"Andrew Gabriel" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Chris J Dixon writes:
Simon Brown wrote:

"Andrew Gabriel" wrote in message

A good manager is a leader whose job is to get the best from the team,

That's the theory, anyway. In reality its nothing like that.

I've long had concerns about what makes a good manager, having
experienced quite a lot of managers during my engineering career.

I've never worked with anybody who began straight off having
trained as a "manager", indeed can't quite see how anybody could
do this.

One of my managers early in my career had been a captain or some rank
in the army where he was leading a bunch of soldiers. His ability to
motivate us was incredible - he had us slogging our guts out, and
enjoying every moment of it.

That would never have worked in the operation I worked for for 25 years.

He didn't have a clue about what we did
technically - he trusted us when we provided him info on progress, etc,
and we trusted him to look after us, which he did superbly. I learned
a lot from him, and put it into use when I was managing a team.

This was in stark contrast to the manager I had beforehand, who was
an engineer (but not up-to-date with current technology) who had been
promoted to a manager, but had no skills in that direction at all. It
was very useful to be able to contrast their two behaviours in similar
situations.

However, the other end of the scale, where promotion is based
only on engineering ability, is not without snags. There was a
time when my chief engineer and engineering manager, whilst both
excellent engineers, had no management skills. This was such a
shame, as their real talents were wasted, and their ineptitude
diminished the work of those in their charge.

Yes, this is common - people keep getting promoted until they reach
a level at which they are not compitent, and then stay there. It's
not helped by most companies having a structure where you can only
be promoted a little before becoming a manager. I was lucky to work
at Sun Microsystems, where there were equivalent management and
engineering roles at every level up the hierarchy, which is how you
retain the world's best engineers without forcing them to do
something else they are often no good at, or losing them.

There are some engineers who also make good managers

Yeah, the best one I ever saw was an engineer.

- I know a few,
but it is rather more the exception than the norm.

That is true of all the best managers.