"I don't think you want a management structure that's just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work." -Mark Zuckerberg
11 replies (most recent on top)
I'm not a middle manager, and with your penchant for making false assumptions one can surmise that you wouldn't make a good one either. I do work for an excellent middle manager and have seen first hand how she manages an incredible amount of BS in such a way that shields my peers and I from a crushing amount of corporate BS. She's worth every penny so long as HY insists upon their approach.
So Elmo fanboi material is OK but posts critical of Elmo aren't.
This place is still a bunch of moderated-by-agenda BS.
Most are just copying and pasting others work. And only have permission to ask permission, no real authority.
Every level needs to have function which is mutually exclusive and cannot be redundant
@quy+1sXAVPco, if that's all you do, then middle managers don't deserve to get paid that much. Make sense?
Let's be clear. Most middle managers are just clueless BSers who would sell their own children to get ahead.
Cut the fat already.
What you don’t want 3 managers who have no idea what they are doing telling you what to do?
Get all these fat lazy useless middle managers off the stagecoach.
Lets have them swinging from trees in the next layoff.
Middle managers become very necessary when the executives think their job is to constantly task people with busy work BS that has no value. Dashboards, fending off constant threats of outsourcing/contracting, DEI, and similarly useless cr-p is the realm of the middle manager. They are necessary so long as we have failed leadership. After that? Maybe not, but I see no evidence of improvement in the executive ranks.
From: Elon Musk
To: All Tesla Staff
Subject: Communication Within Tesla
There are two schools of thought about how information should flow. By far the most common way is chain of command, which means that you always flow communication through your manager. The problem with this approach is that, while it enhances the power of the manager, it fails to serve the company.
To solve a problem quickly, two people in different depts should simply talk and make the right thing happen. Instead, people are forced to talk to their manager, who talks to their manager, who talks to the manager in the other dept, who talks to someone on his team. Then the info has to flow back the other way again. This is incredibly d-mb. Any manager who allows this to happen, let alone encourages it, will soon find themselves working at another company. No kidding.
Anyone at Tesla can and should email/talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company.
You can talk to your manager's manager without his permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another dept, you can talk to me, you can talk to anyone without anyone else's permission. Moreover, you should consider yourself obligated to do so until the right thing happens. The point here is to ensure that we execute ultra-fast and well. We obviously cannot compete with the big car companies in size, so we must do so with intelligence and agility.
One final point is that managers should work hard to ensure that they are not creating silos within the company that create an "us vs. them" mentality, or impede communication in any way. This is unfortunately a natural tendency and needs to be actively fought. How can it possibly help Tesla for depts to er--t barriers between themselves, or see their success as relative within the company instead of collective?
We are all in the same boat. Always view yourself as working for the good of the company and never your dept.