Mysteries of Life

There are many mysteries of life that continue to astound me as I grow older and theoretically wiser.  A few I should mention: Why is popular music popular when it sucks asbad as it does?  It makes me cringe.  Why do politicians of all stripes treat the public like a bunch of indolent morons?  Maybe we’ve earned it.  Lastly, why do people get promoted into management when they have absolutely no idea how to manage? 

Conventional wisdom says that exceptional technicians (and I use this word in its broadest possible interpretation) tend to get promoted because they are exceptional technicians, not because they are good managers.  Rarely is there much thought given to the interpersonal gifts one may or may not have, especially in a technical organization.  I’ve found that many exceptional technicians are exceptionally terrible managers, and I bet that the same traits that make them good at their jobs are the very ones that make their underlings hate them pretty quickly.

When I first sat down at a cubicle at my very first job, the old guy next to me barely noticed and hardly spoke to me for the first six months I was there.  He wasn’t hostile or anything – he simply didn’t want to waste any words on a young and eager engineer who probably wouldn’t listen anyway.  One day I grew some and asked about a picture on his wall of a sinking cruise ship with the caption, “It’s the details that do you in.” 

He looked at me through his ample eyebrows and asked, “Are you a details man or a big picture guy?”  It was easy to figure which one was better.

“Neither,” I said.  “Maybe both.”  He grunted and said no more until several weeks had past.

“You can’t be both,” he said.

“What?” having forgotten the conversation.

“You can’t be both a details man and a big picture guy.  It’s impossible.  It’s hard-wired into your brain.”  At the time I thought he was nuts, but now it sure seems like he was right.  Why?

Ideally the details guys do the work and the big picture guys manage.  There is a wide middle ground, though.  The higher in the org you are, the wider the big picture becomes.

Success as a technician, generally an entry-level type technician, requires that you work with the minutiae because that’s the extent of your world.  A good technician will master his or her crib toys, and they will be noticed by those above them.  In other words, they are being rewarded for their attention to detail.  You see where I’m going with this?  They now have a stamp upon their brains that says “Sweat the small stuff and get noticed”. 

The first promotion comes, and since the technician knows the details, and they got promoted based on their mastery of the details, they can’t possibly let them go.  This is what we’ll call stage 1 micromanangement.  They are now supervising other technicians, and in my experience the supervised employees like having a boss who knows the entry-level jobs well.  They get someone who has been-there, done-that and knows exactly what needs to be done.

The second promotion comes and as the responsibility broadens the new manager begins to encounter situations that are new to them.  They don’t have the background to understand the small stuff of the new things, and the brain stamp tells them to dig in.  This is stage 2.  Now the supervised employees begin to get the queasy sense of being overly managed.  Things are usually good, but interspersed in the daily grind are strange anomalies - numbers may get challenged for little or no reason; conclusions are debated or even changed; simple procedural items get all balled up.

Up comes promotion #3 and we move to stage 3.  The responsibility has broadened again, and the pattern repeats.  It’s getting harder and harder to know all the details, and the workload has increased to suit.  If you are to succeed as a manager, this is where you draw the line.  If you don’t change now, something will surely change later and you won’t like it.  The able manager will learn delegation and learn to trust subordinates but the brain stamp is hard to let go.  For those who can’t, managerial dementia begins to creep in.  Subordinates can’t do anything nearly as well as the manager did them, and work is constantly criticized.  The manager really struggles to make a decision, because the work load is an unending flood of details from below and one tends to be unable to see the flow of the river when one is under water.  The manager is getting up there on the food chain now, and his/her whims often get put into practice.  Pride left unchecked begets arrogance.  Arrogance plugs ears.

Break the chain.  If you eat dinner alone more than once per week, I’d suggest reviewing the micromanagement stages to see if you’ve reached 2 or even 3.  It’s hard, but you gotta let go…