Comment by legaltechPM
5 days ago
I kind of want to call BS on this. Sure, a bad manager can crush an employee's motivation and will to work. But when an employee is crushing it, I am not sure how much of that is really because the manager "empowered" the employee - unless you mean literally just allowing them to show up and work on something of value to the company?
This seems like a "glass half full/empty" question: The top quintile (or so) of developers need little but to be given a mission statement or overall goals and commit access, but some managers bog down those people with improper use of meetings, process that gets in the way, too much 'digital paperwork' (did you fill out all 15 fields of the Jira ticket? etc), etc.
The bottom quintile never get anything done and hopefully you have fired them or convinced them to stop being bottom-tier. For the rest, to accomplish good work they need (A) to give a shit, which often is directly under your influence: how much they think their boss appreciates and cares about them is important. (B) to know what their strengths and weaknesses are so that they can improve, and (C) to be allowed to focus on the important things and not be pulled in 100 directions, which a good manager constantly keeps aware of and constantly tries to tune. A bad manager fails to do A, B, and C, and as such their teams are less likely to accomplish things.
Heya, article author here! You're absolutely not wrong about high-performing employees, that's an entirely different area of performance management that gets ignored way too often. I've got a follow-up post coming Real Soon Now™ that hits on managing both high and low performers.