
Why good managers are so rare - mmenafra
http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/03/why-good-managers-are-so-rare/
======
pixelmonkey
For the tl;dr crowd, here's the key takeaway: "Most companies promote workers
into managerial positions because they seemingly deserve it, rather than
because they have the talent for it. This practice doesn't work."

Before I started a startup, I was a software engineer at a large firm, and it
was clear they were grooming me for management because I was a strong
individual contributor and had "put in my time": 3 years as an engineer.
Advancement at this firm was measured by "how many reports" you had, as in
"direct reports", or people managed by you, and if you just did superior
individual work but had no one "under you", you weren't advancing. So they
sent me to a couple of training courses about management and started prepping
me for the path.

This was one of the many reasons I quit this BigCo to start my own startup.

I am now the co-founder & CTO of Parse.ly
([http://parse.ly](http://parse.ly)). In our first two years after starting
up, I spent all my time building stuff -- which is exactly what I wanted.
Ironically, because the company has grown and now has a 13-person product
team, I am now technically "managing" my engineering team with 13 "direct
reports". But at our company, we have completely decoupled management from
individual contribution -- certainly, if a strong individual contributor shows
an interest in management, we'll consider it. But becoming a "manager" is not
how you "advance" here -- you advance by doing great work. Our first employee
who joined in 2009 is a great programmer and he is still with the company, but
he's still doing what he loves: building & shipping stuff. Based on our frank
conversations on the topic, I think he would quit if I forced him to be a
manager. The appropriate reward for doing great work isn't a "promotion to
management" \-- that's actually a _punishment_ for a great individual
contributor. The right reward is to ensure you continue to provide an
environment where that great work can continue for that contributor, and where
they can continue to grow their skills and apply themselves productively in
the role.

~~~
3pt14159
That doesn't scale for motivated people. I was told the same thing when I
joined FreshBooks when they were only a 20 person team. By the time they were
a 45 person team the strain of lack of management (without the Github / Valve
style decoupling) was obvious. Then I was tasked with hiring my boss. It
sucked hard, I was doing awesome work (four raises in a year an a half) but
when the writing is on the wall and you're only 25 years old the only play is
to leave the company.

I'm 95% convinced that companies larger than 50 people can't acquire truly
outstanding people without having a decentralized system that doesn't reward
power grabs and people pyramids.

~~~
jonnathanson
_" I'm 95% convinced that companies larger than 50 people can't acquire truly
outstanding people without having a decentralized system that doesn't reward
power grabs and people pyramids."_

I wonder if it's even _possible_ to have a system that doesn't reward power
grabs and pyramids at a certain company size. Maybe the number isn't 50; maybe
it's slightly lower or slightly higher. But certainly above Dunbar's number,
we start to see organizations where departmental siloing and fiefdoms emerge.
Politics seems inevitable in these situations, and the people who a) want to
play the game, and b) are good at playing the game are the people who win the
game.

The game exists because all it takes is one or two people to will it into
existence. If a power vacuum opens up, or if enough competing VPs and
Directors emerge, then _someone_ is going to try to get ahead through
politics. The only way to counter that is to play politics. Office politics,
as a whole, is an emergent property of the individual players' political
strategies and counter-strategies.

I have yet to work for, or with, a large company where office politics wasn't
a significant factor. It's a bigger problem at some companies than at others.
But it's always there. It can never be completely curtailed; it can only be
mitigated. The best way to mitigate politics is to implement communications,
reward, promotion, and advancement policies that don't incentivize politics as
much as other systems might. This is a nontrivial challenge, especially at big
scale.

~~~
pronik
> I wonder if it's even possible to have a system that doesn't reward power
> grabs and pyramids at a certain company size.

Somewhat related: I used to believe that if some company could manage being a
BigCorp and still keeping the lean startuppy feeling in terms of work
conditions, individual creativity and management transparency, that would be
Google. I don't know whether they ever tried, but from what I hear and see
(from the outside, never been even close to being inside) they haven't
succeeded and became a by-the-book BigCorp with the usual problems.

~~~
RyanZAG
Reading about management attempts back when Google was starting, they
definitely did try. I'm not sure if they'd admit it, but I think they failed
spectacularly. I'd even go as far as to say that if the people trying couldn't
get it to work it might actually be impossible to create a large company that
isn't a 'BigCorp'. There are too many barriers - social, legal and technical.

------
btilly
I just went through a situation where a reorg put a bad manager in a place of
a good one. I was on the most talented and productive team that they had.
Every. Last. One. Of. Us. Quit.

