> As a manager, your empathy needs to be highly conditional. Your job is to get to the truth of a matter in a respectful way, not make your team feel good.
Doubt. Specifically about the call for managers to have highly conditional empathy and the assertion that making your team feel good is not close to if not the top priority in the list of managerial duties.
We're working with people and whatever the official chain of command says, unhappy people generally deliver shitty work, so even if you short sightedly believe happy teams aren't your job, you'll soon understand why happy teams are a critical component to delivering for "the business".
> and the assertion that making your team feel good is not close to if not the top priority in the list of managerial duties.
I think the implication was that making the team feel good shouldn't come at the expense of communicating the truth.
This is a real problem I've had with some managers in the past: They try so hard to keep everyone happy that they're afraid to have difficult conversations. They soften negative feedback so much that the point is lost. They might even open themselves up to being manipulated by employees who learn how to leverage their desire to keep the team happy and use it against them.
Obviously it's not supposed to be like that, but it's a common pitfall for first-time managers especially.
Over-positivity is a problem you sometimes run across in tech. If you’re dealing with them, learn how to read between the lines to hear what they actually need from you.
I’ve seen it in managers, but I’ve also seen it from internal teams communicating with each other, and even when leaving PR feedback.
> Over-positivity is a problem you sometimes run across in tech.
It's a problem everywhere humans work. I've met team-leads and managers who suffered from toxic positivity everywhere. Either just in the way they conveyed messages, or the way they perceived everything, "house on fire, all is fine".
The only reason a manager is not a friend is because a manager has power over you, the subordinate. Power to fix or break things. This imbalance defines the entire relationship.
A quote from Saving Private Ryan always stuck with me:
Pvt. Reiben: [At Jackson] Oh, that's brilliant, bumpkin. [At Miller] Say Captain, you don't gripe at all?
Capt. Miller: I don't gripe to you, Reiben. I'm a Captain. We have a chain of command. Gripes go up, not down. Always up. You gripe to me, I gripe to my superior officer, and so on and so on and so on. I don't gripe to you. I don't gripe in front of you. You should know that, as a Ranger.
The problem is that surprisingly few people can handle negative feedback without seeing it as a personal attack. Moreover, in a big company you're ten levels removed from actual effects of your job, so if you see the company sailing right into an iceberg, usually it's just not worth it to bring that up. In best-case scenario you'll avoid the crash without without any recognition, in worst-case you'll be seen as a not-team-player and removed from your position. The best course of action in any social group is usually to do nothing, agree with the general consensus, and secure your personal safety.
In general I understood very early in my life that people really hate being told the truth, and knowing what lies given social group decides to believe in is crucial to successful socializing. I don't like this, and it's a big reason why I have very few friends, but the friends I do have value me for not being an NPC.
I think there is a distinction to be drawn between navigating typical social interactions vs communicating an impending iceberg collision to organization members and leadership. In my experience, organizations are typically quite appreciative of receiving a heads up about real, major risks and problems. But it is important to ensure the risk you are raising is clearly understood and not simply speculative. You should not be crying wolf, but it is never a good plan to sit back and watch your organization cruise into an iceberg when you could have said something to prevent it.
My experience is different. People vastly prefer social cohesion over useful information. Case in point: Catholic church was completely immune to any critique, dating back to XVI century. Now it's surprised Pikachu face that Europe is pretty much done with Christianity, within two centuries at most the religion will only be practiced in America and Africa. Of course all other major religions follow the same footsteps, because of course it's just Catholic church that was wrong and they aren't, why would you question your superiors.
Its also very industry-specific. You work at investment bank or some other finance place which sees you only as expensive incompetent cost center putting friction to those beautiful masters of business art? Boohoo, get a shrink if you have to, toughen up, get your shit together or ciao.
Almost, if not literally any other business I ever worked for (electric provider, insurance, telco, government, army etc) were much more humane. And of course better place to work long term. Money is only priority in life only if you don't have them which shouldn't be a concern for most folks here (at least relatively to rest of population around, stupid spending or bad investment can ruin even billionaires of course)
There seems to be a non-standard interpretation of the word 'empathy' in the article there. The word means understanding what someone else is thinking or feeling. As a manager, that shouldn't be conditional; managers should always spare a little attention to tracking how the people around them feel and what they think.
You don't want empathy to be a blocker to telling the truth, fair enough. But one of the lessons high empathy people have to learn is that having empathy for someone and controlling how they feel are two completely different things. One is possible, the other is not. And usually there is a simple way to tell the truth that doesn't hurt anyone beyond what they do to themselves.
Mirroring someone's feelings can certainly help, but isn't that critical. Especially since "sharing feelings" is technically impossible unless the Neuralink people have announced something I haven't heard about - fully comprehending how someone else feels about something is a to-be-solved problem.
Eg, if someone is paralysed with grief and someone else comes up to give them a hug, the hugger is probably acting empathetically even though they aren't mirroring the emotion. It is more about identification and choosing an appropriate response. It is a common tactic of high empathy people to respond to negative emotions by embodying positive ones rather than mirroring the painful ones.
Acting emphatically without invoked feeling, sounds “dry”or high-functioning-sociopath-like (not a killer, but as “doing it only because you know it’s expected/required”).
One of the things I learned in Therapy is that other people’s emotions are their own. I can recognize them without living them myself and that’s okay. And I can be present for someone else by acknowledging how they feel without trying to change it. And it’s also okay to let other people know when you think they’re not seeing something that might change how they feel.
I did invoke feelings - the example was someone paralysed with grief and another person coming over to console them. Which of those do you think is the sociopath?
Managers shouldn't be making empathy conditional in the usual sense of the word, it is necessary in all settings to maintain an orderly, pleasant and respectful workplace. The article probably means something similar to but ultimately not exactly empathy. Probably sympathy, which gets used in the same paragraph. High empathy, low sympathy is par for the course for a good manager in a hard conversation.
I believe one suggestion the author likely intended but didn't make was that "commiseration" does not create happy people. It may deepen trench bonding, but it doesn't increase happiness. The focus then should be on actions that produce happy people, who then produce better work.
As the author says in the last paragraph, sometimes people do need to complain and need that commiseration. Not allowing that, or shutting it down immediately, makes it fester and just get worse.
There are ways of commiserating that don't confirm the complaint, though. Being heard is usually 90% of the need, so just "I hear you, and feel your frustration" is often enough to get them back to an emotional even keel.
And yes, there are people who love to complain, and are only happy when it rains. Managing them can be difficult, because it's treading that fine line between hearing them and agreeing with them.
Personally, I find frustration to be a powerful motivator. I’m not really sure that _happiness_ per se is what leads to better work, but I think feeling empowered to change something is.
The anti-pattern I've seen happen very often in some big tech companies is that shitty work is in fact often what is desired -- by your manager.
The CEO wants good work, but you're too many levels from them for that to matter.
Your manager may be trying to get promoted, and isn't looking for "good work" per se, they're looking for whatever will get them promoted, which can be something shitty that their manager wants, or that the company wants for their broken PR strategy.
And if you, lower down on the totem pole, don't deliver that shit, and instead insist on delivering something good that they aren't actually looking for, you'll be on the firing line. You can't align with the CEO at the cost of disaligning with everyone in-between. The CEO will never know you exist, and you'll be managed out well before they ever knew you existed.
What the CEO says company wide and what the CEO says to middle management and gets them to do are often two very, very different things.
If there's a difficult, unpopular decision to be made, C-suite types often can't just come out and talk about it openly because the very act of doing that will maximise the amount of ill will and damage that decision will cause throughout the business unnecessarily. So the role of middle management is to be the 'bad cop' and pass that message on in a limited way to the affected people, who then blame them for it.
Just because the CEO isn't the one saying it, it doesn't mean it's not coming from the CEO. Part of being a middle manager, maybe even the biggest part, is being the messenger whose paid to get shot.
I agree. Sometimes doing good work feels like a curve fitting problem where the objective function is a function not only of "value" but value to <manager, skip level, .... , CEO, business value>.
I've had bad Managers, like the ones that inspire articles like these. It's a shame people become absolutists after such bad experiences.
When I've played the Manager part, I've always tried to do my best, talk to my team, set them on the proper train to success professionally and from time to time personally too, incentivize them to accomplish company goals, but also when that hasn't worked, I've also had to set them on the proper train out of the team/company.
I've only had issues with 2 out of ~30 people I've managed, all others I've had to lay off have understood (even when there wasn't a reason: Sometimes I was just told to pick someone to send home). Some people don't take it well, no matter how justified you are to fire them. I don't stand for bad friends, why should I stand for a bad employee? Or sometimes "no one" really connects with them, and they never connect with other people, I can only help them so much; maybe this person will "click" somewhere else.
I still talk with some of these people, even sometimes meet with them when I go to their cities, have parties. Normal, human interactions.
For me phrases like "it's family", "they are my blood", "we are friends" are always played like you have to stand for bad people. If you have never cut off a family member or friend, you're probably watching too many films and following too many traditions. Sometimes no matter what, you are different or the tradition is stupid. You may try to make it work, sometimes it simply doesn't.
As a Manager, you can do your job well, you can treat people well, and still bad outcomes come from it, or you can still be seen as the enemy. Whatever, take what may seem good criticism and be done with it.
As an Individual Contributor, I'm not saying not to be best friends with your Manager, I'm just saying that one thing is "the job", which has its own myriad of things happening, and another your personal life. Both can be great experiences as sometimes they aren't.
Having a happy team is a sub-goal of the higher goal of 'accomplishing the task' (getting the work done), because sure it's nice for people to get along, and they're generally better performers when they're happy; but conversely if they get the job done while not getting along, then the higher objective is still attained, which is often the case.
In other words, if a manager's choice comes down to 1) happy people v.s. 2) replacing whoever it takes to get the job done, with or without happiness, then #2 must be done. So 'getting the work done' is the top objective, and everything else is secondary and subordinate to that. An employer's job isn't to run a social club, it's to produce results.
> Having a happy team is a sub-goal of the higher goal of 'accomplishing the task' (getting the work done)
In a pure capitalist system, sure. However, no country lives in a pure capitalist system. The US comes closest in this sense, I think. Where I'm from, the Netherlands, there are more layers to this.
> and they're generally better performers when they're happy
Agreed, including the "generally" part, definitely not always.
> but conversely if they get the job done while not getting along, then the higher objective is still attained, which is often the case.
They'll be outcompeted by people that are motivated. So I think on the short-term and medium term, yea this works. On the long-term, it depends on the industry, incentives and all those things. If the industry doesn't allow for competition, or has other odd incentive structures, then yea, I can see this happen. However, if competition does exist, then no, the companies that work like this will slowly lose market share, provided that being more: passionate, motivated and creative actually yields an edge.
