Recently, I came across a post titled “Don’t look for the right job but select the right manager”. I feel employees change managers and not jobs when seeking new opportunities. In my seven years of industry experience I have been fortunate or unfortunate to have 10 managers and still counting. If you add my Masters and PhD advisers then I have had 12 bosses in around 12 years of professional life. Needless to say my tenure with my MS and PhD supervisors was the longest among the 12.
The difference between academia and industry is that in the former you choose your supervisor and in the latter the manager is assigned to you unless you change jobs or switch companies. With so many bosses, over the years I have picked up some of the traits of managers who were successful and some who were not successful in their jobs. It must be mentioned that in my seven years of industry experience I have only once changed job role and once switched companies so the change in managers in my case was not job related.
The blog is obviously not a checklist of the requirements of a good manager but more like an open feedback to managers out there on what employees seek and look out for in them.
In my opinion, successful managers are born with leadership skills. Average managers tend to acquire those skills through conscious efforts and experience.
Troves of books have been written over the years trying to explain what makes good managers and the source of leadership traits. From my experience some people are good people managers while some others are great technical managers and I have had both. For any company it is a luxury to have separate folks focusing on the two different aspects and they tend to seek managers who have great people management as well as technical leadership skills.
Again, from my experience such managers are a rare breed, just like in sports where the best players rarely make good coaches.
I always connected to managers who would cater to career development of his/her employees while keeping the company’s broader objectives in mind. Alluding to my comment about people management and technical leadership earlier, I have seen some managers who are completely turned off the moment you start discussing any technical issues with them. In such cases, I felt that I was left to hang dry and had to find my own solutions.
But on occasions where I ended up discussing technical problems with my manager in every meeting, I felt that I was becoming only a problem solver with no scope of personal development. I felt enervated in environments where 50 per cent of the projects I was working on were aligned to my career development and the rest were matched to the business requirement.
Managers also need to be transparent with their employees. While talking to my fellow colleagues, I realised that most employees seek transparency as important if not the most important quality in their managers. I always felt part of the company when my manager would relate my projects to company’s business decisions.
I have had managers who lived in a complete bubble and were totally detached from how business was shaping for the company which sort of gave me a feeling of being left out. For managers I felt transparency was intertwined with honesty and integrity.
While it is debatable whether corporate world is the right place for brutally honest people and some level of politics is an inherent part of any organisation, it is true that managers should have some level of honesty. I had a manager who asked me not to support some of the work of his fellow manager in a different team so that he can prove in front of higher authorities that the other guy was unsuccessful in his endeavours. Clearly, I had lost respect for the guy inspite of him being a darling with his own managers.
Another important quality of managers should be finding the right balance between micromanagement and delegation. It is like two extremes and in my experience employees like managers who are neither micromanagers nor delegators. A good manager coaches/mentors his employees instead of micromanaging them. This is very important for new employees. It is the decision of when to manage and when to delegate which distinguishes good managers from the average ones.
Echoing what I said earlier, managers are really an eclectic breed and not everyone can be a great manager. It is also something which comes naturally to the select few and no amount of MBA education or schooling can create managers. They can only hone or improve their skills. Every manager should introspect whether he really likes the job and is benefiting the company. If not then he might end up as a roadblock in the career of many of his employees.
It is some of these experiences mentioned above which have led me to believe that disgruntled and disillusioned employees change managers not jobs.
(The author is an engineer at Qualcomm. He can be reached at [email protected])