There’s nothing more dangerous than an average manager with free time on his hands. When your work is solely coordinating and assigning other people’s tasks, topping off a slow day usually means making up more (needless) stuff for others to do.
This is in part the tyranny of the 8-hour work day paradigm. When the work is progressing as planned and the core issues have been addressed, the right move for the manager is often to step back. But if all you know how do is “manage”, there’s no fallback. Nothing else to fill your time with.
What you’re left with is net-negative management. That the presence of a manager actually detracts more value than not having one at all would do.
The alternative for many smaller teams or shops is the combined idea of managers of one and working managers. That management can be less than a full-time role, it can be a responsibility that people who also does the work can take upon them when needed.
Steffen Hiller
on 17 Sep 09Haha, nice title and post!
How do you always come up with those posts, even though you’re not working at such a big/bad work place?
Kaleb Martins
on 17 Sep 09AHAHAH very nice title and post!
Nick
on 17 Sep 09Everything you’re saying depends on your definition of a manager. If you start by assuming that a manager just assigns tasks to subordinates, then by all means.
But that’s not how effective managers behave. Effective management is about empowering and assisting subordinates to deliver their full potential. Its about managing, not telling.
A manager WITHOUT free time is a dangerous manager. There should always be slack so that a manager can jump in where they can provide the most assistance, react to crises, etc.
David Smith
on 17 Sep 09Funny, my understanding was that there’s nothing more dangerous than a second lieutenant with a compass and a map…
Seriously, good advice too infrequently honored.
Jake
on 17 Sep 09Ouch
David Heller
on 17 Sep 09Does the pure manager still exist? Some one that just exists to supervise others? Though I have the title of manager so little of my time is actually spent managing.
Jim Garvin
on 17 Sep 09Co-fucking-rrect.
Check out Dan Pink’s TED talk on the Science of Motivation – Dan’s points about autonomy go hand in hand with your points about management often having a negative impact.
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
You’d love this quote from the talk: “There is often a mismatch between what science knows, and what business does.”
Stick with the video until the slide with “Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose” comes up (past the half way mark) – that’s where it really gets exciting.
Jim Garvin
on 17 Sep 09I’m a noob.
Dan Pink’s Ted Talk on the Science of Motivation
Jim Garvin
on 17 Sep 09@Nick – If effective management is about empowering a “subordinate” – what could be more empowering than simply bestowing the manager’s authority directly upon the “subordinate”? Then you don’t need the manager at all, and you could use the money for another fully empowered “subordinate”.
JWBooth
on 17 Sep 09@Jim Garvin Wow! You must work in an MIT lab or something. Let’s face it, a blog about design, development, entrepreneurship, etc. is not a great place to find people that manage a bunch space wasting twenty somethings that have a closetful of trophies for “participation”. Bottom line, much like sheep need a shephard, the vast majority of frat boy zombie clock punchers need a manager. I agree with the sentiment of this article entirely (within the proper context) but the idea that every manager should be replaced with another “subordinate” and they should self-manage is, well, dumb.
nate
on 17 Sep 09maybe it should read “beware bad managers with free time.” or, just “beware of bad managers.”
this reminds me of a brief exchange i had with a client about culture building — i think in response to a 37signals post about leadership and culture. rules are needed to create culture — even implicit ones, like those used to form a personal code of conduct. people grumble and rebel when the rules don’t make sense or benefit them in some way.
by the same token, bad managers with free time or with none don’t benefit anyone, but that doesn’t mean one should be wary of the manager based on his/her relative free time.
a little mutual respect goes a long way. if your manager’s bad, well…
Anonymous
on 17 Sep 09How about “beware a company that employs managers?”
Because if you need managers to keep your underlings on task, then either you hired the wrong underlings, or your corporate culture is in the toilet.
Rimantas
on 17 Sep 09Interestingly, Tom DeMarco in hist “Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency” says the opposite: you can only truly manage when you have some spare time, some slack. Of course, his vision of true management is not “means making up more (needless) stuff for others to do.” On the other hand, if you don’t have enough time to work on greater things, then this is the only thing to do. Anyway, highly recommeded book.
Chris
on 17 Sep 09Great post and reminds me of what’s being going on at Yahoo! There’s managers out there that simply think their job is to keep the “programmers” busy. I would put them in the same category as the people who walk around to see what’s going on once they read through their blogs and make their fantasy football picks. Good managers know the value of time and keeping distractions away from the team. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of poor managers out there that need to make themselves look busy. Those are usually the one’s who get cut. Everybody knows who the good manager is. They wait for the bad one to get cut—and the reason they get cut is what this post is all about.