I have a suspicion we're in agreement on it actually since you also mention "which is often the case". I'm not sure if it's often or not, I don't know well enough how different industries operate. But I do agree there are many industries where there's some odd incentive structure (e.g. little competition or a lot of it but passion, motivation and creativity don't matter).
I think happiness and good job performance are like 80% aligned. They're not aligned in the "let's chillout" aspect of happiness or "let's do nothing and relax" but they are aligned in the fiero sense or what game-designers also call "hard fun".
If you have workers that just do what they are told, you better be in an industry where someone isn't trying to disrupt you or is doing its best to work way more creatively and motivated than you.
> An employer's job isn't to run a social club, it's to produce results.
Not all companies look that strictly at it. Well, maybe they do in the US. I've worked for Dutch, Belgian and US companies. US companies are way more "it's to produce results" than the Belgian and Dutch companies I've worked for. Sure, they are also there to produce results. But the intensity was lower, more goodwill was given, more trust too. It didn't feel cutthroat.
Practically it means that I'm helping my company save time by programming AI workflows and we're already saving thousands of hours in my department because of it (tip: I semi-automate a lot, so a human has to have the final say and possibly intervene a bit at the end - the human touch is necessary).
If my manager was a "just get the job done" type then I wouldn't be doing that at all. My official role is being a data analyst but I was a software engineer in the past at other companies. It's precisely because of the more relaxed nature of the company culture I now work at that I'm at least as much of an LLM engineer as I am a data analyst. And I love the hybrid role.
Anyways that's my perspective. It mostly brings nuance, on broad strokes I agree, maybe even the finer strokes.
I just mean there's probably plenty of companies where there's a lot of unhappiness and with a boss who doesn't even care as long as they produce. Infamously this is how Steve Jobs supposedly managed. He was a very hard person to work for lots of the time but he produced results.
Ultimately everyone in management _should_ have their _loyalty_ to their boss, rather than to their subordinates, and different management styles can work. Of course it depends on the employees too. I've never tolerated even one slight bit of disrespect from a boss personally, even as a junior dev. If someone ever treated me badly I resigned immediately without even having the next job lined up, on pure principle. I would've lasted probably about one day working for Jobs, before quitting I bet! lol.
> I would've lasted probably about one day working for Jobs, before quitting I bet! lol.
Haha you rebel! ;-)
Isn’t this actually an incentive to keep your employees at least happy enough so they won’t quit?
A company in the same industry that is nice to work for has a competitive advantage, provided they know how to select the more competent people. Hmm, an opinion loosely held.
Objectives can come into conflict. For example, if you have two employees who simply cannot work together, and you have no other team to move one of them to, you fire the guy who's less productive, because your primary objective is getting the job done. But if the lead guy is more of a troublemaker you fire him instead, but only if net benefit to "productivity" is positive. This is why managers cannot be "friends" with co-workers, because sometimes you have to let somebody go, and you'd never do that to a friend.
Your manager isn't your best friend, but they don't have to be your enemy, either. People like to go "oh managers are faceless executors of company policy" and that is true in certain situations but not all of them. You can still provide value to your reports (and as a report, value to your manager) by explaining your grievances with what's going on. I don't think the article is saying that people should completely shut up, but I actually think the filter doesn't have to be anywhere near where they say it is.
Another team is slow to deliver? It's fine to discuss that. As a manager your job, of course, is to make sure that your report isn't denigrating their coworkers. But it's fairly useful to decide how you want to prioritize your work, or whether you want to depend on that team in the future. Layoffs? There is zero reason to shut up about how dumb your CEO is and how they're doing it for Wall Street. They're coming for you just as they're coming for your reports. Better you talk about it than both people silently bottling up their feelings to please someone way up in their leadership chain.
The best friends I’ve made at work have usually been in non-competitive departments. As in, I’m in marketing and they’re in graphic design, or programming, or doing something else.
Practically, this means 1) I will never be their superior, and vice versa and 2) we aren’t competing for the same position.
In general I think this is a decent approximation for friendships, at work or otherwise.
Counter data point, worked in a company 10 years ago, our team was so close that we would vacation together overseas. All in different companies, cities and countries now, but still try to get together whenever we’re in the same city.
To be honest though, I’ve never been able to replicate that environment again, and it was pre-remote-first days. Might’ve been pure luck, or maybe we just understood how working with people you like is very enjoyable, despite the office politics.
>>Counter data point, worked in a company 10 years ago, our team was so close that we would vacation together overseas.
Worst thing ever, nothing is more harmful than a enemy who appears as a friend. This is even more true at workplace, as you are competing with your colleagues for promotions, bonuses, RSUs, travel opportunities etc. Whether one likes to acknowledge this are not, you are actually competing with them.
Another big issue with this sort of this is, it creates all kinds of untold social contracts which eventually nobody abides by. You wouldn't expect your friend to scheme behind your back to have you stack ranked in the bottom 10%, get your fired. Save his own job and have himself promoted. But in nearly every layoff cycle, this is exactly what happens.
Literally all of that sounds like a you problem. I love my friends! They helped me out immensely over the past decade in terms of personal and professional life. I’ve always tried to do the same for them. I cherish my memories of dancing and drinking with all of them at my manager’s wedding after a decade of friendship.
Not sure if you know this, due to cost centers, companies have per team budgets. Quite literally, X gets bonuses at the expense of Y.
Im not saying people act out of malice. But the game is designed such that somebody needs to lose for the other to win. Its like a pie chart, more area a section occupies, less there is for others.
That’s because you look at your team as a stepping stone and aspire to take the piece of the cake from them. I’m very sorry to say this, but when I’m hiring for my teams, this is the type of personality that I’m looking for to avoid. Genuinely makes the work miserable for everyone.
Apologies, but I don’t like when people outright talk nonsense about my friends, lowering them down to numbers.
What this misses is that, in a properly-functioning organization, a team that reliably delivers gets a bigger pie to divvy up. If your organization isn't like this, then perhaps you should consider finding a new one.
I've experienced both. In my current work, I would never even think about spending vacation from anybody from work.
But long time ago, I've been part of a company, that despite being sort of Accenture-style dev shop (meaning we were competing them for dev projects and often would win on our reputation and competence, not undercutting the price with cheap labor, also quite a few people moved from them to us), yet the atmosphere was extremely friendly. The cca original team still meets after more than 15 years when most went other ways.
I've never seen or heard about anything similar. It attracted and retained top talent much more efficiently than high salaries.
It wasn't secret in any way. Reward excellence immediately, not via some idiotic highly political yearly maybe-rounds. Let go of people clearly incapable to deliver good work (almost never the case, filtering during hiring was apparently good not only on technical skils but also 'culture' compatibility). Hear complaints and act upon them immediately. Pay people to get external certifications, internal in-department training on tech was very frequent and we all took rounds.
Offer optional outside-of-work activities like team buildings, going together to pub. And I mean really optional. No bullshit, honesty and some good hard work. Very flat managerial hierarchy where owners actually listened and acted, and managers and employees acted and communicated as equals.
That's about it. Maybe it wouldn't be enough these days, but back then we were the best game in town and attracted best folks from other companies due to above, without the need to pay higher than rest of high payers.
Yes, as a researcher at a non-profit organization, I became very close with the IT department. I would recommend this approach! It's great to finally not talk about work all the time during lunch (but about homelab, selfhosting, or star wars).
>>The best friends I’ve made at work have usually been in non-competitive departments.
Best friendships I've made at work especially with my managers, in my own teams, have happened when I have openly announced I'm not competing for their position/job. Merely making this clear has made me more friends.
People just don't like to see other people do well, even more so when people are working to take their own position.
That few shitty years I had at work early career often were due to seniors finding books at my desk, or watching me work like mad on side projects, or delivering and speaking a lot during meetings. That's akin to announcing to them they must screw you to save their own jobs. Nothing good happens from there as groups of powerful people mark you up as your enemy and have to get rid of you for their collective good.
The people who got promoted are often those who pretend to be harmlessly inert but are scheming and working behind people's back to get promoted and take top positions. Only last year, a junior I know got a manager fired and took his job, much to the shock of the manager, he eventually learned the junior had been working over an year and bypassing him, talking to managers above, convincing them he could do the job et al. The manager who got fired is struggling from months to find a new job.
Long story short, speak as little as you can, avoid showing off your skills at work, don't appear aggressive, threatening or intimidating. Act totally harmless and inert, but work with people above for your progress. Career growth rarely comes from good performance, its almost always because of interpersonal relationships.
I wish I had followed this advice when I was first a tech lead a few years ago. I wasn't a manager per say, but I had two junior engineers. We had way too much to do in too little time. I explained how the PM had messed up the project plan. I figured I was just letting them know what was going on, but it just brought the mood down.
I think it's ideal that some level of commiseration happens, so people can try to find ways to fix problems that can be fixed or accept that they can't. It really depends on the people, relationship, and culture. Some people aren't willing to do anything for anyone else. Some cultures discourage trying to fix anything.
> It’s a fine balance.
> People don’t like it when you sugarcoat or otherwise patronize them.
Agreed. One of the earliest things you have to learn as a manager is that people also don't ask for what they want, they ask for what they think they want.
I had a direct report who said they wanted to know what was going on, so I told them regularly about the ups and downs. At the end of the year I got the feedback that I was providing unclear direction and being inconsistent - my direction was always the same, but it was obvious that even though they said they understood that I was telling them to stick to the roadmap we planned and checked in on, they were internalizing the week on week things we talked about.
I've since learned the difference of how much to share, and how to effectively say "I know that team X are talking about changing the Foo to Bar, but we're going to keep working with Foo for now". If I've done my job as a lead, the direct acknowledgement of the uncertainty and an instruction to stay the course should be the communication the team needs, and from a technical perspective hopefully our earlier choices will make it less hassle for us to switch from Foo to Bar if/when that decision actually happens.
I feel sorry for people who work in environments where this sort of adversarial thinking, politicking, and commiseration is necessary.
You spend the better part of your waking hours at work. Treating your coworkers as human beings is a sine qua non for me. I've never worked in a place with strict hierarchies, and I've never not become friends with at least most of my managers and coworkers.
You don't gel as well with everyone, which is fine as long as it doesn't hinder professionalism and productivity. But working with people I view as competitors or adversaries? No thanks.
I was attempting to surface the irony of the particular example they gave, because HR is typically the arm of a business that embodies the adversarial relationship between employees and employers. Thus the example rings hollow.
