The Uninspiring Manager - Matt Schellhas

This resource first appeared in issue #114 on 19 Mar 2022 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Other

Too much of what I imagined an excellent manager should be early in my career (not having really seen any) was focussed on personal characteristics. Such leaders should be engaging, people-persons… and inspiring.

It’s not that any of those things is bad, of course. Those are all traits and behaviours that can be put to good use as a manager or lead! But so can the default behaviours of quiet, attentive, carefully-thinks-before-speaking introverts. Or of keep-ticking-things-off-the-list achievers. Or of caring, emotionally intuitive, confidantes. Each has default behaviours that are extremely helpful in the right circumstance, and are downright liabilities in others.

Schellhas makes the case against needing to be inspiring to be a good manager. In his view, people mostly already want to do a good job, and what they need to accomplish that is: information; skill; and willpower.

Inspiration doesn’t help at all with the first two, and only temporarily for the third. A better use of energy than temporarily boosting willpower with some rah rah stuff, he says, would be to put effort into fixing willpower-sapping features of the job. Fixing flaky CI systems that make writing tests seem useless, or removing unnecessary reporting.

One thing Schellhas doesn’t call out that I’ll add - being able to communicate a clear vision for the team is, in my estimation, a requirement of the job. People need to know what they are aiming for, and how their work fits into that. And that vision might even be inspiring! But that inspiration best comes from the work and goals themselves, not from some charismatic leader.