Why do so many managers seem to suck?

Jul 21, 2024

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Uncategorized

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23 min read

Contents

1. What’s up with people not liking their manager at work?
2. Why do we even have managers to begin with?
3. Why are managers ineffective at being managers if we need so many of them?
4. I’m a manager. What can I do to be better?

1. What’s up with people not liking their manager at work?

It’s a common complaint that people have. They just don’t like their manager.

I like my job but I don’t like my manager / boss!

We have too many managers at work!

My manager seems incompetent!

But… why? How can it be possible for so many managers across the world to be dislikable in so many different ways?

That’s what I want to tackle in this essay. Let’s actually understand:

Why do companies have so many managers and managerial layers?
What are the factors that make managers ineffective in their role?
If you are a manager, what are a few things you can do to avoid some basic mistakes?

2. Why do we even have managers to begin with?

To managers in the corporate world, we first need to understand how the academic and professional understanding of managers has evolved over time.

2a. People can only manage so many other people

Let’s start with some psychology and anthropology.

There’s a concept called Dunbar’s number. It says that human brains can only really comfortably manage about 150 relationships maximum. More than this and things start breaking down.

Business has a similar concept called the span of control. The key idea is that there is a limit to the number of people you can directly manage before the organizational structure within a company begins to break down.

The modern rule-of-thumb is that, roughly speaking, you can only manage people in groups of around 10 at a time at most.Exceptions will apply depending on industry and business function.¹

You can see an immediate problem. Imagine a company with 1,000 employees. This means:

You need 100 managers to manage 1,000 people;
But you also need 10 managers for the managers themselves;
These 10 managers for managers ALSO need their own manager.

Just the fact you have 1,000 employees basically means you automatically need to create 3 layers of management on top of them just for this department to function. You have also hired 111 managers just because you need managers.²

Now imagine large multinational corporations. Let’s say you run PepsiCo. It has 300k employees. Try and think of how to manage this many people across multiple countries without layers and layers and layers of management.

So when companies have messy and bloated management structures, this isn’t necessarily because your CEO is some pervert who gets horny at the idea of bureaucracy.

The sheer size and scale of companies today mathematically demands the creation of multiple layers of management and bureaucracy just to keep the company functioning.

This is one of the key reasons for the rise of what is sometimes called the “managerial class” or “professional-managerial class”.

2b. Management has become more scientific and measurable

The early 1900s was a period where people were trying to make the analysis of business more scientific.³

One of the key pioneers in management science was Frederick W. Taylor, who proposed that work could be standardized into specific discrete actions and that workers could be measured on their efficiency in performing these discrete tasks.⁴

This was followed by further academic advancements in fields such as industrial engineering and operations research. Mathematicians and scientists worked to try and analyze business processes as systems and create quantitative methods for analyzing efficiency and optimization such as:

Critical Path Analysis: How should a project be scheduled and what are the most critical activities that need to take place?
- e.g. How many days can the delivery of the servers to our new data center be delayed by before the whole project is delayed?
Assignment, Scheduling, and Queueing: What is the best way to assign resources to tasks to optimize for a specific outcome?
- e.g. How many customer service agents do you need so 95+% of the time a customer calling you for help does not have to wait for more than 5 minutes?
Forecasting: Based on past historic data, can we find trends that will help inform the actions needed today to prepare for the future?
- e.g. How much more flour should a pizza store order next week compared to its usual order if there is a holiday coming up?

The effect of the increasing scientific approach to management is that work within a company becomes increasingly sub-divided and specialized.

2c. The combination of span of control and subdivision of work leads to the modern role of the manager

The combination of increasing management layers and subdivision of work into increasingly discrete tasks has led to modern corporate organizational design.

Employees are assigned based on their business function⁵ and role ⁶;
Each group of individuals under a line manager then functions as a “pod”. This group is responsible for completing and delivering a specific output;
Multiple pods roll up under business departments, where the department leadership acts as the manager for managers and coordinates the division of work across pods.

A modern corporation is therefore an institution built up of work pods. The modern corporation must also be managed by a managerial class to ensure each pod is capable of coordinating with all other pods in the organization.

