Iâm curious about your approach to management: there are two broad schools of thought, one of which says that you should promote the best performers, and the other which says that management is a different skill, and therefore you should promote the people who you think will be best at management. (Some organizations have a âdual ladderâ system as an attempted hybrid between these.)
Startups often face this problem more acutely than most, because the skills which made someone very successful in a 5 person company are quite different than the ones which make them successful in a 500 person company, so someoneâs previous job performance is not the greatest predictor of their future success.
Iâm curious what your thoughts are on this. For most of my career I have been in the âmanagement is a different skillâ camp, but over the past couple of years I have moved towards the other camp.
(Iâm not sure if this question is too broad. If it is, some specific some questions are: 1. To what extent does someoneâs ability to do a specific technical job predict their ability to manage others doing that job? 2. Does the implicit incentive structure of promoting people who are the best managers rather than the best at their jobs warp peopleâs efforts so much that it outweighs the benefits of having better managers?)
I had a hard time answering this and I finally realized that I think itâs because it sort of assumes performance is one-dimensional. My experience has been quite far from that: the same engineer who does a crap job on one task can, with a few tweaks to their project queue or work style, crush it at something else. In fact, making that happen is one of the most important parts of my (and all managersâ) jobs at Waveâwe spend a lot of time trying to route people to roles where they can be the most successful.
Similarly, management is also not one-dimensional: different management roles need different skill sets which overlap with individual-contributor roles in different ways. Not to mention various high-impact roles at companies that donât involve formal management at all. So I think my tl;dr answer would be âyou should try to figure out how your current highest performers on various axes can have more leveraged impact on your company, which is often some flavor of management, but it depends a lot on the people and roles involved.â
For example, take engineering at Wave. Our teams are actually organized in such a way that most engineers are on a team led by (i.e. whose task queue is prioritized by) a product manager. Each engineer also has an engineering mentor who is responsible for giving them feedback, conducts 1:1s with them, contributes to their performance, etc.
Product managers donât have to be technical at all, and some of the best ones arenât, but some of the best engineers also move laterally into product management because the ways in which they are good engineers overlap a lot with that role. For engineering mentors, they usually need to be more technically skilled than their mentees, but they donât necessarily have to be the best engineers in the company; skill at teaching and resonance with the role of mentor is more important.
We also have a âplatformâ team which works on engineer-facing tooling and infrastructure. Currently, Iâm leading this team, but in the end state I expect it to have a more traditional engineering manager. For this person, some dimensions of engineering competence will be quite important, others wonât, and theyâll need extra skills that are not nearly as important to individual contributors (prioritization, communication, organization...). I expect they would probably be one of our âbest performersâ by some metrics, but not by others.
Thanks Ben. I like this answer, but I feel like every time I have seen people attempt to implement it they still end up facing a trade-off.
Consider moving someone from role r1 to role r2. I think you are saying that the person you choose for r2 should be the person you expect to be best at it, which will often be people who arenât particularly good at r1.
This seems fine, except that r2 might be more desirable than r1. So now a) the people who are good at r1 feel upset that someone who was objectively performing worse than them got a more desirable position, and b) they respond by trying to learn/âdemonstrate r2-related skills rather than the r1 stuff they are good at.
You might say something like âwe should try to make the r1 people happy with r1 so r2 isnât more desirableâ which I agree is good, but is really hard to do successfully.
An alternative solution is to include proficiency in r1 as part of the criteria for who gets position r2. This addresses (a) and (b) but results in r2 staff being less r2-skilled.
Iâm curious if you disagree with this being a trade-off?
I havenât had the opportunity to see this play out over multiple years/âcompanies, so Iâm not super well-informed yet, but I think I should have called out this part of my original comment more:
Not to mention various high-impact roles at companies that donât involve formal management at all.
If people think management is their only path to success then sure, youâll end up with everyone trying to be good at management. But if instead of starting from âwho fills the new manager roleâ you start from âhow can <person X> have the most impact on the companyââwith a menu of options/âarchetypes that lean on different skillsetsâthen youâre more likely to end up with people optimizing for the right thing, as best they know how.
