I thought the same way in my first engineering management position. I worked really hard to build the team I always wanted to work on. We trusted each other, worked well together, performed at the top of teams in the company, it was great.
All that trust was destroyed overnight the first time I had to take a directive from executive management that required I put the interests of the business over the team. Basically, I was forced to lie and manipulate about the state of the company to keep the team in place until an acquisition deal could close. Because of my role I was involved in the details such that I knew several projects would be canceled and layoffs would be done.
After that, my team completely turned against me and called me a hypocrite. I couldn’t blame them. A few even speculated I was putting on some kind of show for them and playing some epic long game to win their trust just so I could use it to benefit myself. My best engineers left, and performance of the team subsequently dropped. Executive management blamed me for that too.
Basically, engineering management is a no win game and not worth the stress if you’re a good person. You will eventually, despite all efforts, work your way into an “us vs. them” situation. If you’ve previously preached trust and empathy and transparency or whatever feel good buzzwords dejour you’ll also look like a liar and hypocrite as I was. Anyone who has been in the role for a sufficiently long period will experience something similar to what I’m talking about. It’s only a matter of time.
After what happened, I could no longer stomach putting on another trust-fall-esque dog and pony show. Once you’ve been shown the ugly truths, it becomes hard to keep repeating the same rhetoric that you did before that oddly would make you into exactly the thing you tried so hard not to become in the first place. It really test your own mental image of yourself.
These days I try to project a more realistic attitude. I tell people I’ll do everything I can to be as transparent and open with everything but at the end of the day we’re still working for a company and business where the future is completely unpredictable and it’s in fact a lie to say there are no information asymmetry and cognitive dissonance between management and IC engineers.
Having a well run trusting team isn’t enough and can even make it more likely for one of these situations to occur.
At the end of the day, your direct reports view YOU as the company in a lot of ways. You are their main interface to the rest of the machine.
Just yesterday I had my boss say roughly "don't tell anyone I told you this, but ..." and proceeded to explain what's going on "upstairs".
If you're not willing to take a risk and trust them then you're not trustworthy and whinging on a forum about how unfair people are for not understanding your reasons for lying to them means you didn't learn anything from the exercise.
If I ask a question and my boss tells me "I can't talk about that because X, Y, or Z", I'm fine with it. We're all adults here, we all understand there can't be complete transparency. But you lied to them by omission about things that can affect their employment status. They don't trust you because you're not trustworthy.
Yup. I preface a statement about once a week by saying “there’s a difference between ‘I can’t say’ and ‘I don’t know.’ In this case, …”
It’s been useful. It helps to communicate without breaking bonds of confidentiality or trust.
It also helps people from reading too much into an off the cuff “I dunno” which is literally true. I do not in fact have knowledge of what you’re asking about. Maybe I should or shouldn’t but I can tell you I don’t know.
This is hollow advice. Your job as an engineering manager is to maintain the integrity of the team and deliver business results. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t preach trust and transparency if your definition is selective. By definition those things require authenticity and completeness.
Would you trust or accept as an answer someone who tells you “I can’t say” when asked a very direct question “Is my job safe? Should I start looking for another job?”
Especially when you’ve been ordered (and let’s face it, executives give orders, not suggestions when it comes to this stuff). They expect your loyalty is to them and they also have trust in you that will be violated if you don’t follow their “guidance”.
So what are your choices as an EM? No good ones, besides the obvious of don’t put yourself in that position if you like to think of yourself as a good person.
There are always going to be people on the team for whom the manager will never be good enough. This does not mean most reasonable people run around with such a negative view of everything.
Which, btw, is what I'm getting from your post. That you're one of those people.
* If you tell the team to keep their trust, you loose management's trust. The good thing is you can't be put in this position if management won't tell you. The bad thing is you won't have a job.
* If you don't tell the team, you loose their trust while keeping management's trust.
At the end of the day, most managers are limited by corporate context they work in. They can only be as trustworthy as they're allowed to be.
> They can only be as trustworthy as they're allowed to be.
This may be true, but it still means they're untrustworthy. We all are responsible for our own actions. Behaving in an untrustworthy fashion says something important about a person even if (or especially if) they're behaving that way to save their own skin.
But it sounds like you actually did lie to them, perhaps more than once. That's the problem.
I've been through acquisitions, I've been on teams where 90% of the team was culled and the manager knew about it months and months in advance. In none of those situations did I feel betrayal or like the manager was a liar. Do you know why? Because they never lied. Nothing in the article that I read indicates you need to tell your team everything you know, or that you need to paint a rosy red picture of things when that may not be the case.
Sorry but you don't get a pass for that because "the company told me to". You can manage through tough circumstances with integrity, or you can resign.
Otherwise it shows the priority is about you and your position, not your employees.
(Yes it does not always lead to monetary success, hence why I'm still working after 20 years..)
I hear you. You have honestly identified that the information asymmetry causes trust to be destroyed. It causes cognitive dissonance among ICs, leading to all problems.
> These days I try to project a more realistic attitude. I tell people I’ll do everything I can to be as transparent and open with everything but at the end of the day we’re still working for a company and business where the future is completely unpredictable and it’s in fact a lie to say there are no information asymmetry and cognitive dissonance between management and IC engineers. Having a well run trusting team isn’t enough and can even make it more likely for one of these situations to occur.
