| I guess I'm just cynical, but every time I see a post on "How To Be A Great Manager", I only see "Look At Me, I'm A Great Manager!". Why the cynicism? Because in my career across many companies and many teams, I can count the good managers on one hand, but have seen people "playing manager" everywhere -- and these are the ones who like to espouse theory. * Frequent one-on-ones! (yeah but everyone on your team is demoralized and trying to switch out) * Shield the engineers from crap! (but you still let your team struggle to take care of everything while you're busy "aligning" with the other managers) * Help the engineers grow! (are you actually giving them more responsibilities in a way they can deliver and actually get promoted this year, or just dispensing cheap advice every week?) * Resolve conflicts! (do you personally take it upon yourself to settle issues with your peer managers, or do you co-miserate with your directs about how political everything is) Really, there's dozens and dozens of things a good manager will need to do, and it's far from a solved problem. Drawing up a list of desiderata is not the hard part. The difficulty is how to actually enact them, how to actually impact the team, how to actually drive the project forward. You tell me your secret and I'm all ears. |