People can read their manager's mind
The fish rots from the head down.
β A beaten saying
People generally don't do what they're told, but what they expect to be rewarded for. Managers often say they'll reward
something β perhaps they even believe it. But then they proceed to reward different things.
I think people are fairly good at predicting this discrepancy. The more productive they are, the better they tend to be at
predicting it. Consequently, management's stated goals will tend to go unfulfilled whenever deep down, management
doesn't value the sort of work that goes into achieving these goals.
So not only is paying lip service to these goals worthless, but so is lying to oneself and genuinely convincing
oneself. When time comes to reward people, it is the gut feeling of whose work is truly remarkable that matters. And what you
usually convince yourself of is that the goal is important β but not that achieving it is remarkable. In fact,
often someone pursuing what you think are unimportant goals in a way that you admire will impress you more than someone
doing "important grunt work" (in your eyes.)
You then live happily with this compartmentalization β an important goal to be achieved by unremarkable people. However,
nobody is fooled except you. The people whose compensation depends on your opinion have ample time to remember and analyze your
past words and decisions β more time than you, in fact, and a stronger incentive. And so their mental model of you is often much
better than your own. So they ignore your requests and become valued, instead of following them and sinking into obscurity.
Examples:
- A manager truly appreciates original mathematical ideas. The manager requests to rid the code of crash-causing bugs, because
customers resent crashes. The most confident people ignore him and spend time coming up with original math. The less confident
people spend time chasing bugs, are upset by the lack of recognition, and eventually leave for greener pastures. At any given
moment, the code base is ridden by crash-causing bugs.
- A manager enjoys "software architecture", design patterns, and language lawyer type of knowledge. The manager requests to
cooperate better with neighboring teams who are upset by missing functionality in the beautifully architected software. People
will tend to keep designing more patterns into the program.
- A highly influential figure enjoys hacking on their machine. The influential figure points out the importance of solid,
highly-available infrastructure to support development. The department responsible for said infrastructure will guarantee that
he gets as much bandwidth, RAM, screen pixels and other goodies as they can supply, knowing that the infrastructure he
really cares about is that which enables the happy hacking on his machine. The rest of the org might well remain stuck
with a turd of an infrastructure.
- A manager loathes spending money. The manager requires to build highly-available infrastructure to support development.
People responsible for infrastructure will build a piece of shit out of yesteryear's scraps purchased at nearby failing
companies for peanuts, knowing that they'll be rewarded.
- A manager is all about timely delivery, and he did very little code maintenance in his life. The manager nominally realizes
that a lot of code is used in multiple shipping products; that it takes some time to make a change compatible with all the
client code; and that branching the entire code base is a quick way to do the work for this delivery, but you'll pay
for the shortcut many times over in each of your future deliveries. People will fork the code base for every shipping product.
(I've seen it and heard about it more times than the luckier readers would believe.)
And so it goes. If something is rotten in an org, the root cause is a manager who doesn't value the work needed to
fix it. They might value it being fixed, but of course no sane employee gives a shit about that. A sane
employee cares whether they are valued. Three corollaries follow:
Corollary 1. Who can, and sometimes does, un-rot the fish from the bottom? An insane employee.
Someone who finds the forks, crashes, etc. a personal offense, and will repeatedly risk annoying management by fighting to stop
these things. Especially someone who spends their own political capital, hard earned doing things management truly values, on
doing work they don't truly value β such a person can keep fighting for a long time. Some people manage to make a career out of
it by persisting until management truly changes their mind and rewards them. Whatever the odds of that, the average person
cannot comprehend the motivation of someone attempting such a feat.
Corollary 2. When does the fish un-rot from the top? When a manager is taught by experience that (1)
neglecting this thing is harmful and (2) it's actually hard to get it right (that is, the manager himself, or someone he
considers smart, tried and failed.) But that takes managers admitting mistakes and learning from them. Such managers exist; to
be called one of them would exceed my dreams.
