I agree with my Junior Colleague, Mr. RabidMonkey. A boss who has technical chops but no balls is useless.
As an old fart in the business, I've had a number of Managers who were "Senior Technicians with a promotion" who had no skills in Managing (or motivating) a Team. On the other hand, I've had Managers with only a moderate technical background.
I'd *much* rather work for the second kind, as they had people, listening, and management skills and were successful because of those "soft skills". They cared about achieving "results through others", they motivated and cared for a high-quality team. They delegated technical analyses to those who were capable and acted on recommendations. Yes, they knew enough to ask probing questions and ensure we'd done our homework... but then when *our* recommendations were accepted and implemented we had not only pride of ownership, but some real skin in the game...so very much did things right the first time. That's a job where you wake up in the morning and say "Great! I get to go to work!"
On the other (sigh!) hand, when working for a Senior Techie who is much more comfortable with technical topics than human topics, those decisions are made for us, without our input, and often without benefit of our (more detailed and current) analysis. Knee-jerk decisions made further up the food chain go unchallenged. And we end up doing dumba** things for duma** reasons and end up picking up the pieces (or feces) when it goes badly. Team morale and motivation is nonexistent. Training (except for the boss) is a luxury, career development is do-it-yourself, and coaching is unheard of. That's the job where you end up propping up a whole (leaderless) department from the bottom up... mornings are more like "Crap. I've gotta go to work, I guess."
Bring on a less-technical Boss who wants to lead a team... and count me IN. He'll need to accept that he needs to listen to us, learn from us, and lean on us. My side of the bargain is to never let him take a piece of crap up the chain of command and make him look like an idiot. Where do I sign up?
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I agree with my Junior Colleague, Mr. RabidMonkey. A boss who has technical chops but no balls is useless.
As an old fart in the business, I've had a number of Managers who were "Senior Technicians with a promotion" who had no skills in Managing (or motivating) a Team. On the other hand, I've had Managers with only a moderate technical background.
I'd *much* rather work for the second kind, as they had people, listening, and management skills and were successful because of those "soft skills". They cared about achieving "results through others", they motivated and cared for a high-quality team. They delegated technical analyses to those who were capable and acted on recommendations. Yes, they knew enough to ask probing questions and ensure we'd done our homework... but then when *our* recommendations were accepted and implemented we had not only pride of ownership, but some real skin in the game...so very much did things right the first time. That's a job where you wake up in the morning and say "Great! I get to go to work!"
On the other (sigh!) hand, when working for a Senior Techie who is much more comfortable with technical topics than human topics, those decisions are made for us, without our input, and often without benefit of our (more detailed and current) analysis. Knee-jerk decisions made further up the food chain go unchallenged. And we end up doing dumba** things for duma** reasons and end up picking up the pieces (or feces) when it goes badly. Team morale and motivation is nonexistent. Training (except for the boss) is a luxury, career development is do-it-yourself, and coaching is unheard of. That's the job where you end up propping up a whole (leaderless) department from the bottom up... mornings are more like "Crap. I've gotta go to work, I guess."
Bring on a less-technical Boss who wants to lead a team... and count me IN. He'll need to accept that he needs to listen to us, learn from us, and lean on us. My side of the bargain is to never let him take a piece of crap up the chain of command and make him look like an idiot. Where do I sign up?
Our Company blocked us too. Maybe just a ploy by the Security Administrators to block us until we have a Security Administrator Day?