Size Does Matter

There are plenty of jokes I will spare you about size and how it matters in situations where the specifics are left to the imagination. But there is a reason for the headline here, and it is concretely applicable to office, desk and ego sizes.

You have to realize first of all that am I firm believer in differentiating great people by providing them with disproportionate rewards. It helps motivate and retain effective talent, and it encourages people who are not as successful as they want to be to find a different career. When it comes to offices, anyone can get stoked about having superior digs to work from; a nice desk and a big office makes a promotion feel “real” and it’s usually fairly cheap to provide that reward.

But big desks and corner offices are not good rewards for supervisory managers. Nothing says “I am superior to you” better than being in a separate place, behind a door, with an enthroning desk configuration. It makes even simple questions seem like an income tax audit – you have to prepare, disturb someone who must be doing far more important things, secure a judgment and desperately try not to ever bring up the same point again for clarification.

Yes, of course, some managers have that kind of job – people in sensitive financial roles, or human resources, or sales. Those are functional offices – they provide privacy and security. Some technical people need to work in quiet, dark solitude; they too get my thumbs-up on the office upgrade if it means they provide great performance in return.

But when it comes to a great manager over technical operations that truly serves the team he or she leads, my suggestion is that that person should be in the middle of the fray. That’s where information can be shared at a moment’s notice, casually overheard comments can be leveraged for project optimization, the pulse of progress is immediately evident, and, most of all, people will feel rewarded because of the manager’s presence.

That last statement cannot be read too lightly. If people are willing followers of their leader, taking that leader away will make them feel worse. It will immediately reduce the value of the leader and increase the intangible cost of the inexpensive reward that was intended for him or her.

I have had several experiences that concretely agree with all of this rhetoric. The best hardware engineering manager I know has always elected to work in the center of the action. A capable senior manager who replaced me in a role I once held moved himself to a corner office as soon as he could and immediately lost control of his team, and his job. My own favorite desk ever (because my team liked it) was when I moved into the receptionist desk in the middle of the floor of people I was leading. Two of the most effective “take over a mess and fix it” leaders that I know do so by immediately converting offices into meeting rooms.

I know a few people reading this will be doing so from corner offices. I am not judging your performance. There are exceptions to every rule. But next time your team faces a crisis, consider making a move back to your roots.

Thanks for reading this Management Use Case. I'm the co-author of a new book on software development leadership entitled You.next() that features dozens of other use cases for leadership. Please see more at www.youdotnext.com.