I get that quote was from the article. “HR is not your friend” is a low effort like-generator/meme that has nothing to do with the quote. It’s the kind of nonsense overconfident tweens mindlessly repeat because it feels good and because they think they’re really clever.
The word commiserate in this (otherwise useful!) article feels like a stone in my shoe. If anyone else feels the same thing try re-reading it as “grumbling with”. It’s less flowery, but a closer meaning than the kind of empathetic solace-in-hard-times associated with commiserate.
Another fun, orthogonal substitution: instead of reading this from the manager/report perspective, try teacher/pupil or parent/pre-teen.
> As a manager, your empathy needs to be highly conditional. Your job is to get to the truth of a matter in a respectful way, not make your team feel good. You are largely stuck with your coworkers, and you need to get stuff done together or everyone suffers.
I was an inexperienced manager in my late 20s managing a team with a very odd member composition (2 folks with +50 y/o, 3 folks with less than 21 y/o, and 2 apprentices (between 16-18)) and I related with it, but from the part where they became my good acquaintances.
At that time, at the time that some of them had serious problems**, I usually did step in to cover their shoes until their problem was solved. I did it from the outside because I wanted to have things done, but internally I did know that they would work hard for the team when others needed to go.
I got a lot of personal issues along the way (e.g., middle managers wanting to fire me because of their problems, other managers telling me (rightly) that I was wrong, and so on) but we definitely were in the mix for the top teams, and eventually everyone of the team got promoted in the time span that I was manager until 1 year after I left.
** - In that time there were some things like a DBA that ended up in jail, our trainee that had miscarriages a couple of times, an SWE that got hijacked in Colombia, and one apprentice whose parents divorced and she cannot work with us due to the custody agreement between her parents.
I’m not a native English speaker, can someone point me to a definition of “commiserate” that matches the usage in this article? It seems to have a different meaning according to the dictionaries.
Think of it like this: when two soldiers in boot camp are complaining to each other about their drill instructor, the difficulty of the situation, why the food sucks, etc. - they are commiserating. It is a bonding over being in the same shared crappy situation, and having sympathy for that person because of it.
The author is essentially saying this: a manager shouldn’t join in complaining about the job/company/personal problems etc. with his/her subordinates, because it sets up false emotional relationship expectations.
It's a verb used to describe multiple people lamenting the same bad circumstance, with the idea that it's made slightly less bad by the experience of having to go through it together rather than alone. The phrase "misery loves company" is somewhat common in English, and while it's more often used to describe situations where one person feels bad and acts out to make others feel bad as a coping mechanism, the roots of the word are pretty recognizable in it; "co-misery", as in "we're miserable in this together".
I'm a native English speaker, and I also have no idea what the author is talking about. I don't think that word means what he thinks it means. I think he is using "commiserate" to mean "complain".
It didn't make sense to me either. When normally I read "commiserate", I think someone is expressing empathy to someone else on their bad fortune. I assumed the employee was sorry something bad happened to their boss.
But I think you're right, he's saying employees are complaining and the boss is providing sympathy.
Yeah, I think it makes more sense when you consider that the former (boss complaining to direct) is something that should seem obviously bad to even non-managers, but handling the reverse situation correctly is also critical. It's confusing because the title is written as if I am the direct report, while the article is written as if I am the manager.
Commiserating together means validating each other's negative feelings about something.
You may commiserate with a team member when you both get made redundant, as a healthy example.
When a team of several engineers are all thrown under a bus by a PM, they may commiserate with each other about the workload they find themselves with, as a slightly less healthy (but common) example.
But when you, as a manager, commiserate with the team about the PM throwing you under the bus, you are doing your team and the organisation a disservice, in that you're creating an unhealthy us/them dynamic when doing so, and the other things the article suggests.
One teardown and rebuild of the words that make up the roots of "commiseration" might be "to share in wretchedness" or in another way "to be co-miserable".
it always used to mean some kind of shared negativity though like many words the nuance and original meaning has somewhat drifted.
I think the article is a bit weird. To commiserate means to empathize with another's suffering, such as the getting dumped by your girlfriend example in the article.
But the article launches (literally the first sentence) into "As people become managers, it’s quite common for their team members to want to commiserate with them." as though it is just obvious that all managers have some sadness that their team members need to help them through, which is obviously nonsense.
I can only assume the author omitted context. ex: seems to be primarily expressing sympathy with complaining/venting, particularly when it is about another department or higher level within the company. It is commiseration, but without that additional context it is difficult to understand why it is viewed negatively in the post.
I think of the word as a mixture of complaining and sympathizing.
I would consider it commiseration if one were to complain to their coworkers about an HR policy in the hopes of receiving sympathy or agreement about the problems with the policy.
Managing is a hard job, which is why so many managers are bad and yet, in spite of the efforts of C-levels for decades, the role hasn't been eliminated. There's some wisdom in here, but I would not give this article to a new manager to read. I think it's easy to read too much into this and appear inhuman to your directs.
Is there a line? Sure. Don't shit on your company, but don't do it for your directs...do it for you, because that's just not a healthy way to manage frustration. However, learn to lead in a way that's authentic. Authenticity requires candor.
> Managing is a hard job, which is why so many managers are bad
Many jobs are hard, and I don't think it is a rule that most workers in hard jobs are bad.
My take is multifold:
- Managing takes experience. In the software industry, the evolution has been such that there aren't enough experienced people to fill all the manager positions.
- Startups usually don't hire experience managers because they are deemed too expensive. They end up with inexperienced managers. If it's your first job, you never had a manager yourself, and you're suddenly managing a team, how can you be good?
- It is hard to evaluate the competences of a manager. As an engineer, you can talk with another engineer and get a sense of how good/experienced they are: just ask them to talk about technology. As a manager, it seems harder to evaluate. It's easy to manage a team in a highly functional environment, so you can't say for sure that the manager is good. It's hard to manage a team in a highly disfunctional environment, so you can't say for sure that the manager is bad.
- Managers are promoted from above. It's difficult to judge a manager without considering how their subordinates think about them. I have seen too many people climb the management ladder even though all of their subordinates absolutely hated them.
> As a manager, your empathy needs to be highly conditional.
I don't see that as true. Your empathy always needs to be there, but your response is conditional on the situation. "I feel you, but..." and then offer a perspective that pushes the solution forward. Or even better, "I feel you, and..." to remove the defensive wall of your direct report.
I am blessed that I work in a really switched on team. We focus on keep the talent density high, and on open and transparent communication. Practically everyone in our 70 odd team is a killer, so I have not heard any word of complaint from my team members around other teams. But if I did, I definitely would try to fix it via the open and transparent communcation policy.
I highly recommend reading (or rereading) No rules rules..the culture at Netflix. That's the kind of culture that I strive for, and that I want to foster across the organizations that I work with.
I do think it’s common for managers (especially new ones) to desire too much validation from their reports. James Stockdale offered some advice here in a 1980 Proceedings article [1]
> [Leaders] must be fair and they may be compassionate, but they cannot be addicted to being loved by everybody. The man who needs to be loved is an extortionist’s dream. That man will do anything to avoid face-to-face unpleasantness; he will sell his soul down the river for praise. He can be had.
Half of the article is discussing situation that shouldn’t even taken in the first place.
I understand if your relative/friend/pet you grew up with dies, but if your gf/bf dumps you - keep this out of work. Request some time off and be done with it, more than that and you’re oversharing.
Complaining about organization - take the feedback and move it higher up, it’s not managers responsibility to solve all injustice in the world.
The idea that managers are special people who can, among other things, control their emotions, get to the bottom of things, and communicate properly with their team is a ridiculous one.
The author seems to have an idea of what a manager is that does not fit the reality in 95% of the cases, in my estimation. The article also has a crude and arrogant view of people as employees, who are portrayed as second class to "managers". I really hope the author is nobody's manager...
This is generally good advice but not universal. I’ve seen how complaining about other teams within one’s own team stifles collaboration and can kill cross-functional projects before they get started. But also, if there’s a real problem on another team, there needs to be a channel for people to be real with their direct reports about the problems, so they can build a case to fix it. And if there’s a big and obvious problem that you wilfully ignore or talk around as a manager, it can also hurt your credibility with your team. So it’s a fine line, and one that I’ve never really seen walked perfectly. I’ve had C-level bosses who were constantly complaining about other teams. Happened to be one of my favorite managers actually.
On balance I really like this advice. However, I think there are times when bad or lacking behavior is most appropriately called out privately. Providing critical feedback publicly is often a bad idea unless you’ve done a dress rehearsal.
IMO it is appropriate for managers to work with subordinates to help them level up other members of the team. That’s pretty delicate and usually happens by first acknowledging that someone is falling behind privately.
Except it's quite tough to fight hidden wars in big teams. I was part of that hidden wars, where a team member would totally misinterpret a situation, goes full on complain to the manager, the latter lacking oversight over all of the team, roll with assumptions. Only public attempts for clearing this up helps.
> For evidence of this, light autists often make very effective managers.
This idea is turning my world upside down, having avoided management roles my whole career yet ending up “managing” a small team of like minded experienced engineers despite actively avoiding the formal title. I put it in quotes because I don’t feel like I manage them in any way other than they technically report to me. I could tell them what to do but have only done so twice in 8 years. We chat once a week about whatever we feel like chatting about.
Please could you share any context or insight into this idea so I can understand more deeply?
Your manager isn't your "bro" nor are they an uncaring faceless agent of the corporate bureaucracy. The best managers know how to be diplomatic and sympathize with grievances without over-committing. As a manager, you are as responsible for managing UP (and sideways) as well as down. Part of your job is being the "big gun" that your reports cc on emails when another team is absolutely just being a jerk.
Solid article and great advice in my opinion. One simple takeaway for me is managing well means being accessible to your team at all times. I completely agree that managers shouldn't encourage criticism of other team members, even by staying silent when it happens.
If you need to call something out, do it as a team, making yourself accountable as well. That keeps trust intact and avoids finger-pointing. Thanks for sharing.
I think the other person was referring to the previous comment from 12 hours ago on another posting of the article being exact word for word copy of your comment on this post... (or they weren't, but it's what stood out to me)
> it’s often better to give the most optimistic view for why another team is behaving the way that they are.
Slightly disagree. I’d rather explain that the other team is doing an opportunity cost calculation that your team may not have access to. Sugar coating does not remove frustration
Years ago when Google still maintained a facade that they weren't a Corporate America defense contractor, theyconducted a 2 year study study into what made a team effective: Project Aristotle [1]. The key factor? Psychological safety.
