I had the best manager of my life recently, so I will try to list some of the things she did/was, all of which seem obvious in retrospect, but I have never seen another manager actually do them holistically.
1. Knew the business logic. The role of a PM in my job is to get the BUSINESS requirements, and put them into a story. She took the time to get VERY CLEAR business requirements. (Yes, we are SCRUM, yes, we could tell her "that's not the best solution", yes we could change the plan). The problem is that most managers take "self managing teams" to mean "lol I don't have to do shit."
2. BECAUSE she understood the business logic and roughly what we meant when we said SQL/K8S/RabbitMQ/backend/frontend, she DID NOT PRESS FOR DEADLINES. As opposed to a super senior manager I got placed under next who constantly asked me to give the exact number of hours when the pointed story would be finished.
3. She did not throw all the blame on the team. She took personal responsibility for all the failures and said we did not plan it well. With that said, the team was endlessly loyal and went out of their way to keep her updated and do their work.
4. Trusted us and FORCED us not to overdo it. Whatever magical world HN lives in, a lot of places have "stealth overtime" - she avoided it like the plague. This also worked because she knew what everyone was working on and she knew we were using work time effectively. As a result, she didn't have theories about someone trying to slack off.
5. Planned things she is responsible for planning: Deploys (after getting out feedack), talking to other teams, scheduling meetings with third parties, etc.
6. Remembered "special occasions" - never made a big deal out of it, never made anyone else go do something - you would just get a nice thing YOU like on your desk for your birthday. I know this is petty and trite, but because it was just there, and you KNEW she got 6 hours of sleep and still drove across the city to get your co-worker his favorite cake, it had meaning.
6. When shit hit the fan, she worked OT with the rest of us - that way we knew she had a vested interest in avoiding issues. Most managers really do call you and go back to enjoying their day.
7. This weird and usually a mistake, but I could drop my professional facade around her, and she never abused it to get info or figure out if "I am quitting soon, etc." But she never broke hers, ever, which, I guess, only worked because we somehow knew she was human under there.
Anyway, this post ended up being a rant.
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Edit regarding BAD MANAGERS: I think I am figuring some heuristics of bad managers as this spins around my head:
1. Hypocritical behavior - specifically treating us as incompetent when there is blame to be placed, and as rockstars when there is work to be done. Can't have it both ways.
2. Passive aggressiveness / failure to communicate. "Mr/Mrs. Manager is there anything I could do to help make your job easier." "No everything is great." Then it turns out that over 6 months, this particular manager hasn't said one good thing about anyone on the team and kept a calendar of the SDET's bathroom breaks, but never once did she tell him there was a problem.
3. Emotions at work - specifically, a common trait I notice is management being emotional / expecting you to sympathize and then immediately calling you unprofessional if YOU share something.
1. Knew the business logic. The role of a PM in my job is to get the BUSINESS requirements, and put them into a story. She took the time to get VERY CLEAR business requirements. (Yes, we are SCRUM, yes, we could tell her "that's not the best solution", yes we could change the plan). The problem is that most managers take "self managing teams" to mean "lol I don't have to do shit."
2. BECAUSE she understood the business logic and roughly what we meant when we said SQL/K8S/RabbitMQ/backend/frontend, she DID NOT PRESS FOR DEADLINES. As opposed to a super senior manager I got placed under next who constantly asked me to give the exact number of hours when the pointed story would be finished.
3. She did not throw all the blame on the team. She took personal responsibility for all the failures and said we did not plan it well. With that said, the team was endlessly loyal and went out of their way to keep her updated and do their work.
4. Trusted us and FORCED us not to overdo it. Whatever magical world HN lives in, a lot of places have "stealth overtime" - she avoided it like the plague. This also worked because she knew what everyone was working on and she knew we were using work time effectively. As a result, she didn't have theories about someone trying to slack off.
5. Planned things she is responsible for planning: Deploys (after getting out feedack), talking to other teams, scheduling meetings with third parties, etc.
6. Remembered "special occasions" - never made a big deal out of it, never made anyone else go do something - you would just get a nice thing YOU like on your desk for your birthday. I know this is petty and trite, but because it was just there, and you KNEW she got 6 hours of sleep and still drove across the city to get your co-worker his favorite cake, it had meaning.
6. When shit hit the fan, she worked OT with the rest of us - that way we knew she had a vested interest in avoiding issues. Most managers really do call you and go back to enjoying their day.
7. This weird and usually a mistake, but I could drop my professional facade around her, and she never abused it to get info or figure out if "I am quitting soon, etc." But she never broke hers, ever, which, I guess, only worked because we somehow knew she was human under there.
Anyway, this post ended up being a rant.
---
Edit regarding BAD MANAGERS: I think I am figuring some heuristics of bad managers as this spins around my head:
1. Hypocritical behavior - specifically treating us as incompetent when there is blame to be placed, and as rockstars when there is work to be done. Can't have it both ways. 2. Passive aggressiveness / failure to communicate. "Mr/Mrs. Manager is there anything I could do to help make your job easier." "No everything is great." Then it turns out that over 6 months, this particular manager hasn't said one good thing about anyone on the team and kept a calendar of the SDET's bathroom breaks, but never once did she tell him there was a problem. 3. Emotions at work - specifically, a common trait I notice is management being emotional / expecting you to sympathize and then immediately calling you unprofessional if YOU share something.
I guess it all falls under hypocrisy.