It turns out that there is an interesting feedback effect. People who have the
capability to be smart, are only smart when the environment is right.
Therefore your best people disappear first when you destroy the environment,
because they are the ones who most strongly experience how their productivity
has been undermined.

~~~
gaius
This should be the sort of thing that the managers above notice, I wonder why
they never seem to. Tracking turnover within a team should be a trivial query
in any HR system.

~~~
mercer
I think it's a class thing, mostly.

I've been friends with the (competent) managers above a bad manager, and
discussed a number of times how bad this manager was. They agreed with my
assessment, and yet did nothing about it. I suspect this was partly because
they underestimated how much of a disastrous effect this manager had and
figured that the unpleasantness of firing him combined with the work of
finding someone else would not be worth it. But mainly I think it was because
they were 'friendly' with this bad manager (on account of having lunch and
meetings together as managers), and because he was 'one of them'.

Maybe if managers are kept from become too much of a tribe some of this could
be avoided (assuming that there is competence at some higher level, of
course)?

~~~
gaius
Yes, it's interesting, no-one would deny that programmers are tribal. Get two
guys together from rival firms, using competing technology stacks, and soon
they will set aside any difference and be having a fine old time complaining
about "marketing" and their many blunders.

Managers are like this x10. You go to meetups - they go to MBA school. You
post on forums - they play golf and go to strip clubs. Rationality goes out of
the window when tribal loyalty comes in.

------
Ologn
I see only one quality separating good and bad managers - their confidence in
their own competence. Bad managers seem to feel they lucked out in getting
their job. Like it might be "found out" that they are not really qualified.
Good managers are at ease in their job. They usually seem to feel the company
is lucky to have them, as with some effort they could get into a slightly
better job. They often do, especially after static happens at a company.

A boss goes to his own boss, and that boss gives him an unrealistic goal to be
accomplished in a short time frame. The good boss remains calm and pushes
back. The bad boss walks out of the meeting full of anxiety and tells his team
to accomplish the impossible, quickly. This might work the first few times,
but soon the competent people on the team will leave.

One of the quirks here is management is usually better off in the long run
hiring bosses who will say no to them once in a while. Bosses who always say
yes are more pleasant in the short term to their superiors, but they will be
better off in the long term to have someone who pushes back on requests which
are too unreasonable. We see blog posts here every day about how hard it is to
find good engineers. Incompetent bosses who are dripping with anxiety after a
meeting with their own boss, relaying marching orders for yet another death
march project - good engineers do not remain under such people very long,
especially in job markets like the current one.

~~~
morganherlocker
> Bosses who always say yes are more pleasant in the short term to their
> superiors, but they will be better off in the long term to have someone who
> pushes back on requests which are too unreasonable.

This applies to engineers equally so. The ability to manage expectations is
one of the most important skills one can possess. It also happens to be a
particularly difficult skill to master, which is why, for example, just about
every developer's first freelance project is a fixed bid scope creep nightmare
that they end of walking away from or making $5/hour.

------
mattwritescode
Because people generally fail upwards.

Take for example a poor developer who keeps breaking things. It can actually
be difficult to get rid of someone. So the company instead makes him a low
level manager (no longer directly touching code).

Yes! he comes up with stupid ideas etc, but, his team know he is wrong so they
just work around the stupidity.

In a couple of years of poor management from this junior manager (who team
keeps working through). Upper management (who forgot how bad a developer he
was) think GOD! he has done a good job; his team get things done. Lets promote
him.

Bad manager is now in a higher position again.

~~~
cowls
Its very rare for a poor performer to get a promotion like that.

Generally in big companies especially, if you do well at development and
promote yourself you'll become a manager regardless of managerial ability. You
then get to micro manage the bad developers you mention.

But Ive never heard of someone getting promoted due to poor performance.

~~~
hcayless
I was once told, effectively: "we didn't promote you because you're too
valuable where you are (senior-level engineer)". Needless to say, I left a few
weeks later.

Performance can be very hard to measure, particularly for non-technical
managers.

~~~
andrewflnr
It's not at all obvious that you would leave. Not knowing the specifics, a lot
of us would lean toward asking for a pay raise rather than be promoted to the
level of our incompetence.

