[badpun]

> Your only job as a manager is to protect and develop the team under you.

That sounds like the philosophy of a tumor. Clearly, a manager has to care about other things as well, such as - how can my team contribute to the business in the most valuable way?

[abtinf]

A manager should have a view about the business, and they must work to give their team the evidence and method of thinking to grasp why that view is correct. Only then will the team properly focus on the goal and execute effectively. This is part of developing the team.

"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery

[badpun]

From what I've seen, the biggest role of a manager is interfacing with other parts of the business (i.e. other managers) and actually coming up with what the team should be working on, and how it will fit with what other parts of the business (i.e. teams managed by the other managers) are working on. This is the hard part - it's so easy to just go and build the wrong thing for a couple of years. Managing the internals and the actual work of the team are, in comparison, relatively straightforward part of the job.

[abtinf]

FWIW, I've been told I'm an exceptionally effective cross-functional communicator and that I outperform given my ability leverage my resources to recruit and align support for initiatives across orgs.

Imagine how wealthy our society would be if all the claims of by all managers about management success were actually true.

So far as I can tell, nearly all inter-management communication is useless and has, at best, zero impact. Only at the extreme margins or with select relationships does anything useful result. Like you find the IC SME who actually understand the target market, who is willing to sit with your team to set a vision.

Otherwise, nearly all managers you interact with are careerist.

[jefftk]

> If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

And yet, actual shipbuilding operations look, and have historically looked, much more like the former than the latter.

[JohnFen]

Probably because the first thing that group of yearning men will do is organize the work, and select someone who will be in charge of making sure everybody is in sync.

And boom! That someone is a manager.

To do otherwise ensures that if the ship gets built at all, it will sink in short order.

[john_the_writer]

Wouldn't they then just leave to become sailers? I build account software. If I yearned for the tax laws, I'd stop being a programmer, and start being an accountant.

[wanda]

I think the parent is suggesting that protecting and developing the team is the only important task for a manager that doesn't fail at being a decent human.

The frequent incompatibility between morality and business, even down to simply shipping a shitty product to release at all, right up to building products that are designed to force purchasers to buy a replacement, is a matter that leaders must weigh.

A similar issue also applies to the people they lead. The line of professional detachment, between being too friendly and too military, is very thin indeed.

Generally speaking, while I fully agree with the parent that protecting, developing and coaching team is of paramount importance, I would say that, at the very least, hiring is equally important.

Hire the right people and your job as a manager is the easiest thing in the world.

Of course, in order to be good at any of the above, you must have a solid understanding of the business. It isn't simply a matter of being the people's champion.