Fast forward to the present day and we are in permanent layoff culture. The maverick facade from Big Tech was dropped long ago. Employees are graded on a curve and 5-10% of those regardless of their actual performance will be deemed substandard just to fit the curve. A good portion of those will end up on PIPs or just be laid off. But even those on PIPs are more likely than not to be working there 6 months later.
This is an inherently cutthroat environment. Any pretense of psychological safety has been abandoned in favor of short-term profit seeking. While this is sold as a way of weeding out low performers and cutting costs (despite record high profits that's somehow still necessary), it's really a method of suppressing labor costs.
But having experienced this kind of toxic environment, it doesn't select high-performers, it selects the people who are most liked by management. People who are neurodivergent suffer disproportionately (IME).
My point is that in general nobbody is your friend at work. Not your colleagues, not your manager and not HR> They are to varying degrees protecting their own asses and you will be shocked how quickly someone who is nice to you at work will throw you under the bus to protect themselves ot simply to get ahead.
In a desperate bid to cut and suppress labor costs, managemen thas ramped up the toxicity and further undermined and destroyed any social connections you may make at work. But they've also destroyed the psychological safety that allowed them to do great things. Stack-ranking employees for likability on a curve and OKRs are not what drives success. Those things destroy success.
i feel like i might be in a situation where commiseration is becoming too common and causing our team to lose focus on our goals. As someone not in a manager position, and more of a senior member, is there any way I can steer away from fostering negativity towards empowering the team to make change?
Acknowledge the feelings (or people will think you are sweeping them under a rug), but don’t dwell on them. Don’t over-provide them. Focus on min/maxing the bad/good outcomes. Align people on the outcomes you want. Usually that’s easier 1:1 than 1:N.
If you're someone who tends to be candid, and maybe empathetic, it helps to think through this in advance, and to set expectations in advance.
My current thinking about established companies (flat early startup might be different):
In a superior position on the org chart, your people should know that you'll be capable, honest, trustworthy, and fair, and also that you'll look out for them in some ways, but also that it's often your job to be diplomatic, as part of helping the company work together well.
So, even if you secretly agree with a subordinate that you don't understand what the CEO is doing, or that an adjacent team keeps dropping the ball, you have to be diplomatic.
And hopefully the person already knows that, since literally saying "I have to be diplomatic on this" in the moment probably wouldn't come across right.
You can be informed by, and work with, that concern, and you can convey that you're taking their concerns seriously, but probably don't commiserate.
Maybe one way to think of it (just thought of this one): It's duty of the manager to be more diplomatic, so that subordinates can be more candid within the team. This is another way that a manager can be a bit like helpful insulation.
Having diplomacy as SOP can also help when it's not yet clear that the person is correct in an interpretation. It's still a concern to be looked into, but there's no expectation for you to commiserate.
Of course, if a subordinate is going through a difficult personal/family event, you can express genuine sympathy (while you're also being practically supportive) -- that's not commiserating.
> As your best friend, if you come to me saying that you were just dumped by your girlfriend, you will get unconditional sympathy beyond words. ... Unless you did something totally crazy or illegal, my loyalty will be immediate and unconditional, because – let’s be real – none of it matters. You’re going your way, she’s going hers, and it’s over.
Wow, hard disagree. For someone wanting to maintain a relationship, there's a teachable moment only a friend can give being gleefully run past. Loyalty isn't blind support.
It’s funny (or weird) seeing hot takes on HN like, actually you should seek meaning and friendships in your free time and not rely on your work providing it. Like what 80% of everyone knows already.
That’s actually somewhat blurry. Plenty of trade unions accept some managers as members since so many practitioners manage a handful of people without actual power over them.
Of course at some point up the hierarchy the class interests definitely become opposed.
"Bad therapists just let you rant. Good therapists let you vent, but they ask clarifying questions, and they sometimes push back. [...] You want to be a good therapist."
I wish it had a less clickbaity and more relevant title though. I would have shared it on LinkedIn, but that title makes it looks as the sort of passive aggressive content people post when holding a grudge.
This was the piece that stuck out to me as well. It articulates well the distinction between the good managers I have had and the bad ones as I recollect my work history. This is applicable in close personal relationships as well.
You're a bad manager or a bad friend if attempted "commiseration" doesn't involve a push for attempting to interpret a situation in the light of everyone having the best intentions first (not only but definitely first). Going around constantly complaining about how X and Y are awful bad intentioned monsters out to get you makes you a bad manager, bad friend, bad person. If there are instances of bad intentions at work, it is the role of the manager to get to the bottom of them and try to get them fixed, not to sit around and complain / listen to complaints. We all get frustrated, make mistakes, and even are intentionally mean at weak points; having it met with private bitchfests just fans the flames.
The insinuation that friends are for this kind of negativity breeding behavior is wrong, it's just as bad if your friends engage in it with you as if your manager does.
As an autistic person, I read this and shook my head (meaning "no way," not stimming!) and wonder at the ways allistic people think they handle things better by having specific rules about how to fake emotions with one another.
I remember I really upset some coworkers a few years ago when I said coworkers can't be my friends. I made it clear that I like a lot of my coworkers, I think most of them are decent people and are OK to talk to, but that's a bit different than being a "friend".
A "friend", to me, is someone I can completely be myself around without having to worry too much about it [1]. With a coworker, in the back of my mind I am always remembering "I have to work with this person tomorrow, best not talk about that subject..." and have to bite my tongue a bit. I don't just go around spouting racial slurs or anything too crazy, but my coworkers are exposed to a "tombert-lite" all the same.
Also, if you work for startups and if you become best friends with all your coworkers, when the startup fails [2] then you can find yourself not only out of the job, but also hating a large percentage of your friends in the process.
Now, I've quit/been-fired-from jobs and kept in touch with former coworkers, and then I consider them friends, but I do try and draw boundaries for the people I'm actually working with.
[1] Within some degree of reason, obviously.
[2] Not all startups fail, but an awful lot of them do.
That's a tough question, and it's happened before to me. It definitely makes things a bit weird for me.
If I have a prior relationship with that person, then to some extent they've already seen "full tombert" so I don't have to worry as much, but I'd be lying if I said that there wasn't a part of me that worries a little even still.
Quite often it turns out that the connecting glue that held the friendship together was the shared experience of the same job. Remove that and the friendship fades away.
I resisted this conclusion for a long time, but I finally accepted that many people don't easily mode-switch between complaining and constructive action. If they complain and get positive feedback from it, like commiseration, they start doing their own job less well.
I used to value a bit of commiseration as healthy validation, a little switch of perspective to acknowledge that we have to cope with imperfect circumstances that are beyond our power to fix. It gives people relief from exaggerated feelings of responsibility, and then you can switch perspective back to the question of what can I control, what can I make better for other people.
But over time I've worked with too many people who can't easily switch between the two perspectives. If they go too far into thinking about how the circumstances could and maybe should be better, they make a comfy little nest inside that mindset and never come back to taking responsibility for their own actions and their own effect on circumstances.
I don't want to sound like a stuffy out-of-touch authority figure in a movie with a cool teenage protagonist, and I'm aware that I probably do. I try not to be a dick about it. I don't try to stamp out complaining. I just laugh politely, acknowledge, and change the focus as quickly as possible back to what is in our power to accomplish.
A lot of times one of the things that is in our power is pointing out issues that transcend our team, educating and influencing other teams, etc. You'd think complaining would help with this, and it kind of does, because the things people love to complain about are very often the things that need to be addressed through engagement with leadership or with other teams. But here again, those same people who get demotivated by complaining, complaining also turns them into poisonous communicators. They aren't capable of doing a bit of discreet whining and moaning about product behind closed doors and then coming out and communicating in a constructive way with them.
Again, that's something I didn't start out my career believing. I thought it was normal to vent a little frustration about a product manager in strong language behind closed doors, and then with that done, turn to the task of figuring out a more gracious and constructive way of understanding their perspective and engaging with it to create a better outcome. But it seems like maybe 1/2 or 1/3 of people are capable of making the turn back from talking shit to getting shit done. The rest seem to have the attitude of, well, we figured out this other guy is the problem, right, so what are you looking at me for? When in fact none of us are perfect, and other teams might have equally valid complaints about them.
(I'm not a manager, just an IC, but somewhere along the way I got gray hair and I started worrying about this stuff.)
yeah this whole “manager != friend” thing always felt like a weird flex. ok cool, you’re not my buddy, but you still control my calendar, my comp, and my stress levels.truth is, I’ve had managers who were upfront and still made the team feel safe. and I’ve had ones who used “radical candor” as an excuse to be jerks.
honestly, if you need a blog post to remind you not to be fake-friendly or overly harsh, maybe management ain’t your lane.
just be real, be human, and don’t weaponize empathy.
> This is especially true for friendly, competent, reasonable-seeming managers – people want to commiserate with winners
Interesting. My experience working inside big tech was thinking of managers as mostly losers who are neither technically strong but psycho enough to think they are better and can manage other engineers.
So I think of them as loosers who can't build a company from scratch but have parasitic tendencies to manage other people's money and time without having skin in the game.
Especially the ones who think they know better. And are active in LinkedIn.
> As a manager, your empathy needs to be highly conditional. Your job is to get to the truth of a matter in a respectful way, not make your team feel good.
Doubt. Specifically about the call for managers to have highly conditional empathy and the assertion that making your team feel good is not close to if not the top priority in the list of managerial duties.
We're working with people and whatever the official chain of command says, unhappy people generally deliver shitty work, so even if you short sightedly believe happy teams aren't your job, you'll soon understand why happy teams are a critical component to delivering for "the business".
If not, your competitors will.
> and the assertion that making your team feel good is not close to if not the top priority in the list of managerial duties.
I think the implication was that making the team feel good shouldn't come at the expense of communicating the truth.
This is a real problem I've had with some managers in the past: They try so hard to keep everyone happy that they're afraid to have difficult conversations. They soften negative feedback so much that the point is lost. They might even open themselves up to being manipulated by employees who learn how to leverage their desire to keep the team happy and use it against them.
Obviously it's not supposed to be like that, but it's a common pitfall for first-time managers especially.
You're probably right. There are certain literal statements I react strongly to.
I understand at work I have a job to do, but I choose how to do it and I choose to do it in a humane way.
I don't want to put words in your mouth but it sounds like you're warning against being a people pleaser, in which case I so agree.
Over-positivity is a problem you sometimes run across in tech. If you’re dealing with them, learn how to read between the lines to hear what they actually need from you.
I’ve seen it in managers, but I’ve also seen it from internal teams communicating with each other, and even when leaving PR feedback.
