Management Getaway

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labour and to wait.

A Psalm of Life
William Wadsworth Longfellow

Longfellow could have been writing about the antithesis of the move into management that knowledge workers typically feel is their inevitable career path. Away from the daily problem solving and coding, and the "just get it done" mentality that is often unfortunately imposed. An "escape" to a world where they can have meetings, interface with suits, say the word "verticals" a lot and pretend their documents and MS Project files are part of the vision that drives the organization's success. Woefully misguided are these aspiring managers.

The trouble is, completely flocking from the daily doing and the gusto attitude of the alpha geek can often turn one into the "just-get-it-done-according-to-my-'plan' " managerial type. These managers may, due to their deteriorating expertise, gradually help prevent an organization from integrating its skills and internal knowledge that it needs to compete in the tech industry. In other words, the manager fleeing from his inner geek may help his company disintegrate, in many senses of the word. Like minded managers will coach him along that path, blissfully thinking they are right. People who are now becoming gradually less informed are making key decisions.

Good tech companies do not let managers get themselves completely out of the tech side of the business. They make an effort to keep them in the game at some level. Take Scott Guthrie at Microsoft. Scott is in charge of the teams that build the .NET CLR, ASP.NET, IIS, WPF and more. That's a lot of responsibility. Yet he spends significant time every week writing code, to stay sharp and help make better decisions. Good managers understand that the business dictates some of the skills they must maintain. A tech business dictates that you have to maintain quite a bit of tech knowledge if you are going to make good decisions and therefore be a good manager.

The trouble for organizations is that good managers are hard to come by. "Good" means many things. It includes realizing independently what will make you effective. It also includes delegating things that are not completely part of your expertise and granting autonomy to those implementing these pesky details. Good managers know that this means helping those who will make their team look good, and sharing in that success. Bad managers think they have to appear to think of, know, say and direct everything.

The result is that the fine knowledge plebes often have to communicate with managers that really don't understand their jobs anymore, and sometimes with managers who are just ineffective and blissfully unaware. They have checked out, and they mistakenly think that is a logical progression for their managerial career track. The temptation to "graduate" into management often begets a lackadaisical outlook. Things change rapidly. The luxury of checking out of the process of keeping up is a siren song of organizational ruin.

If you are going to be an effective manager in the tech field, you need to keep your chops sharp. Not daily nuts and bolts sharp, but the more you understand the more effective you will be.