I see only one quality separating good and bad managers - their confidence in their own competence. Bad managers seem to feel they lucked out in getting their job. Like it might be "found out" that they are not really qualified. Good managers are at ease in their job. They usually seem to feel the company is lucky to have them, as with some effort they could get into a slightly better job. They often do, especially after static happens at a company.
A boss goes to his own boss, and that boss gives him an unrealistic goal to be accomplished in a short time frame. The good boss remains calm and pushes back. The bad boss walks out of the meeting full of anxiety and tells his team to accomplish the impossible, quickly. This might work the first few times, but soon the competent people on the team will leave.
One of the quirks here is management is usually better off in the long run hiring bosses who will say no to them once in a while. Bosses who always say yes are more pleasant in the short term to their superiors, but they will be better off in the long term to have someone who pushes back on requests which are too unreasonable. We see blog posts here every day about how hard it is to find good engineers. Incompetent bosses who are dripping with anxiety after a meeting with their own boss, relaying marching orders for yet another death march project - good engineers do not remain under such people very long, especially in job markets like the current one.
> Bosses who always say yes are more pleasant in the short term to their superiors, but they will be better off in the long term to have someone who pushes back on requests which are too unreasonable.
This applies to engineers equally so. The ability to manage expectations is one of the most important skills one can possess. It also happens to be a particularly difficult skill to master, which is why, for example, just about every developer's first freelance project is a fixed bid scope creep nightmare that they end of walking away from or making $5/hour.
As a manager who has not problem pushing back and saying no to "the bosses", I can assure you it has fuck all to do with confidence in my own competence...
It's a matter of responsibility and ethics. No matter how much pressure there is on me and how unreasonable the request are, it's my responsibility to deal with it. If I would just shovel that shit over the wall and pass it on to my team, my presence would be 80% pointless. (Also, my team would bugger off a.s.a.p.)
So no, I'm not confident in my own competence. I feel the anxiety if the owners tell we are screwed if we don't accomplish X in Y amount of time. I sometimes say yes to things I should in hindsight have said no to, but it also happens the other way around. Management is almost always working of an incomplete set of data, a.k.a. guesswork.
But I have a job to do, and I wouldn't be doing it if I just made it someone else's problem, and nobody would believe or trust me if I didn't seem confident.
So that's pretty much the only thing I'm fully confident of: the ability to make people thing what I know what the fuck I'm doing. That is management competence #1, and unless you're a sociopath, it's not a trivial skill. Especially if you actually understand the field in which you work.
I totally disagree with this. I think there's probably a bell curve relating confidence in your own abilities to actual performance.
At one end, you have people who think they just lucked out, and they'll have poor performance because they'll practice cargo-cult management: doing things just because that's what the management books say you should do.
At the other end, you'll have people who are supremely confident in their own abilities, but their hubris will keep them from entertaining valid objections from other people. They'll be blinded by their sureness that the path they picked is the correct one.
You want people who are confident enough to know what they don't know and able to ask other people for help in those areas. These people will be able to lead a team by letting the people in the team know that they're important in the decision-making process.
A boss goes to his own boss, and that boss gives him an unrealistic goal to be accomplished in a short time frame. The good boss remains calm and pushes back. The bad boss walks out of the meeting full of anxiety and tells his team to accomplish the impossible, quickly. This might work the first few times, but soon the competent people on the team will leave.
One of the quirks here is management is usually better off in the long run hiring bosses who will say no to them once in a while. Bosses who always say yes are more pleasant in the short term to their superiors, but they will be better off in the long term to have someone who pushes back on requests which are too unreasonable. We see blog posts here every day about how hard it is to find good engineers. Incompetent bosses who are dripping with anxiety after a meeting with their own boss, relaying marching orders for yet another death march project - good engineers do not remain under such people very long, especially in job markets like the current one.