Corollary 3. Managers who can't make themselves value all important work should at least realize
this: their goals do not automatically become their employees' goals. On the contrary, much or most of a manager's job is to
align these goals β and if it were that easy, perhaps they wouldn't pay managers that much, now would they? I find it a blessing
to be able to tell a manager, "you don't really value this work so it won't get done." In fact, it's a blessing even if they
ignore me. That they can hear this sort of thing without exploding means they can be reasoned with. To be considered such a
manger is the apex of my ambitions.
Finally, don't expect people to enlighten you and tell you what your blind spots are. Becoming a manager means losing the
privilege of being told what's what. It's a trap to think of oneself as just the same reasonable guy and why wouldn't they want
to talk to me. The right question is, why would they? Is the risk worth it for them? Only if they take your org's
problem very personally, which most people quite sensibly don't. Someone telling me what's what is a thing to thank for, but not
to count on.
The safe assumption is, they read your mind like an open book, and perhaps they read it out loud to each other β but not to
you. The only way to deal with the problems I cause is an honest journey into the depths of my own rotten mind.
P.S. As it often happens, I wanted to write this for years (the working title was "people know their true KPIs"), but I
didn't. I was prompted to finally write it by reading Dan Luu's excellent "How Completely
Messed Up Practices Become Normal", where he says, among other things, "Itβs sort of funny that this ends up being a problem
about incentives. As an industry, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to incentivize consumers into doing what we want.
But then we set up incentive systems that are generally agreed upon as incentivizing us to do the wrong things..." I guess this
is my take on the incentives issue β real incentives vs stated incentives; I believe people often break rules put in place to
achieve a stated goal in order to do the kind of work that is truly valued (even regardless of whether that work's goal is
valued.) It's funny how I effectively comment on Dan's blog two times in a row, his blog having become easily my favorite
"tech blog", while my own is kinda fading away as I spend my free time learning to animate.
Β
Hmm. I really enjoy your blog and get pretty excited every time I see
that you have a new post in my RSS reader. If what it takes for you to
blog more is me writing something on the topic, I need to find out what
ideas you have squirreled away so I can prompt you into writing more
:P.
Although, if you're really enjoying animation, maybe I should avoid
those topics instead.
It's true, I can read my manager's mind who reads my mind.
It's brilliant!
I have a manager that does one-on-ones once a year. It's a 30 minute
endurance test on my side, listening to him tell me about the prospects
for the next year, and then asking me how things are going.
"Everything is going extremely well."
He doesn't know me. He isn't even interested in hearing one thing
from me. That's fine. They like me, I do the work I like and want to do,
I give them what they need in the time they need it, and I get what I
want out of the deal.
I think this describes why I've been feeling resentful about work. I
fall under the less confident type of employee. I spend my time fixing
bugs, and even my boss admits I do unrecognized work. The senior
developer gets all the cool assignments and all the recognition, and
although the boss values the work, I feel invisible most of the
time.
Also, since the senior developer has a new family now, I doubt he'll
be leaving any time soon so my possibility for advancement is very
small.
At this point, I haven't decided yet whether I do want them to notice
and let me go, or whether I want to go to greener pastures like you
mentioned.
Do people actually do what managers value or reward?
I've mostly gone off and done my own thing based on what I thought
was important.
@Dan: thanks :-) As to animating, I don't know if I'm enjoying it yet
β learning is hard, dammit, definitely my nostalgia for formal education
that unexpectedly formed in my brain when I entered the workforce has
not survived this latest learning experience... Let's say I'm definitely
planning to enjoy it eventually :-)
@Francis: as a manager I assume my mind to be more transparent to
people reporting to me than theirs is to me, largely because I'm one and
they're many so it's a bit like simultaneously playing chess on multiple
boards. A grandmaster playing amateurs can win all or most games in a
simul, but playing against several people who're roughly in your own
league is hopeless. And I'm hardly a grandmaster mind reader.
@Stephanie: actually your situation sounds pretty good! Definitely
better than having a manager that needlessly bugs you every other
day...
@Bob: I think I'd confront them about it. (I wasn't very good at
picking timing or strategy for that early on in my career; a friend
recently reminded me how he used to advise me on these matters...)
