Ineffective Middle-Management Suckups

re: Ineffective Middle-Management Suckups

JD — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 08:16:09 GMT

A decent defense of middle management. I have corresponded with you directly before and was impressed by your openness.

Is your main point that decisions have to made, and not everyone can be happy about it because there are more workers than chiefs? Let's explore the area of decisions that go against not just some of the workers, but most of them.

My question is about how to deal with the 'bad decisions', the ones which you disagree with but are officially decided. In Microsoft sometimes this comes as "big bets" -- let's say a big bet on a tricky new storage technology as an example [depending on timeframe this could be Office or Windows, it's a frequent problem area].

OK, so what is the best strategy for those on the bottom? From your blog I get these messages:
- Use the open door to give feedback.
- Don't do passive resistance like sandbagging.

This has not been a winning strategy for the bottoms [No Ship Its, no respect, bad PR for the groups involved]. The door is open but no change will happen. The sandbaggers come out far ahead in the end and are rewarded for their pessimism and passivity, though what is delivered is below what was promised.

See: "schedule chicken", "kool aid", "reset button".

re: Ineffective Middle-Management Suckups

JD — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 10:02:06 GMT

Continuing to be impressed by your openness, even late Sunday night :)

I'll admit the two times I have seen genuinely "most" bottoms on a team feel this way, either the exec left for 'personal reasons' or the project was canned. Neither was a good experience.

I'm not sure you quite addressed the passive resistance approach. Working against the plan and standing up to save the project later can be very rewarding from what I've seen. In fact it looks like the only way to speed up advancement. (Whether you regard that as a good thing or not, it is desirable. Even the fastest risers take 5-6 years where someone who started in '89 could move in 2-3.)

re: Ineffective Middle-Management Suckups

steven_sinofsky — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 10:03:06 GMT

Thanks jd,

Of course Microsoft is legendary for making big bets that caused amazing developers to leave and not join in. The bet on the GUI was one of those--the lead developer for our spreadsheets quit because of his lack of faith in the big bet. He later returned.

In the end, if you disagree with the big bet and have raised your objections then you really do have to decide if you can change you own point of view and join in the effort. If not, then you really do need to leave the team. It is better for you and better for the team.

As career advice, my suggestion would be not to do this too early in your career--when you are young of course you have much greater certainty in how things should go and are much less open to others. These things soften with age :-)

And of course, I keep referring to the need to get product cycle experience. If you leave every time you disagree with big decisions you might find yourself without much experience and a lot of jobs.

This is all very challenging because great engineers have strong views on how things should be done. It is no coincidence that "The Fountainhead" is shared as a favorite book by many of us. But for every Roark that gets the project built just the way they want to (and gets acquitted because of strong princples), there are many more disgruntled engineers with long resumes.

Call me an optimist, but I believe that if you stick it out even the most egregiously bad decisions will get fixed soon enough. I do have faith in a system, and I have faith that the right thing happens in the end.

The part that I have the most trouble with is the “most people believe is a bad decision”. “Most” is a lot of people. My experience has been that when someone says this what they really mean is the set of people they talk to but as a manager more often than not, the strong agreement one person senses is not as strong as they think and is usually rooted in reasons beyond those that you might think. In other words, in the heat of a debate it is not unusual for the listening to stop just after someone’s position becomes clear. It might be two people disagree with the direction, but one disagrees because of the architecture and another disagrees because of the customer scenario. A small change in framing the problem might tip the scales. So be careful about generalizing that “everyone thinks…”

re: Ineffective Middle-Management Suckups

steven_sinofsky — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 10:08:00 GMT

(note above comment resubmitted due to typo--wouldn't want that feedback again!)

JD,

With regard to "passive resistance" it looks like you're speaking about some specific experience. I have a tough time imagining the situation where someone was rewarded for performing in a mediocre manner unless there was no track record to base any performance expectations on.

The opportunities for advancement are greater than they ever were at Microsoft. We have more new projects, more new businesess, more new groups, and are hiring more new people this year than in any year before. As the both the depth and breadth of what Microsoft works on increases the need for leaders in both management and technical depth grows.

We will hire more people from college this year for Office than we have ever hired before!

re: Ineffective Middle-Management Suckups

Anonymous — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 12:00:07 GMT

You bring up intersting points in this rather lengthy post: clear communication of intent, sowing clarity instead of confusion, managers are hard working people too.

This very post is the antithesis all those things in the eyes of an IC. To the peons, the proles, the masses huddled over their keyboards, this post comes out as self-aggrandizing and out of touch.

You want to get our attention? Write a 5 sentence e-mail that isn't a me-too version of "great job on such-and-such feature". Our time is as valuable too. Don't patronize us. Don't dumb things down for us.

We know the dirty secrets of stack ranking. We know we're not going to be automatic millionaires. We come into work anyways. We do the job day in and day out. We work long hours and forsake our loved ones. Because even if complain, we care about the job we do. Not for our managers' sake, not for Microsoft, but for ourselves.

Incompetence is there if you care to look. I think part of a manager's job is to root it out, not wait for someone to point it out for them. But maybe that's just the the definitive nature of my work.

re: Ineffective Middle-Management Suckups

Matt McC — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 15:43:30 GMT

Great post, and a great reference! (I wasted far too many hours in college watching Almost Live on Comedy Central)

re: Ineffective Middle-Management Suckups

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 02:37:07 GMT

I have a couple of questions...
What about loyalty? What should an IC do when their manager tells them they didn't get the higher review score because they aren't loyal to their direct chain of command?

In the world of Office there are better managers and middle managers, because the bar is set high, IMHO. In other organizations across the company is thisn't the case. What I've seen, (of course this would be in limited scope), managers who perform poorly, are just moved from one team to another.

Is the company wanting it's employees to spend more time on the soft skills rather than the hard core techincal skills?

Bureaucracy. Threat or menace? Either, both, or neither? Or it depends!

Steven Sinofsky's Microsoft TechTalk — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 00:50:16 GMT

bu·reauc·ra·cy&nbsp;
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