> Over-positivity is a problem you sometimes run across in tech.
It's a problem everywhere humans work. I've met team-leads and managers who suffered from toxic positivity everywhere. Either just in the way they conveyed messages, or the way they perceived everything, "house on fire, all is fine".
The only reason a manager is not a friend is because a manager has power over you, the subordinate. Power to fix or break things. This imbalance defines the entire relationship.
A quote from Saving Private Ryan always stuck with me:
Gripes go up, but shit rolls down hill.
The problem is that surprisingly few people can handle negative feedback without seeing it as a personal attack. Moreover, in a big company you're ten levels removed from actual effects of your job, so if you see the company sailing right into an iceberg, usually it's just not worth it to bring that up. In best-case scenario you'll avoid the crash without without any recognition, in worst-case you'll be seen as a not-team-player and removed from your position. The best course of action in any social group is usually to do nothing, agree with the general consensus, and secure your personal safety.
In general I understood very early in my life that people really hate being told the truth, and knowing what lies given social group decides to believe in is crucial to successful socializing. I don't like this, and it's a big reason why I have very few friends, but the friends I do have value me for not being an NPC.
I think there is a distinction to be drawn between navigating typical social interactions vs communicating an impending iceberg collision to organization members and leadership. In my experience, organizations are typically quite appreciative of receiving a heads up about real, major risks and problems. But it is important to ensure the risk you are raising is clearly understood and not simply speculative. You should not be crying wolf, but it is never a good plan to sit back and watch your organization cruise into an iceberg when you could have said something to prevent it.
My experience is different. People vastly prefer social cohesion over useful information. Case in point: Catholic church was completely immune to any critique, dating back to XVI century. Now it's surprised Pikachu face that Europe is pretty much done with Christianity, within two centuries at most the religion will only be practiced in America and Africa. Of course all other major religions follow the same footsteps, because of course it's just Catholic church that was wrong and they aren't, why would you question your superiors.
Well said, I think this is essentially what people who practice Radical Candour [0] do.
I would much rather my manager give me the harsh truth upfront rather than letting it simmer, and making things worse for both of us.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Candor
Its also very industry-specific. You work at investment bank or some other finance place which sees you only as expensive incompetent cost center putting friction to those beautiful masters of business art? Boohoo, get a shrink if you have to, toughen up, get your shit together or ciao.
Almost, if not literally any other business I ever worked for (electric provider, insurance, telco, government, army etc) were much more humane. And of course better place to work long term. Money is only priority in life only if you don't have them which shouldn't be a concern for most folks here (at least relatively to rest of population around, stupid spending or bad investment can ruin even billionaires of course)
There seems to be a non-standard interpretation of the word 'empathy' in the article there. The word means understanding what someone else is thinking or feeling. As a manager, that shouldn't be conditional; managers should always spare a little attention to tracking how the people around them feel and what they think.
You don't want empathy to be a blocker to telling the truth, fair enough. But one of the lessons high empathy people have to learn is that having empathy for someone and controlling how they feel are two completely different things. One is possible, the other is not. And usually there is a simple way to tell the truth that doesn't hurt anyone beyond what they do to themselves.
Empathy implies not only the knowledge of the feeling, but also some level of share in that feeling.
Mirroring someone's feelings can certainly help, but isn't that critical. Especially since "sharing feelings" is technically impossible unless the Neuralink people have announced something I haven't heard about - fully comprehending how someone else feels about something is a to-be-solved problem.
Eg, if someone is paralysed with grief and someone else comes up to give them a hug, the hugger is probably acting empathetically even though they aren't mirroring the emotion. It is more about identification and choosing an appropriate response. It is a common tactic of high empathy people to respond to negative emotions by embodying positive ones rather than mirroring the painful ones.
Acting emphatically without invoked feeling, sounds “dry”or high-functioning-sociopath-like (not a killer, but as “doing it only because you know it’s expected/required”).
One of the things I learned in Therapy is that other people’s emotions are their own. I can recognize them without living them myself and that’s okay. And I can be present for someone else by acknowledging how they feel without trying to change it. And it’s also okay to let other people know when you think they’re not seeing something that might change how they feel.
I did invoke feelings - the example was someone paralysed with grief and another person coming over to console them. Which of those do you think is the sociopath?
Managers shouldn't be making empathy conditional in the usual sense of the word, it is necessary in all settings to maintain an orderly, pleasant and respectful workplace. The article probably means something similar to but ultimately not exactly empathy. Probably sympathy, which gets used in the same paragraph. High empathy, low sympathy is par for the course for a good manager in a hard conversation.
Empathy vs sympathy?
> unhappy people generally deliver shitty work
I believe one suggestion the author likely intended but didn't make was that "commiseration" does not create happy people. It may deepen trench bonding, but it doesn't increase happiness. The focus then should be on actions that produce happy people, who then produce better work.
I'd argue that this is only true sometimes.
As the author says in the last paragraph, sometimes people do need to complain and need that commiseration. Not allowing that, or shutting it down immediately, makes it fester and just get worse.
There are ways of commiserating that don't confirm the complaint, though. Being heard is usually 90% of the need, so just "I hear you, and feel your frustration" is often enough to get them back to an emotional even keel.
And yes, there are people who love to complain, and are only happy when it rains. Managing them can be difficult, because it's treading that fine line between hearing them and agreeing with them.
Personally, I find frustration to be a powerful motivator. I’m not really sure that _happiness_ per se is what leads to better work, but I think feeling empowered to change something is.
On the topic of unhappy people delivering great work... see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka
I mean, the alternative was that they did hard labor. So I guess there is a silver lining to everything.
There is power to "wow doing this shit fucking sucks, might as well get good at doing this shit work because there is nothing better to do"
> unhappy people generally deliver shitty work
The anti-pattern I've seen happen very often in some big tech companies is that shitty work is in fact often what is desired -- by your manager.
The CEO wants good work, but you're too many levels from them for that to matter.
Your manager may be trying to get promoted, and isn't looking for "good work" per se, they're looking for whatever will get them promoted, which can be something shitty that their manager wants, or that the company wants for their broken PR strategy.
And if you, lower down on the totem pole, don't deliver that shit, and instead insist on delivering something good that they aren't actually looking for, you'll be on the firing line. You can't align with the CEO at the cost of disaligning with everyone in-between. The CEO will never know you exist, and you'll be managed out well before they ever knew you existed.
What the CEO says company wide and what the CEO says to middle management and gets them to do are often two very, very different things.
If there's a difficult, unpopular decision to be made, C-suite types often can't just come out and talk about it openly because the very act of doing that will maximise the amount of ill will and damage that decision will cause throughout the business unnecessarily. So the role of middle management is to be the 'bad cop' and pass that message on in a limited way to the affected people, who then blame them for it.
Just because the CEO isn't the one saying it, it doesn't mean it's not coming from the CEO. Part of being a middle manager, maybe even the biggest part, is being the messenger whose paid to get shot.
I agree. Sometimes doing good work feels like a curve fitting problem where the objective function is a function not only of "value" but value to <manager, skip level, .... , CEO, business value>.
I learned this the hard way.
Astute observation, and spot-on IMO.
I've had bad Managers, like the ones that inspire articles like these. It's a shame people become absolutists after such bad experiences.
When I've played the Manager part, I've always tried to do my best, talk to my team, set them on the proper train to success professionally and from time to time personally too, incentivize them to accomplish company goals, but also when that hasn't worked, I've also had to set them on the proper train out of the team/company.
I've only had issues with 2 out of ~30 people I've managed, all others I've had to lay off have understood (even when there wasn't a reason: Sometimes I was just told to pick someone to send home). Some people don't take it well, no matter how justified you are to fire them. I don't stand for bad friends, why should I stand for a bad employee? Or sometimes "no one" really connects with them, and they never connect with other people, I can only help them so much; maybe this person will "click" somewhere else.
I still talk with some of these people, even sometimes meet with them when I go to their cities, have parties. Normal, human interactions.
For me phrases like "it's family", "they are my blood", "we are friends" are always played like you have to stand for bad people. If you have never cut off a family member or friend, you're probably watching too many films and following too many traditions. Sometimes no matter what, you are different or the tradition is stupid. You may try to make it work, sometimes it simply doesn't.
As a Manager, you can do your job well, you can treat people well, and still bad outcomes come from it, or you can still be seen as the enemy. Whatever, take what may seem good criticism and be done with it.
As an Individual Contributor, I'm not saying not to be best friends with your Manager, I'm just saying that one thing is "the job", which has its own myriad of things happening, and another your personal life. Both can be great experiences as sometimes they aren't.
Having a happy team is a sub-goal of the higher goal of 'accomplishing the task' (getting the work done), because sure it's nice for people to get along, and they're generally better performers when they're happy; but conversely if they get the job done while not getting along, then the higher objective is still attained, which is often the case.
In other words, if a manager's choice comes down to 1) happy people v.s. 2) replacing whoever it takes to get the job done, with or without happiness, then #2 must be done. So 'getting the work done' is the top objective, and everything else is secondary and subordinate to that. An employer's job isn't to run a social club, it's to produce results.
> Having a happy team is a sub-goal of the higher goal of 'accomplishing the task' (getting the work done)
In a pure capitalist system, sure. However, no country lives in a pure capitalist system. The US comes closest in this sense, I think. Where I'm from, the Netherlands, there are more layers to this.
> and they're generally better performers when they're happy
Agreed, including the "generally" part, definitely not always.
> but conversely if they get the job done while not getting along, then the higher objective is still attained, which is often the case.
They'll be outcompeted by people that are motivated. So I think on the short-term and medium term, yea this works. On the long-term, it depends on the industry, incentives and all those things. If the industry doesn't allow for competition, or has other odd incentive structures, then yea, I can see this happen. However, if competition does exist, then no, the companies that work like this will slowly lose market share, provided that being more: passionate, motivated and creative actually yields an edge.
I have a suspicion we're in agreement on it actually since you also mention "which is often the case". I'm not sure if it's often or not, I don't know well enough how different industries operate. But I do agree there are many industries where there's some odd incentive structure (e.g. little competition or a lot of it but passion, motivation and creativity don't matter).
I think happiness and good job performance are like 80% aligned. They're not aligned in the "let's chillout" aspect of happiness or "let's do nothing and relax" but they are aligned in the fiero sense or what game-designers also call "hard fun".
If you have workers that just do what they are told, you better be in an industry where someone isn't trying to disrupt you or is doing its best to work way more creatively and motivated than you.
> An employer's job isn't to run a social club, it's to produce results.
