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Management thread. I saw a discussion in my timeline about whether "only people should be managers that want to do it and be great at it" or "only people should be managers that usually are not keen to do it" etc. - my view has a different angle: Every middle-manager needs to...
... deal with aligning 3 different interests: The best interest of the company, the best interest of their team, and the best interest of the manager himself. Getting those three into alignment is not always easy, and there are different ways different managers cope when ...
... there are irreconcilable conflicts between the three. Some managers have a tendency to put their own interest last, and absorb the differences. This is often good for the team & the company in the short run, but risks being unsustainable. Some managers view their role as ...
... putting the interests of themselves and their team first, and do not act in the best interest of the company. This can also work well in the short term, but usually corrodes the very fabric everybody operates in - and leads to failure modes like fiefdom-building and loss ...
... of cooperation between teams. Other managers put the best interests of their team last; given the power structure in companies, this can often last for a long time, and can go undetected if their teams cannot easily vote with their feet.
Good management IMO consists of being aware of these three interests, being good at aligning them - and when they cannot be aligned, being good at round-robin assignment of "loss", e.g. making sure that one avoids a failure mode where the same party always gets short shrift.
(This simplifies things a bit, because there are the "best interests of other teams" in the picture, too, but I do not have a unified theory of everything :)
