What makes a good manager?

SueC_2

scheming_gypsy wrote: »

and that's the point I'm making, if he was an HR Director and applied for an IT Director's job he would be able to manage the staff effectively.
A few years ago we had an absolute ball bag who was a project manager but managed to get the Senior IT Managers job yet he knew absolutely nothing. He had no idea of what he was supposed to be managing; so when we needed new hardware (a SAN or NAS etc) he didn't know what they were. As he didn't know what they were he didn't have the ability to put a business case forward to the directors. And as he knew nothing about IT he couldn't manage anybody; we'd do the right thing and he'd complain because it wasn't what he thought was right

And that couldn't possibly have been that he was simply a bad manager as opposed to someone who didn't know about IT?

I don't think there is anything wrong with having less technical knowledge than the people who report to you, so long as you recognise that fact and depend on them to provide you with accurate information. Worked correctly, it makes you a better manager, not a worse one, as it builds an environment of mutual dependency where everyone has an important role to play, as opposed to a dictatorship where the manager knows everything and simply relies on their team to simply do what they're told.

scheming_gypsy

RobertoMoir wrote: »

To be fair to me, that might be the point you were trying to make but in the one I actually replied to you said that to manage a job you had to be able to do it.

Which is the problem with forums, things don't come over as they're meant. I wasn't meaning that they need to be able to 'do' the actual job you're doing.. but as in to know the industry that they're managing.

Though I do agree with this. There's a balance between specific area knowledge and generic management knowledge needed to manage an area and it sounds like the manager in your example above had the wrong balance. Equally, an absolute IT genius with no management talent or training and poor skills at things like empathy and so-on would make an equally poor manager due to their lack of management skills, despite being able to do the jobs of their team members.

He didn't really have the wrong balance, he just had the ability to make the directors think he knew what he was talking about. Which was probably because he knew that little his jabbering probably sounded very technical to them (he reported to the Finance Director, so there was no IT Director to realise he was clueless)

SueC wrote: »

And that couldn't possibly have been that he was simply a bad manager as opposed to someone who didn't know about IT?

no, he simply was a cretin with no IT knowledge, as well as being a bad manager... The best way to describe him would be; somebody who was bullied at school and got a job in management so he could bully people yet failed at that.

I don't think there is anything wrong with having less technical knowledge than the people who report to you, so long as you recognise that fact and depend on them to provide you with accurate information. Worked correctly, it makes you a better manager, not a worse one, as it builds an environment of mutual dependency where everyone has an important role to play, as opposed to a dictatorship where the manager knows everything and simply relies on their team to simply do what they're told.

I don't disagree with that, but you do need knowledge in the field you're managing in which is what I think makes a manager - although my original post has been taken too literally.

DCFC79

A manager definitely needs to know about the department, one of my past employers employed a uni grad as a checkout manager and she had zero experience of retail and how checkouts worked and she was a failure.