Technically, neither of the skills mentioned are necessary for the job of making unreasonable demands and berating workers for exercising their rights 🤷
Managers that don’t understand the task at hand are garbage.
Successful companies identify strong engineers and teach them to be members and directors.
Completely agreed on the first point, but unfortunately the latter isn’t always the case.
It’s become almost the norm for both individuals and companies to achieve ridiculous levels of success through abusive cunning in spite of a near-total lack of expertise and effort compared to competitors and coworkers.
And, to be fair, successful engineers/whatever rarely want to be in management. They’ve identified they’re great at what they do and happy to continue doing it if the pay is right. A lot end up moving to management because the pay tends to be higher and then not being great and hating it.
Great managers are great at managing people and processes, not necessarily doing the processes. They understand human psychology to inspire, motivate, and bring teams together. That’s a rare find because that’s largely misunderstood, unfortunately. This is super frustrating because there are plenty of great books/seminars on how to identify and be great managers. The information is out there.
Panel 4:
“But you inspire 6 people to work at peak capacity so that the team is as effective as 9 people, and they all say you give a shit about them, their growth, and doing the work that actually matters with guidance and appropriate comp adjustment. Be a manager.”
If you work with incompetent middle management, move. When you work for a great manager in a great team, you feel bulletproof.
I’m a manager, and this strip nicely brought out my main insecurities about the role. Thanks for pointing out that there are other things one may contribute with, despite losing (or never having) abilities in the three mentioned aspects. It’s not easy to let go of depth, and exchange it for width and longer term thinking.
If you work with incompetent middle management, move
Really wish this notion would die considering how fucking hard that is to do.
I’ll bite.
So one way of reading this is that you’re surrounded by incompetents. Early in my career I thought this. As a corollary to Chesterton’s Fence, it turns out I wasn’t so special and most weren’t so dumb. In a high-density area, being truly surrounded by bozos is just unlikely. So my advice here wouldn’t seem to be folly. If one tries several roles and every one is just full of bozos, it suggests that the one is in error.
Another way of reading this is that you are not in a high density area and perhaps the monopoly-oligopoly players who offer the work to which you are called are so few that the incompetent middle management is entrenched in these few spots and you’d love to leave but burning bridges / no proof the grass is greener suggest stay put. But with so few businesses, theoretically they have their pick of market and would not hire bozos. So, again, moving seems viable and not folly.
Lastly perhaps the factor is life/circumstances/education for you. Like if these desired roles require retraining or expensive certification. I feel for you if this is the case. But since you see those skills’ value, perhaps current-job learning/practice opportunities on-the-job could level you up to be able to hop to greener pastures. Most companies etc of even meager size have some tuition assistance program. Maybe that’s your way.
Regardless, this is your one precious life. I hope you’ll find access to your truest calling. It might be harder than what I said: “move” (such dismissive tone probably resultant from the ignorant perspective of the comic), but I’m confident your creativity and capability can point you in a path toward your flourishing.
I can respect a manager that can’t do these things, if they can delegate and choreograph people well. Sometimes being a good manager simply requires one to be able to corral and give support where needed. They can admit to not being capable of things and respect their reports that do those things well.
If they can’t do anything and just take a top down, demanding approach all the time, they’re useless.
Where are their legs, who took them???
Practice saying, “That’s a terrific idea, but we’re not going to do it.”, twelve times.
Next, congratulations on completing my class on how to be a great manager.
also a lot of fun is if you can code, design and do business and are out of a job because no company has a job like this…
Well… in that case you should specialize in one of your 3 skills.
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More meetings!
Fuck up, move up.
