In the abstract, a manager can be quite effective even if he has no idea how the job is done.
The classic phrase is for the manager to say to the employees, “My job is to help you do your job better. Tell me what you need and I will do it.”
In my experience, the duties of managers do not look like the duties of their subordinates, and the only reason the manager needs to know how to do the other jobs is because managing a small business is not a full-time job. (That is, he manager must spend part of his workday as a cashier or something.)
As a manager for a staff of cashiers, my job is basically to get change from the bank and complete daily paperwork. If this filled a 40 hour week, there would be no need for me to also ring sales.
The ability to fill-in for a subordinate is another thing peculiar to a small business. If you manage a factory with 1000 workers, you do not go work the line when one of them calls in sick. 1) losing 1/1000 the workforce will not seriously impair things, 2) you not doing your job for a day will.
If you have 16 cashiers, the same kind of thing applies: the manager work still needs to get done, and being short one cashier isn’t a big deal. Also, if you run 16 cashiers a shift, you probably have over 40 cashiers under you, some of whom are part-time. You can probably get one of the 10 people who are off today to come in.
If you have 2 cashiers at a time (10 total), it is going to be hard to cover a shift without going into overtime, and you are probably going to have to do it yourself.
That said, I believe that a manager who knows the job will be a better manager for it.
I agree, and my metric is a good manager should do better than random. Hard decisions won’t come out right all the time, but there should at least be a good reason for a bad decision - not a clueless reason.
Because IBM’s problems were financial and marketing, not technological. Look at how much they make from consulting. Look at their installed base. Apple on the other hand did not have a revenue generating installed base, and needed hot new products. That was something Jobs was amazing at, and Sculley useless at.
IBM’s big problem was that they let other people (namely Gates) own critical parts of the infrastructure, and they made the PC so open that they could get out-competed. This might be more the entire mainframe corporate culture than the lack of managers expert in this field that didn’t exist before then. I’m not sure bringing in someone from the Homebrew Computer Club would have done it.
In 1979 or so my adviser organized a conference on Computing in the 1980s. I reread the special issue from it a while ago for a column. The IBM participants saw mainframes stretching forever into the future. Portia Isaacson and Adam Osborne were remarkably prescient about personal computers - and this was before the IBM PC came out.
That works because you and your colleagues must be good. When I moved into a department, I found that my manager, who knew nothing about software, was letting some guy spend full time maintaining a 50 line program - which should have been 20 lines.
A competent and confident technical manager will be able to know how long a project should take, fight his management for enough time to do it right, be a resource for when there are questions or decisions to make, and in the rare cases there is a slacker not let him get away with it. I never cut schedules - I know that programmers are optimists so I always added time to their estimates.
Yup, you need to know enough about the process, the terminology, what’s possible and impossible, etc, but not every fine detail of the ‘how’.
The other facet of this is that if, as a manager, you do know how to perform the duties of your staff, cover can turn into expected duty - you can end up stuck doing it for keeps when someone leaves and their post is deleted, or permanently filling in when the business grows a bit and there’s extra detailed work, but not enough to justify recruiting a whole person.
We have people all the time come over from the manufacturing side of our plant to maintenance and really dont know how we do our job and dont know the equipment. I’ve had managers stand over me yelling at me to fix the damn machine because it’s holding up production like I can just wield some magic and fix things and spare parts just appear out of replicators or they demand to know who broke a machine and cannot get it thru their heads sometimes machines just break down and nobody was at fault.
Even more important, they dont realize how we equipment mechanics worked hard to get trained in our jobs while people on the floor come right off the street.
There is a difference between ordering a meal and running a restaurant. A lot of people who really like food open restaurants. Most of them fail.
A customer can place orders and demand levels of quality. A manager is responsible for delivering them.
I feel yours is a dangerous attitude that is commonplace in business these days. It creates a privileged “management” class that doesn’t really know how to do anything but hold useless meetings and is overly reliant on contractors and consultants.
Think about the implications of common “management” axioms like “hire people smarter than yourself” or “hire experts and get out of their way”. Basically you have now manifested the Dilbert Principal and created an inverse pyramid of competency with your smartest employees doing the work and your dumbest leading. Not to mention you are now completely reliant on “experts” who may or may not have interests aligned with yours and your company.
Keep in mind that most traditional forms of “management” were derived from Industrial Revolution-era industrial practices. You needed men with the big picture to monitor, oversee and supervise other men who were often low skilled and uneducated and knew only their specific task. Things have changed greatly in our “knowledge economy” where the actual work is performed by highly skilled, highly educated people who often know far more than the people who manage them.
