't know much about, you'll be stuck doing this stuff forever and they won't learn these skills. Learn how to delegate, and learn how to set the expectations of your own managers so that they don't assume that every problem can be fixed instantly.

scottm013• 12 years ago

I'd go a step further and answer the question "What are some common mistakes new managers make?" with "Accepting a promotion to management".

If you're coming from a technical role, understand that your new job is not to be an engineer. If you're lucky and are good enough at your new job that you have some spare cycles, you might get to guide some architectural discussions

It can be rewarding to help guide a team towards something you could never accomplish alone, but you must resist the temptation to step and do "do things".

Disclaimer -- I moved up to a director-level position and realized within a year that to be good at it I would probably not be able to continue expanding my technical skills, at least not on company time. I moved on to an "individual contributor" role with a company that provides higher level career opportunities that don't involve having direct reports. The minutia of actual line management wasn't bad as long as there was a good team, but I definitely underestimated the people skills, budgeting, planning, and politics that goes along with being a good manager.

ulms• 12 years ago

I moved on to an "individual contributor" role with a company that provides higher level career opportunities that don't involve having direct reports.

Well, that sounds pretty slick. How's it working out? As someone who was just approached by management about a director position, and this being somewhat familiar ground, I'm concerned about the lack of expansion and technical progression as well. Haven't really seen many "no direct reports" situations in my neck of the woods, unfortunately... but it seems like that could be something to aspire for.

joncooper• 12 years ago

As an aside, anyone got recommendations on learning the skills scottm01 mentions? "people skills, budgeting, planning, and politics"

ansimionescu• 12 years ago

I just read your bio blurb – wow, that's pretty damn impressive! I'm a CS grad looking for a job, and am very passionate about Valve and what it stands for (while at uni I tried to create a startup based on basically the same principles).

I don't know how to contact you, so if you ping me at [0] or [1] I can send you a link to my resume. Thanks!

edit: I'm a big dum-dum – it was quite easy to find your Fb profile, I sent you my resume there (check 'Other' messages). :)

0: https://plus.google.com/+AndreiSimionescu

1: my username at gmail

sheepmullet2• 12 years ago

Problems I found with the top answer:

Performance management: It is highly unlikely as somebody new to the team, and brand new to management, that you can work out who the high performers are and who the under performers are within the first few weeks. If you get it wrong then by making it official and documenting by email you will get the entire teams backs up.

Not explicitly managing resources: Really bad advice. How do you know what is important within the first few weeks? Often you will only have a high level view of what the team does within the first few weeks. Try and do this too quickly and again it can backfire.

gaius2• 12 years ago

I think he was one of the team who was promoted and immediately started settling scores. Like you say, bad advice.

lugg5• 12 years ago

I thought the question was aimed at new to the role not necessarily new to the team?

I found the advice about visibility pretty on the nose. I have yet to have a direct supervisor who hasn't stolen credit a few times. In contrast the guys or girls above them have all been really good at directing it downward. As far as my career has gone anyway.

ryanburk4• 12 years ago

"share praise, take blame" has worked really well for me in the past. folks who fail at learning this tend not to last long or at least don't advance since no one will want to work for them.

ianmcall• 12 years ago

When I wrote the answer (that is currently top answer) I was thinking about a longer time window for the "new manager" period, perhaps a year instead of a few weeks. You're right that someone new to the team and new to management won't be able to accurately assess who the top and bottom performers are in their first few weeks. Same for how to allocate resources.

If the "new manager" period is the first year of management then I stick by my answer on those points.

sheepmullet2• 12 years ago

From a years (or even six months) perspective the points make a lot more sense. The question asked about the first few weeks as a manager :). Thanks for taking the time to clarify.

michaelochurch• 12 years ago

If you get it wrong then by making it official and documenting by email you will get the entire teams backs up.

Yep. Much of management theory assumes that employees are passive, like cattle, and that the employee will cluelessly make nothing of the manager who's "documenting". In reality, that puts the person into war mode.