Not all companies look that strictly at it. Well, maybe they do in the US. I've worked for Dutch, Belgian and US companies. US companies are way more "it's to produce results" than the Belgian and Dutch companies I've worked for. Sure, they are also there to produce results. But the intensity was lower, more goodwill was given, more trust too. It didn't feel cutthroat.
Practically it means that I'm helping my company save time by programming AI workflows and we're already saving thousands of hours in my department because of it (tip: I semi-automate a lot, so a human has to have the final say and possibly intervene a bit at the end - the human touch is necessary).
If my manager was a "just get the job done" type then I wouldn't be doing that at all. My official role is being a data analyst but I was a software engineer in the past at other companies. It's precisely because of the more relaxed nature of the company culture I now work at that I'm at least as much of an LLM engineer as I am a data analyst. And I love the hybrid role.
Anyways that's my perspective. It mostly brings nuance, on broad strokes I agree, maybe even the finer strokes.
I just mean there's probably plenty of companies where there's a lot of unhappiness and with a boss who doesn't even care as long as they produce. Infamously this is how Steve Jobs supposedly managed. He was a very hard person to work for lots of the time but he produced results.
Ultimately everyone in management _should_ have their _loyalty_ to their boss, rather than to their subordinates, and different management styles can work. Of course it depends on the employees too. I've never tolerated even one slight bit of disrespect from a boss personally, even as a junior dev. If someone ever treated me badly I resigned immediately without even having the next job lined up, on pure principle. I would've lasted probably about one day working for Jobs, before quitting I bet! lol.
> I would've lasted probably about one day working for Jobs, before quitting I bet! lol.
Haha you rebel! ;-)
Isn’t this actually an incentive to keep your employees at least happy enough so they won’t quit?
A company in the same industry that is nice to work for has a competitive advantage, provided they know how to select the more competent people. Hmm, an opinion loosely held.
Objectives can come into conflict. For example, if you have two employees who simply cannot work together, and you have no other team to move one of them to, you fire the guy who's less productive, because your primary objective is getting the job done. But if the lead guy is more of a troublemaker you fire him instead, but only if net benefit to "productivity" is positive. This is why managers cannot be "friends" with co-workers, because sometimes you have to let somebody go, and you'd never do that to a friend.
I got to the same quote and stopped reading. This person would be great in charge of robots, too bad humans have emotions.
Your manager isn't your best friend, but they don't have to be your enemy, either. People like to go "oh managers are faceless executors of company policy" and that is true in certain situations but not all of them. You can still provide value to your reports (and as a report, value to your manager) by explaining your grievances with what's going on. I don't think the article is saying that people should completely shut up, but I actually think the filter doesn't have to be anywhere near where they say it is.
Another team is slow to deliver? It's fine to discuss that. As a manager your job, of course, is to make sure that your report isn't denigrating their coworkers. But it's fairly useful to decide how you want to prioritize your work, or whether you want to depend on that team in the future. Layoffs? There is zero reason to shut up about how dumb your CEO is and how they're doing it for Wall Street. They're coming for you just as they're coming for your reports. Better you talk about it than both people silently bottling up their feelings to please someone way up in their leadership chain.
The best friends I’ve made at work have usually been in non-competitive departments. As in, I’m in marketing and they’re in graphic design, or programming, or doing something else.
Practically, this means 1) I will never be their superior, and vice versa and 2) we aren’t competing for the same position.
In general I think this is a decent approximation for friendships, at work or otherwise.
Counter data point, worked in a company 10 years ago, our team was so close that we would vacation together overseas. All in different companies, cities and countries now, but still try to get together whenever we’re in the same city.
To be honest though, I’ve never been able to replicate that environment again, and it was pre-remote-first days. Might’ve been pure luck, or maybe we just understood how working with people you like is very enjoyable, despite the office politics.
>>Counter data point, worked in a company 10 years ago, our team was so close that we would vacation together overseas.
Worst thing ever, nothing is more harmful than a enemy who appears as a friend. This is even more true at workplace, as you are competing with your colleagues for promotions, bonuses, RSUs, travel opportunities etc. Whether one likes to acknowledge this are not, you are actually competing with them.
Another big issue with this sort of this is, it creates all kinds of untold social contracts which eventually nobody abides by. You wouldn't expect your friend to scheme behind your back to have you stack ranked in the bottom 10%, get your fired. Save his own job and have himself promoted. But in nearly every layoff cycle, this is exactly what happens.
Literally all of that sounds like a you problem. I love my friends! They helped me out immensely over the past decade in terms of personal and professional life. I’ve always tried to do the same for them. I cherish my memories of dancing and drinking with all of them at my manager’s wedding after a decade of friendship.
Having a social life is actually a good thing!
We are talking about colleagues, not friends.
Not sure if you know this, due to cost centers, companies have per team budgets. Quite literally, X gets bonuses at the expense of Y.
Im not saying people act out of malice. But the game is designed such that somebody needs to lose for the other to win. Its like a pie chart, more area a section occupies, less there is for others.
That’s because you look at your team as a stepping stone and aspire to take the piece of the cake from them. I’m very sorry to say this, but when I’m hiring for my teams, this is the type of personality that I’m looking for to avoid. Genuinely makes the work miserable for everyone.
Apologies, but I don’t like when people outright talk nonsense about my friends, lowering them down to numbers.
Im not sure you get the mathematics of this here. You can hire anybody, anybody, any saint for that matter.
The more area a section occupies on a pie chart, the less area other sections get.
>>Apologies, but I don’t like when people outright talk nonsense about my friends, lowering them down to numbers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
I don’t see a reason to think they don’t understand the math. They just don’t care.
What this misses is that, in a properly-functioning organization, a team that reliably delivers gets a bigger pie to divvy up. If your organization isn't like this, then perhaps you should consider finding a new one.
Please share where you work so I can make sure I never end up working anywhere near you
I've experienced both. In my current work, I would never even think about spending vacation from anybody from work.
But long time ago, I've been part of a company, that despite being sort of Accenture-style dev shop (meaning we were competing them for dev projects and often would win on our reputation and competence, not undercutting the price with cheap labor, also quite a few people moved from them to us), yet the atmosphere was extremely friendly. The cca original team still meets after more than 15 years when most went other ways.
I've never seen or heard about anything similar. It attracted and retained top talent much more efficiently than high salaries.
>>I've never seen or heard about anything similar.
Yeah, I mean, they don't exactly go around announcing how the whole thing is done. You often don't know who won at your cost.
It wasn't secret in any way. Reward excellence immediately, not via some idiotic highly political yearly maybe-rounds. Let go of people clearly incapable to deliver good work (almost never the case, filtering during hiring was apparently good not only on technical skils but also 'culture' compatibility). Hear complaints and act upon them immediately. Pay people to get external certifications, internal in-department training on tech was very frequent and we all took rounds.
Offer optional outside-of-work activities like team buildings, going together to pub. And I mean really optional. No bullshit, honesty and some good hard work. Very flat managerial hierarchy where owners actually listened and acted, and managers and employees acted and communicated as equals.
That's about it. Maybe it wouldn't be enough these days, but back then we were the best game in town and attracted best folks from other companies due to above, without the need to pay higher than rest of high payers.
[dead]
Yes, as a researcher at a non-profit organization, I became very close with the IT department. I would recommend this approach! It's great to finally not talk about work all the time during lunch (but about homelab, selfhosting, or star wars).
>>The best friends I’ve made at work have usually been in non-competitive departments.
Best friendships I've made at work especially with my managers, in my own teams, have happened when I have openly announced I'm not competing for their position/job. Merely making this clear has made me more friends.
People just don't like to see other people do well, even more so when people are working to take their own position.
That few shitty years I had at work early career often were due to seniors finding books at my desk, or watching me work like mad on side projects, or delivering and speaking a lot during meetings. That's akin to announcing to them they must screw you to save their own jobs. Nothing good happens from there as groups of powerful people mark you up as your enemy and have to get rid of you for their collective good.
The people who got promoted are often those who pretend to be harmlessly inert but are scheming and working behind people's back to get promoted and take top positions. Only last year, a junior I know got a manager fired and took his job, much to the shock of the manager, he eventually learned the junior had been working over an year and bypassing him, talking to managers above, convincing them he could do the job et al. The manager who got fired is struggling from months to find a new job.
Long story short, speak as little as you can, avoid showing off your skills at work, don't appear aggressive, threatening or intimidating. Act totally harmless and inert, but work with people above for your progress. Career growth rarely comes from good performance, its almost always because of interpersonal relationships.
I wish I had followed this advice when I was first a tech lead a few years ago. I wasn't a manager per say, but I had two junior engineers. We had way too much to do in too little time. I explained how the PM had messed up the project plan. I figured I was just letting them know what was going on, but it just brought the mood down.
I think it's ideal that some level of commiseration happens, so people can try to find ways to fix problems that can be fixed or accept that they can't. It really depends on the people, relationship, and culture. Some people aren't willing to do anything for anyone else. Some cultures discourage trying to fix anything.
It’s a fine balance.
People don’t like it when you sugarcoat or otherwise patronize them. If something is bullshit, it’s worth calling out.
Commiseration typically leads to feeling disempowered though and you need your reports to feel empowered for a team to function well.
> It’s a fine balance. > People don’t like it when you sugarcoat or otherwise patronize them.
Agreed. One of the earliest things you have to learn as a manager is that people also don't ask for what they want, they ask for what they think they want.
I had a direct report who said they wanted to know what was going on, so I told them regularly about the ups and downs. At the end of the year I got the feedback that I was providing unclear direction and being inconsistent - my direction was always the same, but it was obvious that even though they said they understood that I was telling them to stick to the roadmap we planned and checked in on, they were internalizing the week on week things we talked about.
I've since learned the difference of how much to share, and how to effectively say "I know that team X are talking about changing the Foo to Bar, but we're going to keep working with Foo for now". If I've done my job as a lead, the direct acknowledgement of the uncertainty and an instruction to stay the course should be the communication the team needs, and from a technical perspective hopefully our earlier choices will make it less hassle for us to switch from Foo to Bar if/when that decision actually happens.
I feel sorry for people who work in environments where this sort of adversarial thinking, politicking, and commiseration is necessary.
You spend the better part of your waking hours at work. Treating your coworkers as human beings is a sine qua non for me. I've never worked in a place with strict hierarchies, and I've never not become friends with at least most of my managers and coworkers.
You don't gel as well with everyone, which is fine as long as it doesn't hinder professionalism and productivity. But working with people I view as competitors or adversaries? No thanks.
> If I think that HR sucks, and I commiserate with my directs about it, my team is going to treat them poorly.
