He involved people in the vision, understood people's aspirations, gave people freedom when he knew it was the right time and there was no politics. He gave importance to getting things done more than anything else. He was a good programmer himself some decades back and even if he didn't know the details, he could call out bad ideas. He knew that part of his job was to clear the bottlenecks so that people who did the work could be efficient and so on. More importantly, everyone who worked for him were happy to work with him.
He had a very different style, some would say chaotic and disorganized but there was a method to the madness. He disliked documentation and creating beautiful reports which a lot of managers seem to do. But in client meetings, his personality was such that it didn't matter. They had a lot of respect for his ideas.
Since he left, its been terrible and so articles like these which, while they might appear overblown, actually reflects the reality in most companies.
While casually surfing, I came across this blog post which has some good ideas to 'fix' middle management:
A manager's performance should be judged on the following dimensions:
- A key component of a manager's performance should be the sum of the performance scores of the individuals who work for him. This is good in many ways, starting with the fact that this incentivizes the manager to ensure that his team gets the credit vs. taking credit himself. It also ensures that the manager is more upfront about delivering hard feedback and helping improve employees who are lagging behind. Finally, when recruiting new employees, the manager will try and find good people vs. just adding more bodies to build his empire
- Get feedback from the manager's employees and her peers about how effective she is in empowering her employees. Often times employees get bogged down by all the processes that large companies are bound to have. A manager's job should be defined by how well she can empower her employees, cut through the processes, and get stuff done.
Finally and most importantly corporations ought to be EXTREMELY transparent about the evaluation/performance scores of not just managers but all employees. Employees, should be able to easily look up other employees' evaluations.
Ofcourse, these ideas have shortcomings. For e.g. the boss and the team can game the system so that everyone gets a good ranking, but the work they do could be mediocre. A manager can also reciprocate with low rating to an employee who gives him a low rating. But the ideas seem to be in the right direction.