The old phrase about never pulling a gun unless you intend to kill someone? It also applies to HR practices and "documenting". You only do that if you're sure you're going to fire someone as quickly as you can, because there's absolutely no way to turn back once down that road. The best route is to fire same-day with a generous severance, but most middle-managers don't have that leeway (either to fire quickly or to give severances). Which gets to the crux of why being a middle manager sucks so hard. You have major responsibilities (hiring, firing, defining and canceling projects) but none of the power to do them properly. You often get stuck between self-serving, arrogant executives (MacLeod Sociopaths) and checked-out minimum-effort players (MacLeod Losers) and can very easily be cleaning up the messes of both.

peterwwillis• 12 years ago

I wish there was a way to share this list with a manager without seeming like a dick.

gaius2• 12 years ago

Print and leave on desk.

dredmorbius• 12 years ago

Once was a time that inter-office mail existed for situations just such as this. Spares you the delivery even.

abtinf• 12 years ago

I've felt this way several times in the past.

What I've found is that its a good indicator of when I need to launch a new job search.

Under good management, I usually don't feel the need to share a list like this. If I do, then I can usually have a 5 minute chat with the manager to get things worked out. If that doesn't work, a longer discussion can be in order.

Under bad management, I usually feel like any attempt at change is more likely to hurt me than help me. I once took the risk of sharing the netflix culture slide deck [0] (a quick and insightful must read) with a manager. His response was that, if I was attracted to that sort of culture, then maybe I should get a job at netflix. Fail. You can probably guess at the number of management discussions we had after that.

[0] http://www.slideshare.net/reed2001/culture-1798664

emddudley• 12 years ago

That Netflix culture slide deck sounds pretty idyllic, but it's also 5 years old. Netflix has faced a number of challenges since then, and I wonder if they've changed their approach at all.

bjelkeman-again2• 12 years ago

I probably have made all of those mistakes at one time or another. Some of the mistakes where bad enough to nearly sink a company. Hopefully I make fewer of them now.

It is humbling to have a great team actually letting you manage them, especially when you mess up and the tell you and they let you learn from your mistakes.

When you have teams like that it is easy to manage. If you do, take really good care of your team. They are worth it.

jevanish7• 12 years ago

What kinds of things do you like to do to take really good care of them?

bjelkeman-again2• 12 years ago

It probably varies a bit from what type of organisation you are running.

Then, listen to people, understand where they are at, offer something which means that they develop personally. Make sure everyone is really clear on what you are trying to achieve and then give them the rains to lead and achieve that together. My product development teams have a very strong idea of where we are going with the products and they do 95% of their work without any input from me.

Again, listen to people. Attend meetings, not to control things but essentially keep your ear on the ground for issues or friction then resolve it quickly with the person in focus. Also I attend meetings to inform people on what is going on in the rest of the organisation.

We run a very open organisation, so we discuss budgets and how we approach things very openly. Open discussions about how we are expanding are important. One effect of this is that we have very little in the form of politics in the organisation.

A lot of this can sound like clichés, and it is, if you don't do it well and with people in your focus. The organisation we run is there to support a great group of people doing great things. Not the other way around.

err4nt• 12 years ago

I have a hard time respecting the authority of people who are visibly fallible. It has led to me pursuing a working relationship where I'm a self-directed independent worker in more of a team where we each have our own corner to nibble away at and that has been working well.

Lately I have felt the desire within me to lead, or to create employment for others as I see so many of my peers selling themselves short, slaving away for terrible managers who have no idea what managing is.

I'm grateful to see you and others in this thread who approach management with a 'what can I do for these people' attitude. Do you have any advice for a young guy like me who one day wants to be one of the 'good managers' or hire people under me but has zero management experience so far?

I'm thinking it might be good for me to run workshops or hackathon projects or short-term commitments to limit my faults so if I make a mistake it's over soon and I can reflect on it and do better next time. Do you think a lot of short-term projects would be like management training speed-dating, or is there a better way to work on these skills?

edderly• 12 years ago

I think the biggest mistake new managers make is to forget that you are principally managing people. Even though day to day there's a lot of email, meetings, project management and office politics it pays to remember that you succeed through your staff as much if not more than through your personal efforts.

jevanish7• 12 years ago

Do you manage anyone? How do you remember that?

abdinoor2• 12 years ago

A number of the points in the top answer are really symptoms of not being aware of what is going on with your people. One of the fatal flaws (for the manager if not the company) I have observed in poor managers is a lack of spending time with the team members.

