I spent some time as a middle manager, talked way too much with friends in similar situations at other places and I learned the following:
* It is very easy to be both very busy and do nothing useful at all. Just accept and schedule a bunch of meetings.
* Your potential of improving things depends mostly on the C-level suite. Trying to get buy-in from other levels of management is a waste of time.
* Middle managers are quite often recreating other orgs they aspire to without any thought if their prescriptions are suitable for their orgs.
* The C-level are actually behaving more like individual contributors than managers. The CEO is typically working mostly on closing deals and attracting investors.
* Lower level managers are often created from senior or valuable employees because a title change is the only way of rewarding them and using their experience
* Some of the best managers are HR professionals, but they are completely sidelined. HR is working to protect the companies which for good and evil can clash with your goals.
* No one is a prophet in their own village, not matter how loyal you are climbing the ladder, and how much you learn along the way chances are they are still going to hire someone from the outside to be your boss that knows less than you. It's better to switch orgs when making big jumps in your career.
* There are certain pure management skills (everything with budgets) which are quite valuable, and managers are either undertrained
So, if I ever run my own company of over a 100 people this is what I'm going to do:
- make sure executives / senior managers are doing as much decision making as possible, while accepting input from every senior person in the company, manager or not.
- Promote only experts in their fields, preferably from your own ranks as managers.
- Instead of introducing hierarchy, consider instead providing managers with experts in management as deputies. Recruit fresh MBAs or experienced HR professionals. This way they help instead of hindering.
- Make sure every role has ways to grow while remaining individual contributors. Just give them levels, like Software Engineer lvl 12. Make sure they have free capacity to get delegated tasks or for their own initiatives.
* It is very easy to be both very busy and do nothing useful at all. Just accept and schedule a bunch of meetings.
* Your potential of improving things depends mostly on the C-level suite. Trying to get buy-in from other levels of management is a waste of time.
* Middle managers are quite often recreating other orgs they aspire to without any thought if their prescriptions are suitable for their orgs.
* The C-level are actually behaving more like individual contributors than managers. The CEO is typically working mostly on closing deals and attracting investors.
* Lower level managers are often created from senior or valuable employees because a title change is the only way of rewarding them and using their experience
* Some of the best managers are HR professionals, but they are completely sidelined. HR is working to protect the companies which for good and evil can clash with your goals.
* No one is a prophet in their own village, not matter how loyal you are climbing the ladder, and how much you learn along the way chances are they are still going to hire someone from the outside to be your boss that knows less than you. It's better to switch orgs when making big jumps in your career.
* There are certain pure management skills (everything with budgets) which are quite valuable, and managers are either undertrained
So, if I ever run my own company of over a 100 people this is what I'm going to do:
- make sure executives / senior managers are doing as much decision making as possible, while accepting input from every senior person in the company, manager or not.
- Promote only experts in their fields, preferably from your own ranks as managers.
- Instead of introducing hierarchy, consider instead providing managers with experts in management as deputies. Recruit fresh MBAs or experienced HR professionals. This way they help instead of hindering.
- Make sure every role has ways to grow while remaining individual contributors. Just give them levels, like Software Engineer lvl 12. Make sure they have free capacity to get delegated tasks or for their own initiatives.