Oh managers
“You are ideally suited to a career in middle management explaining things to some people and persuading other people to do things.” @hondanhon
Good managers are hard to distinguish. They don’t immediately stand out. They have to be learnt. There has to be a distinction of managers who are good at building dynamic teams of good people and delivering good output and managers who are good at corralling disparate groups of a range of types into producing good output. I think the second maybe more tiring. Teams, departments (whatever you want to call them) that are work in progress or work in progress. It’s not always that managers are poor or managers are good, it’s often just that they are too busy trying to manage the work in progress, the endless reporting and the smiley face badges and not focusing on people, delivery and core agility. If you don’t look out for people, if you don’t know your people, if you don’t prioritise your people, you aren’t managing.
But there are so many managers (which is obviously not really helping).
You could say that everything that needs to be written about managers has been written but people keep getting hired and companies/departments/teams/managers keep being crap so people should keep writing/shouting/believing.
’The toughest problems are related to people, process, workflow and politics.’
‘I don’t think “harass people into doing things better” is really a job description. Maybe I should change that from “harass” to “harangue”’ Robert Brook
Anyhow, back in the day Dan Hon nailed it in Episode Forty One…