At least in tech, many managers are promoted from individual contributor roles and they only carve out a little time to be a manager. Usually that means they don't know what is going on, and when issues do come to their attention those issues have been festering for quite a while.

jevanish7• 12 years ago

I've always been stunned how few tech companies and startups do 1 on 1s. It's the single, easiest way to surface a lot of this. As long as you don't completely ignore what's brought up in them, you'll get in front of a lot of trouble.

@abdinoor - what tactics do you use to get in front of these issues?

abdinoor2• 12 years ago

@jevanish you're right about the one-on-ones being the easiest way. But just doing the meeting is not enough. You would be surprised how many managers walk into a 1:1 with no agenda and are just asking "What's up?"

It is also not enough to just talk about the day-to-day. The 1:1 is not a smaller standup meeting. Just because there is "nothing on your plate" does not mean you skip the 1:1.

I generally prepare by reviewing notes from previous meetings and any goals that we have set together. Also bring a number of questions about company direction, transparency, colleagues, etc. Over the course of many 1:1s I can build a pretty comprehensive understanding of what makes this person tick and how they feel about their work and colleagues.

cam-• 12 years ago

fwiw in one on ones I go over all the tasks/responsibilities of the next position above them, and we see if they did any of those kind of tasks in the last sprint. If they did we record them. We also look if there are any opportunities to do tasks in the next level above as well so they can be assigned that work in the next sprint. That waY i can make a strong argument when the person is ready for a promotion too.

mp3jeep01• 12 years ago

When I first started work out of college I kept a notebook of "things I like/don't like" about my managers, mostly as a training piece for myself. One of the top qualities one of my managers had was his comfort level with admitting to me "I don't know the answer to that, but I think I know where we can find it".

Probably summed up as something like "check your ego at the door". This goes for not only managers, but any member of an organization -- pretending to know something when you really don't and being afraid to ask questions is a huge red flag to me for both managers and employees alike.

And back to the list, IMO that's a pretty good list, especially coming from one person's experiences.

lugg5• 12 years ago

Piecemeal advice, even if you know the answer to all job interview questions answering a straight up "no haven't dealt with that before but I'd tackle it by learning x y z." Will set you apart from pretty much everyone. Being able to confidently tell someone you politely have no fucking clue is pretty rare in my experience.

Example I interviewed for a job I know I was qualified for, they kept asking questions about things I really had no idea about (all stuff I had never dealt with before - only similar things) they were so refreshed by the honesty and how I dealt with not knowing things they offered me the job despite pretty much what I thought at the time was tanking the interview.

nostrademons2• 12 years ago

I used to interview people for Google, and "I don't know but here's how I would go about finding out" almost never counted against candidates. What would count against a candidate is if they made a wrong assumption and then blindly proceeded as if that assumption was correct.

neumann2• 12 years ago

Similar experience. I've had two job interviews where I answered a lot of the questions with, "I have no experience with that, how does it work?" or "Not sure, but sounds interesting". In one case they asked me to complete a technical challenge while watching over my shoulder using their tech stack just to see how I would try to solve their problems not a CS 101 exam question - which I would just google anyways). It was a great interview process. We discussed my approach during it, they helped me understand their method, we got to see what it would be like working together. In both job interviews I was offered the position, not based on my immediate IT skill tree, but character compatibility and demonstrated ability to learn.

noisy_boy• 12 years ago

This hit too close to home. As a subordinate and as a manager, I've always felt totally comfortable saying, "I'm not sure but I'll check this".

As a subordinate, it was quite annoying to deal with one of the worst managers in my career - I call him the "pretender". I already have plenty to do, and no I don't want to spend time on "checking if too many ping requests from other machines caused harddisk space on this machine to get full" (not joking, true story). The "pretender" had a title of "senior project manager" and the only thing true about that was the "senior" part (nothing against competent seniors), hemmed and hawed in the meetings pretending he knew what he was talking about and basically dumped it all on me.

