I think that helped make me a decent manager. At least, my employees seemed to think so.
But I could be wrong.
I think the management skill nobody talks about is how managers should realize they are part of a team and their focus should be on whatever the team's goal is, not in finding the perfect way to apologize. As the article says: "Your job is to ship working software that adds real value to users, to help your team grow, and to create an environment where people can do their best work."
I couldn't give a rat's ass if a manager doesn't apologize to me in a way that makes my eyes water, admitting his humanity in the process, if that manager doesn't insist on making the same mistake and getting in my way all the time.
We are all humans, not robots. Heck, even the LLMs mess up.
In any situation, I've always believed it is better to let people we're all human and it's ok to take risks and make mistakes.
It's not about management skills.
It's also impolite to use "nobody" in it.
I'm going through a bit of a phase at the moment, so I'm biased. It's "show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome".
I used to find that an interesting idea, not sure if true or not. Nowadays a few years later, I'm almost hyper focusing on it, because I'm noticing that it is mostly true. Like, there's some room for individuality but when things _matter_ (e.g. livelihood, etc.), then the incentive seems paramount for most people.
My friend who is still there says this is his last ever programming job, after that manager he wants nothing to do with this industry, and that is a shame.
To me, that means 1. To identify the issue that occurred (especially when you caused it), and much more importantly, 2. Put systems into place that prevent it from happening again.
Employees can feel very clearly when a manager lacks accountability and as part of mid and especially high level management (if your goal is actually improving both output and quality of people's lives) to not just say you did something wrong, but actually put your skin in the game ensuring what happened will not happen again (usually it means being better at saying no or aggressively managing prioritization rather than heaping additional tasks on people).
You can say that again. In another window, I am iterating with one for fixing my site CSS.
enterprises just love layers and layers of management. can't get enough of it. No CEO has ever seen a management layer he didn't like.
Here's the doc for responding to mistakes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AqBGwJ2gMQCrx5hK8q-u7wP0...
And here's a video with Matt talking about it in a little more detail: https://www.loom.com/share/651f369c763f4377a146657e1362c780
It's a very similar approach to the linked article although it goes slightly further in advocating "rewind and redo" where possible.
EDIT - The full "curriculum" is here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18FiJbYn53fTtPmphfdCKT2TM...
Getting on with people long term is often about making them feeling acknowledged and being clear about what makes them valued.
The real trick to 'repair' is not to make hollow promises. Managers can be perceived as failing when an external event happens and they haven't planned for it, or they bet against it happening. This can kick off a whole chain of events, including pushing team members into crunch time or 'impossible positions'. Its rare that you can stop the external event or a similar one from happening, so promising it won't is hollow.
The next hollow promise commonly made is 'when it happens I won't let X happen [to you]'. The problem here is often that you probably will. In two ways: either X happening is clear in hindsight but not with foresight, so you'll probably make similar decisions again; or, the team member ending up in an unhappy situation is the best of a bad bunch of options.
I've had to place people in positions where they had insufficient support and excessive demands. Sometimes I knew this going in, and sometimes I did not.
You also have to be careful about passing the buck - if you're the manager you need to be clear with yourself about what your job is and whose issue any given problem actually is. Do you help your team interact with third parties, or do third parties interact with your team through you? How much are you supposed to represent your teams needs to management (e.g. pushback) vs how much are you supposed to represent your management's desires to the team (e.g. pushdown).
If you are caught passing the buck to shirk responsibility by your reports or by management you will lose a lot of trust and respect very quickly. You can always pushback or pushdown harder to appear 'good' to one party, but at some extreme that is going to lose you your job. Its your choice how to play this - so own the choice.
I especially like OP’s point #1. “I know I did x, sorry about that” is so much more powerful than “Sorry you let yourself get upset that I did x”.
Another important aspect is the context. A lot of people are good at public excoriation, and private apology.
If I show my ass in front of a bunch of people, the apology is not an apology, unless it's made in front of the same people.
He was also close to retirement and didn't care about moving up the ladder. Many bad managers do and will sacrifice you and the rest of the team to make themselves look better.
Acknowledging what happened, taking responsibility, and reconnecting.
...is a reflex, not a tactic.
I always made that clear to my employees, but after that, my employees' interests generally came second (over my own).
It seemed to work. I was a manager at the same company for over 25 years, and my bosses were really tough (but fair).
Love this book! Just read it. Must read for parents, IMO.
Good for you if you consider yourself so emotionally detached from work that you can let go of the fact that work relationships are still human relationships. However, you sit comfortably in the minority. Most people carry the human aspect of their work relationships into work. Ignoring that is step 1 of being a really bad manager.
This doesn't mean we don't set appropriate boundaries or avoid giving feedback. It does mean that a great manager navigates the nuances of work relationships and work itself. It also means a great manager will adjust their approach depending on the personal needs of each employee. For instance, if I was your manager and truly believed what you're saying here*, I'd just give you the brass tax feedback and keep everything about the work itself.
