It's called "empire building" and is also part of the principal-agent problem where the manager is the agent and is assumed to have the firm's best interests in mind, but in reality doesn't. As a result, the principal (for example an owner) has to come up with methods to keep their management honest (example... tying most compensation to stock price - although I think this just makes management short sighted).
I was once in a meeting where an IT manager was told his group would have to handle the install for a piece of software that like 2 engineers used. The guy asked for 3 additional head count and my jaw dropped. If someone has ever seen the Avatar Airbender show, I was like Prince Zuko speaking up at his father's meeting. You see I was there as a courtesy and tried to point out that even one headcount seemed like a lot for something that should take less than a week of work for a single employee. At the time I didn't understand that the manager understood this, but was playing for more staff to build their own importance. I didn't understand the games they play. As part of the game...you always say your people are swamped no matter what...or refer to a massive backlog of work even though that backlog is all super low priority and existing employees can be reprioritized.
A common miscommunication in an R&D organization is asking another team to do a task, and getting the reply that they're willing to do the task if you provide headcount. You're not asking them to grow their team in perpetuity. You're asking them to reprioritize their existing work to accommodate one request.
(I know this isn't really a miscommunication. It's misaligned incentives leading to an exasperating kind of logrolling.)
There are not many options. Headcount might help (secondment, overtime, contractors, move from another team, new hire) or pushing other work back (or cancelling it, reducing scope) or saying no (find a workaround, go without it). I might of missed it but there is only so much you can do. A win win might be showing how doing X now is not worth it because event Y makes X obsolete or less valuable.
You can just have a queue. I’ve seen departments that basically function as an internal vendor of services to other departments. First in first out. Fixed schedule to expect turn around on most requests. No one complains. Seems quite pragmatic and fair.
Until they become the sole group that does X (Officially), and other groups realize that having them do a simple task related to X is way more hassles and months of wait time so each team just build their own unofficial X or try to circumvent it from day 0.
I'm not say this or that method is better just pointing out what I've seen so far through different companies. Not all work is the same priority but if you try to reprioritize then you can enter the endless quagmire of inter-department/group politics than involve a lot of useless meetings.
And a simple FIFO queue can be equally as problematic.
I have seen it where they are literally the sole provider of x. Cheaper than third party x vendor even because of a lack of profit margin charging internally. Still their terms are straightforward and there’s no bullshitting.
Only works if you have a lot of funds or your funding model isn’t broken. Where I work it’s a big dance around funding IT to build or connect stuff for Ops/Engineering. Because it’s such a chore there are lots of alternatives (ticketing, middleware, event management/collection system etc.) or even shadow IT.
FIFO is not an efficient way to prioritise work, though. Unless all work has about the same value and urgency, in which case, I guess, that sounds nice.
If you are an specialized department, insulated from the organizational goals, and circled by people that only speak in riddles, FIFO is the best you can do.
The context was in R and D at a large organization. Are some projects better funded/further along/seemingly more important to spearhead? Sure. But that was not how this department handled the workload. Dozens of people are coming to them a day for work done on hundreds of separate projects potentially. They can’t afford to triage this workload nor even can you really. Like I said, no one complained because despite FIFO turnaround was still faster (that afternoon if you got your job in during the morning potentially) and cheaper than any third party vendor.
This seems impossible to fix in a divisional org structure, where each division owns their P&L. If I'm in division A, and division B wants something from us that won't make a difference on my P&L (or will just add costs [headcount]), why would I be incentivized to help? If they pay for it though, that's a fee for service. Seems fine. It's all internal accounting anyway, so it's mostly fake.
That likely depends on how exactly your org works. In my company, usually cross-org funded HC is permanent. It is expected though that you do whatever they ask for with that HC for ~3-5 years.
> the manager is the agent and is assumed to have the firm's best interests in mind, but in reality doesn't.
Every manager I had at every major multinational company only had the interest of their own career progression in mind, not the company's, not their team's. You as an employee under them were just a means to their goal, nothing more. I naively assumed that making them look good and doing the overtime when needed to achieve their idiotic deadlines would also guarantee my ascension later, but boy was I gullible and wrong.