Once I moved up and stopped reporting to him, he had nobody to dump work on, got exposed and last I heard, left.

snorkel• 12 years ago

Pretenders are my favorite type of manager to mess with. When they ask if ping requests filled up the disk I would gladly "check" that for them using the "system diagnostic regression suite" and ... nope ... everything looks good there ... But hmmmm ... Seems there was a power surge in the cloud layer ... You better inform upper management that there may a tornado forming in the cloud!!! If you can't argue with stupid at least have some fun with it.

incision2• 12 years ago

I surely agree with most of what's posted there - a majority of it is straightforward common sense that's barely even specific to management.

"Don't procrastinate, communicate clearly" are to management what "eat less, exercise" is to losing weight or "only buy things you need, spend less than you earn" is to saving money.

The problem isn't managers that they haven't read this compilation of checklists or its equivalent in any of the thousands of management books out there.

The problem is the brokenness of management as a role in general.

Too many organizations are stuck in an broken structure which makes management the most direct if not only way to advance in terms of status, pay, autonomy or all three.

The end result are incompetent managers who need to be taught common sense or unhappy ones who are far better suited to other roles, but recognize them as dead-ends.

If becoming a manager stops being desirable for all the wrong reasons you won't have to remind your new, inexperienced managers not to be lazy or not to manage by intimidation.

jevanish7• 12 years ago

It seems like a number of newer, growing startups are making sure there are individual contributor paths for growth. What would you like to see as a solution?

Also - do you think it's that their overwhelmed, under-trained for the new demands of the role, or something else that causes so many managers to fail?

incision2• 12 years ago

'It seems like a number of newer, growing startups are making sure there are individual contributor paths for growth. What would you like to see as a solution?'

I think that making available a number of paths for growth is certainly a good thing. I expect there are size limits on such a structure - either for the company as a whole or the extent of the company that gets to experience that track.

This is something I'm very curious about - small companies which have managed to keep their employs happy, well-paid and continuously growing (as individuals).

'Also - do you think it's that their overwhelmed, under-trained for the new demands of the role, or something else that causes so many managers to fail?'

I doubt there's ever truly a single source for manager failure, but if I had to bet on the most significant variables in failing in a typical situation I'd say:

* Promotion Beyond Competence:

Happens for all sorts of reasons - nepotism, stereotyping, political maneuvering (puppet appointments), adherence to tradition and many more.

However it happens, the person is not properly equipped for the role, in the worst case it's to such a degree that they don't recognize how far they fall short.

* Lack of Ambition / Urgency:

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If it is broke, don't fix it. There's too much risk. No reason to rock the boat and jeopardize a steady, comfortable paycheck.

* Unmanageable People:

I expect lots of people have never worked for a good manager of any measure. That bad experience makes them utterly certain that anyone who isn't 'in the trenches' 100% of the time useless - a drain on their productivity.

So, once the good one comes along - the one who will make him/herself an impenetrable human bullshit shield for 98.6% of every day in exchange for a 5 minute status report - they refuse to offer up that barest minimum.

SilasX• 12 years ago

I surely agree with most of what's posted there - a majority of it is straightforward common sense that's barely even specific to management.

I agree, and would add that they're not even answering the specific question being asked (which happens a lot on Quora). The question they're all answering is:

"What is good general management advice?"

But the question that was asked is:

"What are mistakes specific to new, inexperienced managers, that are common for that particular class of managers?"

A responsive answer to that question will generally be expressible as,

"The manager will make it a policy/habit that <blank>, thinking that <poor recognition of group dynamics>. In reality, <mechanism happens> and so they encounter <failure mode>."

For example,

"The manager will start a policy of not tracking employee time, on the grounds that the group is responsible and trustworthy, not realizing that this will make it harder to demonstrate progress and efficiency to higher-ups, and result in less leeway being given to the group on important decisions."

[Please don't refute the logic there, I'm not offering it as valid, just showing the form that a responsive answer would have.]

IgorPartola16• 12 years ago

So at one point I took on a management job, stepping up from a (lead) developer. I felt like the whole thing was kind of a train wreck and I am still slowly analyzing the black box recordings from it. This was my first time having direct reports that were not one or two interns and managing a team of seven other highly intelligent people was quite a chore in itself. What bugged me is that I could never tell if the problem was the environment or something I was doing. I tried to be fair. I mentored people when I could help. I tried to not be overbearing when I had nothing to add. I present challenging problems to the people who I thought would find them interesting. I advocated for my guys to the upper management, trying to improve working conditions. I insisted on being flexible, discarding what was slowing us down, and adopting what was good. None of that seemed to help: my dev team learned to resent me for delivering the bad news (for example the dev team was the fallback for doing data entry for weeks on end when nobody else could handle it and we had no time to finish better data entry tools because of it), and my boss(es) learned to resent me for not delivering what they expected.