* And I don't. From my experience most people who take this stance have been conditioned that emotions are bad. We are big emotional bags of meat. The people I've managed with this mindset tend to be the hardest to manage. Eventually something hits their feels, they can't handle it, and the erratic behavior begins. I much prefer people who are forward with their emotions. When something happens they can vocalize it appropriately allowing me to address it. When they have feelings about feedback received, making a mistake, or doing something bad I can easily acknowledge and validate those feelings while maintain the feedback & boundaries.
The senior ICs are the squad leaders on the frontline with the rest of the team, knee deep in the same shit they are. It’s really THOSE people doing the constant day-to-day trust building, team leveling, shit getting done-ing, repairing…
And so yeah, a good manager lets those seniors just go be good at that, not bogging them down with work that is a complete waste of their potential. It’s a bit of a symbiotic relationship really, because a manager with no such seniors on the team won’t have the firepower to crush goals, and a senior without a good manager will never be allowed to excel.
This is super common and a very bad sign. As an employee, you are disposable in this type of culture, though it should go without saying.
> enterprises just love layers and layers of management. can't get enough of it. No CEO has ever seen a management layer he didn't like.
Bc more warm bodies in your org looks better on the resume. Managing 200 people on paper is more impressive than managing 20.
Love Your Errors
It's not a failure, it's an opportunity for improvement
No shame, no blame
But this is part of the point, while for you that might not matter, your manager cannot assume this. Other people DO care.
One of the ways your manager can mess us is by assuming you don't care about that...
Second, when things go poorly, accept responsibility. When things go well, give credit to the team.
Such a manager is extremely rare.
Most will be oblivious to their own biases and cognitive short-comings.
I don't think most "bad managers," even know that they're bad at their job. There's no accountability, no metrics, no performance reviews, no studies on their productivity... mostly because their "job" is to be the proxy for the power of the shareholders.
I applaud anyone who finds themselves an engineering manager and wants to be good at what they do and work for their team. It's hard to find a good manager.
But the only recourse for an IC under a bad manager is to quit or find another team to work on.
Inability to apologize / repair was near the top of the list. Everyone makes a lot of interpersonal mistakes. Most people can apologize.
Another big one was "norms for thee, but not for me". As in the rules we create as a team don't apply to me. But apply to everyone else. The toxic person gets to use them as a cudgel, but they don't seem to be bound by them.
Another one is being very thin-skinned. Easily jumping into a kind of victim mentality (surprisingly common even in leaders) where they are the ones being put upon. Being a victim, they are justified in doing whatever it takes to correct the situation
Related to that last one, many of these folks feel like they're taking on more than their share and have to carry the team. They may have a narrative they are the brilliant person on the team that has to fix everyone else's screwups. Or the team can't live without their unique skills. Therefore they're "special" and get to act outside the rules / norms. And other leaders can feed into this when they think the special person is indispensable, turning a blind eye to their bad behavior.
In addition to what you said overall, I think bad managers can have all sorts of qualities, but imo the worst ones correct for mistakes to protect themselves or people's impressions of them, leaning highly neurotic, and can't deal with conflict well, so they put in arbitrary systems in order to indirectly deal with any one-off grievance or mistake. Bad managers won't evaluate or re-evaluate the systems they put in place because they put them there to protect their ego.
"Surely this employee is underperforming because I don't like how they're performing and we have a system for that!"
They struggle to adapt to their new job because to delegate sufficiently they need to be able to trust, and let that manifest as other people doing the tasks they might have once done without their hands in the pie directly. They might assume that part of the reason they got the job was because they're great communicators, and never consider that actually that it's just that nobody ever told them they have some growing to do.
In my 26 years of experience, I see managers and HR professionals as company advocates, with a single mission: to protect the company's interests.
Whether managers admit mistakes or not is irrelevant; what matters is that they defend the company's interests, no matter the cost.
Mistakes are passed on to the people who can do the heavy lifting, and they respond with dismissal or legal retaliation (when possible).
Your HR exit interview is designed to find out if you harbor resentment toward the company and if there's a chance the company will be sued.
I've tried every imaginable technique I've read in modern books. Politics are more important than anything, and nothing works.
Specifically, getting people to follow your direction, giving and receiving difficult feedback, growing people, being able to engage thoughtfully in stressful conversations…
Engineers that don’t have these and believe their technical chops are the only thing that matters are extremely limited in their careers.
I have bounced a technically excellent staff level engineer off my team for this reason.
There are very few roles in tech for people to sit in a corner by themselves and write code, especially as you get to more senior roles.
Great managers are able to touch on our humanity, which should inspire us all to rise up to meet them.
One of my newish mantras is: "Apologizing is what we expect of 9-year-olds. Older children are expected to make compensations or repairs. Adults are expected to modify their own behavior in the future."
Also called wishful thinking... Often such measures do definitely not work. There is even an internet law named for this: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure".
I am not. I enjoy doing great work and take pride in it.
> that you can let go of the fact that work relationships are still human relationships.
They are. And I get along with some people, and not as great with other people. But the people I get along with I go out usually, outside of work, whereas the ones I don't particularly vibe with are just colleagues.