Iâm curious about your approach to management: there are two broad schools of thought, one of which says that you should promote the best performers, and the other which says that management is a different skill, and therefore you should promote the people who you think will be best at management. (Some organizations have a âdual ladderâ system as an attempted hybrid between these.)
Startups often face this problem more acutely than most, because the skills which made someone very successful in a 5 person company are quite different than the ones which make them successful in a 500 person company, so someoneâs previous job performance is not the greatest predictor of their future success.
Iâm curious what your thoughts are on this. For most of my career I have been in the âmanagement is a different skillâ camp, but over the past couple of years I have moved towards the other camp.
(Iâm not sure if this question is too broad. If it is, some specific some questions are: 1. To what extent does someoneâs ability to do a specific technical job predict their ability to manage others doing that job? 2. Does the implicit incentive structure of promoting people who are the best managers rather than the best at their jobs warp peopleâs efforts so much that it outweighs the benefits of having better managers?)
I had a hard time answering this and I finally realized that I think itâs because it sort of assumes performance is one-dimensional. My experience has been quite far from that: the same engineer who does a crap job on one task can, with a few tweaks to their project queue or work style, crush it at something else. In fact, making that happen is one of the most important parts of my (and all managersâ) jobs at Waveâwe spend a lot of time trying to route people to roles where they can be the most successful.
Similarly, management is also not one-dimensional: different management roles need different skill sets which overlap with individual-contributor roles in different ways. Not to mention various high-impact roles at companies that donât involve formal management at all. So I think my tl;dr answer would be âyou should try to figure out how your current highest performers on various axes can have more leveraged impact on your company, which is often some flavor of management, but it depends a lot on the people and roles involved.â
For example, take engineering at Wave. Our teams are actually organized in such a way that most engineers are on a team led by (i.e. whose task queue is prioritized by) a product manager. Each engineer also has an engineering mentor who is responsible for giving them feedback, conducts 1:1s with them, contributes to their performance, etc.
Product managers donât have to be technical at all, and some of the best ones arenât, but some of the best engineers also move laterally into product management because the ways in which they are good engineers overlap a lot with that role. For engineering mentors, they usually need to be more technically skilled than their mentees, but they donât necessarily have to be the best engineers in the company; skill at teaching and resonance with the role of mentor is more important.
We also have a âplatformâ team which works on engineer-facing tooling and infrastructure. Currently, Iâm leading this team, but in the end state I expect it to have a more traditional engineering manager. For this person, some dimensions of engineering competence will be quite important, others wonât, and theyâll need extra skills that are not nearly as important to individual contributors (prioritization, communication, organization...). I expect they would probably be one of our âbest performersâ by some metrics, but not by others.
Thanks Ben. I like this answer, but I feel like every time I have seen people attempt to implement it they still end up facing a trade-off.
Consider moving someone from role r1 to role r2. I think you are saying that the person you choose for r2 should be the person you expect to be best at it, which will often be people who arenât particularly good at r1.
This seems fine, except that r2 might be more desirable than r1. So now a) the people who are good at r1 feel upset that someone who was objectively performing worse than them got a more desirable position, and b) they respond by trying to learn/âdemonstrate r2-related skills rather than the r1 stuff they are good at.
You might say something like âwe should try to make the r1 people happy with r1 so r2 isnât more desirableâ which I agree is good, but is really hard to do successfully.
An alternative solution is to include proficiency in r1 as part of the criteria for who gets position r2. This addresses (a) and (b) but results in r2 staff being less r2-skilled.
Iâm curious if you disagree with this being a trade-off?
I havenât had the opportunity to see this play out over multiple years/âcompanies, so Iâm not super well-informed yet, but I think I should have called out this part of my original comment more:
If people think management is their only path to success then sure, youâll end up with everyone trying to be good at management. But if instead of starting from âwho fills the new manager roleâ you start from âhow can <person X> have the most impact on the companyââwith a menu of options/âarchetypes that lean on different skillsetsâthen youâre more likely to end up with people optimizing for the right thing, as best they know how.