I know that there were quite a few problems above me. Lack of leadership carries far and wide and there was a disconnect between what the products did and what the management thought it did. Lack of money (think lack of compensation, lack of tools, lack of time for anything but immediate returns) did not help either. I do keep questioning whether I was doing all the wrong things or if I was put in a situation designed for me to fail, or perhaps both.

After I left I understand the company hired three different people to replace me: a manager, a dev lead, and a support engineer. I suppose that's some kind of a sign that I was trying to do too many things at once. Most of the engineering team also left after I did. The least I could do is give them the great recommendations they all deserved so all of them moved onto exciting new pastures. However, I cannot help but feel like I failed at this task that I felt sure I could tackle and I don't understand why.

Please excuse the rant. These types of topics always trigger those same feelings in me.

Edit: now I work as a developer on 2-3 person teams. I have no reports. I get to be productive again! I can write code that doesn't have to suck to compensate for poorly chosen deadlines. This is good for the soul. I do miss leading a team though; not managing but really leading. One of my proudest moments was when I was allowed to follow a system of estimates and sprints I put together and for 8 weeks my team delivered on schedule and exactly what was promised. That was one of my more joyful moments.

bane2• 12 years ago

welcome to low/mid-level management. You get squeezed from the top and bottom. Everybody will hate you, so you just try and hit deadlines.

It also sounds like a typical story where the larger organization was trying to keep management lean, without realizing that it really did take multiple people to do the job.

One place I worked at ground through three managers in 6 months (with 120 people under them) before finally getting the clue and hiring a proper team of 7 to do the job.

It's not uncommon at all and it really is the upper management's responsibility to properly staff their low/mid management teams.

rpwilcox• 12 years ago

How common is 600% turnover in management?

I know turnover in engineering is usually high (if people are moving around every 18 months to 2 years)... but 600%?

hluska• 12 years ago

I only know your side of the story, so I know this assessment won't be entirely accurate. However, based on what you have written, it sounds like you were a pretty good manager who just got caught between your employees and your bosses. I especially like how you recognize your team members' intelligence, and tried to advocate for them with senior management. You likely made some mistakes along the way, but every manager on earth makes many mistakes.

Sometimes even the greatest skippers can't keep a boat from sinking. It's helpful to consider how you could have made the situation better or worse. But, based on what I've read, you're putting too much blame on your own shoulders. Rather, remember that it took three people for them to replace you.

IgorPartola16• 12 years ago

One thing I realized later that I did wrong was pushing back on the upper management too much. For example I said I did not want my team working weekends on regular basis as had been the practice up to that point. We ended up not having to anyways but it painted the team in a bad light.

Really this translated into me taking a long time to understand what the priorities of the business were vs the development priorities. Definitely let's of stuff I would consider typical first time manager mistakes.

jeroen• 12 years ago

You had your dev team do data entry. No wonder they resented you.

Wouldn't it be cheaper and better for morale to hire a couple of temps to do the data entry?

robterrell• 12 years ago

Even better for morale, if temps truly could not be found, would be to advocate for everyone including the management above you to do the data entry. None of you are there to enter data, after all, so it's not like it's more appropriate for engineers to do it on weekends. The upper management would have maybe more incentive to get the proper temps located. And you go from goat to hero.

pjungwir• 12 years ago

the dev team was the fallback for doing data entry for weeks on end

Wow, what? It sounds like you were doing the right things, but this is hard to comprehend. Wouldn't temps cost $12/hour for this? No wonder they were angry.

