<story><title>Managers, stop distracting employees</title><url>https://hbr.org/2023/01/managers-stop-distracting-your-employees</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>onion2k</author><text>Something to note is that there are &lt;i&gt;two&lt;/i&gt; important variables in the second story. The first, as you say, is that you had a different manager. The second is that &lt;i&gt;you&lt;/i&gt; had more experience. In every situation a manager is only ever as effective as the information they have, and that comes from how good their team is at communicating with them. I&amp;#x27;d hazard a guess that you were better at telling your manager what they needed by the time the second event happened.&lt;p&gt;If the team has good comms, and experience of both working and communicating updates to their manager regularly, and the skills to explain things in ways people understand, generally speaking you find the manager needs to check in less often. They can trust you to raise things promptly, to ask for them to do things for you, and that when you&amp;#x27;re quiet it&amp;#x27;s because you&amp;#x27;re busy rather than stuck. I find that teams who complain about their manager very often don&amp;#x27;t trust their manager and vice versa. Building up that trust by getting both sides to work on improving comms fixes a ton of problems.</text></item><item><author>Waterluvian</author><text>I remember an experience many moons ago where there was some &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;emergency&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt; situation and our manager was just insufferable. Every 40-60 mins wanting to check with the ~3 engineers working on the issue for an update or to offer futile advice. I could palpably feel their anxiety and helplessness. I remember it reminding me of the trope of a parent in an ER on a hospital TV show. Obviously there was a lot of pressure put on them from above. I am sympathetic.&lt;p&gt;Years later, a very similar experience happened with a different manager. But they handled it very differently. They called a meeting, led us through understanding the situation and us working out what the solution should be. They got our feedback on how long we thought it would take and then said they&amp;#x27;d come by for an update in half that time. And that was it.  I was so impressed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>idopmstuff</author><text>While I do think the manager bears the vast majority of the responsibility in situations like these, the reality is that you&amp;#x27;re right, and oftentimes managers do a bad job because they&amp;#x27;re getting pressured from above to communicate and don&amp;#x27;t know what to do.&lt;p&gt;You can often get them on your side by giving them a plan that makes them feel like they&amp;#x27;re in control (again, totally not your responsibility! But better than dealing with them being obnoxious constantly). If they ask for an update and you say, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t know what&amp;#x27;s wrong, but we&amp;#x27;re looking into it&amp;quot; then they don&amp;#x27;t know what to do. If you tell them &amp;quot;I don&amp;#x27;t know what&amp;#x27;s wrong, but right now we&amp;#x27;re investigating x because we suspect that&amp;#x27;s the source of the issue. I&amp;#x27;m checking the logs and other engineer is trying to recreate the issue in a clean environment. Unfortunately I don&amp;#x27;t have a good answer as to how long it&amp;#x27;ll take, but we&amp;#x27;ll update you either when we&amp;#x27;ve learned something useful or in two hours, whichever is sooner,&amp;quot; then they have something to say to the people above them and they understand when they&amp;#x27;ll get an update, so they don&amp;#x27;t need to bother you.&lt;p&gt;A helpless manager is like a child - if left alone, they&amp;#x27;ll just shout and cause problems. What they really need is direction and structure.</text></comment>
<story><title>Managers, stop distracting employees</title><url>https://hbr.org/2023/01/managers-stop-distracting-your-employees</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>onion2k</author><text>Something to note is that there are &lt;i&gt;two&lt;/i&gt; important variables in the second story. The first, as you say, is that you had a different manager. The second is that &lt;i&gt;you&lt;/i&gt; had more experience. In every situation a manager is only ever as effective as the information they have, and that comes from how good their team is at communicating with them. I&amp;#x27;d hazard a guess that you were better at telling your manager what they needed by the time the second event happened.&lt;p&gt;If the team has good comms, and experience of both working and communicating updates to their manager regularly, and the skills to explain things in ways people understand, generally speaking you find the manager needs to check in less often. They can trust you to raise things promptly, to ask for them to do things for you, and that when you&amp;#x27;re quiet it&amp;#x27;s because you&amp;#x27;re busy rather than stuck. I find that teams who complain about their manager very often don&amp;#x27;t trust their manager and vice versa. Building up that trust by getting both sides to work on improving comms fixes a ton of problems.</text></item><item><author>Waterluvian</author><text>I remember an experience many moons ago where there was some &lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;emergency&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt; situation and our manager was just insufferable. Every 40-60 mins wanting to check with the ~3 engineers working on the issue for an update or to offer futile advice. I could palpably feel their anxiety and helplessness. I remember it reminding me of the trope of a parent in an ER on a hospital TV show. Obviously there was a lot of pressure put on them from above. I am sympathetic.&lt;p&gt;Years later, a very similar experience happened with a different manager. But they handled it very differently. They called a meeting, led us through understanding the situation and us working out what the solution should be. They got our feedback on how long we thought it would take and then said they&amp;#x27;d come by for an update in half that time. And that was it.  I was so impressed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tremon</author><text>&lt;i&gt;that comes from how good their team is at communicating with them&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Communication is a two-way street. Proactively calling a meeting with all those involved to understand the situation and then letting the team get on with their work is 100% a managerial skill, not a function of the seniority of the engineers.</text></comment>