alt Hacker NewsIn my experience the bad managers are constantly trying to impress their bosses and curry the next promotion. They treat their reports like serfs who are obliged to burnish their image.
The best managers (very few) I've come across are like a mother bear. Protective of their team, running interference and pushing back on out of scope work, etc.
I've only ever had one manager whose calendar was viewable by his team. If he needed a meeting with you, he would ping by email with the subject and any supporting materials and asking you to block out the meeting time in his calendar. Talk about respecting your productive times.
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> trying to impress their bosses and curry the next promotion
There are companies where the entire upper echelon is like that. Full of career people that is only looking up to get a promotion and ignoring their responsibilities toward their teams.
One of the symptoms of this disease is that there is a total disconnect between leadership and the average employee. As everybody is looking up there is no connection or communication down.
And it is very difficult to fix. People at the top have that mindset. So, their expectation is that people below them will be tending all their desires and laughing their jokes. They do not understand promotions as a reward for performance but as a reward for personal loyalty.
The bigger the corporation, the easier this occurs. Small companies die when this happens, big monopolistic corporations get so much money that they can afford to sustain such an inefficient way of working. For big enough corporations it looks like "nobility" in a feudal system. Backstabbing, office politics, and sectarization dominates the environment.
Anecdotal, but every Engineering Manager I've had for the past 10 years has had a calendar I could see. One EM had anonymous event names on their calendar, but I think it might have been the default setting in AD.
> I've only ever had one manager whose calendar was viewable by his team.
Is this an American thing? Here in Europe, it seems common. How else can you schedule meetings if you can't see when everybody's free?
It is technically systemically called an unstable equilibrium. Admitting even one person in a company that places carreer above all else, forces either a full austing by the rest of the company, incurring a coordination cost, or at an individual level facing untennable competition as you operate at a severe disadvantage in self promotion.
This is why, besides maybe a small time window at some startups, management will always on average consist of ruthless looking after number one personality types.
While in a small business their goals migght still by nescessity align with those if the actual company, in a more corporate setting the relation between actual company performance and personal activity is so detached that even those taking into account alignment to a certain degree are handicapped relative to those going 100% self promotion.
The systemic stable equilibrium is therefor a shark tank of rutheless egoists trying to exploit anything and everyone they can to climb over each other and pull each other down.