IgorPartola16• 12 years ago

That's the route we went eventually, but inputting geographic data directly into MySQL is not something that temps could handle. We needed the time to create the tools to be able to hire temps. In the meantime cash flow depended on the data being there.

neumann2• 12 years ago

Thanks for sharing - the description of your situation echoes my self-questioning in similar situations. My own post analysis now makes me always consider if there a clash between my personality and work culture? Sometimes these differ and you don't want to be the manager that the work culture has moulded. I am not a whip or hard ass, I am there to take a certain load that permits the workers to do their job. Management requires all the things you mentioned, but sometimes the workplace has developed a culture where this isn't possible. Most companies mess up management, and often the people that aspire to it don't pull their weight and think it is a promotion to tell other what to do.

IgorPartola16• 12 years ago

Thanks for sharing as well.

kevingadd2• 12 years ago

It just sounds like you got fucked by upper management. It happens a lot. Sorry to hear it; don't take it too personally.

balls187• 12 years ago

I do miss leading a team though; not managing but really leading.

Your title doesn't impact your role on the team. You can easily make a big impact as a leader, without the people management aspect.

IgorPartola16• 12 years ago

What I mean by that is putting together a team and creating a product, not just stepping up on a team to take on a more senior role. You are right, you can step up on any team, and that's how I got to do what I did in this instance: stepping up in a small way until someone recognized that I could lead the team officially. I do look forward to one day starting a venture of my own.

Kaizyn• 12 years ago

I don't think you have enough data points to draw a meaningful conclusion about whether the problem was with you or if it was with the environment you were working in. The best you can do is look at the individual situations and circumstances you were in and think of what (if anything) you will do differently next time when faced with the same scenario. However with that said, it has been my experience that when there is a lack of leadership above in a company, the knock on effect is generally a bad working environment for everyone working in the organization below the bad management.

IgorPartola16• 12 years ago

Lack of leadership two levels above had a huge impact on bit strategy and morale. When you know the CEO is taking it easy while you work 60 hour weeks, it is very demoralizing.

jsudhams• 12 years ago

ah ha, i can very well relate to this. While i did not move out of the company i took a individual contributor role after a similar situation. i don't think you could have done anything different because when we are in that position and we manage the show the management thinks it is ok and you can. But when new manager comes on board he can easily put a proposal to the management which will be accepted because there is not a great expectation and new hires typically get a honeymoon period where they can analyze what is required for the optimal performance of the team. I think you will just do fine in large corporates where money is not an issue for projects.

NicoJuicy• 12 years ago

If most of them left after you, you were doing a good job. Employees know when you are with your back against the wall, but because you deliver the news, you also see the reaction (i would realize that some choises are made above you).

netcan2• 12 years ago

It's a long read, so of it doesn't grab you don't read it. This might explain everything you experienced: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

logfromblammo3• 12 years ago

I love that article. It fits so well with my anecdotal experience that it hurts. Unfortunately, it has made me cynical, since it essentially means that I can't advance within a typical business organization without becoming either predator or livestock.

The grandparent poster slots neatly into the model as a loser selected by a psycho to be promoted to clueless just long enough to absorb the blame for something. After the misdirection, the clueless is discarded, along with any losers that may have attached too strongly. The situation was designed to terminate in failure, as a reset button, so that the psycho in charge could turn a few clicks on his career ratchet.

IgorPartola16• 12 years ago

Wow, that is a great read! Thanks! It definitely explains quite a bit.

Tactic2• 12 years ago

You were in a losing situation from the start. You were selected to be the heavy, the patsy and the scapegoat all in one.

It is clear from what you have said that your people were overworked, deadlines were not reasonable and there were not enough proper employees. Yet management persisted with their existing paradigm and you got to be the one that bore the bad news to everyone so they all resented you.

The best you can do in that situation is exit. Which it sounds like you and others figured out.

Sleep well knowing you cared about the people and the results, it was upper managment that did not. They cared only about the money.

As a side note, I hear this excuse a lot, about how money will be lost if we don't do this bad thing or that. Money is brief, setting up the proper business practices is long term. Sure, there are temporary situations that require extra effort... but they are obvious and temporary.

IgorPartola16• 12 years ago

Thanks. The money thing is tough. On the one hand, I do believe that the company had negative cash flow and was a few months away from closing the doors unless sales ramped up. On the other hand, part of the problem was that new upper management was brought in to replace the CEO who was not doing anything for the company and I believe they took quite a large salary, possibly enough to make take the company from positive cash flow to negative.

