> As a manager you are seen as the default main character of your team.
In my entire career I have never known anyone who viewed managers this way.
The best managers I've known have been viewed as great supporters of the team, people that advocate for you, get you the resources you need, and help run interference with leadership.
The vast majority, from the "meh" to the horrid have been viewed by the team mostly as obstacles in hero's journey to solving problems and shipping products.
And that's only from the IC perspective. From the leadership team perspective the view of manager ranges from seeing them as useful goons that keep lazy workers in line to, in the best cases, people who might be able to rise through the ranks to approach, but never quite reach, their level.
But I've never, ever encounter people who think of a manager a the "main character".
Yes, "main character" is Twitter jargon not normally used in business.
However, it is true that the manager often represents the team in meetings. To the other people in those meetings, the manager may be the only person they know on the team.
An extreme version of this: outside a company, the CEO may be the only person the average person has heard of. Who do you know who works for Tesla, besides Musk?
Or consider the inventions attributed to Edison. Could you name anyone else who worked in his research labs?
Matt Tait talks about Twitter and its main characters here[0]. I just block all these 'characters' so I never have to see them in my feed. And it's not just a handful, I block ~300 accounts which in my eyes are all bad faith actors / troublemakers who are subtly trolling Twitter because they have a large following.
It's inspired from literature. It means someone who views themselves as the main character of the world's story. In some literature, the world tends to revolve around the main character. (This is not true of much of literature that deals with, for example, character studies, but think of books like Ender's Game or Lord of the Rings.)
Although we are each usually the 'main character' of our own story, we typically know that we are not "the main character" of the world broadly. Some people act in ways that suggest they may not understand the difference. People refer to them as having "main character syndrome."
IMO the people that throw around phrases like narcissist, main character syndrome, lack of empathy, etc. usually know nothing about the person they are attempting to diagnose and simply have differing perspectives that they can't see eye to eye on.
On Twitter, I think it means "someone who thinks they're the main character of the story"; that is, someone self-important or narcissistic. But I'm not a Twitter person (a Twit?), so I'm going by what I hear from others.
On Twitter I'd say the "main character" designation is less about how a person acts, and more about how everyone else is talking about them. They are the main character of the moment because suddenly half of your timeline is other Twitter users either directly or indirectly referring to them. Usually because they are wrong in a way that drives a ton of engagement.
Yes, a manager is more like the coach of a sport team. Not really a part of the team proper as such. They can't be and still be able to do a huge part of their job -- acting as the interface between the team and the other parts of the organization.
A manager's job is to coordinate effort on a high level, to ensure that the team has everything it needs to function well, and to remove as many roadblocks as possible.
A managers's job is to "grease the skids" and run interference.
Never played at all would be strange (it seems uncommon to watch a sport you have never played, let alone make a career of it). It's pretty common in the NFL to see coaches who were never professional players and possibly only played at a small college to boot.
While one who has at least dabbled in coding is preferable, a great manager can be effective even if they've never written a line of code in their life.
I'd much prefer a manager who knows how to manage but not how to code over a manager who knows how to code but not how to manage.
That's obviously ideal. I didn't mention it not because it doesn't exist, but because I was trying to do a "compare and contrast" with the other two, more extreme, cases.
Yeah, that I'm mystified by. A good manager, to use an imperfect analogy, is more like something between a coach and referee for the team; I don't think fans of baseball typically see the coach as the main character, important as they may be. At worst, a manager is seen as one of the lower demons in a particular level of corporate hell; a henchman or toady for the villain, if you will.
I concur, a great manager gets out if your way as you do your job well and understands his job only exists to manage other people doing profit generating/risk-reducing work.
This is the type of boss that will take credits for your work so he feels like the main character.
In my entire career I have never known anyone who viewed managers this way.
The best managers I've known have been viewed as great supporters of the team, people that advocate for you, get you the resources you need, and help run interference with leadership.
The vast majority, from the "meh" to the horrid have been viewed by the team mostly as obstacles in hero's journey to solving problems and shipping products.
And that's only from the IC perspective. From the leadership team perspective the view of manager ranges from seeing them as useful goons that keep lazy workers in line to, in the best cases, people who might be able to rise through the ranks to approach, but never quite reach, their level.
But I've never, ever encounter people who think of a manager a the "main character".