Thankfully, I’ve got the evidence, after a decade of growing teams and shrinking them, of observing great people doing awful work and seeing previously poor performers excel to say that the line between being great at the work yourself and being a great manager of the people doing that work is largely disconnected. I will absolutely concede that much of the time, great people managers were good at, or at least performed, the jobs of their reports at one time or another. But that, my friends, is correlation, not causation. Just because most managers apply for and are promoted into their role by
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