Or why is it that managers need managers to manage their management? 🤔
Middle manager in an IT company here. My job description is saying “no” to requests outside the official pipeline, in order to shield my team from outside interference and burnout. I need a manager to fight for me whenever I pick a fight with one of the VPs who think we need to drop everything and refocus on their pet project.
manager here. I’m just a jerry. I kept crawling, and it kept working. I don’t like it any more than you.
Myself and some other managers I know became managers for being competent at our science-based jobs when the company wanted to expand. Our education and career up until this point mostly had not involved learning skills like delegation, teaching, scheduling, and team-budgeting, not to mention the interactive social skills needed to successfully manage individuals.
Some bad managers are just good workers that weren’t able to suddenly learn these skills when their employer insisted they manage a team so it could pursue its endless quest for infinite growth by setting up hierarchies of workers. Good managers are either trained in management or extraordinarily talented.
Organizational structure can be seen as just style points. Gabe Newell of Valve famously does not do organizational structure. He didn’t when he worked at Microsoft and he doesn’t now. It’s also been said per capita/employee no other tech company makes as much money as Valve.
I hope he writes a book about it or something. As an executive at a large organization I’d love to know more and try to run my division like he does. But I don’t want to just make it up as I go along…
What the heck does “does not do organizational structure” even mean? Valve must have some kind of structure.
I’m not sure they do have anything that looks like typical corporate America, but I don’t know a lot more. I know at Microsoft everybody reported to him and from what I’ve been able to piece either that’s not changed we Valve. But he obviously doesn’t “manage” everybody, so how he does it I’m not sure.
Most organizations are just a dictatorship by another name if we use the definition in The Dictators Handbook which states keep your essentials and influentials small in quantity so you can pay them for results. A democratic environment those groups are many so you can only win them over with policy and influence. I feel like he runs his organization like the second but I want to know more. A lot more.
Yep I’m keen to understand more, the information is super scarce, all I could find is a short YouTube that didn’t explain much.
You know, 50 years from now everyone may be doing the Gabe method the same way they say they do agile. it would be hilarious to see it happening.
And painful if it’s like that. Meeting twice a week is not agile, Janet! Lol