Going the extra mile for your boss might work out for you when everything goes smooth in the org in times of economic prosperity when there's room for everyone to move up, but when the org or economy went tits up, and things were being put on chopping block, those managers didn't hesitate to grab the only parachute for themselves and let their team sink or throw them under the bus to save themselves at the tune of "So Long and Thanks for all the Fish", so I learned the valuable lesson to not go the extra mile for any boss unless I have written guarantees of a reward.
It's the way the reward system is set up in these companies. Climb the ladder and kick it under you after you dangle the carrot in front of naive idiots to push you up that ladder for rewards they might never see. I think someone called it "the GE way".
From my perspective, I've had mostly good managers, in the sense that I've had multiple managers get fired over the years for being more interested in making sure the team had the tools and support that it needed than doing what the org at large wanted that wasn't possible.
To me, the best managers I've had have done a good job balancing what their team was able to do against what the org needed/wanted them to do. Sometimes that was pushing back against the org and doing the hard work of saying things weren't going to happen, and sometimes it was being clear and sympathetic about conveying difficult realities down to the team about what was needed. I've had managers convey things to me that ultimately led to me quitting and finding other work, but I hold them in high esteem because they clearly communicated what needed to be done to meet demands and I decided it wasn't for me and didn't hold it against me.
There are good managers. They're just also good peers who happen to be your manager and fulfill the role of a manager as best they can. Sometimes the system of the company rejects that, but that's also a sign you're maybe working somewhere that wants you to have no peers and no support, and maybe that should prompt some changes for you as an employee.
For years, all my managers were extremely bad to the point where I thought I was the problem. Until I had my first good manager.
My definition is: if my level of stress after a meeting with a manager is lower than before, then it is a good manager.
With bad managers, I carefully select what I share, often downright lie to them just to limit my stress level. I know a bad manager will throw me under the bus to save their ass, so I behave accordingly. I essentially manipulate them as much as I can: it's politics.
With a good manager, I share all I can, reach out when I need their help, and have their back when stuff goes south. It's team work.
As an IC, a good manager will shield you from the chaos, infighting, changing priorities and ever shifting timelines. They will ensure that you are aware of what’s going on, and have enough clarity to be able to proceed.
A bad manager will most likely try to help by exposing you to all of the above, and cause you get caught up in all of the confusion that comes with it.
I think it’s important to say that they also protect from rogue/drive by superstar IC’s. The ones who will come along and “fix” your problem, leaving a mess that nobody understands behind them that makes them look competent and your team incompetent, when in reality they’ve just half assed the job.
I’ve seen managers stand up for their teams and defend against those guys successfully.
It really reveals how clueless some managers are when they sing praises of the "rockstar" IC who from day 1 trash talked their coworkers and broke everything they touched before leaving after a few months to do the same somewhere else.
It shows how managers often just base their opinions on vibes given in meetings and don't care to understand anything they're managing.
Having worked in both very flat and very hierarchical organizations, I can tell you exactly what makes a good manager. Any manager, good or bad, is an information bottleneck. Managers have more organizational exposure and are thus a much bigger target for communication. The good ones filter out noise and help you prioritize your work.
The problem I have with less hierarchical organizations is that when you have only one layer of middle management, middle management gets squeezed between executives and individual contributors and tends to burn out. Even worse with zero layers, where individual contributors are expected to self-manage. Communication overhead ends up eating most of the productive hours of the day.
The empire-building problem with more hierarchical organizations is already well explored in this thread, but communications are also a problem. With too many layers, organizational alignment suffers, and silos develop even if the managers involved are uniformly well-intentioned.
There's an underappreciated upside to silos, however, which is that functional parts of the organization can end up insulated from dysfunctional ones. In flat organizations, dysfunction anywhere is dysfunction everywhere.
A disproportionately large group of the good managers I've had were ex-military, and their big traits were clarity about what we were doing and why, and that when the SHTF they would fight alongside the team, not against it. This wasn't exclusive to ex-military types, but if you are so cynical as to believe in no good managers you may want to look for places which employ this style.
I can imagine within gov contracting this same group of people are violently annoying instead, but I have never had the experience of that world.