At the end of the day, the dev team pulled through and got product out the door, warts and all. This then enabled sales and other teams to get more clients on board and paying, which actually saved the company.

TwistedWeasel• 12 years ago

The hard part for me was that managing engineers takes a lot of time and energy, it's not possible to be a full time engineer and a full time manager.

Over time your understanding of the technical details of the work your team is doing will atrophy and where once you may have been an expert on all aspects of the system you must now rely on the judgement of the senior members of your team when making decisions. This is hard for a lot of people, to know that you don't know enough to make a decision and then to trust your team enough to help you make the right one.

Building that trust is important, because without it you'll make bad (or at least uninformed) technical decisions. it's easier if you moved up into a managerial role from a team you worked on instead of being hired to manage a team you just met.

pascalo• 12 years ago

What really always rubbed me up the wrong way was approaching me to come up with the question "OK, how long then?". Because "managers" tend to ask this when neither scope nor current state of the project are visible, and are then getting offended when one points out to them that it's an impossible question. They then usually proceed to ask you to just make something, clearly demonstrating that they don't want to improve the disaster state of the project or care for your opinion in any shape or form, but instead prefer some randomly made up number.

So whenever I hear this question in that very particular tone, I already plan my exit strategy because I know it's going to be a train wreck.

polemic• 12 years ago

Those answers are great, but they're also very high level and general.

One of the best pieces of advice, badly paraphrased below, I've heard from a military context.

   "Any time you instruct a subordinate, you must be 
    prepared to deliver the same instruction every single
    time they perform that action, and expect it to be 
    performed in that way until otherwise instructed."

This is a warning about micromanagement, flippant decisions and how to delegate. For example, if you tell someone off-hand not to bother you with X, be prepared to never be bothered with X again. If you tell someone how to shine their shoes, be prepared to tell them how to shine their shoes every single day.

Again, this is an a military context where orders flow downhill, but the same applies in other areas of business. An experienced manager knows where they need to set the boundaries within which their staff operate, with as much autonomy and initiative as possible. An inexperienced manager doesn't understand how to balance this equation.

PS if anyone has a better formulation of the above, please share =D

IgorPartola16• 12 years ago

I am reading Dune and this is very similar to the advice Leto gave to Paul. Which came first, I wonder?

mantrax5• 12 years ago

Can you please quote which part you refer to?

Shivetya• 12 years ago

Not knowing when someone has to go or worse, having the confidence to make them go. Far too many cannot organize their thoughts properly to justify it to themselves or even HR.

JoeAltmaier• 12 years ago

OP lists all the issues from the point of view of management.

From the employee point of view, here are some common manager problems:

Employee comes in earlier, leaves earlier than manager: manager assumes employee is only working the hours they see; they act on this and insult/piss off the employee with their assumption of slacking.

Manager optimizes group for his own metrics e.g. maximize resources/minimize commitments to increase likelihood of meeting all objectives. Company loses (spending way too much for the minimal accomplishments); employee loses when manager won't permit taking on anything but the most mundane projects.

Manager cherry-picks opinions in group to justify the approach manager Wants to take, instead of letting the experienced employees make their own plan. Managers don't 'get to' make decisions; they are supposed to gather information to make the Right decision.

jaunkst• 12 years ago

Listen. Don't think. Keep it simple stupid. Let the leads lead, and we'll just listen.

doxcf434• 12 years ago

One thing I didn't see on any of the lists is ethics. Truly world class managers and team builders are also very careful about ethics, and see it as more important than their project, job and career.

alien3d• 12 years ago

Software development. 1. Don't have experience programming(medium is okay for fast debug). 2. Don't have experince in meeting room.Altitude E.g don't play with your phone in meeting room don't voice opinion.. It you don't talk how people would knew it ? 3. Follow Up Client And Vendor .Some new born or over experience take think as simple.(Serious Issue). 4. No Money Manager.Just wanted to request people work for them without money(Serious issue).

There's a lot to write here.. but above seem important to me dealing with problematic manager.

emilioolivares• 12 years ago

Mistake #1: It's not about you, it's about them. Mistake #2: Not having frequent one-on-one meetings with your direct reports. For this I recommend you listen to: http://www.manager-tools.com/manager-tools-basics. One-on-ones are considered the core of the management trinity. Mistake #3: Not giving timely, frequent feedback. Mistake #4: Not coaching your team to help them grow. Mistake #5: Not wanting to let go of your individual contributor responsibilities.

