The Manager

Are managers at work necessary? In a sense, yes and in another sense, I am not so sure. Obviously the board members and executives need people on the front lines to organize and execute their vision of however they think the company should operate, but past that, are they really all that necessary?


Here is my idea of what an ideal manager does. He/She attends meetings with the board and executives and figures out what direction they want to take the company and how their direct reports can help this process. He/She also figures out what work their direct reports need to do in order to make this happen. He/She assigns the work to the direct reports and that’s it. End of discussion. Just tell people what you want them to do, by when you want it done and leave them alone.

Think about this in it's purest sense, do we all NEED to be MANAGED?  Are we all that disorganized and listless, like a bunch of leaves fluttering in the wind without some person reigning us all in and keeping us on the right track, like a bunch of dumb horses that would just wonder off into the woods without someone managing us? 

Most of the time, unless you are operating some sort of a sweatshop, you’re dealing with adults. In many cases, college educated adults who all have bills to pay. So there is really no need to have someone standing over their shoulders making sure their assignments are getting done as though they are children who don’t want to do their math homework. Everyone knows that if you don’t get things done on time, on a consistent basis, you eventually get fired. Therefore, you can’t pay bills, and eventually you end up living under a bridge someplace with a bunch of other clowns who couldn’t get their jobs done properly. So that eliminates the need of management to constantly be up peoples asses about things they need to have done and when.

Then there is the whole idea of the employees needing someone to talk to about vacation time and benefits and problems at work etc. These were important aspects of management prior to the invention of the internet. Every single piece of clerical crap like this can now be easily handled within your typical online, employee documentation portal. And if things get so bad at work that employees have to voice their opinion to someone, there is always HR.

Now, employees need to have their performance reviewed once per year. This can still be done by the manager who assigns the work to them. Whoever gets the most work done, in an acceptable way, on time, gets the bigger raises. This keeps things simple. Since the personal relationship between the employee and the manager would be minimal at best, there isn’t much room for someone rubbing the manager the wrong way, or sleeping with him/her for a raise, or ass kissing or taking credit for other peoples work. This system is based off of simple math and should work for everyone. It is much more difficult to argue with the results of a review when it is based on hard mathematical performance figures. You either got all your work done on time or you didn’t.

Then there is the idea that managers must be there to motivate the help. Motivation is something that is extraordinarily overrated in our time. I have said this before, and I will say it again, nobody likes working for a “company” unless they have some sort of major, personal financial interest in whatever the company is doing. Over people’s lifetimes, they get better and better and pretending to be motivated to be there but that is all it is, people pretending to care. So enough with this “motivation” guff, just judge people based off of the work they get done and let’s stop diluting ourselves. Stop expecting people in their 30’s, whom you pay just barely enough money to get by on a monthly basis to have a deep seeded love affair with whatever sort of widget you are selling, it is a complete waste of time and money. Judge people on production, not attitude. Unless they are a complete basket case and making other employees uncomfortable, who cares? People work to make money for themselves and their families, not because they love some company.

Managers are often very concerned with people coming in on time. I firmly believe we are at a point with our technology where employees will eventually not ever have to all drive to a common building with the companies name on it. Just about everyone who works for a company already has the ability to work from home. It is better for the employees pocket book, the environment and morale overall. Even so, within my system, if an employee is consistently late and they still get their allotted work done, who cares? You hire people that you think will get some kind of work done, if it takes them 6 hours a day to do it, mission accomplished.

And then there are meetings. Managers love meetings. Here is my policy about meetings. Unless someone can prove that whatever change they want to hold a meeting about will net the company a gain in their quarterly revenue from the previous year, there is no meeting.

Managers have also grown very fond of the team building idea within a company. Everyone has to be a part of team as though we are all playing basketball. Again, very overrated, anyone who has ever worked on a corporate team understands that most of the time the members of the team have absolutely nothing to do with one another. I once worked on a Retail Loss Prevention team for two years and all I did was write Korn Shell Scripts for data automation purposes. Yet, I still had to attend meetings about employees stealing shit from stores and report to a manager who didn’t know how to turn his monitor off and on. Corporate “teams” are nothing more than groups of people who share a similar salary range on some organizational chart, nothing more.

There is the coaching and mentoring aspect of management that I also find to be extraordinarily overrated. Since I have started my professional career in IT, I have worked directly for at least 30 separate managers. Out of those thirty people, I only learned skills that I use today (rather successfully) from two of them. I learned customer service skills within the IT business that I utilize today from a guy I worked for indirectly in a helpdesk when I was 18 (TButt). Within the same company, I eventually wound up working for a guy who taught me my management strategy and honed my troubleshooting and systems software management skills as well as organization skills that I still use (Doug). And that’s it. Other than those two dudes, I would like to thank Matt Coan for everything I have today.

I have worked for other people who I enjoyed working with and I currently have no issues with those whom I work for but in the past, I am surprised some of the people who called themselves my managers could actually hit water when they pissed. I have worked for people who were arrested for embezzlement, fired for sexual harassment, literally lied their ways into jobs which they were eventually fired from, hired people just because they were hot, used drugs in company bathrooms, sold company assets on EBay, came to work drunk, watched porn at work and one guy even got fired for calling a Hispanic person something that you never call a Hispanic person.

The fact of the matter is, managers aren’t what they used to be in the 50s and 60s and 70s and even the 80s. Much of what they were relied upon to do can be replaced by a few lines of HTML. People need their jobs much more now than ever, so everyone gets how important it is to get things done well and on time. People don’t become managers anymore for being great leaders, they become managers because they were already a manager somewhere else or because they have been working somewhere for so long that they were going to quit, so someone made them a manager. People want to be managers because it looks nice on a resume, but do we need them? Do we need all of them? Are companies making more money than they could be if they diluted half their salaries to the people who actually do the work?