I have had a good manager and here are some concrete examples. He thought it was important to deliver what we promised so he would work with us to get good estimates and would then bring those outside our team and argue for a reasonable time/scope. He would deflect stupid requests (add AI to our project that had no reason for it). In my four years working under him he got us two off cycle inflation adjustments by going to HR and telling them to retain good talent in software we need to pay more.
Is it possible for the manager to be given insufficient resources by their manager? Such as insufficient pay to hire sufficiently skilled people, or insufficient budget to hire sufficient people?
In a good organization, there will be several layers of people owning failures of different types. The low level manager can claim ownership of failure to sufficiently manage expectations, their manager can claim ownership of failure to prioritize properly, and a yet higher level leader can own failure to provide funding.
It's a responsibility of management to ensure that the work is understood and proper resources are negotiated for and allocated to perform it.
When a manager doesn't understand the scope of the work or has not made the case for adequate resources, to the project's jeopardy or their team's, it's typically referred to as mismanagement.
If this culture of under-serving itself for no apparent benefit except to appear too busy to be assigned more work extends elsewhere, it could be an organizational issue. If it's a SNAFU principle situation, management needs to be brought in alignment and trust with leadership, or leadership needs to be replaced. I've encountered both at the same place at the same time, and thankfully the board agreed.
Is it possible for the IC to be given insufficient resources by their PM? Such an insufficient pay or insufficient time or or? Whose fault is the failure then? My point is, we all work between lines and try to do our best, whether we are managers or ICs. A good manager will try to do their best just as you do, a bad one will throw all his troubles on your back, or blame you/the organization/moon phases for them.
It's about shielding the team from the consequences of failure. A good manager will say "If my team failed it's because I did not prepare them well enough/lead them well enough/manage expectations well enough". this is what ownership looks like. It is orthogonal to probability of failure.
I like this take a lot. This assumes that authority, competence and responsibility are aligned. However, this is often not the case in "modern" management as authority is spread very thin and responsibility is fluid (highly dependent on outcome).
Well I've had good managers but you're right in that they were peers more than emperors.
As for something concrete, I can think of managers fighting for my bonus allocations, fighting for comp days after a crunchy deadline, things like that. Estimation was earnest and not pushy. Problems were handled in a solution oriented way, not a blame game. You could argue that's just maintaining combat readiness but I'll take it.
I see here a lot of generalities about good managers helping you prioritize work, shielding you from chaos, bringing organization to the team, etc. These are necessary, but not sufficient. Any reasonably well-organized, good-intentioned, and less selfish person/manager can do that, but I wouldn't necessarily call them a good manager.
The measure of a good manager is their willingness to do something difficult for them for the benefit of their team or reports, such as saying no to various pressures from upper management, not jumping into latest trends pushed down to the teams, not saying yes to every new pivot, etc. Most people in a work situation would not do that, which is why there are no good managers.
I've had good managers. They always get outplayed and outmaneuvered and ultimately fired and replaced by sociopaths who spend all their time successfully playing politics and never doing anything significant.
I never said all managers all bad or that they should be removed and employees should self organize instead. Managers are needed so that ICs can focus on the work, the problem is that a lot of large companies, especially from traditional industries, tend to create some of the worst kinds of managers possible because their incentives are the worst.
I dream of a graduation speech where someone says all of this stuff, or even a proper uni course “avoiding corporate bullshit in a narcissistic world and how to sue your landlord” … except the donors wont like this!
> handle the install for a piece of software that like 2 engineers used.
Ah yes .. current prios remain in place, more context switching, operational ownership, unplanned fallout, holidays, meetings ...
cutting the pie in more pieces does not give you more pie ... people still seem to think that ...
I was once in a meeting where an IT manager was told his group would have to handle the install for a piece of software that like 2 engineers used. The guy asked for 3 additional head count and my jaw dropped. If someone has ever seen the Avatar Airbender show, I was like Prince Zuko speaking up at his father's meeting. You see I was there as a courtesy and tried to point out that even one headcount seemed like a lot for something that should take less than a week of work for a single employee. At the time I didn't understand that the manager understood this, but was playing for more staff to build their own importance. I didn't understand the games they play. As part of the game...you always say your people are swamped no matter what...or refer to a massive backlog of work even though that backlog is all super low priority and existing employees can be reprioritized.