Most managers are ill-equipped to lead
Deficiencies range from lack of training to complete incompetence.
When I was in high school, the choir director would routinely scream at students. She would pound on her piano in frustration and tell us how terrible we were. On occasion, she would walk directly up to a student and yell in their face. Her temper was well-known throughout the school.
But she could also be really fun and funny. She expected a lot from the choir (especially show choir), and we learned a lot, musically. She pushed us to be our best.
I often wondered: was the yelling necessary? I got a glimpse of an alternative when my school hosted an invitational — other schools would come to us to compete and perform. Pairs of students from my choice would "host" the visiting choir and help them navigate the building, and make sure they had anything they needed.
The choir I hosted had an incredibly kind director. He was motivational as his students gathered around before they went on stage. And the group was amazing. Clearly, yelling was not a prerequisite for incredible performance. (In the fictional world, Ted Lasso comes to mind.)
You could say that my experience with my choir director was a teaching moment, since that type of personality exists in the world. I've encountered it in the work world. Yet I wonder: why is that behavior tolerated — especially in a manager — when it's known to be ineffective and have a negative impact on employees?
Managing the work vs. managing the people
I first became a manager back in 2016. I was promoted to the director of the customer service department, which I'd been working in since I started at the company. Seven people reported to me: four customer service reps who doubled as onboarding specialists, two technical support reps, and one analyst. I'd been the senior member of the department for many years; the go-to person for the most challenging customers and most head-scratching issues. It was a natural progression of my career to go from individual contributor to manager, and something I wanted. But there's a huge difference between being a peer and taking on the role of manager.
I had no manager role models. My boss — who continued to be my boss after my promotion — wasn't the best example. She and I worked really well together and got a lot of shit done, but that's because we had similar personalities. After I became a manager myself, I noticed that she didn't do well with people who had dissimilar personalities, and she avoided confrontation. As a result, problems went unaddressed and continued to fester.
I wanted to do better, but I didn't know how. My only preparation was reading the book Why Managing Sucks and How to Fix It by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. The authors argued that managers should manage work, not people. I worked for a fully remote company that embraced asynchronous work. The book — aimed at companies with similar working models — taught me that I needed to establish clear expectations, deliverables, and timelines and then to back off and let people do work their own way.
To a large extent, that's sound advice. Most managers think of "managing work" and implement rigid employee surveillance, such as tracking mouse movement to "make sure people are working." Or employees spend half their time reporting on their results instead of doing the work.
Autonomy is a worthy aspiration, but managers also need to manage people in other ways. They need to provide support, act as a sounding board, and figure out how to give people what they need and want from their careers. Autonomy doesn't work when people aren't sure how to get the work done. Think of it this way: working autonomously is a skill. People might be good at one skill (like coding, for example), but have never done project management. They don't know how to plan their days when there's zero oversight and they're only told to "get shit done by this deadline." Autonomy can still work, but the manager's job is to help the employee figure out how to manage their work and prioritize — in a way that makes sense for the individual employee.
Most managers are ill-equipped to manage. They don't know how to provide that type of individualized support. They only know how to implement their own preferred way of working — not how to be adaptive to other ways of working.
That's a best-case scenario. At worst, managers are toxic or incompetent.
It's hard to improve managers
In 2016, Michael Beer (an emeritus professor at Harvard Business School) wrote an article for Harvard Business Review called Why Leadership Training Fails — and What to Do About It. He points out that most manager training "doesn't lead to better organizational performance, because people soon revert to their old ways of doing things." He cites that decades of studies have shown that management training isn't effective and why, but "that understanding has not made its way into most companies."
It's a combination of managers who don't know how to lead, and those that have no interest in doing better. For the latter group, managing is about power and strong-arming employees into submission. It's the opposite of autonomy and a terrible way to effectively run a department.
It's also a terrible environment for employees. Back in 2021 — during The Great Resignation — MIT Sloan Management Review published an article that found that a toxic corporate culture is 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting a company's attrition rate. Employees don't like feeling disrespected or that they're not recognized for their work.
Despite all of this information that managers and management styles have a direct impact on work, things haven't gotten better. Training is bad or nonexistent. There aren't enough paths for stellar individual contributors who want to earn more and advance, but aren't suited for management.
A 2024 Forbes article entitled 15 Effective Employee Retention Strategies focuses entirely on employee perks, with some references to building teamwork and reducing burnout. But nowhere does it suggest taking a good, hard look at the people in charge and assessing whether or not managers can be better — or should even be in the role at all.
Sometimes, the worst people are put in management roles simply because they know how to play a good game, and their power goes unchecked. "Failing upwards" can have very real, very harmful consequences.
I wish I knew how to fix this problem. I think a lot of people — like the younger version of myself — see bad management and think they can do better. But the truth is, we can't do better without a specific understanding of how to lead a team and care for its people.
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