Unintuitive Things I’ve Learned about Management
&quot;Unfortunately at many places, you’re roadblocked in advancing your career unless you become a manager. This sadly incentivizes the wrong outcomes, in which people who don’t love dealing with people become bad managers, and both they and their team suffers.&quot;<p>Random thoughts on this..<p>A good manager, who builds &amp; runs a good team can achieve far more than any single great employee.<p>There are no one man companies worth $1bn.<p>It&#x27;s appropriate that manager compensation reflects this value for shareholders. The problem is that organisations are very poor at training managers, business schools don&#x27;t do it at all as far as I can see. MBA&#x27;s are about money and &quot;problem solving&quot;, other courses produce &quot;human resource managers&quot; which is code for pseudo lawyers and process administrators.<p>Strategic action to create and foster human capital outside academia is woefully lacking in our economy at the moment. Companies are increasingly ephemeral and are not invested in developing people in the way they were, there is a fight for &quot;talent&quot; that seems to suppose that business capabilities are innate and not learned, and disregards the benefits of team work and corporate culture. How many times have people reading watched teams and projects smashed up by new hires (or early career) from Harvard, LBS or IMD who then get promoted to do even more damage or bugger off to consultancy or some other corporate? 6 months of good numbers followed by 5 years of turmoil and painful retrenchment - if you are lucky.<p>Loyalty is at the heart of bad management, pension schemes locked people in meaning that they were tied to shareholders in the long run. Corporate software is the epitome of this issue - we used to chant &quot;that fine for you but we have to live with it&quot; at vendors, now everyone looks at the latest lashed up piece of crap and things &quot;well, if I am here in five years then no one else will have the faintest idea that this is my fault and anyway I will probably be sacked for not filling some form properly so sod it.&quot;<p>The McKinsey driven cult of performance management (cf. In Search of Excellence, Build to Last and Beyond Performance) has done huge damage. This sets managers against employees in a forced pantomime of marking and red queen style denotions of performance. Management time is burned in handling a dangerous (in career terms) process which ruins their relationship with their teams, employees are asked to do things that demonstrate their performance that are orthogonal to actual performance, and not vital things like supporting team mates or their management, developing for four quarters hence (vs. 2 weeks hence) implementing infrastructure for others and so on.