This reminds me of a story I heard at film school about some movie director (don't remember his name). Basically the guy was an alcoholic and was too dysfunctional to pretty much do anything. His crew loved being left to their own devices. Everybody got to do what they were good at. The sound person did the sound the way they wanted. The lights person did the lights they wanted. The costumes person did the costumes the way they wanted. No one around with lesser expertise to boss around the real experts. That way, the director had a stellar career winning lots of awards for being drunk at the pub while his crew made great movies. So, guess what happens next. The director eventually sobers up, starts involving himself in his movies, and watches his career go down the tubes. It turns out, he was actually a pretty bad director.
So what's the lesson here?
If the manager is actually shitty at what they do/manage and has great people working for them, then being at the pub might actually be the most constructive / least destructive thing they could be doing.
The problem is: No manager ever thinks of themselves this way. They usually think they can do each one of their reports' job better than they can, when it's rarely true.
The best managers I've ever had throughout my career were the ones who knew their own limitations and acted accordingly.
> No manager ever thinks of themselves this way. They usually think they can do each one of their reports' job better than they can, when it's rarely true.
Not every manager is like this.
Good managers will be able to evaluate their team members' actual abilities, and adjust their approach based on what is actually going on. As a manager, if you are able to hire experts who know how to successfully coordinate amongst themselves—and want to coordinate without sabotaging each other in some way, and are able to stay on-task, and prioritize things properly—then you can and should leave them alone to work, after pointing everyone in the right direction.
But who gets to decide if the people doing the work are really as good as they think they are? It's not just bad managers that delude themselves about their own abilities. Sometimes people need guidance or can benefit from guidance, but don't think they need it and are offended that you would even think they could benefit from it.
A lot of people you hear complaining about micromanagement fall into this category. Not everyone who resents being closely supervised can be successful without close supervision.
> The best managers I've ever had throughout my career were the ones who knew their own limitations and acted accordingly.
Same here. I would wager, though, that the best co-workers and subordinates you've had also were those who knew their own limitations and acted accordingly.
Far from it. The times I've been put in charge of producing commercials or large art projects where I wasn't personally doing the work, I've done it by phone, mostly from a bar, and only intervened when someone made someone else cry on the set. This is the way to do it. Find the best people you can find, tell them what you want, give them a budget and let them do their best.
The great part is that the client will never have any idea if it could have been better. It probably couldn't have been better anyway.
Another problem you didn't identify: it requires their crew to be composed entirely of fairly senior, talented people. Hire a bunch of junior (even good juniors) and see how this "self-managing" crew never finishes a film, let along a good film.
You have to hire senior people anyway if you want to measure by quality/quantity of work output.
The software engineering crew composed of 5 people straight out of college plus one grown-up to play the role of kindergarden teacher is quite common in our industry, but I very much doubt that such a team produces more/better stuff than if you just had one senior person do it all by themselves with zero communication/management overhead.
The real reason for having such teams is that you have to have some way of progressing these junior people to become senior and of progressing ICs to first-time managers.
In those teams, the manager is at least part-way a teacher/mentor. And, in some cases, they might best teach a lesson by letting their subordinate make a mistake, so they experience the consequences first hand and have the bad experience of having to dig themselves out of it. ...so, even in such uneven teams, there might be surprisingly good reasons for being less involved than a manager's impulse might naturally be. And the first-time manager gets to develop certain mindsets like reflecting on the right level and kind of involvement and so forth.
Department heads on a film set are usually people with long and proven track records. So are the people who work directly below a CEO, which the original article talks about.
I agree you get better return from seniors, which is why everybody wants to hire seniors. But we get new seniors by training juniors/letting them get experience. I think 5 juniors + 1 senior isn’t the way to do it, you should have at least 1 senior per junior (better still more seniors than juniors). Then you still get stuff done (maybe a bit less than if you didn’t have the juniors) and a few years later you have a couple new useful intermediate developers (and a few years after that they’ll be experienced seniors).
> The best managers I've ever had throughout my career were the ones who knew their own limitations and acted accordingly.
I agree with the conclusions and overall thinking. I would however regard the example as an exception rather than the rule.
Furthermore I think the creative industry has some peculiarities of its own (ie. most people would do creative work or hobbies without being paid, Justice as a rewarding activity).
My point is that in a company or startups the intrinsic motivations might be very different.
A good manager spends considerable time hiring so they can find the best possible people for the role. The manager then ensures their hires have clear objectives and goals and training and tools. Then the manager gets out of the way and lets them do what they were hired for. This takes the least “work” for the manager but can be the most difficult, especially if they are insecure at all.
It really helps if a manager more or less knows how to do the tasks they assign/delegate. But hopefully they’re hiring people better than them at a subset of tasks. The managers job is to understand how it all comes together and the bigger picture of the company.
In essence, a maestro. A maestro can play all the instruments but not anywhere near as well as each individual player. The maestros job is keep them all in harmony so they can all play their best within the confines the maestro provides them.
Ive been in situations like your drunk director and usually it just caused a power vacuum followed by power struggles. The headstrong people contested high level decisions and without some sort of final arbiter the result was a mess. It never ended well.
I'm kind of suspicious about this story. It sounds either apocryphal or like a key piece is missing.
Corollary: since the Peter Principle and the Dilbert Principle ensure that most managers will in fact be shitty at what they do/manage, as a general rule, most managers can best serve their team and employer by routinely ditching work for the pub.
So what's the lesson here?
If the manager is actually shitty at what they do/manage and has great people working for them, then being at the pub might actually be the most constructive / least destructive thing they could be doing.
The problem is: No manager ever thinks of themselves this way. They usually think they can do each one of their reports' job better than they can, when it's rarely true.
The best managers I've ever had throughout my career were the ones who knew their own limitations and acted accordingly.