Managers and meetings

I don't know what exactly everyone did to become a manager at where I work, some people did some pretty good work and then got noticed, others were just was around long enough to get a decent idea of everything that is going on to eventually get pushed into a managerial position.

But skill and seniority aside, if there is one thing that will make or break a project, it's the managers. I'd have to say that the less involved the managers are, the better the project is off.

I have yet to meet a really good manager; the kind that knows have to motivate a team, that knows how to set realistic goals and then provide the support to help the team achieve those objectives in a timely manner. If I would define the role of a manager, it would be exactly that.

What I have seen so far in terms of management in a large corporations, is that managers are the people that schedule meetings to have everyone report in on exactly what they are doing... so they themselves report to people further up the food chain on what is going on. Middle managers, generally tend to do very little work and don't seem to have the expert skills that the "grunts" have when it comes to getting the work done.

The other thing I have noticed about managers is that they are rather detached from the rest of the team... in the sense that they are not generally spending long periods of time working with the team to have a good sense of what is really going on. If there is one thing for certain, it is that a lot of information gets filtered out in meetings, because of time constraints and the other is to make oneself look good (ie. filter out all the experiments that went wrong and then present the stuff that went well... or even present a few bad things and a few good things and then tell the manager that you need more time to look into things). Attending meetings is more about knowing how to present than getting the work done it self... because it is the only thing that these managers really see.

I should also point out that there is a big difference in a person's ability to present and their ability to get something up and running. Eventually, what you might find for a large comany is that most of the managers are the kinds of people that are good at doing the talk... but when it comes to doing the walk.. it is an entirely different matter.

In essense, people that are just good at talking are *terrible* to be put into a desicion making position.

Managers and meetings

The biggest real-life role I've seen so far with managers is that they are meeting chairmen and I think that's pretty much the only real work that they do... and I would argue against the notion that they do any sort of real work.

For the most part, I've only seen managers setting up agendas and getting people to talk... trying to glean information out of everyone to try and make project level decisions. This is, of course, coming from a person that isn't involved with the project at it's most intimate levels and with visibility limited to what is presented to them.

How is one supposed to make good decisions based on a 2~3 hour discussion involving 5~6 people doing a shit load of work? I would argue that they can't and this is where most projects fail.