> but often there’s just a fundamental lack of understanding as to what management cares about and needs to know about.
At some point, you've got to think about whose role it is to manage who.
If your management needs to be spoon-fed the decisions they must sign off, and reacts poorly to signal that is not perfectly worded or inadequate because the relevant information was not transmited down, what use are they?
They need to be spoon fed in the sense that you’re their eyes and ears. However they are human, so to win the war of attention, you have to communicate well and maybe be persuasive because there’s 10 other reports or peers doing the same thing. Their job is not to merely sign off but to triage too many problems to find at once.
If they don't have the attention for a problem, then maybe they should let me handle it? Once again, if they want a say in my problems and they don't give me the necessary information to frame that problem for their specific context, I can't help.
Information needs to flow both ways, and in so many situation, the reason information pushed up is not relevant is that context wasn't pushed down.
I think you’re changing subjects. Isn’t the context of this thread the need for engineers to be able to communicate with their managers/leaders?
Them lacking context or not is a separate problem. But you should be able to make a case for your proposal without that much context. What are values, risks, known, unknowns, costs, etc.
> I think you’re changing subjects. Isn’t the context of this thread the need for engineers to be able to communicate with their managers/leaders?
The original claim was that engineers tend to have poor upwards communication skills, fueled by low understanding of management goals. My claim is that that situation is to be expected when so much information doesn't flow down.
> But you should be able to make a case for your proposal without that much context. What are values, risks, known, unknowns, costs, etc.
...And that case will often be deemed irrelevant to the company's goals, or incompatible with the company's challenges (lack of funding, staffing, etc).
Then you also pointed out that many managers can't spare the attention for some decisions they are asked to do. Maybe this kind of decision shouldn't have been pushed up in the first place? Stories of engineers ranting about having to climb 2 ranks to approve a $100 expense are pretty common, for instance.
At some point, you've got to think about whose role it is to manage who.
If your management needs to be spoon-fed the decisions they must sign off, and reacts poorly to signal that is not perfectly worded or inadequate because the relevant information was not transmited down, what use are they?