Cheers!

deathanatos2• 12 years ago

Lowering the bar - Inexperienced managers have low standards, or lower their standards, in an effort to make a hire. Good managers know that they're much better off keeping a high bar and waiting for the right candidate.

I'm facing this argument right now, and it's unclear to me on what my manager's opinion on this is. I'd rather not trade quality. While I agree with the quoted answer, I can't think of a good argument to back it up, and the answer doesn't provide one. Can someone give something more concrete here, especially something more concrete than, "well, a weak hire will cost you more in training / patience / bringing them up to speed / constant mentoring"? (or is that really the argument?)

novaleaf• 12 years ago

off topic, but wow, quora is actually letting me read past the first answer without logging in. they are finally wising up after I ignore the call-to-signup for the umpteenth time?

tomp• 12 years ago

Adding ?share=1 to the link helps.

Dolimiter• 12 years ago

Can't we ban links to the Quora website? It doesn't let people read the page without logging in.

RivieraKid• 12 years ago

Who's we? And no, you don't have to log in, try it.

zhte415• 12 years ago

A handful:

Not delegating.

Not working through others.

Not managing a group's resources.

Promoting one's self while failing to support one's boss.

Appropriating others' work as one's own.

Not growing relationships with other groups in a non-protective, non-clique, non-silo'd way.

Following, rather than questioning, organisational policies (i.e. not managing upwards).

hessenwolf• 12 years ago

There are some old IEEE articles on management for techies that, in my humble opinion, are simply brilliant.

Delegation: (usually the first failure I see) http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/art5.html

And the rest: http://www.see.ed.ac.uk/~gerard/Management/index.html

himanshuy• 12 years ago

Wish, I could post it on my company's intranet.

iQuercus• 12 years ago

"Thinking too small - A successful leader is going to create growth and opportunity for their team. A leader who thinks small is unlikely to do either. Instead of planning how to grow your business 100%, plan how to grow it 10x or 100x."

This attitude could potentially backfire. It can lead to a closed-loop that eventually results in dishonesty to meet unattainable numbers. Better to plan growth empirically and adjusting for things like regression to the mean at the team and company level.

blisterpeanuts• 12 years ago

Micromanagement is the #1 problem I've seen with inexperienced managers (and some experienced ones, too). I'm surprised the article didn't mention that, although a couple of the commenters did, at least.

You have to hire good people that you can trust to do the job, up front. Then you have to trust them to do the job. It's as simple as that.

snarfy• 12 years ago

Praise publicly, criticize privately (with the person you are criticizing, not behind their back).

Tactic2• 12 years ago

The biggest mistake I see managers make is that they think they are there to deliver completed projects to upper management. They are playing project manager when they should be playing people manager.

A good manager's job is to make sure their direct reports have everything they need to get their job done. The proper information, tools, training, time, motivation, etc. If they have the proper staff the rest of the success will stem from that.

I have employed that as a manager and expect it as a direct report and have only ever seen success when it is employeed both in the military and the private sector.

sambeau• 12 years ago

The single most common mistake I see managers making is assuming that their job is to manage the people rather than the project, closely followed by trying to micro-manage the project itself. Trust and delegation are key to all of this.

A good manager looks after a project not its people, concentrates on the big picture while letting others deal with the small details. A good manager achieves this by delegation.

Assuming you've hired the right people in the first place you should be able to let people get on with their jobs — if you try to do their jobs for them you will fail through lack of expertise or lack of time.

I would add that iteration is also key - a manager should check on a regular basis that what has been planned is what is being done and that if not ensure there is time to change what is being done as early as possible. Good staff and good managers appreciate that some things will take a few iterations to get right but it is better to iterate than to take the first version of everything (and foolish to plan for this) - not iterating leads to over-design and slow progress as everyone desperately tries to second-guess all the situations their work might have to cover.

Iteration is also the best way to get a feel for individual workers' pace and abilities.

What are common mistakes that new or inexperienced managers make?

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