The Myth of the Working Manager
The tech world is full of job descriptions that describe the role of the workingmanager. The title itself is a condescension, as if management alone doesn’t rise to the challenge of being challenging.
I was discussing DHH’s post on Moonlighting Managers with a colleague when it occurred to me that many people have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a manager should do. We’ve polluted the workforce with so many bad managers that their toxic effects on teams hovers like an inescapable fog. The exception has become the rule.
When we talk about management, what we’re often describing are more supervisory tasks than actual management. Coordinating time-off, clearing blockers and scheduling one-on-ones is probably the bare minimum necessary to consider yourself management. There’s an exhaustive list of other activities that management should be responsible for, but because most of us have spent decades being lead in a haze of incompetency, our careers have been devoid of these actions. That void eventually gives birth to our expectations and what follows is our collective standards being silently lowered.
Management goes beyond just people management. A manager is seldom assigned to people or a team. A manager is assigned to some sort of business function. The people come as a by-product of that function. This doesn’t lessen the importance of the staff, but it highlights an additional scope of responsibility for management, the business function. You’re usually promoted to Manager of Production Operations not Manager of Alpha Team. Even when the latter is true, the former is almost always implied by virtue of Alpha Team’s alignment in the organization.
As the manager of Production Operations, I’m just as responsible for the professional development of my team as I am for the stability of the platform. Stability goes beyond simply having two of everything. Stability requires a strategy and vision on how you build tools, from development environments to production. These strategies don’t come into the world fully formed. They require collaboration, a bit of persuasion, measurement, analysis and most notably, time. It’s the OODA loop on a larger time scale.
Sadly, we use reductive terms like measurement and analysis which obfuscates the complexity buried within them. How do you measure a given task? What measurement makes something a success or failure? How do you acquire those measurements without being overly meddlesome with things like tickets and classifications. (Hint: You have to sell the vision to your team, which also takes time) When managers cheat themselves of the time needed to meet these goals, they’re technically in dereliction of their responsibilities. The combination of a lack of time with a lack of training leads to a cocktail of failure.
This little exercise only accounts for the standard vanilla items in the job description. It doesn’t include projects, incidents, prioritization etc. Now somewhere inside of this barrage of responsibility, you’re also supposed to spend time as an engineer, creating, reviewing and approving code among other things. Ask most working managers and they’ll tell you that the split between management and contributor is not what was advertised. They also probably feel that they half-ass both halves of their job, which is always a pleasant feeling.
I know that there are exceptions to this rule. But those exceptions are truly exceptional people. To hold them up as the standard is like my wife saying Why can’t you be more like Usher? Lets not suggest only hiring these exceptional people unless you work for a Facebook or Google or an Uber. They have the resources and the name recognition to hold out for that unicorn. If you’re a startup in the mid-west trying to become the Uber of knitting supplies, then chances are your list of qualified candidates looks different.
The idea of a working manager is a bit redundant, like an engineering engineer. Management is a full-time job. While the efficacy of the role continues to dwindle, we should not compound the situation by also dwindling our expectations of managers, both as people and as organizations. Truth be told the working manager is often a creative crutch as organizations grapple with the need to offer career advancement for technical people who detest the job of management.
But someone has to evaluate the quality of our work as engineers and by extension, as employees. Since we know the pool of competent managers is small, we settle for the next best thing. An awesome engineer but an abysmal manager serving as an adequate supervisor.
The fix is simple.
- Recognize that management is a different skill set. Being a great engineer doesn’t make you a great manager.
- Training, training, training for those entering management for the first time. Mandatory training, not just offering courses that you know nobody actually has time to take.
- Time. People need time in order to manage effectively. If you’re promoting engineers to management and time is tight, they’ll always gravitate towards the thing they’re strongest at. (Coding)
- Empower management. Make the responsibilities, the tools and the expectations match the role.
Strong management, makes strong organizations. It’s worth the effort to make sure management succeeds.