@Cody: I guess I've mostly done my own thing, too, but it's a bit
subtler than that. Managers rewarding something doesn't require them to
say they will. My managers ended up rewarding me doing my own thing, at
least much of the time. And while it was me who chose that thing, my
choice was affected by how the org would respond to my work. There are
things I knew were important that I never ventured into because I didn't
see how the politics could be overcome; things I did happily because the
politics aligned to help me instead of getting in my way; and things I
decided to do even though there was political friction to overcome (this
last kind of thing is something most people recoil from, and so do I to
some degree or other β the threshold is different for everyone.)
The upshot is that one can be rather responsive to incentives without
being the type who "does what he's told." In fact, the more independent
people in my experience are the ones most aware of what the org "really
wants", while people doing what they're told are the ones who let
themselves be dragged into areas considered "important grunt work", to
their own detriment. The independent person will actively fight
assignments which are nominally important but not really appreciated,
insisting on doing their own (usually better appreciated) thing instead,
and this is actually the strongest form of responding to
incentives!
I like this as a piece to develop empathy and self-awareness in
managers. To that end it gave me a new heuristic to try: http://blog.jeffreyfredrick.com/2016/01/01/pretend-they-are-mind-reading/
Jtf
You can write endless pieces about techs actively managed by managers
having no technical background whatsoever β and it is almost always a
sad story. If you know something, you mostly end up doing the job
because you can, and managed by people who can not.
Actually, my point holds for managers with a technical background
just as much as it holds for ones without it, as long as they have a
bias towards valuing some kinds of important work over others.
Wow, Yossi! You're back! And with a great article to add to that.
As a non-manager I can only have fun reading this. It's quite true,
but now you've actually revealed some of our tactics. Now the
pointy-haired boneheads will persecute us also for "following orders",
which will be a malevolent adaptation to their own tastes.
But we (subordinates) can also be partially at fault here. I am not a
"responsibility crusader" (like your hero from Corollary 1), but when I
see this in others, I do support them β more or less vocally. If the
whole team acts as one β the manager will usually yield.
I used to have such a nice setting, where the manager was possible to
convince at times (even without unanimity β a strong majority would do)
β so this was a Corollary 3-type situation.
Now I am jumping between 3 projects, which costs me a ton of context
switching (see Joel's article from about 2001), and encourages
procrastination β e.g. reading "Proper Fixation"). Two of these projects
are operating at the Corollary-3-level, but in one there is a collection
of ego-invested buffoons taking revenge for code review, plus a
non-technical manageress channelling orders from above her (this is like
a diode β a one-way communication channel, but we can't respond via it).
The rules are just handed down to us.
Even in the last situation, if we weren't just a bunch of envious
conflicted losers, I can imagine that it would be possible to make the
manager do our bidding with the upper layers.
So, there is always some room for manoeuvre except for keeping your
CV up to date (which doesn't hurt anyway), if there are only enough sane
people to work with.
There are corollaries to that β e.g. if it's just you and the boss,
and your role is personal-assistant-scapegoat for the infallible master
β then: eject button.
Glad you liked it!
Bang on!! I have never really thought of it from this perspective,
but now it makes perfect sense. I can now replay all the moments where I
have felt less valued than someone else who always gets to do cool new
assignments and think β "I really did what you asked me to do. This is
what you said was really valuable" and the other person getting rewarded
for just being part of something inherently cool that he did not have to
put any effort to look good.
I think now that I am at the level where I could be leading a team
some day soon, it provides me valuable insight into how to really build
a team who feels valued and also create value. Thank you for that.
Good luck! Personally I never aimed at managing a team, it just turns
out that it's the only way to be responsible for more than I can handle
myself and I appear to value this ability more than the control over
details and the depth of understanding that is lost in exchange for
breadth. But I'm dumber as a result, no doubt about it... I guess the
less you mourn the lost depth, the more you enjoy it.
The bit about the manager who loathes spending money hits a bit close
to home for me. A past manager wanted a robust system of rotation for
backups, but didn't want to buy the actual tapes.
Interesting! I wonder what you ended up doing...
i don't understand the first sentence of this article: "People
generally don't do what they're told, but what they expect to be
rewarded for."
Which part of this sentence?
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