I agree about experts, but not about hiring people smarter than yourself. What’s the inverse of that? Hire people dumber than you are? That gets done all the times by managers with no confidence who don’t want their staff to disagree with them.
Unless your are staffing a job where initiative and creativity are negatives, you want to hire the smartest people you can find with reasonable social skills. Unless you are really, really smart, that person might be smarter than you. And even if you are it is good to find someone better at things you might not be the smartest about.
BTW I agree that people who love to eat are not good restaurant owners, but sometimes people who love to cook aren’t either, if they are incompetent at marketing and logistics.
One issue I have seen come up has been that a manager that can’t do the job of his reports has no objective basis to settle disputes between them. So they end up going with the lowest risk, or the best sold solution. I had to learn to sell my ideas better, not just to have better ideas. But you still run into the situation where the ass-kisser is golden, and the the one who tells it straight is the goat.
When I hear the “managers who can manage widgets can manage anything”, I think of a poker analogy.
Imagine a guy with a weak grasp of the rules and statistics playing against those who know how to play. He might think, “I don’t have to know how to read my cards, I just have to know how to read people.”
Not sure if you were responding to me or the thread, but…
It can be advantageous, or very specifically disadvantageous. I am a senior manager reporting to the board. I do happen to know a lot of the technical detail of what my team does, because I worked my way up to this role.
My knowledge of how to do technical stuff frequently erodes cases I make that we should buy in additional technical resource to get a job done on schedule. It’s the right thing to do, but it’s easier and cheaper to expect me to work through the night, work through the weekend, and cancel leave, because ‘We’re already paying you, and you do know how’ and ‘besides, it’s only one extra thing’
I would say a good manager doesn’t need to be an expert on the INDUSTRY but does need to be an expert in the job/team being managed. To use another example from above, I think knowing mechanical engineering can be transferred between industries since many of the problems/issues are similar regardless of the specific industry. However, asking a mechanical engineer to manage an IT team (for example) is just asking for trouble. No matter how good of a manager you think you are, not knowing the fundamentals of the industry or common issues/resolutions are going to get you in trouble and won’t be as effective.
Every manager thinks they are hiring the “best and brightest”. But they all still think they are the smartest manager ever. No manager really thinks he’s the Pointy Haired Boss from Dilbert.
The manager who thinks he is brilliant doesn’t reject people because they are too smart, but because they are arrogant, or know-it-alls, or won’t fit in or won’t be happy here because he is too senior.
Surely you’ve noted that the skill sets of people working for different managers differ. I’d hazard that this isn’t just selection from available candidates, but where they get candidates from.
It depends on what sort of business you’re talking about and what level of manager. Yes, I need to know something about what my staff does- but there are three professional titles and three support titles in my office. I can’t be an expert at all of them. My manager needs to have some knowledge of what I do- but he’s got 12 different titles directly or indirectly reporting to him and so on up the line until you get to the head of my agency who oversees people working in 250 or so different titles. At some point, it becomes more important to know the field/mission/overall goals than to know the day-to-day details. And at other levels , the big picture is less important than the details - a food service manager can probably transition fairly easily from a prison to a hospital to a school , but I wouldn’t expect that to be the case for the heads of those institutions.
To be honest, if any manager was so “brilliant”, they would be something other than a middle manager in some giant corporation. Most people are horrible at interviewing. When I got to a point in my career where I started interviewing candidates, HR gave me a list of interview questions to ask. But they didn’t give me the answers! In spite of all the "how to interview/be interviewed material out there, it is an entirely subjective process, ultimately based on how much the interviewer “likes” you.
Unless you are interviewing for the sort of position that needs the smartest person on the planet, hiring is about finding a balance between a candidate who is smart, capable and motivated and a candidate who will get bored of his job in 6 months and leave for a better one.
If HR ever gave me a list of questions to ask it would go in the recycling so fast their heads would spin. I’ve been lucky enough to work in places where HR helps hiring managers hire, not hinders them. I realize this is not common.
My strategy is to see how much the candidate understands about what he did if he is experienced or relevant technical areas if she is a new college grad. Anyone can parrot facts but if they understand the reasons for why things work (or at least have hypotheses) I want to hire them. It has worked out pretty well so far.
If the job is inherently do the same thing every day, yeah. But I see lots of jobs which could be made more efficient by the application of some smarts. Sometimes the problem is that the person doing the job doesn’t think about ways of improving the process, sometimes the manager doesn’t think in terms of improving the process.
