I have now been managing teams for almost 6 years now and it’s been an interesting journey. From where I started out, I have now changed drastically in how I view management roles in tech and what my focus areas are. One of the key things I have been thinking about lately is how one of the core management tenets is expressed in one of the 2 ways usually. There might be more but these are the 2 broad flavors I have found. (Would love to learn more about other types if anyone has more thoughts)
The core tenet I am talking about is: what are people for (from a managers point of view)? The 2 broad categories I have found people answer this question:
- People are resources to help management get work done (or achieve company goals).
- People are unique, snowflake, irrational beings who may or may not decide to help management get work done.
People as Resources
Usually management who believe in this view consider resources as plug and play and try to focus more on output. The growing of talent is not the core focus here because it’s a hard problem, time and resourcing is limited and there are far more pressing problems or goals to take care of.
There’s also a belief here that resources are replaceable which aligns itself with not investing so much in the people themselves. There’s frequent conversations around adding or removing people as required to align with continuously changing company priorities.
In this system, people are expected to understand the company goals and be 100% focused on working in alignment to meet these goals. There is no bottom up thinking required, you ask people to do X and they should do X or they will probably be finding another job soon enough.
Management usually manages via authority with rare scenarios of influence driven decision making.
People as Irrational Humans
A lot of leaders I have worked with ascribe to this style where they think of each person as a unique human being with their own sets of desires, motivations and goals. There is generally an openness to empathy where if a person needs to go handle a situation, the management is like yeah – go figure that out and come back when you are ready.
In this system of thought, management knows it’s hard to find the right talent so the only path forward is to hire and grow the talent they can find and retain the talent they already have. There’s a constant focus to keep your employees happy because that is what will drive their engagement to align and execute on company goals. A top down mandate does not work very well in this system.
You tend to be invested not only in company goals in this system but also in humans themselves and in their growth, both work related and personal. You find ways to align personal growth to company growth which makes your life easier. In this system, people spend a lot of their 1-1 talking about non-work or non-project things.
Management usually manages via influence mostly with occasional needs for authority driven decision making.
Is one better than the other
I think it is a function of the industry and state of the world. For certain areas, it’s easy to hire, the tasks are not specialized and your labor needs change frequently. I am guessing service industry is a good example where the people as resources belief works and generates the right results for company and the management.
However, in the current state of tech industry, I do believe the 2nd school of thought: people as irrational human beings works better. It’s hard to find good talent and top-down approaches to alignment don’t work. You need to motivate and engage the people in your organization so they will help you achieve organizational goals. It’s not a function of authority but a function of influence. However this style can lead to conflict between company goals and personal goals occasionally which are especially tricky.
Who am I?
I definitely started my leadership journey in the 1st camp. I just looked at engineers as a means to get complex software built in my early days. However, over the years I have changed. I would like to believe I fall in the 2nd category now. I have been fortunate to have had very empathetic managers and I have been lucky enough to manage some really great people who have helped me grow as well. These experiences have taught me that the 1st style can usually lead to local maxima but global sub-optimal results while the 2nd style (and the one I try to be) results in global optima but occasional local sub-optimal results.
I have found that if you take care of people genuinely, they will take care of you.
Which one are you?
Even though it may feel ideal to be 1 style of manager v/s the other, we may be displaying behaviors that are of the opposite style while we try to hold ourselves true to the one we think we are. If you think you fall into the people as irrational beings camp, ask yourself when was the last time you did a 1-1 with your direct report that talked nothing about work? When was the last time you put together a documented growth plan for them to help them get better or to the next level? When was the last time you took the time to give detailed and documented feedback to your direct report?
I think these are some key indicators that tell us – which of these styles we may be aligning to in our behaviors. Would love to hear more about other people’s experiences