3. Why are managers ineffective at being managers if we need so many of them?

3a. What a manager does and what their team does is not always the same

A manager’s primary responsibility is ensuring the work output of their pod is achieved, and that the pod is capable of coordinating with other pods.

Note that this does not mean the manager is technically required to be able to perform or be good at the underlying work the pod does.⁷

Instead, for managerial roles you also value other key skills instead:

People management: Can you run and manage your team so that they work efficiently to produce the desired work outputs on time and within budget?
Acquiring power: Your team needs resources. To get resources you need power. Do you know how to ask / beg / scream / cry / bribe / threaten other people in the organization to get the resources and budget your team needs?
Inter-pod coordination: Are you able to manage the coordination between other pods within the company so you understand their needs, manage their office politics, and have them support your pod or influence their decisions?

This is what is more colloquially known as office politics. Different organizations may have varying levels of it, but it is unavoidable.

A manager that focuses too much or too little on office politics can therefore be ineffective.

Most people can imagine why too much office politics is bad. Too much office politics and you turn into a scheming weasel who is unpleasant to work with.

It may be unusual to say that some managers don’t focus enough on office politics and acquiring power. So I should justify this.

“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In order to get things done in life, you need to have power. It doesn’t matter how well intentioned you are if you can’t make your demands heard and acted upon.

A well-meaning manager with no political power in an organization is sentimental and anemic. You need power to:

Influence how work is distributed between pods;
- e.g. Is everyone getting a fair share?
Ensure that other pods support your pod properly;
- e.g. Is your team getting data access and responses to queries on-time?
Make sure your pod’s opinions are heard and incorporated in major decisions;
- e.g. Sales is planning to over promise something to the customer. This will make your life hell in actually meeting the requirements. Can you stop them in time?
Acquire resources to help your team run and reward them;
- e.g. You have a great person on your team and you want to promote them. Do you have the influence to force that promotion through the system and guarantee it?
Protect your team when they need to be protected
- e.g. The company needs to make cuts. Are you even involved in the conversation to decide what cuts to make, or are you not important enough and you will just be told the outcome?

When a manager is also not a specialist in what their team does, this can also lead to friction in managing the team itself.

The manager may not appreciate how difficult or easy specific types of work are and fail to assign work correctly or provide appropriate resources and time for work to be completed;
The manager may be unable to provide training and development for members of their team;
The manager may not understand the nuances of the work output and require members of the team to take on responsibility that the manager might technically be responsible for⁸.

3b. Promoting managers is hard

So we know that managers need to have different skills from the people who work under them. How do we identify who would make a good manager then?

The answer is… that there is no good answer.

The majority of companies promote based on merit. The idea is that by promoting your most talented and capable employees, you build an organization that values skills and hard work.

This has an obvious problem. This approach doesn’t actually try to determine what the optimal role for each individual is and match them based on what is optimal. So:

Someone may be good at the coordination and management role but fail to make management because they cannot stand out while doing the regular technical work; and
Someone may be great at technical work but absolutely horrible at managing people and office politics.

This leads to something called the Peter Principle:

employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another

The only way to really see if someone is truly capable of being a manager is… just to let them run and manage a team of people and see if it works out.

3c. Training managers is hard

Okay, so promotion is difficult. By promoting people who show technical competency and capability in their existing role, at least you promote people who understand the work they will oversee.

And if you know nothing else about a person, promoting the person who is hard working and capable is probably a weak signal that they are more likely to adapt better to being a manager.⁹

Surely though you can also provide training and support for people to become better managers once they are in their role?

Yeah nah.

There are several problems. The first is a broader trend across the corporate world where education and learning budgets are being cut. This is a broader topic I’d like to cover this topic in more depth in the future as a standalone essay, but the general gist is this:

Training budgets are a bit like the prisoner’s dilemma;
Clearly it would be great for everyone if all companies invested a lot in training;
But it’s really good for a company if they just don’t invest in training and instead steal another company’s trained employees;
Oops, now all companies are just stealing each other’s workers and not investing in training.

The second problem is that some skills are either not possible to train someone on or not worth training them on because they need to be used so infrequently it is not cost effective to provide that training.

For example, how do you manage an employee who needs time off due to a family emergency but they are also a critical member of the team? There isn’t really any training that tells you precisely what to do here.¹⁰

The third problem is that a lot of learning about how to be a manager is based on interacting with other managers and copying what they do.

