The problem with promoting people internally is that they get promoted with all the knowledge they had of their previous roles. That can certainly be a strength, but it’s also a weakness. 

The Senior Director I report to (we’re a few layers apart but ultimately) was once a software engineer, so he knows everything there is to know about that as it relates to our company. He also used to manage the networking team, though they now have a team lead of their own, who reports to the Senior Director. 

This Senior Director still seems to know literally everything about every project that is going on in our company. I don’t know how he has time for this, but he does. 

Unfortunately, that also means he’s in just about every project chat and feels the need to step in. On the plus side, his comments and fixes are usually helpful. On the minus side, he’s so fast to step in that it doesn’t give the people whose job it is to do the work time to actually do said work. 

One recent example: one of my software engineers hit a blocker and reported it in the group chat like he was supposed to. After fewer than five minutes, the Senior Director said he would try to figure it out. Now, I get why he did that: no one had replied to my engineer saying they’d look into the blocker. But that doesn’t mean the Senior Director is the one who should do it. If anything, he should tell the person who is responsible for the blocker to figure it out. He should only be stepping in if there is legitimately no one who can fix the problem. 

When I was a manager at my last job, the hardest thing for me to learn was that I wasn’t supposed to jump in and fix every problem; I was supposed to manage my team and let them do the work. This was different from my previous-to-that-one job, where I sometimes had to solve problems since I was the only person who could. It took me a year or so, but I eventually got into the management role the way my then-boss wanted me to be. And, technically, I think that’s what my current boss wants too — although his plan for me figuring things out doesn’t seem to be working.

For a mature company, we certainly do have some people with a startup mentality. In a startup, everyone is expected to get their hands dirty. But even if the Senior Director knows how to fix something, he should still be letting the people under him do their jobs. Otherwise what are said people going to do with their time? 

Write blog entries, I suppose.