the topic that keeps my mentees – mid-level managers in our beloved tech scene – up at night is people management.
It's a broad topic, but the questions my mentees ask most often are always the same:
– what principles to follow when building a team;
– whether to bring your battle-tested crew from previous jobs with you to a new gig;
– what to fire people for, and how to do it painlessly;
– how to give feedback properly so you don't offend them but still get the point across…
And so on. There’s a whole legion of these questions, and I answer them confidently and without a second thought – how else could I, when I’ve answered each one at least twenty times already?
But this week, I got asked an unconventional one:
who is someone you would absolutely never put in a management role?
I'll be honest: the question caught me off guard, and I asked for some time to think it over until our next session. I thought about it, formulated my answer, and before sharing my thoughts with my mentee, I'm sharing them with the subscribers of the samdark blog.
If you've ever renovated your apartment, you've definitely run into this type of contractor:
– We'll knock this out for you right now. It'll be dirt cheap!
– Sorry, but that's not exactly what I need.
– Yeah, but you don't get it, it's really cheap! We'll use particleboard from Home Depot here, nails from the dump there, we'll patch it up with some glue – I actually have some left over from my last client, it doesn't hold well but it's free, we'll slap some shit on here, shove a couple of sticks in there…
– But it's just gonna turn out like shit in the end. Can't you just do a proper job?
– Do you have any idea how much a proper job costs? Nah, nah, nah, what's wrong with you, everyone does it this way. Yeah, it's shit, but it's literally peanuts – stop busting my balls, just agree.
– I want it done right, I have the money – no need to do a trash job, no need to cut corners – just do it well. You could do it like this, or like this, or even like this…
– You're a weird dude, man. We're offering you cheap, and you want it good. It's impossible to work with someone like you, so go fuck yourself.
Sound familiar?
In the corporate world, it looks exactly the same. If you hand a project over to a manager with a similar mindset, they'll pretty quickly come back to you with a completely inadequate solution and an explanation of why they chose that specific option:
❗️ doing it right is more expensive than doing it wrong, so our baseline plan is to do it wrong. Yeah, it doesn't solve our clients' problems – but it's dirt cheap.
❗️ No, nobody handed down any budget constraints to us. We just want to make it as cheap as humanly possible.
❗️ Yes, we'll go to the project sponsor and show them an option that a priori doesn't meet their needs, but hey, it's for peanuts. Yes, we're sure they'll agree to it – because they couldn't possibly choose an option that's better but more expensive, right?
This approach makes my blood boil – I've been unable for years to figure out where these managers get this mental block against doing it right, and why minimizing costs becomes the only meaningful criterion out of a whole variety of options.
But maybe no explanation is needed here. What's needed is the realization that people with this mindset aren't going to change. They might be great individual contributors, but under no circumstances should they be put in management roles – these are Anti Midas types.
Any initiative you put them in charge of will turn into absolute shit.
And you'll end up spending a ton of money, time, nerves, and other employees' energy cleaning up the shitshow left behind by these Anti Midases. So it's better not to. Keep these employees in rank-and-file roles, and if you suddenly find yourself with a manager who has this mindset – kick them out on their ass before they cause any real damage.