đź’ˇ Why competent workers become incompetent managers (and more)
Why competent workers become incompetent managers
This isn’t a new revelation , but it’s helpful to see research to back up how important good managers are:
Managers play a crucial role in shaping an employee’s experience. For example, research shows that nearly 70% of the variability in employee engagement can be predicted by their managers’ behavior, decisions, and personality traits. In other words, whether people are happy, energized, or miserable at work depends mostly on their boss—and whether or not they’re an incompetent manager.
The article goes on to talk about the well-known Peter Principle, which states that “employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent”:
One of the core mechanisms behind the Peter Principle is the gap between the skills needed in junior technical roles and those newly and additionally required in senior and managerial positions. To improve the promotion system, especially for significant promotions for team leader or line manager roles, it’s essential to consider a person’s past performance or technical expertise and leadership potential, such as collaboration experience or services to the team. Organizations can counteract the Peter Principle through comprehensive training programs that equip employees with necessary competencies, such as people management skills, strategic thinking, and emotional intelligence before promoting them to managerial roles.
It’s mind-boggling how often organizations promote individual contributors into manager roles without any training at all. This is a major contributing factor to the Director problem so many orgs are battling with right now:
Your organization will succeed or fail on the basis of your director layer. And in most organizations, that layer is a mess right now.
Heartbeats: keeping strategies alive
I like this idea from James Stanier on how to make sure that product strategy doesn’t die the moment it’s created:
One way to do this is to create a regular heartbeat for your strategy. The duration of this heartbeat is up to you, but aligning with one of the larger cycles of the year is a good bet: for example, perhaps you could do it quarterly or biannually. The heartbeat is a communication that looks back at the strategy, recaps the key points, and then shows how it has been implemented in the time since the last heartbeat. It’s a chance to show how the strategy is living and relevant, and that it’s not just a document that was written once and then placed on the shelf.
Coming home
I love everything Mandy Brown writes, but Coming home hit extra hard. I have been becoming increasingly disillusioned with social media to a point where I wish I could just leave it all behind, but I had this idea in my head that because of the work I do, that’s not an option. Mandy managed to articulate my feelings about it so well:
To step into the stream of any social network, to become immersed in the news, reactions, rage and hopes, the marketing and psyops, the funny jokes and clever memes, the earnest requests for mutual aid, for sign ups, for jobs, the clap backs and the call outs, the warnings and invitations—it can feel like a kind of madness. It’s unsettling, in the way that sediment is unsettled by water, lifted up and tossed around, scattered about. A pebble goes wherever the river sends it, worn down and smoothed day after day until all that’s left is sand.
I’ve been particularly disappointed with how Mastodon just isn’t the replacement I hoped it would be, and on that point I feel validated as well:
As much as the Fediverse is different (the governing structures, the incentives, the moderation, the absence of ads and engagement tricks), so much of it is also unsettlingly familiar—the same small boxes, the same few buttons, the same mechanics of following and being followed. The same babbling, tumbling, rushing stream of thoughts. I can’t tell if we’re stuck with this design because it’s familiar, or if it’s familiar because we’re stuck. Very likely it’s me that’s stuck, fixed in place while everything rushes around me, hoping for a gap, a break, a warm rock to rest awhile on. Longing for a mode of communication that lifts me up instead of wiping me out.
Her conclusion about writing on your own site has always been important to me as well, but her point that it’s about more than just “owning your content” is excellent:
While one of the reasons oft declared for using POSSE is the ability to own your content, I’m less interested in ownership than I am in context . Writing on my own site has very different affordances: I’m not typing into a little box, but writing in a text file. I’m not surrounded by other people’s thinking, but located within my own body of work. As I played with setting this up, I could immediately feel how that would change the kinds of things I would say, and it felt good. Really good. Like putting on a favorite t-shirt, or coming home to my solid, quiet house after a long time away.
15 years into writing this site, what Mandy says here feels good to me. I think I will continue to post here until I have nothing left to say—and the words will remain here long after that day has passed. I’ll dip into social media when I must, but this will always be home.
Why GitHub Actually Won
This is a really interesting overview and perspective by one of the co-founders of GitHub:
So, to sum up, we won because we started at the right time and we had taste. We were there when a new paradigm was being born and we approached the problem of helping people embrace that new paradigm with a developer experience centric approach that nobody else had the capacity for or interest in.
The whole post is worth reading for the history and all ways things just went right for GitHub.
Thanks for reading Elezea! If you find these resources useful, I’d be grateful if you could share the blog with someone you like.
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PS. You look nice today 👌