Good Management and Bad Management

I recently finished reading Behind Closed Doors, Secrets of Great Management. The book really got me thinking about management and how I've been doing it in my short career as a SW development manager. In this post I'll explain what it was that got me thinking.

There is quite a big difference between the management described in the book and in the management that I've seen in practice. Here are some of the things that great managers do according to the book. This is not an exhaustive list of things discussed in the book, the ones described here felt important to me.

Provide feedback. Great managers provide timely, both positive and negative feedback. Timely means that it is almost immediate. Feedback should be given not only when really major things happen but also based on more or less normal work related things.

Great managers coach people. They identify the goals and needs of the people they are managing and they people achieving these goals. Great managers also coach people so that they concentrate on things that support the the goals of the team and the organization. Coaching is an ongoing activity, you cannot provide coaching with in meetings that occur once every half a year.

Great managers involve the team in decision making. In the book there is a nice story in which the book's Great manager facilitates a new forum involving a group that will meet regularly. The first thing that the group does is that they brainstorm and decide how the forum will do their work, what tools and practices they will use, and so on. This is superior to the way this would be done in a typical Finnish company. In my experience it is usually the manager who decides how things will be done and as a result the people find it hard relate to the results. They might not be motivated to follow the manager's approach regardless of how good that might be. Team involvement generates motivation and commitment.

Avoid "micromanagement". I have discussed this in some other entries in this blog. This book also has the view that managers should not focus on giving people detailed instructions on how to do a task. There are three excellent articles related to this in Joel on Software about different management styles. Joel calls his preferred style Identity Management.

According to the authors the most important tool that their book presents are the one-to-one meetings between the manager and the individual people that belong to his team. One-to-ones are used to facilitate feedback and coaching for example. These meetings are held weekly and therefore they address things in timely fashion: Feedback is given on time and coaching for upcoming goals and events can be given on time.

After reading this book I was convinced that what was described was indeed Great management. Management is about people and the manager should concentrate on people. My sin has been that I have been concentrating too much on technical stuff and ignoring management. I have a technical background and it's hard to completely stop coding and other technical work. But technical work has a tendency to eat all time, at least it has that effect on me. When that happens, the management suffers and the team goes on without a manager.

Reality

The sad thing is that in my career I have never experienced great management as described in this book. Here are some observations from the reality I have seen it in the five different Finnish companies I have worked in.

The feedback comes usually late if ever. It is common to receive feedback only after some major mistakes have been made. Situation gets even worse if there's no coaching - Negative feedback is completely absurd if there was no advice and the things went wrong. In Finland we have these personnel appraisal systems where development discussions between a manager and an employee are conducted once every half a year. The idea is for the employee and the manager to sit down and do away with goal setting, feedback and coaching all in one shot. This is quite different from having weekly sessions. But maybe those weekly one-one-ones are only appropriate for the happy extrovert people living in USA, we Finns are completely different creatures and trying this here would be a disaster... or i don't know.

There is no coaching. Managers are too busy working on "more important stuff" and ignoring people. Because there is no coaching and support the new managers have to learn things the hard way. New managers are forced to make mistakes and learn from them. It would better to provide coaching where the more experienced manager shows how to avoid at least the most oblivious traps.

Managers make most of the decisions themselves. The managers may discuss with the different stakeholders before they make the decision but truly involving the people who do the work in decision making is rare. Obviously it is good if the manager discusses with the workers before he makes the decision but it is still not as good as having the group members in a joint session where they brainstorm and then decide. In software development the workers have the best knowledge and ignoring that fact is a mistake.

I'm not claiming that I do things any better than described here. I have been guilty of committing all the sins described here.

Many technical managers have technical backgrounds. Because of that they usually haven't received too much training on how to manage people. Additionally it is hard to switch from a purely technical job to a management position. For me some of the management stuff is just boring! I used to think that management is just paper shuffling that anyone is capable of doing. I guess I'm still thinking like that: Certainly you don't need a university degree to do management. University degrees are needed in more difficult jobs, software development being one of those!

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