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by netjiro
1752 days ago
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I think the most common mistake is the assumption that the coordination by the manager is essential to supply direction and avoid errors and mistakes. This is consistently assumed without actually measuring the amount and severity of mistakes without management direction. I know I can trust my people to coordinate themselves with very low error rates as long as I provide them with the information and incentives they need to make the correct decisions by themselves. The total cost of extra full time managers is significantly larger than the measured error cost. Some of the common management tasks will be loaded onto leaf node staff. This costs less, mostly since they aggressively minimise those tasks to the bare minimum friction while a full time manager tend not to. It is not 1950. We can trust our people to function much better given the right environment and tools. I've run several large complex international projects with very low management overhead. |
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I mean there are different levels of managers, there is your direct manager who probably just needs to delegate some tasks and trust you to manage yourself, and then manage their local budget, but there are managers also of a division with multiple groups in there and they have to manage stuff about budgets that takes into account legal requirements that people lower than them really aren't aware of.
anecdote time about this managerial level (I've told this anecdote before here) - one time I was consulting at a place and they had these Friday breakfasts for about 7-9 teams together (so about 100+ people in a big warehouse eating danish breakfast) and the division managers would sometimes say some things about what was going to happen in the next few months. So, one time the main guys for all the teams gave this speech about why they were doing something in a particular way and it went very deep detail about accounting rules and a particular financing law that applied so that was why they were structuring the next 9 months work in the way they were because it allowed them use a half a million dollars etc. etc.
Everyone was nodding sagely along as if they understood what they were hearing, but I knew a lot of them didn't understand anything, I didn't understand it all either - I just knew I was hearing the managerial equivalent of nerd speak - like the way I would talk about engineering tradeoffs.
A lot of the developers there spent their time going around talking about how these two guys did nothing and were useless, because from the 'outside' of their work it would look like they just sat around talking.
Maybe they are not as useful as other workers, but I do know that I am not able to adequately judge it from what little details I observe about their daily routines.