Googly: Do Managers really matter at work ?

Google is a company set up by highly creative engineers for creative and crazy engineers. They innovate all the time and come up with crazy ideas .A company filled with “A” players who considered management a distraction from the designing and debugging they loved to do . Eventually ,  One day  an highly talented engineer , had this crazy idea of what do managers actually do ? . Do managers really matter ? .  Given the open culture of Google , this idea spread pretty fast and had gone to CEO of Google , Larry . Larry even took and reduced the number of managers per product line and wanted to see what happens  . The result ? . Things started working fine after managers are cut down…..!       only for a while  . Then things started getting worse .  CEO of Google started getting involved in expense reports , leave approval and guiding team through company’s vision .  The ploy has back fired royally and managers are back royally . But CEO of google wants to know what managers really do  . A comprehensive project called “ PROJECT OXYGEN” is launched to dig manager’s brain and  he he here the comes the tricky point document it  J J . Google’s management needs data to show and prove to its engineers why and how  managers are effective and required , for god’s sake otherwise they don’t accept after all its Google :) 

Google’s people analytics team  persuaded skeptics with data accumulated through “PROJECT OXYGEN “ . I'm sure if you are manager you would have googled up this term now :P  . In Google , engineers rate managers semi annually and annually and exit interviews would be conducted to figure out what could be improved . Project oxygen team started using this data to analyse . First , they analysed exit interviews to see if something could be deciphered  . The overall output of team with lower rating manager is almost similar to one with higher rating . Exit interviews did not help much . How to deciphere this riddle  ? . Finally , managers reviews revealed some interesting facts .  Entire team's performance is tightly in correlation with manager's effectiveness . A slight increase in management performance is increasing the teams results manifold .  

High performance managers differ from average ones in the following three categories .

1. Is a good coach.

2. Empowers the team and does not micromanage.

3. Expresses interest in and concern for team members’ success and personal well-being.

4. Is productive and results-oriented.

5. Is a good communicator - listens and shares information.

6. Helps with career development.

7. Has a clear vision and strategy for the team.

8. Has key technical skills that help him or her advise the team.

One more suprising fact found is , Employees love to have freedom and want to be independent in their work but they are willing to talk to their managers about their career growth . Further evidence is found when managers of higher score are analysed for in their work styles and impact on teams performance .High scoring mangers saw less turnover on their team than other did – and retention is relatively related strongly to a manager quality than seniority , tenure or promotions . The data also showed a tight connection between manager’s quality and workers happiness .  Employeed with scoring bosses consistengly reported greater satisfacation in mutli .

This shows that decisions taken by managers with common sense is not common after . We might need managers for much more than common things ..!