The Importance of Engineering Managers

What happened when a company set out to disprove the importance of managers

The study of management has been ongoing since the dawn of the industrial age when the role of managers became important for output and quality. One of the earliest systematic studies of management was conducted by Frederick Taylor through time and motion studies and resulted in his 1909 book, The Principles of Scientific Management. A contrasting approach was Henri Fayol’s administrative management theory. Fayol was an engineer who worked his way up to become manager of the Compagnie de Commentry-Fourchambault-Decazeville mining company in France and helped the struggling firm prosper. Administrative management theory is an approach to management and increasing productivity by emphasizing organizational structure and human behavior, grounded in the five functions: planning, organizing, command, coordination, and control. Fayol wrote, "When I assumed the responsibility for the restoration of Decazeville, I did not rely on my technical superiority... I relied on my ability as an organizer [and my] skill in handling men." 

Throughout my career I have often been reminded about the Peter principle. This concept, developed by Laurence J. Peter, observes that employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent. The reason is that skills to perform one job do not necessarily translate to another. There of course have been innumerable studies and theories put forward about effective and ineffective management including Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman’s book First, Break All the Rules based on Gallup's multi-decade, multi-company study that included over 80,000 managers. The key findings from this study being that the quality of a manager is the most crucial factor in determining an employee's performance and engagement at work. Gallup has continued to study performance at hundreds of companies and measured the engagement of 27 million employees. Through their surveys, they have discovered links between employee engagement at the business-unit level and performance indicators such as customer ratings; higher profitability, productivity, and quality. Gallup reported in 2012 that only 30% of U.S. employees are engaged at work and that managers account for 70% of the variance in engagement. 

After well over a century of study on management, it seems odd that a large tech firm would set out to prove that managers weren’t important but that’s what Google did with Project Oxygen. Researchers at Google hypothesized that managers were, at best, a necessary evil, and at worst, a layer of bureaucracy. The team based the quality of a manager on their manager performance ratings and manager feedback from Google’s annual employee survey. The data quickly revealed that managers actually did matter as teams with higher quality managers were happier and more productive. Google’s researchers pivoted to study the next question, if managers do matter, what are the common behaviors of their very best managers? They came up with a list of ten attributes and rolled those out to help managers improve. Laszlo Bock (at the time Google's VP of people operations) told The New York Times, "We were able to have a statistically significant improvement in manager quality for 75 percent of our worst-performing managers." The list includes: be a good coach, empower teams don’t micromanage, create an inclusive environment, have a clear vision, have expertise to advise the team, etc. 

Google isn’t the only company to contemplate whether or not managers were important enough to employ. A number of other companies have tried the Holacracy methodology of "management without managers", including Zappos, Medium, and Github. This isn’t surprising when surveys like the one from Chartered Management Institute found 49% of employees would rather take a pay cut if it meant working with a better manager. Steve Denning, a management scholar and former World Bank executive, warned against viewing Holacracy as a panacea. He claimed that instead of removing hierarchy, decisions are funneled down from circle to circle in a clear hierarchy. Denning also argued that the voice of the customer was missing from the Holacracy model. Thus, Holacracy would not work well in an organization that did not already have agility and passion for the customer. Some companies like Medium, found Denning’s warnings to be true and dropped Holacracy. Andy Doyle, the head of operations at Medium stated, “it was difficult to coordinate efforts at scale.” Using self-management across an entire enterprise to determine what should be done, who should do it, and how people will be rewarded is hard, uncertain work, and in many environments it won’t pay off.

Having worked for managers and been a manager for decades, I think good managers help teams a lot, and bad managers hurt teams even more. Teams with bad managers almost cease to produce any work as they spend so much of their time arguing with the manager, complaining about the manager, fretting over the manager, etc. As a manager of managers, which usually includes senior managers, directors, vice presidents, and c-level executives, you need great managers to lead your teams but you can’t afford the bad ones. This means you need to stay close to your teams, especially when you have a new manager in place. If they are not working out, act quickly to remedy the situation. At Google this involved helping underperforming managers gain the skills they needed. At other companies this means letting the manager go quickly. Whether you should have a “hire fast/fire fast” approach or more methodical approach that puts you heavily invested in the success of the new hire is the topic for a separate article. Either way you need to have a well thought out playbook that almost always involves a 30-60-90 day review period to ensure you are on top of how the new manager is performing. Leverage skip level meetings and employee engagement surveys as well. 

The more challenging situation is when you promote someone internally. Since we know the person we almost never employ our new hire monitoring playbook but we should. Let me remind you of the Peter principle that we covered earlier. Lots of engineers or product managers who are performing wonderfully at one level can get talked into taking on management responsibilities without having those skills. 

The role of managers, particularly engineering managers, cannot be understated in the modern workplace. Various studies, from early management theories to Google's Project Oxygen, overwhelmingly corroborate the notion that effective management is key to organizational success. While there's no one-size-fits-all approach to management, the essence lies in nurturing talent, steering teams towards clear objectives, and fostering an environment of mutual respect and collaboration. The detrimental impact of poor management can be equally monumental, often leading to disengagement, decreased productivity, and even attrition.

As we navigate the complexities of the business landscape, organizations need to place a premium on managerial competence. This means investing in continuous development programs for managers and ensuring that transitions into managerial roles are met with the right training and evaluation metrics. Whether it's through timely feedback mechanisms like 30-60-90 day reviews or employee engagement surveys, the emphasis should always be on raising the bar for management effectiveness. In the end, a strong manager doesn't just lead a team but contributes to building an organizational culture where excellence is not just expected but engrained.