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Comment by blitz_skull | Hacker News Reader

> for a good manager, you also need a good organization

False. Being a good manager is aligned with being a good leader, which is 100% down to the person who is the manager. Sure you may not have an "effective team" without a good organization, but as a manager your job is to make the team succeed, and if you're following the laws of leadership, it has nothing to do with your organization.

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The difficulty becomes that, in a bad organization, a good manager can easily get stuck unable to both be a good leader to their team and be a good manager as seen by the organization. I've had multiple managers fired/reassigned because they were leading the team well in a fractured organization, but because they weren't prioritizing the things that upper management wanted over the objections of their teams.

If what the team wants to do to succeed is at odds with what the organization thinks it wants, the manager often can't square that circle.

No doubt. This is the dichotomy of leadership. The alternative is don't become a manager in a bad organization. But barring that solution, your only alternative is to grind on both sides of the wall until you've either got breakthrough... or you get fired.

It's not a good answer, but it lines up with the reality I've experienced.

Oh for sure, but I think the GP's "you can't really be a good manager in a bad org" is generally true on the long term. Either the org crushes you into being a bad manager, or you're pushed out. The odds are that a single, or even a few, good managers aren't enough to turn the ship of a bad org for the better.

Ah, that was a poor word choice on mine. I meant "for a good manager, you need an appropriate organization."

That said, I somewhat reject the idea of "laws of leadership." Too situational and way too much "had the best people working for them" involved in so many of the success stories out there.

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