~~~
skj
I just think that a promotion shouldn't automatically entail moving into
management. At my company the engineer ladder and the management ladder are
different (though you can transfer between them if you like). I can get
promoted 5 more times (NOT gonna happen, I'm hoping for 2 in the next 5 years)
before I get stalled out. And people that are 5 levels above me are
effectively gods.

~~~
andrewflnr
Yeah, that makes sense to me. But apparently hcayless is not in the same
situation but still got offended when they weren't promoted.

------
afthonos
All in all great article, but it seriously lost credibility with _" Talents
are innate and are the building blocks of great performance. Knowledge,
experience, and skills develop our talents, but unless we possess the right
innate talents for our job, no amount of training or experience will matter."_

Until such a time as we can (a) define "innate talent" precisely, (b) measure
it so that we know now much a person has, and (c) determine that none of our
current methods of teaching the related skill result in enough of an
improvement, statements like that are just excuses for people to look at each
other and say "I just don't think he has the talent to do this. Great guy,
hard worker, but no talent."

Interestingly, if you dig into the links and studies provided, you find that
"talent" is never defined and, where used, _completely replaceable_ by
"skills" or "interests". And once you replace it in the above sentence, it
becomes either obviously false (of course skills can be increased with
training) or patently absurd (of course training rarely changes your
interests).

Still a great article for the connection between management and employee
satisfaction and productivity.

------
kolbe
Anthropomorphizing companies, units, artwork, governments &etc is a long trend
in humanity that needs to stop. I don't know the psychology behind it, but
humans seem to love to find a handful of other humans to personify an agency,
then become overly obsessed with them as the cause of success or failure.

The US government doesn't suck: Bush or Obama suck. Apple isn't a great
company: Steve Jobs is a great leader. AIG doesn't have a bad business model:
Mo Greenberg makes bad decisions. The Patriots didn't win a Super Bowl: Tom
Brady won the Super Bowl!

No organization, NONE, has exploited this tendency more than Harvard. They are
masters of the bait and switch. And this article is a classic example. They
list all sorts of arguments for there being problems with companies/units,
then, without any proof of causation, attribute the failures to bad
management. They talk about what it means to be a good manager, but in no way
do they offer any evidence that the problems of bad employee engagement and
productivity will actually be solved by introducing a good manager.

Why? Because Harvard is in the business of selling you its students as
managers. They've developed a reputation of offering highly-credentialed
applicants two (HBS) and four year (HUG) vacations to ride the marketing wave
of "Harvard grads are great managers." While MIT focuses on creating students
who themselves will invent, create and further the pace of the world, Harvard
instead seems to have chosen to exploit our tendency to anthropomorphize
company success by latching onto shareholder and management insecurities (lack
of engagement and productivity), even where there isn't anything to be
insecure about, and inserting their graduates into highly paid positions as
"the solution."

And they've been fabulously successful in this marketing campaign. I think SV
has done a very good job of seeing through this schtick, but comments here
make me think the tide is turning.

That's not to say there's no such thing as a bad manager. There are managers
who can personally ruin/save a company. But all problems are not caused by bad
management. All productivity issues do not stem from bad management. Sometimes
it's a sociopath manager, but more often it's a bad product or business plan
or economic downturn or any one of a set of problems that no shiny new Harvard
manager will fix.

~~~
gbhn
I'm stuck on the "don't anthropomorphize institutions" and then "Harvard is in
the business of..." Is there a particular Harvard person(s) you think is
responsible for this?

~~~
andrewflnr
"Harvard is in the business of..." is not in any way an anthropomorphism. GP
is using "anthropomorphism" incorrectly, but they are consistent, and your
question is unjustified.

~~~
GhotiFish
I think it's fair, personally. If people used the same terms as he was in his
complaint, he would be complaining about that instead.

It's not one person it's a company, but it's not a company it's an agregation
of people and policy. Is Obama evil? No the US government is, is the US
Government evil? No but there are some corrupt people and some bad policies.

on and on we go.

------
argv_empty
The authors sure took a long time saying, "because companies select managers
based mostly on factors other than managerial talent, like seniority."

~~~
joesmo
I worked at a place where the manager was chosen simply because she had a few
months longer tenure than another coworker of mine. She was so obviously
unqualified, it was ridiculous, but they stuck with the decision and within
half a year they lost their two best developers. Even sadder, the person they
passed up, IMO, would have made an _excellent_ manager. Won't ever know now.

------
edw519
Manage things. Lead people.

If the hundreds of poor managers I have known would have just understood these
4 words, nothing else could have made more positive impact.

------
mediaserf
The article points out that good managers don't make decisions based on
politics. What I have seen is not only do bad managers make decisions based on
politics but also ego. I have seen ego destroy startups and big companies
alike. Many tech companies interview managers purely from a tech perspective
and do not effectively drill down into the management side.

A good interviewer can get a sense for someone's ego vs. assertiveness pretty
easily, but so many interviewers are looking at experience and skillset over
character, personality and style. Experience and skill set are important but
the other aspects are often overlooked. As an example, a hands-on development
manager needs to not only be screened for the development chops but also if
they are mature enough to handle the decisions that need to be made in that
management role.

