The problem is that management is one of the best places to hide. What do I mean by that?
You typically get paid more, and you get a degree of autonomy that you can use to arrange your own time. So, big incentive.
But you also get to hide, in the sense that it's hard to call out an incompetent manager like you can call out a dev who doesn't know how git works. After all, a manager needs to interact with a bunch of people, and any one of those people could hold up the show. This is why people feel thrown under the bus, their manager needed an excuse that wasn't incompetent management.
It's nebulous. If someone delivers a project well, was it them, or was the project not ambitious enough? If they don't deliver it, did they not have enough resources, was the timeline unrealistic?
So there's a massive incentive to manipulate the baseline. You want people to feel like you are personally delivering way over expectation.
This is where leadership comes in. Nobody can know the nuts and bolts of how you manage your weekly standups, but everyone can see your TED Talk. You must be really important, why else would you be at Davos? You're clearly very up to date on modern management techniques, that's why you have an agile coach for your team.
It's not all smoke and mirrors. I do think that leadership means imparting some sort of overarching goal in a business, along with direction like "we want to exit any business where we're not number 1 or 2 within 5 years". That's not stupid, but it also isn't time consuming. Mostly what they need is a lot of experience in the trenches, but by the time you're a senior leader, you already have that.
I get the feeling a lot of these made-up things that leaders come up with is precisely because they don't do anything during the day. The decisions they make don't take that long, since they are baked into experience and organizational momentum, and getting the updates from subordinates doesn't take much time either, but they feel like they need to be seen to be always busy.
You typically get paid more, and you get a degree of autonomy that you can use to arrange your own time. So, big incentive.
But you also get to hide, in the sense that it's hard to call out an incompetent manager like you can call out a dev who doesn't know how git works. After all, a manager needs to interact with a bunch of people, and any one of those people could hold up the show. This is why people feel thrown under the bus, their manager needed an excuse that wasn't incompetent management.
It's nebulous. If someone delivers a project well, was it them, or was the project not ambitious enough? If they don't deliver it, did they not have enough resources, was the timeline unrealistic?
So there's a massive incentive to manipulate the baseline. You want people to feel like you are personally delivering way over expectation.
This is where leadership comes in. Nobody can know the nuts and bolts of how you manage your weekly standups, but everyone can see your TED Talk. You must be really important, why else would you be at Davos? You're clearly very up to date on modern management techniques, that's why you have an agile coach for your team.
It's not all smoke and mirrors. I do think that leadership means imparting some sort of overarching goal in a business, along with direction like "we want to exit any business where we're not number 1 or 2 within 5 years". That's not stupid, but it also isn't time consuming. Mostly what they need is a lot of experience in the trenches, but by the time you're a senior leader, you already have that.
I get the feeling a lot of these made-up things that leaders come up with is precisely because they don't do anything during the day. The decisions they make don't take that long, since they are baked into experience and organizational momentum, and getting the updates from subordinates doesn't take much time either, but they feel like they need to be seen to be always busy.