HR is definitely not your friend though
What does that have to do with anything in this article?
The quote is directly from the article.
I was attempting to surface the irony of the particular example they gave, because HR is typically the arm of a business that embodies the adversarial relationship between employees and employers. Thus the example rings hollow.
I get that quote was from the article. “HR is not your friend” is a low effort like-generator/meme that has nothing to do with the quote. It’s the kind of nonsense overconfident tweens mindlessly repeat because it feels good and because they think they’re really clever.
The word commiserate in this (otherwise useful!) article feels like a stone in my shoe. If anyone else feels the same thing try re-reading it as “grumbling with”. It’s less flowery, but a closer meaning than the kind of empathetic solace-in-hard-times associated with commiserate.
Another fun, orthogonal substitution: instead of reading this from the manager/report perspective, try teacher/pupil or parent/pre-teen.
> As a manager, your empathy needs to be highly conditional. Your job is to get to the truth of a matter in a respectful way, not make your team feel good. You are largely stuck with your coworkers, and you need to get stuff done together or everyone suffers.
I was an inexperienced manager in my late 20s managing a team with a very odd member composition (2 folks with +50 y/o, 3 folks with less than 21 y/o, and 2 apprentices (between 16-18)) and I related with it, but from the part where they became my good acquaintances.
At that time, at the time that some of them had serious problems**, I usually did step in to cover their shoes until their problem was solved. I did it from the outside because I wanted to have things done, but internally I did know that they would work hard for the team when others needed to go.
I got a lot of personal issues along the way (e.g., middle managers wanting to fire me because of their problems, other managers telling me (rightly) that I was wrong, and so on) but we definitely were in the mix for the top teams, and eventually everyone of the team got promoted in the time span that I was manager until 1 year after I left.
** - In that time there were some things like a DBA that ended up in jail, our trainee that had miscarriages a couple of times, an SWE that got hijacked in Colombia, and one apprentice whose parents divorced and she cannot work with us due to the custody agreement between her parents.
I’m not a native English speaker, can someone point me to a definition of “commiserate” that matches the usage in this article? It seems to have a different meaning according to the dictionaries.
Think of it like this: when two soldiers in boot camp are complaining to each other about their drill instructor, the difficulty of the situation, why the food sucks, etc. - they are commiserating. It is a bonding over being in the same shared crappy situation, and having sympathy for that person because of it.
The author is essentially saying this: a manager shouldn’t join in complaining about the job/company/personal problems etc. with his/her subordinates, because it sets up false emotional relationship expectations.
It's a verb used to describe multiple people lamenting the same bad circumstance, with the idea that it's made slightly less bad by the experience of having to go through it together rather than alone. The phrase "misery loves company" is somewhat common in English, and while it's more often used to describe situations where one person feels bad and acts out to make others feel bad as a coping mechanism, the roots of the word are pretty recognizable in it; "co-misery", as in "we're miserable in this together".
I'm a native English speaker, and I also have no idea what the author is talking about. I don't think that word means what he thinks it means. I think he is using "commiserate" to mean "complain".
It didn't make sense to me either. When normally I read "commiserate", I think someone is expressing empathy to someone else on their bad fortune. I assumed the employee was sorry something bad happened to their boss.
But I think you're right, he's saying employees are complaining and the boss is providing sympathy.
Yeah, I think it makes more sense when you consider that the former (boss complaining to direct) is something that should seem obviously bad to even non-managers, but handling the reverse situation correctly is also critical. It's confusing because the title is written as if I am the direct report, while the article is written as if I am the manager.
Commiserating together means validating each other's negative feelings about something.
You may commiserate with a team member when you both get made redundant, as a healthy example.
When a team of several engineers are all thrown under a bus by a PM, they may commiserate with each other about the workload they find themselves with, as a slightly less healthy (but common) example.
But when you, as a manager, commiserate with the team about the PM throwing you under the bus, you are doing your team and the organisation a disservice, in that you're creating an unhealthy us/them dynamic when doing so, and the other things the article suggests.
One teardown and rebuild of the words that make up the roots of "commiseration" might be "to share in wretchedness" or in another way "to be co-miserable".
it always used to mean some kind of shared negativity though like many words the nuance and original meaning has somewhat drifted.
I’d say that ‘commiserate’ is a euphemism for complain. How do you understand it?
I think the article is a bit weird. To commiserate means to empathize with another's suffering, such as the getting dumped by your girlfriend example in the article.
But the article launches (literally the first sentence) into "As people become managers, it’s quite common for their team members to want to commiserate with them." as though it is just obvious that all managers have some sadness that their team members need to help them through, which is obviously nonsense.
So yes, it's unusual phrasing.
I can only assume the author omitted context. ex: seems to be primarily expressing sympathy with complaining/venting, particularly when it is about another department or higher level within the company. It is commiseration, but without that additional context it is difficult to understand why it is viewed negatively in the post.
I think of the word as a mixture of complaining and sympathizing.
I would consider it commiseration if one were to complain to their coworkers about an HR policy in the hopes of receiving sympathy or agreement about the problems with the policy.
An uncritical, and perhaps implicit, validation of negative feelings.
Managing is a hard job, which is why so many managers are bad and yet, in spite of the efforts of C-levels for decades, the role hasn't been eliminated. There's some wisdom in here, but I would not give this article to a new manager to read. I think it's easy to read too much into this and appear inhuman to your directs.
Is there a line? Sure. Don't shit on your company, but don't do it for your directs...do it for you, because that's just not a healthy way to manage frustration. However, learn to lead in a way that's authentic. Authenticity requires candor.
> Managing is a hard job, which is why so many managers are bad
Many jobs are hard, and I don't think it is a rule that most workers in hard jobs are bad.
My take is multifold:
- Managing takes experience. In the software industry, the evolution has been such that there aren't enough experienced people to fill all the manager positions.
- Startups usually don't hire experience managers because they are deemed too expensive. They end up with inexperienced managers. If it's your first job, you never had a manager yourself, and you're suddenly managing a team, how can you be good?
- It is hard to evaluate the competences of a manager. As an engineer, you can talk with another engineer and get a sense of how good/experienced they are: just ask them to talk about technology. As a manager, it seems harder to evaluate. It's easy to manage a team in a highly functional environment, so you can't say for sure that the manager is good. It's hard to manage a team in a highly disfunctional environment, so you can't say for sure that the manager is bad.
- Managers are promoted from above. It's difficult to judge a manager without considering how their subordinates think about them. I have seen too many people climb the management ladder even though all of their subordinates absolutely hated them.
> As a manager, your empathy needs to be highly conditional.
I don't see that as true. Your empathy always needs to be there, but your response is conditional on the situation. "I feel you, but..." and then offer a perspective that pushes the solution forward. Or even better, "I feel you, and..." to remove the defensive wall of your direct report.
I am blessed that I work in a really switched on team. We focus on keep the talent density high, and on open and transparent communication. Practically everyone in our 70 odd team is a killer, so I have not heard any word of complaint from my team members around other teams. But if I did, I definitely would try to fix it via the open and transparent communcation policy.
I highly recommend reading (or rereading) No rules rules..the culture at Netflix. That's the kind of culture that I strive for, and that I want to foster across the organizations that I work with.
I do think it’s common for managers (especially new ones) to desire too much validation from their reports. James Stockdale offered some advice here in a 1980 Proceedings article [1]
> [Leaders] must be fair and they may be compassionate, but they cannot be addicted to being loved by everybody. The man who needs to be loved is an extortionist’s dream. That man will do anything to avoid face-to-face unpleasantness; he will sell his soul down the river for praise. He can be had.
[1] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1980/september/le...
Half of the article is discussing situation that shouldn’t even taken in the first place.
I understand if your relative/friend/pet you grew up with dies, but if your gf/bf dumps you - keep this out of work. Request some time off and be done with it, more than that and you’re oversharing.
Complaining about organization - take the feedback and move it higher up, it’s not managers responsibility to solve all injustice in the world.
The idea that managers are special people who can, among other things, control their emotions, get to the bottom of things, and communicate properly with their team is a ridiculous one.
The author seems to have an idea of what a manager is that does not fit the reality in 95% of the cases, in my estimation. The article also has a crude and arrogant view of people as employees, who are portrayed as second class to "managers". I really hope the author is nobody's manager...
This is generally good advice but not universal. I’ve seen how complaining about other teams within one’s own team stifles collaboration and can kill cross-functional projects before they get started. But also, if there’s a real problem on another team, there needs to be a channel for people to be real with their direct reports about the problems, so they can build a case to fix it. And if there’s a big and obvious problem that you wilfully ignore or talk around as a manager, it can also hurt your credibility with your team. So it’s a fine line, and one that I’ve never really seen walked perfectly. I’ve had C-level bosses who were constantly complaining about other teams. Happened to be one of my favorite managers actually.
On balance I really like this advice. However, I think there are times when bad or lacking behavior is most appropriately called out privately. Providing critical feedback publicly is often a bad idea unless you’ve done a dress rehearsal.
IMO it is appropriate for managers to work with subordinates to help them level up other members of the team. That’s pretty delicate and usually happens by first acknowledging that someone is falling behind privately.
Except it's quite tough to fight hidden wars in big teams. I was part of that hidden wars, where a team member would totally misinterpret a situation, goes full on complain to the manager, the latter lacking oversight over all of the team, roll with assumptions. Only public attempts for clearing this up helps.
> For evidence of this, light autists often make very effective managers.
This idea is turning my world upside down, having avoided management roles my whole career yet ending up “managing” a small team of like minded experienced engineers despite actively avoiding the formal title. I put it in quotes because I don’t feel like I manage them in any way other than they technically report to me. I could tell them what to do but have only done so twice in 8 years. We chat once a week about whatever we feel like chatting about.
Please could you share any context or insight into this idea so I can understand more deeply?
The word "Best" could truthfully be omitted from this title...
Your manager isn't your "bro" nor are they an uncaring faceless agent of the corporate bureaucracy. The best managers know how to be diplomatic and sympathize with grievances without over-committing. As a manager, you are as responsible for managing UP (and sideways) as well as down. Part of your job is being the "big gun" that your reports cc on emails when another team is absolutely just being a jerk.
prompt: write a long text about something with management and use all possible inflections of "to commiserate" in every second sentence.
Solid article and great advice in my opinion. One simple takeaway for me is managing well means being accessible to your team at all times. I completely agree that managers shouldn't encourage criticism of other team members, even by staying silent when it happens.
If you need to call something out, do it as a team, making yourself accountable as well. That keeps trust intact and avoids finger-pointing. Thanks for sharing.
