Yeah, HR cannot help you be a better manager, especially considering many of the worst managers and experiences people have at their companies involve HR.
Those training sessions are also terrible. Even if they did have good content (instead of rah-rah and feel good BS), you can only remember so much at once, which even has a name for it: the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve https://peakmemory.me/2013/06/29/hermann-ebbinghaus-and-the-...
It's certainly a two way street between a manager and team member to work well together, but in my experience the best managers in Silicon Valley/tech retain great people for a long time. In fact, many bring former team members with them from company to company, being a talent magnet.
It is my experience good managers know how to filter through employees to find ones that are manageable. Perhaps not at the time of hiring, but they know how to move people off their teams that they know are not good members. I consider myself a decent manager and built strong teams of people that would still work for me or act as references, but even then, I probably failed with half the people I hired.
If you're doing it right as a manager, it's not about authority. Instead, you should be working to align interests and support your team.
Having someone younger than you as a manager can feel awkward, but if they actually invest in you and listen to you, it can be a great relationship...especially if you know you don't want to be a manager. Then, it's like this person is doing you a favor, so you can stick to the IC work you like.
Knowing what to do is a hugely uphill battle on its own, but then actually being brave and making the time to have the necessary discussions with your team is another level. Many managers are afraid of doing so or fear the time commitment.
The counter intuitive lesson many leaders have to learn is that when you proactively have these discussions that align interests between employee and company, while also showing some empathy for your team, you fix many problems when they're super easy, instead of massive fires to fight.
With all that in mind, that is exactly why I started Lighthouse; knowing what to do and then actually doing it are two separate things. Keeping it all in Google docs and making your own system from scratch rarely holds together as well as someone automating things and reminding you of the right things to do.
Certainly finance has its own terrible reputation and problems, but that does not absolve Silicon Valley / Tech companies from doing better. They absolutely have the knowledge, funding, resources to do better.
But that's not the question. The question isn't whether Silicon Valley can do better. The answer to that is trivially yes. We can all do better.
The question is, is the quality of management in Silicon Valley worse than it is in other industries and other locations. I would argue no. I would argue that the quality of management in Silicon Valley is at worst average, and is likely above average. In Silicon Valley, workers have far more bargaining power than they have in other areas of the country, and, as a result, if the management is truly awful, they'll simply leave.
That's not true elsewhere. If you're working for say, Epic Systems in Madison, Wisconsin, and you have a bad manager, what are your options? Sure, you can quit... and go work for who else, exactly? The employee's next-best opportunity isn't nearly as valuable, so management can get away with being less competent.
This isn't a theoretical consideration, either. I've moved from the West Coast to the Midwest, for family and cost of living reasons, and one of the things I've noticed is that the management here just really isn't as good, especially with regards to software projects, as it is on the West Coast. Partially that's down to the companies here being less software oriented than they are on the West Coast. But I would also argue that a significant part of it is that the management here is simply less competent.
"Sure, you can quit... and go work for who else, exactly? The employee's next-best opportunity isn't nearly as valuable, so management can get away with being less competent."
The reason the Valley is different is because if you have 35% turnover at most companies, you're out of business.
In Silicon Valley, you can hide it behind more recruiters and funding. I've talked to multiple companies with first hand accounts of that level of turnover, which is rare in other industries because they'd go out of business losing that many people.
>The reason the Valley is different is because if you have 35% turnover at most companies, you're out of business
Really depends on the business. Walmart and Amazon have considerably greater than 35% turnover. Yes, 35% turnover is fatal if you're trying to do specialized, high-skill work. However, most businesses are not doing specialized, high-skill work. They're doing the routine work of delivering the goods and services that people need every day to live their lives. 35% turnover in that situation is arguably an advantage because it prevents bonds from forming between employees. It's a lot harder to organize and form a union to demand rights when you don't even know if that person you're talking to is going to still be there a month from now.
I appreciate the skepticism, but that's a very fixed mindset. People can absolutely change and I've seen it hundreds of times.
It certainly can take a "come to Jesus" moment like you find out your team hates you, you get fired, a wave of employees quit on you, etc, but people can absolutely change when they decide to.
Character is absolutely important, and it does predispose one to being a better manager, but you can become a good manager later in life.
Unfortunately, as we discuss in the article (I wrote it), the incentives aren't always there, nor are the positive examples of what to do.
I agree that people can and do change, at many levels and in many ways. When we unknowingly treat people badly, and get the wake up call, we can (perhaps) shift to treating them better.
My personal journey has included discovering how amazingly angry I was, without even knowing it. It precluded having reasonable (engineering) discussions when people disagreed with me, being able to take and give direction, etc. Therapy helped a lot. Learning to be truthful, disagree reasonably, keep promises, think through problems, treat people kindly are all 'learnable'. But some core elements of our beings are pretty intractable, and I believe having the solid core of 'self' that can stand (again in the face of negative personal consequences) against the often outrageous conduct that's around us in the world is only very occasionally developed in adulthood.
I do believe in change too, but what I've seeing in many places are temporary changes to save your job or get a promotion, not a real change, a profound change.
Yeah, certainly consequences matter. The more they have to change or else X (which they really don't want), the more likely they are to change. That said, unfortunately, many will only do just enough to not get fired.
A lot of employees either A) don't know what to talk about or B) aren't sure what their current manager considers safe topics.
Questions like the above (though not all of them) can help spark discussion and get them to open up. I've personally seen a number of times where team members have a lot to say about something and didn't realize I wanted to hear their ideas on that topic.
Obviously, delivery matters, and choosing a good question is important. If you have a foundation of trust already built (see Psychological Safety research) then a lot of those questions can help.
Those training sessions are also terrible. Even if they did have good content (instead of rah-rah and feel good BS), you can only remember so much at once, which even has a name for it: the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve https://peakmemory.me/2013/06/29/hermann-ebbinghaus-and-the-...