~~~
jtbigwoo
To add to your point, it's also important to match the manager's character and
personality to the role. I have a friend who's a great manager for entry-level
folks because he can rally everyone around his vision and he has enough domain
knowledge to help with a huge number of tasks when the team doesn't know much.
However, as soon as his employees get a few years of experience and want
independence, they tend to get frustrated and leave.

He's really successful in his situation, but he's not the one you'd have
leading a high-performance team of experts.

~~~
runawaybottle
Interesting that you bring that up, because I'm currently suffering from that
exact situation (working under such a manager).

------
yiedyie
This could also explain: [http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2013/04/understanding-
organiza...](http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2013/04/understanding-
organizational-stupidity.html)

~~~
jonathanwallace
@yiedyie, this is a fantastic article. Do you have any other recommendations
along similar lines?

However, the original article is not as great. It starts strong but gets into
hand-wavy generalities about the requirement of innate talent which is one
which I vehemently disagree.

~~~
yiedyie
This came first to my mind when I saw the OP, I like deep thought articles and
sometimes I share them here, check my submitted stories and among some very
shallow submissions maybe you might find something interesting.

Later edit: You might also want to check arethuza's _ribbonfarm blog_ link
above.

------
001sky
Note: This is not an original thought. It's the premise of "The Office", or
something like that. But it's worth considering.YMMV.

CEO>Manager>Employee

==

Sociopath>Incompetent>Suckers

TLDR:

Manager<=>Incompetent

In other words, from a game theory perspective, being a (mid-level) manager
(in a hierachy) is an unstable equilibrium for a vast majority of situations.
Truly excellent companies have deeper benches of talent (or are structured in
ways that compensate, ie. they are more "flat")

~~~
arethuza
Also known as the Sociopath-Clueless-Loser hierarchy:

[http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
principle-o...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-
the-office-according-to-the-office/)

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Thank you for this link it is really interesting and I had never seen it
before!

------
sz4kerto
Kahneman thinks otherwise. Perceived CEO performance and company performance
have low correlation -- as low as 0.3.