You just said that 12 hours ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44170385
Yes, I did. I started my day with that comment, and funny enough, I'm logging off on it too. I guess I really do believe it. Thanks for noticing.
I think the other person was referring to the previous comment from 12 hours ago on another posting of the article being exact word for word copy of your comment on this post... (or they weren't, but it's what stood out to me)
> it’s often better to give the most optimistic view for why another team is behaving the way that they are.
Slightly disagree. I’d rather explain that the other team is doing an opportunity cost calculation that your team may not have access to. Sugar coating does not remove frustration
Years ago when Google still maintained a facade that they weren't a Corporate America defense contractor, theyconducted a 2 year study study into what made a team effective: Project Aristotle [1]. The key factor? Psychological safety.
Fast forward to the present day and we are in permanent layoff culture. The maverick facade from Big Tech was dropped long ago. Employees are graded on a curve and 5-10% of those regardless of their actual performance will be deemed substandard just to fit the curve. A good portion of those will end up on PIPs or just be laid off. But even those on PIPs are more likely than not to be working there 6 months later.
This is an inherently cutthroat environment. Any pretense of psychological safety has been abandoned in favor of short-term profit seeking. While this is sold as a way of weeding out low performers and cutting costs (despite record high profits that's somehow still necessary), it's really a method of suppressing labor costs.
But having experienced this kind of toxic environment, it doesn't select high-performers, it selects the people who are most liked by management. People who are neurodivergent suffer disproportionately (IME).
My point is that in general nobbody is your friend at work. Not your colleagues, not your manager and not HR> They are to varying degrees protecting their own asses and you will be shocked how quickly someone who is nice to you at work will throw you under the bus to protect themselves ot simply to get ahead.
In a desperate bid to cut and suppress labor costs, managemen thas ramped up the toxicity and further undermined and destroyed any social connections you may make at work. But they've also destroyed the psychological safety that allowed them to do great things. Stack-ranking employees for likability on a curve and OKRs are not what drives success. Those things destroy success.
[1]: https://psychsafety.com/googles-project-aristotle/
i feel like i might be in a situation where commiseration is becoming too common and causing our team to lose focus on our goals. As someone not in a manager position, and more of a senior member, is there any way I can steer away from fostering negativity towards empowering the team to make change?
Acknowledge the feelings (or people will think you are sweeping them under a rug), but don’t dwell on them. Don’t over-provide them. Focus on min/maxing the bad/good outcomes. Align people on the outcomes you want. Usually that’s easier 1:1 than 1:N.
Empathy from your manager and reality mixes like entropy and the vacuum of space...
If you're someone who tends to be candid, and maybe empathetic, it helps to think through this in advance, and to set expectations in advance.
My current thinking about established companies (flat early startup might be different):
In a superior position on the org chart, your people should know that you'll be capable, honest, trustworthy, and fair, and also that you'll look out for them in some ways, but also that it's often your job to be diplomatic, as part of helping the company work together well.
So, even if you secretly agree with a subordinate that you don't understand what the CEO is doing, or that an adjacent team keeps dropping the ball, you have to be diplomatic.
And hopefully the person already knows that, since literally saying "I have to be diplomatic on this" in the moment probably wouldn't come across right.
You can be informed by, and work with, that concern, and you can convey that you're taking their concerns seriously, but probably don't commiserate.
Maybe one way to think of it (just thought of this one): It's duty of the manager to be more diplomatic, so that subordinates can be more candid within the team. This is another way that a manager can be a bit like helpful insulation.
Having diplomacy as SOP can also help when it's not yet clear that the person is correct in an interpretation. It's still a concern to be looked into, but there's no expectation for you to commiserate.
Of course, if a subordinate is going through a difficult personal/family event, you can express genuine sympathy (while you're also being practically supportive) -- that's not commiserating.
Just want to say this is an interesting and excellent insight.
People don’t quit jobs, they quit bosses
I've had amazing bosses, and yet I've still quit. Once you get bored and have no room to grow in the company there's little your boss can do about it.
Incorrect. I quit my job. My boss was amazing.
> As your best friend, if you come to me saying that you were just dumped by your girlfriend, you will get unconditional sympathy beyond words. ... Unless you did something totally crazy or illegal, my loyalty will be immediate and unconditional, because – let’s be real – none of it matters. You’re going your way, she’s going hers, and it’s over.
Wow, hard disagree. For someone wanting to maintain a relationship, there's a teachable moment only a friend can give being gleefully run past. Loyalty isn't blind support.
A manager is my class enemy. Not my friend.
It’s funny (or weird) seeing hot takes on HN like, actually you should seek meaning and friendships in your free time and not rely on your work providing it. Like what 80% of everyone knows already.
That’s actually somewhat blurry. Plenty of trade unions accept some managers as members since so many practitioners manage a handful of people without actual power over them.
Of course at some point up the hierarchy the class interests definitely become opposed.
Great article. This bit in particular:
"Bad therapists just let you rant. Good therapists let you vent, but they ask clarifying questions, and they sometimes push back. [...] You want to be a good therapist."
I wish it had a less clickbaity and more relevant title though. I would have shared it on LinkedIn, but that title makes it looks as the sort of passive aggressive content people post when holding a grudge.
This was the piece that stuck out to me as well. It articulates well the distinction between the good managers I have had and the bad ones as I recollect my work history. This is applicable in close personal relationships as well.
You're a bad manager or a bad friend if attempted "commiseration" doesn't involve a push for attempting to interpret a situation in the light of everyone having the best intentions first (not only but definitely first). Going around constantly complaining about how X and Y are awful bad intentioned monsters out to get you makes you a bad manager, bad friend, bad person. If there are instances of bad intentions at work, it is the role of the manager to get to the bottom of them and try to get them fixed, not to sit around and complain / listen to complaints. We all get frustrated, make mistakes, and even are intentionally mean at weak points; having it met with private bitchfests just fans the flames.
The insinuation that friends are for this kind of negativity breeding behavior is wrong, it's just as bad if your friends engage in it with you as if your manager does.
As an autistic person, I read this and shook my head (meaning "no way," not stimming!) and wonder at the ways allistic people think they handle things better by having specific rules about how to fake emotions with one another.
I remember I really upset some coworkers a few years ago when I said coworkers can't be my friends. I made it clear that I like a lot of my coworkers, I think most of them are decent people and are OK to talk to, but that's a bit different than being a "friend".
A "friend", to me, is someone I can completely be myself around without having to worry too much about it [1]. With a coworker, in the back of my mind I am always remembering "I have to work with this person tomorrow, best not talk about that subject..." and have to bite my tongue a bit. I don't just go around spouting racial slurs or anything too crazy, but my coworkers are exposed to a "tombert-lite" all the same.
Also, if you work for startups and if you become best friends with all your coworkers, when the startup fails [2] then you can find yourself not only out of the job, but also hating a large percentage of your friends in the process.
Now, I've quit/been-fired-from jobs and kept in touch with former coworkers, and then I consider them friends, but I do try and draw boundaries for the people I'm actually working with.
[1] Within some degree of reason, obviously.
[2] Not all startups fail, but an awful lot of them do.
So if you have a best friend you get hired on with you at the same level do you cease to be friends?
That's a tough question, and it's happened before to me. It definitely makes things a bit weird for me.
If I have a prior relationship with that person, then to some extent they've already seen "full tombert" so I don't have to worry as much, but I'd be lying if I said that there wasn't a part of me that worries a little even still.
Quite often it turns out that the connecting glue that held the friendship together was the shared experience of the same job. Remove that and the friendship fades away.
I resisted this conclusion for a long time, but I finally accepted that many people don't easily mode-switch between complaining and constructive action. If they complain and get positive feedback from it, like commiseration, they start doing their own job less well.
I used to value a bit of commiseration as healthy validation, a little switch of perspective to acknowledge that we have to cope with imperfect circumstances that are beyond our power to fix. It gives people relief from exaggerated feelings of responsibility, and then you can switch perspective back to the question of what can I control, what can I make better for other people.
But over time I've worked with too many people who can't easily switch between the two perspectives. If they go too far into thinking about how the circumstances could and maybe should be better, they make a comfy little nest inside that mindset and never come back to taking responsibility for their own actions and their own effect on circumstances.
I don't want to sound like a stuffy out-of-touch authority figure in a movie with a cool teenage protagonist, and I'm aware that I probably do. I try not to be a dick about it. I don't try to stamp out complaining. I just laugh politely, acknowledge, and change the focus as quickly as possible back to what is in our power to accomplish.
A lot of times one of the things that is in our power is pointing out issues that transcend our team, educating and influencing other teams, etc. You'd think complaining would help with this, and it kind of does, because the things people love to complain about are very often the things that need to be addressed through engagement with leadership or with other teams. But here again, those same people who get demotivated by complaining, complaining also turns them into poisonous communicators. They aren't capable of doing a bit of discreet whining and moaning about product behind closed doors and then coming out and communicating in a constructive way with them.
Again, that's something I didn't start out my career believing. I thought it was normal to vent a little frustration about a product manager in strong language behind closed doors, and then with that done, turn to the task of figuring out a more gracious and constructive way of understanding their perspective and engaging with it to create a better outcome. But it seems like maybe 1/2 or 1/3 of people are capable of making the turn back from talking shit to getting shit done. The rest seem to have the attitude of, well, we figured out this other guy is the problem, right, so what are you looking at me for? When in fact none of us are perfect, and other teams might have equally valid complaints about them.
(I'm not a manager, just an IC, but somewhere along the way I got gray hair and I started worrying about this stuff.)
yeah this whole “manager != friend” thing always felt like a weird flex. ok cool, you’re not my buddy, but you still control my calendar, my comp, and my stress levels.truth is, I’ve had managers who were upfront and still made the team feel safe. and I’ve had ones who used “radical candor” as an excuse to be jerks.
honestly, if you need a blog post to remind you not to be fake-friendly or overly harsh, maybe management ain’t your lane.
just be real, be human, and don’t weaponize empathy.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
> This is especially true for friendly, competent, reasonable-seeming managers – people want to commiserate with winners
Interesting. My experience working inside big tech was thinking of managers as mostly losers who are neither technically strong but psycho enough to think they are better and can manage other engineers.
So I think of them as loosers who can't build a company from scratch but have parasitic tendencies to manage other people's money and time without having skin in the game.
Especially the ones who think they know better. And are active in LinkedIn.
Most sane 4chan/Blind dweller.
Shouldn't you be on LinkedIn?
Oof, I expected you to at least deny it.
Keep flaunting it, king.