I had a hard time answering this and I finally realized that I think it’s 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 managers’) jobs at Wave—we 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 don’t involve formal management at all. So I think my tl;dr answer would be “you 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.”
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 don’t have to be technical at all, and some of the best ones aren’t, 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 don’t 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 “platform” team which works on engineer-facing tooling and infrastructure. Currently, I’m 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 won’t, and they’ll need extra skills that are not nearly as important to individual contributors (prioritization, communication, organization...). I expect they would probably be one of our “best performers” 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 aren’t 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/demonstrate r2-related skills rather than the r1 stuff they are good at.
You might say something like “we should try to make the r1 people happy with r1 so r2 isn’t more desirable” 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.
I’m curious if you disagree with this being a trade-off?
I haven’t had the opportunity to see this play out over multiple years/companies, so I’m 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 don’t involve formal management at all.
If people think management is their only path to success then sure, you’ll end up with everyone trying to be good at management. But if instead of starting from “who fills the new manager role” you start from “how can <person X> have the most impact on the company”—with a menu of options/archetypes that lean on different skillsets—then you’re more likely to end up with people optimizing for the right thing, as best they know how.
I had a hard time answering this and I finally realized that I think it’s 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 managers’) jobs at Wave—we 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 don’t involve formal management at all. So I think my tl;dr answer would be “you 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.”
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 don’t have to be technical at all, and some of the best ones aren’t, 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 don’t 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 “platform” team which works on engineer-facing tooling and infrastructure. Currently, I’m 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 won’t, and they’ll need extra skills that are not nearly as important to individual contributors (prioritization, communication, organization...). I expect they would probably be one of our “best performers” 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 aren’t 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/demonstrate r2-related skills rather than the r1 stuff they are good at.
You might say something like “we should try to make the r1 people happy with r1 so r2 isn’t more desirable” 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.
I’m curious if you disagree with this being a trade-off?
I haven’t had the opportunity to see this play out over multiple years/companies, so I’m 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, you’ll end up with everyone trying to be good at management. But if instead of starting from “who fills the new manager role” you start from “how can <person X> have the most impact on the company”—with a menu of options/archetypes that lean on different skillsets—then you’re more likely to end up with people optimizing for the right thing, as best they know how.