Retaining respect when you move up to manager?

Subject: Retaining respect when you move up to manager?
From: Geoff Hart <Geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>
Date: Thu, 12 Aug 1999 09:23:58 -0400

Candace Bamber rightly pointed out that <<...it all depends
on how you define "doomed" and what you want out of your
career. If being a truly great techwriter is what you want to
do, then it *would* be a doom to be forced to manage. I'm
personally in the other camp - I want to be the best manager I
can be...>>

It's rather rare for anyone to have a job where they're able to
both manage (usually a full-time job) and still do any "useful"
production work (also usually a full-time job). I did it for a
year, and it darn near killed me. I'm more than happy to be
back in the trenches, and don't expect to give up the writing
and editing part of my job anytime soon. But:

<<...great managers are always respected by their staff...
Once you've decided someone is incompetent, it's amazing
how many reasons you can find to further rationalize your
assessment!>>

And that's the problem. You're either a manager or a writer;
you're unlikely to be both. Unless you're Superwoman, trying
to do two full-time jobs as well as the people who are only
doing one of the jobs will inevitably mean that you're doing
neither job to your full potential. In this case, it's your
managerial skill that will suffer most , and that means they'll
lose respect for you as a manager. Since you're new at the
job, and will take some years to learn to manage
"subconsciously", you'll have to devote most of your effort to
learning to manage; moreover, the new organisational
structure will take some time to stabilize enough for you to let
it run on its own, without constant monitoring and
interference. A key phrase my best-ever manager once taught
me: "Managers manage so their employees can do the work."
That's a cliche, but it's no less true for being a cliche.

<<I'm about to find out, I guess, whether it's possible to be
taken seriously by staff when you don't have their technical
knowledge. I am transitioning out of my role as doc lead and
into a new role as implementation project manager.>>

I think you're making a common mistake, and one that
reappears regularly on techwr-l: you're confusing tool
knowledge with writing skill. There's no question you won't
be the same wizard with Framemaker when Frame reaches
version 20 and you haven't worked with it since 1999; but
you'll still understand page layout and text hierarchies and
how to write terse, efficient, procedures. Odds are, you've
been doing this long enough to be at least on a par with your
new writers, and if you're keeping tabs on what they're doing
and how (so you can do your managerial best to get out of
the way and give them the support and tools they need to do
their work), your skills aren't going to go out of date anytime
soon (if ever).

Example in a different context: When I work with our
programmers, they listen to me with respect, even though I'm
not their supervisor and am technically below them in the
hierarchy, because I can talk to them in their own language.
That's because (a) I learned to program almost 20 years ago
(eek!) and (b) I still read enough about programming to have
a grasp of how programming skills and tools have evolved.
Now, after so many years of not having worked with
anything resembling a compiler, I probably couldn't program
anything much more complex than the archetypical "Hello,
World!" code. And I wouldn't recognize a modern integrated
development environment if one <ahem> bit me. But I can
still talk to them about looping, global variables, event loops,
data structures, and the like. The point is that some of the
fundamentals never change or change very slowly, whereas
the tools for applying those fundamentals change too fast for
you to keep up unless you use the tools for a living. And if
you keep up to date on the fundamentals, you'll know more
than enough to keep their respect in at least that part of your
job.

--Geoff Hart @8^{)} Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

"Perhaps there is something deep and profound behind all those sevens,
something just calling out for us to discover it. But I
suspect that it is only a pernicious, Pythagorean coincidence." George
Miller, "The Magical Number Seven" (1956)

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