As a manager, I actually find people doing "big picture" thinking quite annoying to deal with. What I want you to do is concentrate on the tasks in front of you and do those well. You shouldn't be caring about the total amount of tasks to do, or if we are going to finish the project on time. That is my problem, not yours.
At some point I realised that it's better to have all the issues in the tracker assigned to project managers and never have more than half a dozen on someone at a time because some people just can't seem to handle it.
People with a lot of work assigned to them will report how stressed they are and how they are working too hard. When I ask them if they are working more than 40 hours a week they tell me "no". (We don't allow people to work unapproved overtime)
And then if you unassign all the work off them and just parcel out the issues they work the same amount of time and produce about the same amount of work and yet are not "overworked" to hear them tell it.
> As a manager, I actually find people doing "big picture" thinking quite annoying to deal with. What I want you to do is concentrate on the tasks in front of you and do those well. You shouldn't be caring about the total amount of tasks to do, or if we are going to finish the project on time. That is my problem, not yours.
Your attitude is probably sound and productive in itself, but it's going to drive away a lot of top performers and leave you with a predictable but modestly achieving team at best. You may benefit from finding a way to accommodate some of those "big picture" thinkers who show more initiative and who might bring attention to some of your own blind spots and misjudgments.
A lot of high performers do like to think about the big picture, and they have good ideas. A lot of them become managers, and good managers usually ask for their input. But also, a lot of people on a team like to think about the overall status of a project or a company rather than the task at hand. Many problems are more interesting than the one in front of you. Worse, sometimes contributors like to obsess over org problems as a way of validation. As in, I am only a week behind but the project is over two months late! That can be annoying.
That's... fine? They can't all be Jeff Deans, or John Carmacks. Nor would you want them to be. Promote those that are up the engineering ladder and let the L4's do L4 work. You need L4 work to happen or else the annoying bugs don't get fixed and the small but important pieces of functionality don't get built.
I don't think the suggestion is that they _never_ do big-picture thinking, only that they concentrate on the current task. The wider view can be addressed in retrospectives.
Early in my career I quickly moved off projects whenever I found myself working for people like you.
As a junior, especially when working for large organisations I frankly didn’t give a shit whether I did what was described as “my job”, I was interested in learning as much as possible, working across multiple teams and areas and maximising the value of my output (as opposed to the alignment between my output and a job description or someone barely more senior than me’s idea of what I should be doing).
Some managers hated this. Others trusted me, treated me as an equal, and let me propose ideas and take on tasks that nobody even knew/thought were possible and deliver massively outsized value. Those are the ones that made my career.
My advice to anyone young and ambitious is that if you find yourself just “concentrating on your tasks” most of the time, get out of there.
Truth is you need both. Some cases call for insulating someone so they can think deeply about one problem. Some require bringing everyone into the fray so you can cross-pollinate ideas. Mis-judge and you get cogs-in-the-machine or status-update-hell syndrome.
Also, of course, the way you treat someone, the kind of tasks you give them, and the style of management and working with them should be tailored to each individual to get the best out of them.
I’m constantly amazed at how many people want to be managed and told what to do, and value “clarity” over freedom.
Often times, people would walk up to the devs and ask if we could work on this thing. Often times, especially if they were fat cats in the company, we'd happily switch gears to appease. Our manager homie eventually told us like "Look, I'm your manager and I delegate the tasks that have been requested of us. Have whoever comes up to you to talk to me, even if it's [SVP of Engineering guy]." And so we did and it streamlined everything a bunch.
With respect, this is backwards. This is recipe for burned out and isolated employees that have no buy in or ownership of organizational goals.
>What I want you to do is concentrate on the tasks in front of you and do those well. You shouldn't be caring about the total amount of tasks to do, or if we are going to finish the project on time. That is my problem, not yours.
Most likely you're not a perfect oracle and therefore will not be able to do what you describe here. So you're already set up for failure by attempting to shield the team from "politics" or however you would describe them.
>People with a lot of work assigned to them will report how stressed they are and how they are working too hard.
No they won't. At the point someone is telling you this, they are burned out. In which case you already failed and now you're behind the curve with a burned out and alienated team member.
I suggest you take a step back and evaluate how you view yourself in relation to your other teammates. If you believe you are smarter or better than them then you need to re-evaluate whether you should be in management.
Your job as a manager is to care for your employees without being parochial, giving them as much information as appropriate (which is USUALLY all of the information) while ensuring that they have the tools and environment that fit their individual working style, and mediating between team members to align incentives across the organization.
