Poll: Are middle-managers and directors the problem at where you work?
In my personal experience -- from empire-building, to bad hires, to gaming metrics, to focusing on multi-quarter initiatives while things are on fire, I seem to find middle-managers & directors are often the group who seem to be most often the issue at a bad company. This has been my experience about half of companies, from startup to faang.
Let's see what the community at large thinks.
[Edit: To vote, click on an up-arrow below]
Yes, almost always.
So very, very easy for them to be the problem. As 'middle managers' they are answerable to neither the customer nor the investors. They float rootless within a larger organization. Their career goal is then defined as 'meet objectives within budget'. The natural human response to that is
These goals do not align with the investors' nor the customers' interests.They do not align with their team either. A goal's team is "maximize fun, minimize stress".
And strangely, many managers although they are very good at being "the leaders" are disappointing when it comes to "care about the team".
But there are good managers, but they are so few (1 out of 4 in my own specific data point). We always talk about the 10x-productivity coder. We should talk more about the 10x-team-protector manager.
I wouldn't lump middle-managers in with directors.
In my experience, middle-managers actually do a pretty tough job - they manage their teams and deal with all of the politics and requirements from above.
Directors on the other hand - once you get to this level you're dealing with people who live in another reality.
IMHO, there's a huge difference between "the problem" and "a problem" here. Yes, they're often a problem.
But upstream are:
- Top Officers and Directors, who (as a generality) do a crap job of recognizing / recruiting / retaining / training / supervising / promoting good mid-level managers.
- Complexities of big pictures and scale, which very often force managers to be the bearers of bad news to the worker bees - who want things to just be simple and straight-forward in their trenches.
- Human nature, which provides us with a very meager supply of people who are both (potentially) really good at management, and eager (or at least quite willing) enough to put up with all the crap that being in management offers.