From the post: "The middle manager that doesn't perform any useful work is a fun stereotype, but I also think it's a good target to aim for."

This is the kind of argument that makes people come up with middle manager stereotypes in the first place. In fact, the whole post is a great example of why middle manager stereotypes exist: it starts with a straw man argument and comes up with a "better alternative" that makes life easier for the manager, regardless of what the manager's reports really need.

I've seen this whole "I will empower you to do everything on your own" principle in action and it's exhausting. Especially when the word "empower" is a used as a euphemism for "have you take on additional responsibilities".

Look, boss, sometimes empowering me is just what I need, but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.

When I was a manager I had to take a training based on the book "The Coaching Habit." It left me really sour on the role, and explained some of the behavior of previous managers of mine that I least appreciated, specifically that their approach to management seemed to be to just get me to articulate and explain my problems over and over until I somehow rubber-ducked myself into solving them myself. When that didn't work, it transitioned to "so how can I help?", which would again eventually be turned around into "now you know how to go help yourself", no matter how direct the request was or how much it really needed management authority behind it.

I get that the point of the strategy is to help people with strong director-style personalities to listen and empathize a bit more, but in my experience it ended up being implemented as "my responsibility to my reports is to listen and nod."

One of my worst job experiences was when I depended on a colleague who wouldn't deliver. Any feedback or conversations with that colleague mostly resulted in tantrums and empty promises.

The lack of delivery severely harmed the services I provided to the company and to external users, ruined team morale, and was a huge source of stress.

My boss always turned the problem back on me, despite him also being my colleague's boss.

I tried everything I could for 18 months and had extensive documentation of all my attempts, sometimes working in parallel with my boss or using his recommendations.

Still, the problems persisted and every time I brought it up with my boss it was as if he was oblivious to the ongoing saga. I want to HR and over his head about it and he always fed me shit about "empowerment" and "growth."

Yeah, I was empowered to interview with other company's and grew into other new roles.

If you ever want to quickly destroy an organization, just separate the ability to control with the responsibility to control.

Burnout, infighting, and chaos will ensue.

>> but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.

Managers definitely need to contribute and this is a great way to do so, and also build credibility with your team. You don't get the fun or deep technical problems; that's not your job, but you can fulfill whatever transparent leadership is (I think?) by protecting your team from the noise (i.e. the shit umbrella) and contributing in a supporting role (the servant part). The hard / tiring thing is doing this consistently and repeatedly.

It was clear the author never actually performed servant leadership. If they did, they would be writing a different article about how much work they did to support their team instead of “how much lack of work can I get away with”. They sounded like an absent manager.

In my experience, leadership is the ability to guide and direct, power is the ability to influence and control. Leaders wield implicit power. Officers of the company wield explicit power.

I see management in the ideal case of finding leaders and equipping them with organizational authority. That's often not what happens, and when you fuck up, the tail wags the dog, and you give empty suits power they can't control. It's one of the reasons "MBA" managers often are perceived as shitty - they lack domain knowledge, have mediocre finance/accounting skills and are invested with lots of power.

As a senior leader in a tech org, my value is deep understanding of the business and the engineering landscape broadly, along with deep knowledge in a few verticals. My goal every day is to plan and articulate what we need to do, make sure my teams have what they need, and help "litigate" disputes and problems. "Agile" religious adherents, project and program managers are not leaders.

Engineers in general are terrible at organizing people, and tend to create little fiefdoms of straw bosses. When I look for directors and managers, I'm looking for the kids who played Civ and SimCity who aren't literalists.

For me the worst of this is organizations where employees have to write their own performance reviews. Eff that. You're the boss, you tell me how I'm doing. If there's one thing a manager should be accountable for it is the development and evaluation of the people the manager is responsible for.

It isn't the best written piece, but your snippet feels taken grossly out of context. The rest of it:

"A common response is to invent new work, ask for status reports, and add bureaucracy. A better response is to go back to working on technical problems. This keeps the manager’s skills fresh and gets them more respect from their reports. The manager should turn into a high-powered spare worker, rather than a papersshuffler."

While being an IC and a manager is quite challenging, I think it's worth discussing the various permutations of it (only one of which is what the author has written about). It can lead to all sorts of systems (round robin leadership within a team being probably one of the most experimental). But for a more conservative, traditional system, there are many examples, e.g. Apple leadership coming out of former ICs.

The biggest issue in the post is "creates direct links between supply and demand". One of the more important things to do as a manager is sit in hours of meetings so your reports can get a fifteen minute synopsis about the decisions made. And represent your reports in those meetings.

That entire paragraph is a string of poorly-articultated, cringeworthy sentences. In fact the whole article seems to be a series of strawmen set up on the basis of oddly specific and naive interpretations of management concepts like "servant leadership". There's basically nothing in here that I would agree with as a blanket statement without a lot of company and org-specific provisos.

All that said, to be charitable, I think what the author meant to express is that you don't want to make yourself a bottleneck as a manager, which is a common failure mode for newly converted IC to junior manager. Where he goes off the rails in the most tone-deaf way is describing that as "not doing useful work". As a manager your work is constantly observing what people are doing, staying the hell out of the way when things are working, and leaning in when things are not going well from a team and outcomes perspective. Doing that well is incredibly challenging and important work.

Yep, this is just a ploy to create a PMC that actually has no skill workers in it. You just shove MBAs, nepos, etc into these roles and just have them gobble up some managerial course which is often nothing but: delegate, CYA, and 'manage expectations.'

I dont think we need to go back to the old ideas of The Manager who is Above It All and Doesn't Get Their Hands Dirty. At least at middle levels.

>Look, boss, sometimes empowering me is just what I need, but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.

One of the reasons I really like my current manager is he spends a lot more time reminding us he can/offering to "take care of any blockers." His whole management style can be summed up as "Why is it blocked? Ok, leave it to me." Frankly I love it. If it's something we should take care of he's very specific about it too.

> it starts with a straw man argument ...

Perhaps they have, but there are also no shortage of middle managers that are adequately described by it. I worked for one for a few years.

Friendly reminder that management exists to get you to justify your expensive pay check. Every employer-employee relationship is adversarial. Adjust accordingly.