Jim Garvin
on 17 Sep 09@JWBooth Thank you for demonstrating how to set up a straw man to the rest of the class. Are there any other ideas that you’d like to make up and then call dumb?
If not, you may return to your seat.
raghubetter
on 18 Sep 09Does this mean the team must be aware of managers with free time or its just an advisable column for managers….
Joe
on 18 Sep 09Actually Jim Garvin, I think JWBooth is correct. Anyone who thinks so highly of themselves as to assume that their selected subordinates require no management is not a good manager.
A good manager is there to create and maintain the high standards of good self-managers.
irrationalidiot
on 18 Sep 09I’ve only had two good managers in my career. Those were the ones that left me alone but were there to help and encourage when needed. Either I generally suck at selecting managers or there just aren’t that many good ones.
Nice post.
steve
on 18 Sep 09David, how many “average managers” have you worked for in your career? You’ve always been self-employed or with 37signals, right? Not sure how you can presume to know what it’s like to work for a manager given that you don’t have a broad range of work experience across multiple companies. Most “managers” I know do a lot more than just “coordinating and assigning other people’s tasks”. Read some of Rands’s thoughts if you want to know what real-life IT managers are responsible for.
DHH
on 18 Sep 09Steve, I had the good fortune of being educated by lots of terrible IT managers in my time. I have indeed not always been self-employed or with 37signals, no. And I’ve seen this pattern myself repeat as well as discuss it with others who had the same observations.
But certainly there are great managers who don’t follow this pattern.
Jim Garvin
on 18 Sep 09(I have to admit this sentence confused me, so I apologize if I missed your point.)
I don’t think hiring self-driven people requires an egomaniac.
It seems you are suggesting that a bad manager is the one that is capable of selecting good “subordinates” (the ones that would be so intrinsically motivated as to render any manager redundant).
That seems utterly non-sequitor to me. If a person doing the hiring were to be great, wouldn’t they always be looking for people that don’t require someone else’s routine direction?
I need to mention context, because I think you, JWBooth, and myself are assuming different ones. I’m assuming a creative context. I don’t think the spare time of a manager makes much of a difference in a non-creative context.
You said:Firstly, why call that person a manager? That sounds more like a mentor, to me. Secondly, you’ve built in a presumption that the “self-managers” don’t already have high standards. Isn’t that a reflection of the hiring practices?
I think the smart business would keep the mentor, lose the manager, and try to hire better people.
Meredith
on 18 Sep 09Here here! I think more managers need to be able to create fallback projects for themselves, ones that they can work on when the work they manage is moving along as planned.
This can be work that contributes to the overall mission of the company, and can include simply taking time to think through questions like: are we meeting our mission critical goals? Are we accomplishing things as efficiently as possible, rather than blindly doing things as we always have?
This kind of work does not equal creating busy work for your employees, and actually contributes to the success of the company.
Carl
on 21 Sep 09Love this: ‘That management can be less than a full-time role, it can be a responsibility that people who also does the work can take upon them when needed.’ Makes so much sense.
Lydia Hirt
on 21 Sep 09We’re also inspired and motivated by the work of Daniel Pink and appreciate your interest in the man behind the groundbreaking bestseller, A WHOLE NEW MIND. I’m excited to let you know that December 29 marks the release of Pink’s latest book, DRIVE.
Bursting with big ideas, DRIVE is the rare book that will change how you think and transform how you live.
Forget everything you thought you knew about how to motivate people—at work, at school, at home. It’s wrong. As Daniel H. Pink explains in his new and paradigm-shattering book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, the secret to high performance and satisfaction in today’s world is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.
Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does—and how that affects every aspect of our lives. He demonstrates that while the old-fashioned carrot-and-stick approach worked successfully in the 20th century, it’s precisely the wrong way to motivate people for today’s challenges. In Drive, he reveals the three elements of true motivation:
*Autonomy- the desire to direct our own lives *Mastery- the urge to get better and better at something that matters *Purpose- the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
We hope Daniel Pink’s DRIVE will open your eyes and change the way you think in 2010!
Please visit www.danpink.com and www.riverheadbooks.com for additional details.
This discussion is closed.