Had 1 on 1's with my manager for a whole year and everytime they told me how I was doing such a great job as compared to others in the team. There was no zero bad feedback. At the end of the year we had the yearly review and they praised me. However on the review document they placed me on PIP. It was such a shock because why tell me everyday how I am doing such a great job only to put me on PIP? Raised the issue with the skip and he admitted the reason they did that was because HR forced them, claiming not everyone can do well, someone must be on Pip, so they settled on me.

These days our 1 on 1's barely last 5 minutes, it's like we do it as a formality. She is even afraid of talking to me and the worst bit is that I cannot change teams because of the PIP. Plus it's a bad job market. never been this dammned

Communication is important, sure. But I don’t think it’s the most important skill for managers.

If communication was the key skill needed to be a great manager, it would imply that great managers could parachute in to run any old team, as long as they were able to communicate well.

But the best managers don’t just communicate their decisions; they need to exercise judgment and expertise to make good decisions in the first place. And making good decisions requires understanding your technology/product/team very well, which all go far beyond communication.

one of the most annoying things to me are managers who pull the "here's what I'm evaluating you on...now write up this self eval what you've done over the last year that fits these items and I'll copy paste it into your eval." Why even become a manager if you can't capture these yourself? A self evaluation should be a reflection of what a person gained over the past year and not an exercise to fill out a form for a manager to remind them of such.

As a manager I take notes throughout the year WITH my staff to capture what they worked on, how they grew, and all that stuff. If there are stumbles along the way we capture those too. It just makes it easier to then show the higher ups how consistently good a person is (or not in some cases). The self eval is less of an exercise in futility of reminding the boss what you did but an opportunity for staff to reflect on their growth.

I am now retired but I was a middle manager with three different Fortune 500 companies. What I experienced was the same at all three companies:

1. Senior management had no clue how to hire middle managers. Literally one hundred percent were selected as a promotional reward to the best performing employee. Almost always a person who had no prior management experience. And there was no training.

2. Senior management demanded obedience and loyalty. If there were performance issues, they wanted the person fired. If too many people were fired, then that was the middle manager's fault. In the end, if you didn't have people on performance plans, you weren't being tough enough. But if you ended up having turnover, you were going to be fired yourself.

I think advocating is impossible to be done by managers effectively. There're just so many dimensions involved and it's genuinely non-trivial. The best workplace is where the employees advocate for each other. Because everyone notices different things about others, but they often just keep it to themselves. They assume just because it is revealed to them it must be obvious to others as well. Not so.

And advocating for yourself is just doomed to fail. But that doesn't mean you don't have a voice. You do, for others; due to the nature of how advocating works.

I don't think this is what sets great managers apart. Communication is certainly necessary, but not sufficient. Empathy and care, technical relevance, decisiveness, honesty, ability to provide feedback, trust are all at least as important as communication.

At this point, I'd take someone somewhat capable and behaving like a human over most things.

I would say that clear and accurate communication is one qualification of being a good manager. It’s not the only qualification, and not enough to be great.