Being a manager is a lot like an apprenticeship scheme in the way that you have to learn a lot of the skills through on-the-job training.
This is a problem because if there are a lot of bad managers or manager behaviors out there… then you perpetuate and continue the cycle of bad managers.¹¹ Breaking this cycle requires either an intervention¹² or the person involved to recognize that things need to change and then make effective changes through their own determination.

3d. Incentives within companies are misaligned

I talk about the misalignment of incentives a lot because it’s just true.

What is good for a manager is not always the same as what is good for the employees they manage or what is good for the company.

Remember one of the original key skills for a manager:

Acquiring power: Your team needs resources. To get resources you need power. Do you know how to ask / beg / scream / cry / bribe / threaten other people in the organization to get the resources and budget your team needs?

This has three obvious problems. First, with great power comes great responsibility.

The purpose of acquiring power as a manager is to allow your pod to work more effectively. But the acquisition of power as a goal is always dangerous

How much time should you spend acquiring power vs doing something with that power? Also a difficult question to answer.

The second issue is that if you have a job where there is an explicit goal of acquiring power, then… you get the types of people who explicitly want power.

The third is that once you become a person who just has a ton of power…

3e. Managers aren’t always equipped for their role

There is an expression “shit rolls downhill”.

If the top of an organization is problematic, then the problems from the leadership at the top will become the problems for everyone else lower down too.

The same is true here. Your manager will be constrained by the limits and problems of the organization.

For example, if a Head of Business Department runs their department through some misguided Darwinian “survival of the fittest” principles, then you can have a situation where inter-pod factional warfare breaks out. There is very little any single pod leader can do to fix this problem. Everyone in their pod is going to be collateral damage. The only question is how bad it gets.

3f. Managers don’t have to be good to get the job done

Remember that ultimately, a manager is responsible for delivering the work output of their pod to support the broader organization. So long as this occurs, then (generally speaking) the other details don’t matter and get ignored.

For example, maybe your manager is really strict and has bad interpersonal skills. But not to the extent they’re actually a liability. Well, if all the work in the team is getting done on time with high accuracy then… doesn’t that show their management style is working?

Sure, it would be good if they develop better interpersonal skills. But every company has a massive laundry list of problems that need fixing. Is this really the most important thing to worry about right now?

And… do you want to be the person who picks a fight by telling your manager they’re bad at dealing with people?

So managers might not even be aware they are ineffective, get support to get better, or have any urgency to do anything about it.

A manager needs to balance their own job and work with managing their team and managing the broader company. This is before we even get into work life balance.

Managers need to make tradeoffs and decide what to focus on if they can’t do everything that needs to be done.

So sometimes you just have to accept things will just be bad and it’s not worth trying to fix or change things.

For example, let’s say that everyone in your company just loves having meetings about everything. A manager might be able to create a culture within their pod that avoids meetings.

But any inter-pod interaction is going to be meeting based. There is very little your manager can probably do about it because they will be seen as abnormal for refusing to have meetings. And they may choose to take the L on this in order to have power and influence in other aspects such as budgets and promotions.

4. I’m a manager. What can I do to be better?

I don’t want this article to feel all doom and gloom. It is possible to have effective managers and it is possible to have well run organizations even if there are a ton of ways things can go wrong.

I am not here to write yet another book on “leadership”.¹³ There is also a massive range of management styles that can work for many people.

What is likely most helpful is to provide a general baseline of advice that you can build upon to develop your own management style.

4a. What is your pod responsible for?

At its core, an effective manager runs their pod effectively. This means, you need to have very clear and explicit answers for the following questions:

What is the outcome your team is responsible for?
What resources and capabilities does your team need to be successful?
- Do you even have these resources? If not, what is missing? Can you acquire them?
How do you actually measure success in your team?
- It’s not enough to say “they produce good work”. What does that even mean?
- This is especially true for “knowledge workers” such as researchers, data analysts, accountants, etc. whose main output is knowledge and reports rather than explicit outputs such as in manufacturing.
- It gets even more complicated when you consider that there may not be a standardized outcome. For example, if a doctor cannot cure a patient is that a failed outcome? If not, then what does success look like?