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This is in fact, a good way to build trust. But there's more to do in terms of being transparent and honest.
I'll give you an example. A lot of companies work like Amazon where they stack rank and pip people constantly. It causes a lot of grief among ICs. The low level EM really doesn't have a choice but to implement executive policies.
So are EMs just hapless? No. They can do a few things. When the pip/focus arrives, transparently and honestly say that you were targeted - from above. Let the blame flow upwards. Let the blame flow towards the people who are to be blamed.
No IC realistically trusts corporations any longer. But By letting the blame flow upwards and being transparent about what's cooking behind the scenes, you ARE building trust.
Your early and consistent transparency could be the way a father starts looking for another job early to feed their children. Your early and consistent transparency is how a student with a loan can prevent themselves from falling apart. It can help someone with complex immigration situations figure a way out before shit hits the wall. It can help a pregnant woman plan something towards pregnancy (especially health insurance).
Just be transparent about corporate nonsense and let the blame flow upwards. That is trustworthy.
> Basically, engineering management is a no win game and not worth the stress if you’re a good person
This is what soured me on being an EM.
I stumbled into the role over time and was very much team-focused over company-focused. Over time I realized that's not tenable. At the end of the day your first team (borrowing a term from 5 Dysfunctions of a Team [1]) needs to be such that you're more beholding to the company than your reports.
For me I couldn't handle the inner turmoil & stress that created. The times where one can't both do right by their reports *and* the business ate at me.
people are not stupid- they know a business needs to make money. middle managers who tries to hide this from their team, even with the best intention (ie, to "shield" them from the realities) are only fooling themselves and in the end will always look like hypocrites to their team, while also taking the blame from higher ups. there's no winning.
Most replies missing the forest for the trees in this anecdote by focusing on a lack of mutual trust.
Management is fundamentally the art of aligning your team’s motivations toward the company’s benefit. Inevitably, those things will be irreconcilable and as a manager, it’s your obligation to do what’s in the company’s interest.
If you can’t stomach that, you will be happier avoiding the manager track.
If anybody blamed me for not being fully transparent about such things, I would tell them "welcome to earth." I remember the project manager at a past company I worked for said "In here, it's all about the end user. Our lives don't matter." He was right. The markets don't give a crap about you or your life in the same way it doesn't give a crap about the life of your competitors which you put out of business.
Also, omission of facts is not lying. There is no obligation for you to keep them informed about everything that's happening in the business. They can read their employment contract.
Very cold and insensitive management style in my opinion.
If a project I was working on for multiple years and I believed in was shut down and my manager told me “welcome to earth” and “our lives don’t matter” I would one hundred percent leave.
Yes, the markets are cold and ruthless but it doesn’t mean you have to be.
> Lying by omission, also known as a continuing misrepresentation or quote mining, occurs when an important fact is left out in order to foster a misconception. Lying by omission includes the failure to correct pre-existing misconceptions. For example, when the seller of a car declares it has been serviced regularly, but does not mention that a fault was reported during the last service, the seller lies by omission. It may be compared to dissimulation. An omission is when a person tells most of the truth, but leaves out a few key facts that therefore, completely obscures the truth.
> The markets don't give a crap about you or your life in the same way it doesn't give a crap about the life of your competitors which you put out of business.
It's not just markets. You also don't care about the employees' psychological safety of, say, the toothpaste manufacturer you buy the toothpaste of. You just want toothpaste.
While I personally think it's important to have high integrity, and to work in a company where this is not undermined, ultimately it's about whether or not your company is doing something valuable enough for others to pay for. That's why your salary comes in every month.
All that trust was destroyed overnight the first time I had to take a directive from executive management that required I put the interests of the business over the team. Basically, I was forced to lie and manipulate about the state of the company to keep the team in place until an acquisition deal could close. Because of my role I was involved in the details such that I knew several projects would be canceled and layoffs would be done.
After that, my team completely turned against me and called me a hypocrite. I couldn’t blame them. A few even speculated I was putting on some kind of show for them and playing some epic long game to win their trust just so I could use it to benefit myself. My best engineers left, and performance of the team subsequently dropped. Executive management blamed me for that too.
Basically, engineering management is a no win game and not worth the stress if you’re a good person. You will eventually, despite all efforts, work your way into an “us vs. them” situation. If you’ve previously preached trust and empathy and transparency or whatever feel good buzzwords dejour you’ll also look like a liar and hypocrite as I was. Anyone who has been in the role for a sufficiently long period will experience something similar to what I’m talking about. It’s only a matter of time.
After what happened, I could no longer stomach putting on another trust-fall-esque dog and pony show. Once you’ve been shown the ugly truths, it becomes hard to keep repeating the same rhetoric that you did before that oddly would make you into exactly the thing you tried so hard not to become in the first place. It really test your own mental image of yourself.
These days I try to project a more realistic attitude. I tell people I’ll do everything I can to be as transparent and open with everything but at the end of the day we’re still working for a company and business where the future is completely unpredictable and it’s in fact a lie to say there are no information asymmetry and cognitive dissonance between management and IC engineers. Having a well run trusting team isn’t enough and can even make it more likely for one of these situations to occur.
At the end of the day, your direct reports view YOU as the company in a lot of ways. You are their main interface to the rest of the machine.