Bad Management Advice
I spend a lot of time with engineering leaders dissecting different leadership challenges, and mentally mapping out the different outcomes that could result from different approaches to dealing with each challenge. We’re always looking to find the perfect union of fairness, consistency, and empathy.
I’m not often asked questions about the wrong way to do things, so I was surprised when someone asked me about the worst management advice I’ve gotten. It reminded me of a Twitter thread a couple weeks ago:
Q. What’s the worst leadership advice you’ve heard?
A. By far the worst is “Hire great people and get out of their way”.
— @jmwind
Two teams of smart people who are working hard on conflicting priorities will often result in minimal progress for your company. They might be executing at a swift pace, with measurable outcomes, but the lack of alignment can kill forward progress. Smaller teams that work less efficiently but are aligned to each other will end up having a bigger impact on the organization. And nothing is more frustrating to the great people you hired than lack of forward progress. Alignment is essential for the health and success of your business, especially if you hire great people.
A couple other hits from my list of bad management advice:
If you hire senior engineers, they can onboard themselves, and they won’t need management. There’s some truth to this - you should expect a senior engineer to be more comfortable with vague requirements and be resourceful and self-directed. But you can’t just throw them onto a team and expect them to be producing production-quality code immediately. You might also get away with less project management with experienced employees. They still need and deserve feedback, career growth, opportunities to learn new things, and for you to provide context so they can do their jobs.
Ignore questions from your team for a certain amount of time before answering them. You don’t want to set a precedent that you’re always around to help, and they’ll figure it out themselves because they need to. This might be my favorite bad management take because it’s just ridiculous. Trust that your team escalates important issues to you that need your input or expertise in order to unblock them. Being unavailable doesn’t empower your team to make decisions on their own. It causes them unnecessary stress, fear of punishment, and at worst, unsatisfactory results that you’ll need to deal with later because you didn’t want to be bothered to answer a question.
People who are interested in discussing salary early in the interview process are in it for the wrong reasons. We have jobs to make money. Would you do your current job for 1€? Probably not. It’s important to discuss salary expectations early in the interview process to ensure that you’re not wasting anyone’s time. If the salary expectations are really out of sync, it’s better to find out before investing hours in an interview process.