I could give references, but the book (Thinking, Fast and Slow) is not in
public domain yet, so just some 3rd party links:
[http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/634181be-4769-11e1-b847-00144feabd...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/634181be-4769-11e1-b847-00144feabdc0.html)
[http://www.delanceyplace.com/view_archives.php?2084#.UyL_vIU...](http://www.delanceyplace.com/view_archives.php?2084#.UyL_vIUhK1k)

~~~
btilly
This does not disagree with the point. I've encountered some of the research
that they are referring to in [http://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-
Differently/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-
Differently/dp/0684852861). What Gallup has done is developed their own
methodology to identify who will be effective managers, and their claim is
that the managers that they identify as effective have a huge impact on
performance. But their identification has a fairly low correlation with what
most in the organization perceive as who is effective.

If you re-read the blog keeping what I just said in mind, you will see that it
fits. And you will further see that your point is in complete agreement - the
people who are perceived as having good management potential have a low
correlation with actual performance.

The blog points out that this happens at the bottom level because people who
are good at non-management tasks get promoted to management and may or may not
be a fit. But as you go up the latter you find that a lot of what tends to get
rewarded is visible success. Which gives an unfair edge to self-promoting
narcissists who manage to make their occasional successes more visible than
they should be. The result being that perception and reality tend to diverge.

------
jasallen
This is a great article and I think nails everything.

One thing I would add, contrary to conventional wisdom, is that Accountability
is probably the least important. I don't mean to say that you should let poor
performers hang around, but that, given that everything else is firing on all
cylinders, your team will let you know who their poor performing peers are. So
an innate talent or process at 'accountability' isn't really overly important.

------
mikeleeorg
In my opinion, the most optimal organizational structure to have is to train
people who actively want to become managers (but don't promote them unless
they can actually do the job), and give individual contributors an alternate
career path - like that of a technical architect, senior contributor, etc.

Being a manager is a very, very different mindset from being an individual
contributor. And there ARE people who want the managerial career path too. The
trick is in finding them and offering the appropriate training (because not
everyone is cut out to be a manager).

Lastly, the "manager" title is very broad. There are people managers,
technical managers, project managers, etc. So training someone to be a manager
needs to be tailored to the types of managers at your organization.

------
ianamartin
What I see more often than not is that bad managers come from lazy planning.
Bob has been here for a long time now. We should reward him. Hmmmm. What to do
. . . oh! Let's make him a manager. That way we have an excuse for a small
raise.

Next thing you know, Bob is a crappy manager. Sorry, Bob. The leadership was
too lazy to plan out career paths for the people. Now Bob is a crappy manager
who will be pushed aside and ignored until he either quits or gets fired.

But now Bob has management experience. What does he do? Go back to doing the
scrub work for scrub pay? Hell no. He wants that middle management pay check.
Now Bob is going to make a career out of being a bad manager. Because Bob's
first managers were lazy.

Sorry, Bob.

------
arijitraja
I have managed people with different skills and demographics and have figured
out being a manager is a natural progression in some countries like India and
not many companies are bothered if the person truly is meant for the role. I
have seen brilliant tech resources totally screwing up their career paths
becoming a manager.

This is something which is less practiced in the UK. I have worked in the city
and have worked with experts who have been in tech for 15 years and there is
no pressure either from their within or from the management.

As the article very rightly cites - "Companies fail to choose the candidate
with the right talent for the job 82% of the time"

------
alanlewis
The conclusions in the report seem tenuous. Read the article, and you'll learn
that this is all based on the Gallup "Q12" poll (read the report for yourself:
[http://www.gallup.com/strategicconsulting/164735/state-
globa...](http://www.gallup.com/strategicconsulting/164735/state-global-
workplace.aspx)) That poll is made up of 12 yes or no questions. 12. Including
ones like "I have a best friend at work." Google "Gallup Q12 criticism" after
reading the original survey, read what you find, and see if you still take it
seriously.

------
k__
We had such a problem at the company I worked last year.

The RnD-Director was a dev and wanted to develop and not to tell people what
they should do or don't. So he went back being a dev and gave the position to
another one, he probably still got the same pay but with a job he found much
more pleasing.

The CTO of the company left it, because of the same reasons. He thinks of
himself as a computer scientist and not a manager. He wants to solve technical
problems and don't talk to the big bosses of customer companies or manage
people around.

------
SixSigma
Promoting people to their level of incompetence aka the Peter Principle

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle)

------
lewaldman
My take on Good vs Bad managers is very, very simple:

"Good managers are like sea captains. Bad managers are like a slaves
overseer."

The last pearl from my manager was: "If you can produce 100% in 6 hours/day
you would for sure produce 150% in 9 hours/day (Together with a puzzled look
after I pointed that no, we are not a screws factory)."

I don't need to mention that the entire team is aggressively looking for new
positions on other companies (BTW a it is/was a VERY nice team).

------
jtbigwoo
It's also often true that managers tend to get promoted/retained for advancing
their own interests as opposed to advancing their subordinates. When upper
management looks for junior managers to promote, they see the easy stuff
first. They see the people who get their reports in on time, network
effectively, and argue forcefully in meetings rather than figuring out who is
actually leading.

------
afterburner
I'm not seeing anything about the warning signs of some people being ambitious
for a position merely because it pays better, gives more power over people, or
gives more status/bargaining power. Too awkward to talk about? Self-defeating
for Harvard Business School?

------
trhway
{set of good managers in software } = {set of people able to manage other
people well } intersect {set of people able to do software engineering well}

No wonder that it is rare. If you add additional filter that a company need to
be able to correctly identify and promote such people...

------
kevinskii
> _Leaders should...[choose] the right person for the next management role
> using predictive analytics to guide their identification of talent._

Such useful advice! We shall immediately assign one of our worker bees to
create a predictive analytics system forthwith.

------
rabino
The best managers I had share a few traits: They are creative and effective at
solving problems when you have one, and they stay out of the way when you
don't.

------
mbesto
Peter Drucker (the old father of modern management) and Gabe Newell (the new
father of modern management) both agree - managing people is a skill in
itself.

When will we ever learn?

------
aaronapple
Based on what I've seen, even really, really smart, careful people make the
wrong hiring/promotion decision ~50% of the time

------
namenotrequired
Does anyone have any advice on avoiding bad managers while looking for a job?

~~~
saucetenuto
The best predictor I know of is this: teams who interview their own managers
tend to have good ones. Teams who don't, don't.

