A better approach is to have separate career tracks for 'people' managers and 'project' managers.
People managers do the performance evaluations and various HR administrative tasks (signing time cards, hiring, firing, etc.) but they rely on feedback from their group which are both individual contributors and project managers.
Project managers lead the projects and have to select/attract the right combination of individual contributors to their project if they want it to succeed.
A project that 'gets more management' will usually have to justify the addition of PMs from a cost-benefit perspective. And a project that is overburdened with management types will usually see the ICs migrate to other projects in order to improve their impact.
All this happens organically, so individual contributors are empowered instead of being disenfranchised through organizational changes.
That sounds like basically matrix management which has many well documented issues. The biggest one in my experience is that the people managers need to be themselves judged on some rubric. If that rubric is success of projects then it tangentially aligns with business goals. If it's something else or they don't have power over projects then they are encouraged to play constant politics.
> Why would they need to play constant politics if they don't have power over projects? Not everyone is motivated by the same things.
They do have power over the projects. Being able to PIP someone is power over everything that person does including which projects they work on. Including which projects no one works on. Except it's not their direct power which means to leverage it they need to play politics. Adding layers doesn't remove that power but simply increases the amount of politics they play to make up for it.
The goal with the matrix management is to distribute the risk. If your people manager puts you on a PIP then at least your project managers will have some ability to push back on that.
But there is no good reason for the People manager to care anything about what projects have people working on them. If they start to care about which projects are successful instead of all projects are successful then they're not a good fit for the job. And yes I have experienced that, as well as it's opposite.
and this leads to 4 engineers and 6 managers sitting in a meeting, and nobody actually being responsible for anything.
no, of course, there's a lot of value in providing escalation/descalation/rehoming processes, and dedicated ways for org-wide feedback on people's and projects' impact, but people are not just three orthonormal roles on top of each other in a trenchcoat, if there's not clear hierarchy then - as others pointed out - the informal chaos takes over (because it's the human default)
Do you have any practical experience with companies running as it's described in this motivational book?
Many of those books are selling well because they are well written and say exactly what reader thinks might work, but if you ask anyone else who worked with the author, the reality can be quite different.
> Do you have any practical experience with companies running as it's described in this motivational book?
I do not have experience running it at a company level, but at a team level (I have been an engineering lead in two companies for the last 6 years).
From all the books I've read (I read a lot), this is the one that was most "spot-on" about treating other humans and making them feel valued and therefore building a team with strong bonds.
> Many of those books are selling well because they are well written and say exactly what reader thinks might work, but if you ask anyone else who worked with the author, the reality can be quite different.
Absolutely agree.
In my experience I resonate most with any books when I have already, unbeknownst to me, been applying what they preach (which has been the case with Setting the table that I'm currently in the process of finishing).
I believe that it requires a lot of introspection to be able to apply new knowledge (ie, if you haven't thought about it or experienced it before reading about it)
That's what I like about "agile roles" like Product Owner or Scrum Master, they take a slice of traditional manager's responsibilities, but they don't have any reporting authority over other workers. My EM has like 30 direct reports and it works fine because he doesn't really have anything to do with our day to day work.
Those semi-managerial roles are the biggest problem with that model, in my opinion. Sure, it works as long as everything is peachy. But as soon as there are any real conflicts of interest, it will show who is the real manager. And it's not the product owner or scrum master.
With authority comes responsibility for your actions. Without responsibility, no authority. The product manager is a manager in name only, and product owner even less so.
That doesn't mean you can't have several direct reports. The classic matrix organization for example. But it means semi-managers without real responsibility have no real mandate for doing a good job at the slightest hint of trouble.
> But as soon as there are any real conflicts of interest, it will show who is the real manager. And it's not the product owner or scrum master.
If there's a conflict of interest, it needs to be discussed based on merit, not based on who has the bigger authority.
If there's no agreement, it needs to be escalated to somebody who has the authority (manager). But IME this doesn't happen very often.
I like this model, because the default position is that none of the engineering, product, process is the "master", so you need to negotiate. If one of the roles also has reporting authority, that automatically skews the decision making towards yielding to them.
I'm not sure how you can evaluate 30 people you don't interact with closely.
NIMS, the National Incident Management System, talks of ICs having between 3-7 direct reports, when there is a need to be connected to what they are doing, because beyond that, you can't reconcile things easily.
That list of “skills” is spot on. I also especially like his use of the term “skunking” to describe how somebody’s personal opinions/problems/issues impact the rest of the team. “51%ers” are exactly the kind of people I want to work with.
I hope I'm not violating any copyrights – page 143 of Setting the Table from Danny Meyer [1]
> To me, a 51 percenter has five core emotional skills. I’ve learned that we need to hire employees with these skills if we’re to be champions at the team sport of hospitality.They are:
1. Optimistic warmth (genuine kindness, thoughtfulness, and a sense that the glass is always at least half full)
2. Intelligence (not just “smarts” but rather an insatiable curiosity to learn for the sake of learning)
3. Work ethic (a natural tendency to do something as well as it can possibly be done)
4. Empathy (an awareness of, care for, and connection to how others feel and how your actions make others feel)
5. Self-awareness and integrity (an understanding of what makes you tick and a natural inclination to be accountable for doing the right thing with honesty and superb judgment)
For future reference, you are certainly not violating US copyright law, because quoting a few sentences from a book falls under fair use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
I was curious why the author decided to call them "51 percenters." A google search of the term suggests that the skills of this group of employees are divided by 51% hospitality and 49% technical excellence. Please feel free to correct me if there is anything wrong in my interpretation.
Exactly! I’ve never been able to express a succinct list of why some teams and/or companies feel better than others, but “51%ers” explains it perfectly.
Someone "whose skills are divided 51-49 between emotional hospitality and technical excellence" [1]. Seems quite bizarre to me to define it so precisely. Even if skills were measurable in such a way, how many people will be exactly 51% emotional hospitality, and why is 52% or 50% not suitable?
i think the implication is if a 51%'er has to decide between technical excellence and emotional hospitality then, all other things equal, they will use emotional hospitality since that's the majority of their skills (51%). It sounds like preferring to hold a hand vs rejecting incompetence. I don't really agree, i get not being jerk is important but i would flip it to 51% technical excellence 49% emotional hospitality.
People managers do the performance evaluations and various HR administrative tasks (signing time cards, hiring, firing, etc.) but they rely on feedback from their group which are both individual contributors and project managers.
Project managers lead the projects and have to select/attract the right combination of individual contributors to their project if they want it to succeed.
A project that 'gets more management' will usually have to justify the addition of PMs from a cost-benefit perspective. And a project that is overburdened with management types will usually see the ICs migrate to other projects in order to improve their impact.
All this happens organically, so individual contributors are empowered instead of being disenfranchised through organizational changes.