Yesterday I had a conversation with a guy who is working at a place where I was a development manager 5 years ago and it has really left me with something to ponder.
The background story is that the dev manager in the company, EDC, had been promoted to be IT Director and because we had talked before he called me and asked if I wanted to take over the dev manager position of a department of 16 developers (No QA, but how I handled that is a different story!). Anyways, I quickly found some gigantic problems in the infrastructure, architecture and people there, so I made a plan which I presented to my boss and the board and after only a little bit of discussion I got the go to execute on the plan.
Together with a few core guys and a few new hires I made, we started out on a huge refactoring of the systems this company used and things progressed. We changed the release procedures, the processes and the infrastructure, and as I retreated from actually doing much coding (managers need to get out of that as soon as they can), my boss gave me the dubious honorary title as “War Minister” in the board. My task there was to challenge and keep the chairman at bay, because no one else dared having discussions with him.
Well, this chairman was, and is, a very successful, charismatic man, who has been an extremely strong leader in his part of the company, which left him with a power that crippled people around him. Personally I don’t really care that much about perceived power, I just want to do things right, so I didn’t mind arguing with him, which led us to take over board meetings with heated discussions, which luckily often led in the direction I wanted to. The short lesson here is that the man was intelligent and just needed a strong adversary to bounce ball with. We were better off with each other because of it.
And so it went, the restructuring moved on, things settled and I became bored. The plan we had would eventually last 5 years, but since it was on track, I didn’t really have to do much about it. My main work became risk assessment of new features and often saying no to some people wanting a hack because of “business opportunities”, which also gets tiresome in the long run. I didn’t really see much need for me anymore and I couldn’t justify my salary, so I moved on.
Back to yesterday. This guy is a friend of mine and he rants about the state of the organization. No one takes responsibility, because the chairman’s orders are being followed strictly throughout the marketing and IT parts of the company. No one really feels empowered and so they become inane slaves who executes on work they know is wrong. My friend even directly told his boss there (who was a project manager lead when I was there) that he would not want to become any form of manager in an organization like that, because no one has balls.
And this all makes me sad. Do I really have to stick around doing so very little actual work to see things in the right direction? Should I expect things to fall apart just because I leave? Where did I go wrong?
One problem I might consider is that I did not have a suitable second in command. One who could take over from me. But in this very example I believed the project manager lead had the right attitude and could see the execution through the processes and tools I had started. At the time I also had a very strong, young team lead which I had hoped could be the driver of the technical changes, but alas, he ended up being railroaded and left 1 year later.
Was the plan I made not good enough? No, they stuck to it with minor changes. 5 years after I started, 3 years after I left, they delivered the last part of the restructuring.
Sadly the same thing happened in Scanjour, the company I left to join Unity. The guy who hired me there was a boss of mine in a previous time and he assembled a very, very strong management team of 5 people. For various reasons he decided to leave, and soon after 2 of the other management left as well, leaving it to me and the program manager lead to run the department for a long period. We did so with what we consider good success, we were strained, but we saw improvements all the time. Then senior management decided that we needed a director, we did not have influence on which it would be and we were not that happy with the new boss. Eventually by some weird coincidence, I and the program manager lead decided to quit on the same day. And since then the department and my QA team has been in decline. So that time the detour started with my boss leaving.
I’m not sure I’ve actually come to much of a conclusion while writing this. It is a bit of a horror for me that my mere presence is needed for my department to thrive. I consider it a personal failure that I have to be there, because my ultimate achievement must be to be superfluous and have a self-sufficient executing team. Maybe I did achieve that internally in my departments, but I didn’t prepare them properly for the onslaught of surrounding politics, which had a big effect in both EDC and Scanjour and maybe this handling of the surrounding is what I have to accept is my primary task and achievement, but my pride will always be with the work the employees in the department is doing.
To answer my own question: Yes, that manager is really needed. If things are going well in his department, and you can’t really understand why, assume that he is doing something intangibly right. He is needed.
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