Managers Good and Bad

I’ve worked for lots of managers — mostly good, a couple of bad ones. Scott Berkun has written an excellent essay on how to survive a bad manager.

Many years ago I had my first, and only, experience managing a software development team. It’s a difficult job and the transition from developer to manager is hard — I went from spending 90% of my time on purely technical issues to spending 90% of my time on people issues. And the team had a lot of people problems. I had been a member of the team for a short time beforehand which makes the transition harder. My relationship with team members changed — I had become “one of them”. My tenure lasted about a year. I moved back to a technical lead role on another team afterwards. I can’t say for certain whether my team thought that I was a good manager or not. I think I did pretty well under very difficult circumstances — the overall organization was dysfunctional and I didn’t have much influence on working conditions. I tried to shield the team from the worst of it. And that’s something to keep in mind before blaming your manager for doing a bad job. As Scott says: “If you were so fed up with your manager that you wanted his job, paying some attention to his management landscape is well worth the time. It’s possible your bad manager is actually protecting you from an even worse manager above him.”

Note: Scott has a lot of other interesting essays on his web site. He’s also written a book, The Art of Project Management, which, based on his essays and the book excerpts, sounds like worthwhile reading. (Via Dave)