4b. What are you directly responsible for? How do you influence decisions?

As a manager, you have power and control over things. You also have the autonomy to make your own decisions and act independently.

Know exactly what you can and cannot do, and the guardrails you operate within. You may have more power and control than you realize.

What decisions are you fully capable of making and controlling, and what do you need explicit approval to make?
- Part of making work easier is reducing bureaucracy and complexity.
- It is helpful to talk with your own manager and explicitly agree with them how your team is measured on success.
- Then agree with them what decisions are fully within your control. This is especially important in departments where the boundaries between pods are unclear.
- Don’t just assume your boss thinks the same way or believes the same things as you. This is not always true!
How do decisions in your company actually get made?
- Identify the important people who actually influence the decisions that get made in your company.
- This is not always the same as the person who officially makes the decision!
- For example, the Head of a Department might really really trust their deputy and follow any advice their deputy gives them.
- The critical influencer and gatekeeper for decisions is therefore the deputy, not the actual Head of Department.
What do key stakeholders in your company actually want?
- Part of solving the coordination problem in a company is by aligning people’s incentives.
- If what they want is the same thing you want, then you are much more likely to succeed in convincing them to work with you, support you, etc.
- So what is it that they actually want? Note that this is not always what officially they are responsible for!
- For example, does personal prestige and credit matter to them? Feeling important? Having a happy team?

4c. What does your team need to execute and deliver the outcome?

Your job as a manager is to create the environment and structure where your employees can succeed by acting independently and effectively.

The same way you want to understand what you can and cannot do and the limits of your power, your team also wants the same.

What processes need to be in place to make work as simple and easy as possible?
- Is the success of your team dependent on other pods? If so, what is the standard process for getting their input / review / etc.?
- What process do you need inside your own team to structure work effectively and respect work life balance?
- For example, if you have working parents who need to pick their kids up from school then you might create rules about setting deadlines for 3pm. Or rules around asynchronous working that don’t require everyone to observe the same working hours.
What are the working styles of each member in your team?
- For example, what is the best way to contact people with urgent messages? Do people actually know or are they just assuming?
- If people overall hate meetings, then can you structure work to minimize useless meetings?
- For example, do you actually need a meeting to review work or can you set the deadline 1 day earlier, have them send you the document to review, and use the Comment / Track Changes function to make changes and tag people for specific actions?
- For example, you might ban all meetings between 3pm and 5pm so everyone is guaranteed 2 hours of time for guaranteed deep work.
What decisions can people in your pod make without requiring your input?
- Just as you want clear agency and rules from your manager, your team wants them too.
- Make it clear what guardrails / rules the team operates within. And then everything within those guardrails your direct reports have full autonomy to act within.
- This empowers your team while also reducing the work you need to do and lets you focus on other tasks.
- However, for this to work you need to have trust in your team and also make clear what your expectations are such as how you measure success.

1
For example, a call center might go up to 15, while a software development team might be as low as 3.
2
If your effective span of control has to be less than 10, then this number will go up even more.
3
This itself follows similar attempts in other disciplines such as Wilhelm Wundt’s attempts in psychology.
4
Frederick’s life is pretty fascinating. He originally applied to Harvard Law School in order to be a lawyer just like his father. But despite getting in, he ruined his eyesight from studying too hard. So instead he joins a family friend’s manufacturing business and becomes a factory foreman. While developing his theories of business that would eventually make him a Professor at Dartmouth and being elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he also causally wins the tennis doubles championship of US Open!
5
What part of the business do you belong in
6
Your seniority and reporting lines
7
For example, you might have someone with very little mathematical knowledge running a data analytics team. Or a sales specialist running an engineering team.
8
Such as reviewing work and outcomes
9
It might only be say, going from a 50/50 coin toss to 55/45 coin toss but that’s still an improvement!
10
Obviously you should act compassionately. But how do you manage the risk to your project? The approach you need will be highly specific to what the exact work you oversee is so there is no good generic answer.
11
This is similar to the idea that broken families create broken people. And broken people go on to break other people.
12
e.g. Training and education on effective management practices
13
I would only be adding to the massive pile of management books floating out there in the wild that you find in airports.