[cbanek]

I think it's good that they are doing some more managerial skills fit, although I think even a good manager for one team at a company might be a bad manager for a different team at the same company.

One of the companies I worked at hired a manager for a different team, and then somehow my team got stuck with the new manager. I don't feel like they were a great fit for our team, our people, and our way of doing things, despite how the other team thought the person would be great. People on the team started jumping ship and transferring to other teams, and I think it basically destroyed the couple of years of work we had put into building that new team. If you're hiring a manager for an existing team, I think it's important to have the direct reports really involved in the hiring process. It not only gives a sense of agency and involvement that helps bring a new person on above you, but also checks the culture fit of the people being managed (on both sides).

If managing is a people skills game, as this article seems to conclude, then it inevitably has to be about the people being managed. For example, is it a team of younger devs who need more mentoring and building up of skills? Or is it a more senior team who needs someone to push for them in the org and stay out of their way technically? These are two completely different managers in my book, and not because they are of two different levels of skill necessarily. While one person could probably do either, I think more realistically a manager is probably more on one side or the other.

[chrisbro]

100% have the team involved. I recently hired for a manager to take over one of my dev teams, had a couple of candidates I was on the fence about, but after hearing the development team's feedback, removed them from the running. A person's manager is one of the most influential people in their lives, like it or not, and it's very important to give people a say in that decision whenever possible.