What Your Manager Wants
The simple answer is, your manager wants the same things you do, as long as those things make money for the company. But the money matters more to them than it does to you, because the way managers are rewarded is different from the way you are. A manager is evaluated, at least in part, based on how much their group contributes to the company’s bottom line.
Companies exist to make money. In the end, that’s all they care about. Managers face this fact all the time, and the higher level the manager, the more they focus on what the company needs.
That means that even at the low levels of management that professionals normally encounter, the manager’s job is different from your job, so their priorities and incentives are different from yours as well, and the biggest difference comes down to the emphasis on money.
The movie Office Space tries to express this fact humorously by showing a banner across the work area that reads, “Is This Good for the Company?” in bold letters. Everything else is secondary.
What to Watch: When Money Is Tight | |
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When times are good, money flows into the company, and sometimes this shows up in added benefits, like the latest equipment, access to training, bringing in industry leaders to speak on the latest technologies, and maybe even better food in the cafeteria. A company is a consumer of resources, however, and if those resources are not available, it will consume itself. Watch what happens when times get difficult. Suddenly all those perks you’ve come to expect go away, there is a search for expenses that can be eliminated, and ultimately people start losing their jobs. Hard economic times are a crisis for a company, and it will react accordingly. |
Incidentally, the emphasis on money is one reason professionals promoted into management are often unhappy. As technical people, they care about their profession more than anything, and they were so good at it that they were promoted into a job with very different priorities. Suddenly they have to care about financial matters that always felt secondary before, and that’s a hard adjustment for many new managers to make. This topic will be revisited in Chapter 3, Creating Constructive Loyalty.
The emphasis on money grows more pronounced as you deal with managers higher up in the chain of command. The overlap between what managers want and what the company wants grows more pronounced, until you reach the executive level, at which point they are often indistinguishable.
A friend of mine is a retired senior vice president at a Fortune 50 company. One day an engineering problem escalated up to his level. He convened a meeting of all the relevant personnel, including his direct reports, the technical people in charge of the problematic system, and anyone else who might be affected. That meeting had one goal: figuring out how much money was required to buy their way out of the problem. Would they have to pay a fine? Contract out to another firm? Pay for additional equipment or other hardware? Every decision came down to costs.
After the meeting, the technical people approached him and offered to describe the actual details of the problem. Because this is an engineering company that promoted from within, he too had an engineering background and enjoyed those discussions. But the important point is that those discussions were always secondary to the decisions about money.
It’s not that professionals don’t want their employers to make money. Everyone would like to see that happen. It’s just that managers care more, partly because they are evaluated and rewarded based on the financial performance of their groups, and partly because they are not as directly involved in the details of the technical jobs. So there’s an overlap in what both sides want, but it’s not complete. Sooner or later there will be conflict.
In the complicated world of employees and managers, there is an added complication: your boss is probably not very good at their job, and both of you know it. If you think about it, there’s a clear reason for that, which is the subject of the next section.