Willful ignorance in management

One thing I’m struck by is how often VPs and execs are willfully ignorant of what it’s like to work for them. Here’s a tweet where people discuss what it’s like to work for MS and Sinofsky disagrees with someone about what it was like to work at Microsoft, under Sinofsky: https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/733699065763004416

I don’t mean to pick on Sinofsky here, I’m just using this example because it’s public. This seems to be the default state of management.

A friend of mine once took a job under a notoriously bad manager. Within a week of joining the company, two people they’d talked with during the recruitment process told them “if I’d known who you were going to work for, I’d have advised you to decline the offer”. 

Recently, I was talking to an acquittance about mismanagement and described the deeds of the manager mentioned above, who was and still is employed as a manger at a Bay Area unicorn that’s very careful to curate its image and is known on HN as one of the best places to work at in the bay. Despite not naming names (I named neither the person nor the company) my acquittance was able to guess who the manager was. My acquaintance has never lived on the west coast and has spent almost their entire career at what people might call a lifestyle business. My acquaintance isn’t in the Bay Area tech scene and has never worked on the west coast, but this manager’s misdeeds are so well known that news had spread to east coast folks who aren’t particularly connected to the Bay Area tech scene.

Here’s a manager who’s so well known to be bad that, not only do people express their condolences to new employees who are hired by the manager, people working on the other coast who have friends of friends of friends at the company know to avoid this manager. Every few years, I hear another random story about this guy. The last one was that, when one of his reports was unhappy and proposed doing something else that he would be better at, the manager told him "tell me why you won't fail at this like you have at everything else" (and the person was highly successful before and after working for this manager). And yet, at the company, the manager’s reputation among upper management is fine.

Once, after one of many waves of attrition from the company, someone asked what the company was doing about all of the attrition. The response was that the company only wanted to keep two of the people who’d left recently anyway. Upper management somehow had no idea that the problem was the managers and not the employees, despite this being common knowledge not only inside their company, but outside, and not only outside, but on the other coast.

On the flip side, a friend of mine recently described an amazing director that he works for, saying that she’s the best directory he’s ever worked under by a pretty large margin. The thing that makes this director incredible is that she looks for problems that are affecting her org (bad managers, people in other orgs who are reducing the effectiveness of her employees, etc.). Despite being a 3rd line manager with quite a few people in her org, she has 2 1:1s with every employee every quarter, in which she takes copious notes, which she uses to figure out what’s going wrong in the org.

I agreed with my friend that this is amazing. I don’t know any 3rd-line managers who spend that kind of time trying to help the people who work for them, and I only know of a small handful of others who spend any time at all looking for problems that are causing unhappiness or reducing productivity.

But what really ought to be amazing is that this kind of thing is so rare that it’s amazing. Why should this be so rare? For the past year or so, I’ve been asking VPs, execs, and other people in upper management at various companies what they do to reduce blind spots and make sure that their view of what’s happening is correct. The median answer, as well as the 98%-ile answer, is a variation of “I would know about anything that happened, there couldn’t possibly be any kind of bias or bad behavior that I’m not aware of”. I’ve gotten variants of this answer everywhere, from giant companies that are large enough that no one can really understand how the company works, to small, elite, trading firms that pride themselves on their rationality and lack of bias. The 30%-ile answer is “what do you mean [bias or things I don’t know about]?”, which happens when it hasn’t even occurred to someone that they might not be omniscient and unbiased. The 99%-ile answer is a variation of “yeah, that’s a really hard problem and here are the things I do to try to mitigate the issue, but it’s not really enough”.