I have in the past categorised managers as "umbrellas" or "funnels" (and I guess there's an inbetween 'pipe').
The idea is that there is work the team should ideally not be doing (the 'shit'). That either needs to be rebuffed by the manager or handled another way (e.g. by stalling on it, doing it themselves, or making it someone else's problem).
Good managers keep the shit away from the team somehow. They're umbrellas.
Poor managers act as simple proxies. If anyone requests anything from them, they pass it on to someone on their team, without considering if they should or could block it (or handle it themselves). They're pipes.
Really bad managers act as intensifiers of the shit. e.g. by getting multiple people on the team duplicating effort on it. Or by being the sort of corporate busybody who goes and attracts more of it. Or by having slow, talky meetings about it which add time and friction. They're funnels.
One thing I found from my experience as a team lead (and which is somewhat touched on in this article), is that sometimes, because team members never get a whiff of all of the deflected things that never reached them, the more critical will sometimes get the opinion that you're doing nothing at all other than acting as a pipe.
I vividly recall one incident where I passed along an urgent UAT issue to a self-styled "hot shot" developer, who responded (with cc's) that he was entirely too busy, and that "if I had two hands I could do it myself".. since I was "obviously not busy as I hadn't had many commits lately". Meanwhile, I was two hours into a client call negotiating turning functionality requests into deadline shifts, was simultaneously trying to triage a production issue to see if it was our problem or the client's problem, and had 50+ emails from developers and clients just from that day still un-responded to.. yeah, silent evidence is a bitch.
I do have to agree, however, that moving back to development released a lot of stress for me. It's far less stressful thinking about whether or not I can get something done as opposed to wondering whether 15 other people are going to be able to get something done..
Yes, and I didn't mean to be rude to any team leads, sorry if it came across that way.
In any role, it's important to communicate the work you're doing (ideally without bragging), up and down the hierarchy. That is hard for an umbrella to do but possible. ("Just checking folks - is anyone keen to fill in 5-min increment timesheets?" (Groans) "Thought not")
Also, changes in manager offer a natural opportunity to compare, since you can detect a difference in the kind of work the team receives.
Sorry, the muse for my post was to vent tangential memories that it recalled moreso than anything you said that seemed particularly rude or short-sighted :)
What's the analogy for really, really bad managers who pass everything through, but not before completely misunderstanding the request and garbling it beyond recognition such that the developers deliver something completely different than what the customer actually wanted? These managers are also adept at completely misunderstanding their developers and telling clients outrageous things because they're just pretending to understand.
I have in the past categorised managers as "umbrellas" or "funnels" (and I guess there's an inbetween 'pipe').
The idea is that there is work the team should ideally not be doing (the 'shit'). That either needs to be rebuffed by the manager or handled another way (e.g. by stalling on it, doing it themselves, or making it someone else's problem).
Good managers keep the shit away from the team somehow. They're umbrellas.
Poor managers act as simple proxies. If anyone requests anything from them, they pass it on to someone on their team, without considering if they should or could block it (or handle it themselves). They're pipes.
Really bad managers act as intensifiers of the shit. e.g. by getting multiple people on the team duplicating effort on it. Or by being the sort of corporate busybody who goes and attracts more of it. Or by having slow, talky meetings about it which add time and friction. They're funnels.