If Your Boss Could Do Your Job, You’re More Likely to Be Happy at Work

Studies of leaders often focus on their style or charisma, but we wanted to look at how workers are affected by their boss’s technical competence. That is, is the boss is a real expert in the core business of the organization? How much expertise does he or she have? Boss competence is, admittedly, a multifaceted concept. Hence we measured it in three different ways:

Whether the supervisor could, if necessary, do the employee’s job.

Whether the supervisor worked his or her way up inside the company.

The supervisor’s level of technical competence as assessed by a worker.

Using these three measures of supervisor competence, we found that employees are far happier when they are led by people with deep expertise in the core activity of the business. This suggests that received wisdom about what makes a good boss may need some rethinking. It’s not uncommon to hear people assert that it’s a bad idea to promote an engineer to lead other engineers, or an editor to lead other editors. A good manager doesn’t need technical expertise, this argument goes, but rather, a mix of qualities like charisma, organizational skills, and emotional intelligence. Those qualities do matter, but what our research suggests is that the oft-overlooked quality of having technical expertise also matters enormously.

I have mostly worked with technical leaders. I’ve found that the more aligned my job is with their experience and the core business, the happier I am.

The lesson seems to be to actively grow leaders in your core business area. And, if you want to change your core business area, to devote time towards growing leaders in that new area.

Mythical Man Month draws an interesting lesson from this idea:

I have earlier argued that the sheer number of minds to be coordinated affects the cost of the effort, for a major part of the cost is communication and correcting the ill effects of miscommunication (system debugging). This, too, suggests that one wants the system to be built by as few minds as possible.
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The conclusion is simple: if a 200-man project has 25 managers who are the most competent and experienced programmers, fire the 175 troops and put the managers back to programming.

Brooks goes on to conclude that is not realistic, and the real solution is to break up systems to reduce communication overhead. But, when they read “put the managers back to programming,” I know some pretty great leaders who get excited at the prospect.