> For instance, if I was your manager and truly believed what you're saying here*, I'd just give you the brass tax feedback and keep everything about the work itself.
I'm... usually in a pretty good human relationship with my peers, whether code monkeys or managers. So if you chose to keep everything about the work itself, we'd lose a part of our connection. But I wouldn't mind, I'd adapt.
Your last paragraph is a lot to unpack, especially trying to view myself objectively. But I will say that while I consider myself a person that is not afraid of their feelings; if I would come to you to address some aspect of the work to be done ("When something happens they can vocalize it appropriately allowing me to address it.") I wouldn't put a lot of emotional investment into this. This is what happened. I believe this would impact our whatever. Feel free to do with this information as you wish. At the end of the day I'm rowing in the boat as per the captain's indication.
I wonder though why you wouldn't believe that I get my emotional needs met from places outside of my direct contact with my manager. I have a great relationship with my family, with my friends, most of the times with my peers. I'm just not looking for emotional support in a manager and I'd like to think I've never been 'erratic' in the workplace.
In my stints in managerial roles, I was mostly focused on the work to be done. I haven't gotten bad reviews, on the contrary. So I'm making the mistake of assuming that focus on work to be done is more relevant than focus on how to approach each individual.
Said another way, I don't say no a lot, I put prioritization up front and tell them that we are sacrificing other deliver items.
That is a decision that an exec can work with, mediate between teams, and builds mutual respect for senior leadership as you don't break promises you've already made, unless there is mutual agreement from the business.
I'm not personally engineering my career in leadership around moving up, but building teams of people that can do exceptional things tends to be the driving factor that allows me to continue up the track.
I view it as more a single system of constant improvement and understanding ability to execute in the environment. Nothing hurts credibility more than late commms, and missed deadlines due to over commitments.
The person your responding to clearly has a desire to do productive work with minimal roadblocks. In one person the roadblock to that desire/expectation might manifest physiologically as depression, in another person as anger, and in another as detachment. Getting rid of the roadblock is what needs to happen regardless of how the emotion manifests.
This does not mean that emotions are not addressed, but that they are addressed primarily as signifiers of a mismatch between the world and one's underlying desires/expectations, not the thing itself.
Sometimes, the desire/expectation of an individual is counter to the good of the overall system and group of people. In this case, a good manager might start by explaining the larger situation so that an individual can update their desires and expectations through the additional knowledge. Then new thinking/perception shifts the physiological experience of those desires (i.e., emotions).
In other cases, the gap between desires/expectations and reality is too big to bridge, which means emotions cannot be resolved in the current context.
Edit: Perhaps it's the native danish that tricks me, but by "inclusion" I refer to the practice of forcing and keeping people together - no matter their behaviour. Especially in public schools. Consequences of bad behaviour is not felt on the person doing it, but the ones around having to accept it.
[1]: I even have a draft article on similarly transferred learning: https://entropicthoughts.com/transparent-leadership-beats-se...
With how ridiculously performative and disingenuous the techbro interviews have become, if we don't want to play that game, we have to keep some signal unspoken.
Although, I don't make comment about whether you're getting your emotional needs met outside of work. I'm glad that you do - a lot of people out there aren't, and they are feeling really lonely.
Another VP gave an award to one of his teams for implementing a company-wide system. His team was actually one of the last adopters of the system that my team identified, implemented, refined, and delivered.
Anyways, they are running two different companies now.
Took a couple of tries, though. The first run broke everything.
If you’re fair, what function does being tough serve? Or does being fair allow tolerating the shortcoming that’s being tough?
An employee being tough - resilient, emotionally strong - sounds like a good idea. But manager being tough to reports? I fail to see the function/value.
If I showed that I could deliver, they would basically give me a “blank check,” for support, but I was expected to take this high level of trust seriously, and not abuse it. They wouldn’t second-guess my decisions.
They would assume that I knew what I was doing; which could be pretty scary, but I was also expected to ask for help, if I found myself over my head. They might be grumpy, but they’d give me the help. I did risk having the responsibility yanked, though.
Copping to my mistakes was expected. I was also expected to do so, in spite of possible dire consequences. If they found out about it after the fact, or if I tried to cover it up, things would go badly.
Throwing co-workers or employees under the bus was very bad. It pretty much destroyed your rep. Weasels did not do well.
High expectations, high trust, big support, a ton of agency, and really high standards on deliverables and transparency.
From what I read here, a lot of folks would have difficulty in that environment. I liked it, but it could be stressful.
> High expectations, high trust, big support, a ton of agency, and really high standards on deliverables and transparency.
This sounds like a utopia to me to be honest. I am not sure if I agree with your assessment about how many here would not be able to handle it. My concern is many here won’t be able to offer it. I would love this type of management.
I loved the agency, but they could be brutal. I used to watch Japanese managers bring subordinates to tears.
They were gentler to me, but not that much gentler. I had the "privilege" of being in the "inner circle" of trust.
I suppose there has to be a sacrifice.