From what you wrote you seem to tend to treat devs as human CPUs and not as intelligent people that might be much more capable than anyone in the management and who are naturally complex problem solvers (no offense, MBA is easier than undergrad and incomparable to computer science or any hard science). You are reducing them to FIFO/priority queue processors without giving them a view of the big picture, likely increasing their stress and sense of futility, pigeonholing them to being single-task focused at all times.
> As a manager, I actually find people doing "big picture" thinking quite annoying to deal with
That's a bold statement. You've made your job easier, at the cost of creating a culture of "not my job". You assume you can handle all the big picture yourself. That way lies micromanagement.
Maybe your team requires that right now. Only you know. But you should also ask yourself why you sound like your team is annoying you. In the quote above, in "to hear them tell it", "some people just can't handle it".
I wouldn't try and argue with someone who retorts to stress by asking you whether you work more than 40 hours a week, which is like telling a foie gras goose that actually it spends less time a day eating than most other poultry.
A while ago, I would have agreed. I've long since learned that the reason our industry has the management problems it has because we don't prepare people for leadership. At all. We just throw them in the grinder and hope it works out.
This means there are a lot of people who see stress and work that way because they don't know any better. A lot of people who think it's "manager vs. team". I can't cure that by myself, but as long as I can offer nudges to rethink that, I will.
Like almost every systemic problem, it only gets fixed if a large number of us keeps trying to fix it. (That said, I certainly get being tired of trying to :)
There are several failure modes I see from lack of big picture thinking:
- A system is left running for years even though we no longer need it as a business. Millions of dollars wasted because no one had a ticket for "think about whether we still need system X" so no one thought about it. (This one happens a LOT, oh my lord.)
- Two teams solving the same problem in different ways. They each hit their goals and people get promoted and so forth. But the business ends up silently paying double, and we all have to deal we extra cognitive overhead from the redundancy, which slows us down.
- Excessively manual processes. People clock in and fix support issues all day instead of re-engineering the thing to be more automated and self-service. But again, everyone's doing their tasks as specified, promotions all around.
As a support person I see this happen often when a new feature is implemented to an existing product, typically something a customer requests.
The feature works, it passes all test we throw at it, and then when out in the field the product breaks down in unexpected ways because the developers/product managers/big thinkers use the product doesn't match how the customer uses the product. Functionally sound by itself but fails as a system.
The issues are generally obvious from a systematic view, but when each person is face first at a different part of the elephant they'll all say their piece is working.
Because if it's a problem in the first place, and they start to notice it, and care enough to voice up about it, it means it's become frequent enough that you seem not to have done/said something about it.
Their reaction is not about you. It's about the environment in which they understand they operate.
Their options are: care about it, not care about it, leave for a better environment.
I've seen this attitude so many times and it has never ended well.
Odds are that the people who do the work have an order of magnitude better understanding of the bigger picture than someone whose role is to portion out work in small bites.
If this is your real idea, I wouldn't want to work with someone who works with this logic. Working with someone who takes most of the responsibilities may not be very good for development.
Hu? "total amount of tasks to do, or if we are going to finish the project on time" is exactly the boundary that should be upheld between contributors and their managers.
One of the most important tasks of a manager is to lead, not just to delegate. by 'leading', one of the core is about forming consensus. my question is, how could you annoying by folks doing 'big picture' thinking at the stage of forming consensus?
As a big picture thinker, sometimes big picture thinking is an excuse to jerk people around. There's not just one big picture, there are tons of possibilities at any given moment. Unless it's a repeat process w defined goals, the view will depend as much on your mood and random thoughts as it does on the actual stuff.
> As a manager, I actually find people doing "big picture" thinking quite annoying to deal with
People aren't cogs in a machine. Your attitude is dehumanizing. I'm in a position where I also want people to concentrate on their tasks, but way more often than not I have something pointed out by a direct report that I missed -- and because I stow my ego at the door, I accept and appreciate that help, and make sure they're commended for it by the larger organization. They wouldn't be able to do that if they didn't see the big picture.
A peer of mine has a great quote from a movie whose name I can't recall, that goes something like this:
"Sometimes, you treat people like mushrooms. You keep 'em in the dark and feed 'em shit."
At some point I realised that it's better to have all the issues in the tracker assigned to project managers and never have more than half a dozen on someone at a time because some people just can't seem to handle it.
People with a lot of work assigned to them will report how stressed they are and how they are working too hard. When I ask them if they are working more than 40 hours a week they tell me "no". (We don't allow people to work unapproved overtime)
And then if you unassign all the work off them and just parcel out the issues they work the same amount of time and produce about the same amount of work and yet are not "overworked" to hear them tell it.