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Comment by darkerside | Hacker News Reader

As someone who suffers from the same neuroses, I would push back on some of this a bit.

If you haven't built trust with every person on your team, that doesn't make you a shitty manager. The more people you can work with and trust, the more effective you may be as a manager, but don't let a counterexample serve as proof positive that you suck. Trust is a two way street.

Sometimes people underperform for other reasons that have nothing to do with you. They may have a different perspective, or they may just be having a bad day. Or they may have family or health problems affecting them. Or, they may actually just no longer care or not be good at their job.

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For the first point -- I believe that OP wants the manager to extend trust as a mechanism and path toward both a trusting relationship and short-term performance.

For the second -- it is on the manager to know enough about the reasons affecting their report's performance to be able to adapt before the team underperforms. (and it is on the report to surface that information quickly so that the team isn't compromised)

How can this be accomplished? I take great pains not to get involved in my employees' personal lives. When they call out sick, I never ask why. While I do ask if "they need anything", they never have to tell me what they are sick with, or if they are even not sick and just need a day. I assume they are adults who are competent to manage their own time.

I once worked with a manager who would always ask for details like "oh you have a headache? Do you have a fever?" While I think his intentions were good, and that he just wanted to show concern and even offer support or advice, I always found the questions incredibly invasive and a violation of my privacy.

My team knows that I will always listen if an employee wants to share details of their personal lives (upto anything that crosses the line of appropriatness for work), but I would never pry.

So, in this example, I would never know an employee is struggling with a personal issue, unless they broached the subject with me.

I don't think it's prying to care about your employees and want to make sure they are ok. Asking for at least first level details should be done IMO.

What do you consider first-level details? It’d be super put off if my boss asked me if I had a fever when I emailed in sick.

“Nothing to serious I hope? Can I be of any help?” works for me as an employee.

This is highly subjective though.

Personally, if I'm sick, the last think I want to do is communicate with my manager - it means you have to be careful, you never know if they're digging, or 'professional but not exactly sincere empathy' etc..

'Adult Professionals' shouldn't need to be coddled. If you're sick you're sick and that's that.

If you have something that's a 'big deal' then you have that in a conversation in which the managers emotional response one would expect is empathy but beyond that it's a matter of 'how to work around it'.

'Trust' is a multifaceted thing, I generally do not trust that people will do their jobs well at the outset, until I've seen evidence of that, but as far as those kinds of workplace issues I definitely 'trust by default'. People get sick and that's that.

And then have a lot of tolerance because we are all a little odd in our own ways and it's just easier not to get caught up in stuff.

I trust my manager to not be a dick when I'm sick. I also believe he is an empathetic person who cares about me and wants to know what's up. I understand he has a list of tasks that need to be completed by his small team. So I'm happy to let him know whether I expect to be out for a day or a week.

If I didn't have such a relation with my manager I'd be looking for a job. If he doesn't look out for me when I'm sick he will probably not look out for me professionally either.

That's the sign of having a good manage. Not everyone has that unfortunately

This is it. Someone not bothering to ask this is actually a bit rude. IMO.

I understand the first point, but I disagree that is always going to be possible or the correct path. If you blindly trust every employee, you will eventually end up hurting the company, the employee, and yourself.

Second point, sure. That's the ideal. But it's not always going to happen, and you need to be able to deal with that situation to be a well rounded manager and leader. IMO.

Thank you for being a voice of reason. Puritanism is so popular on HN.

I didn't see any discussion of blind trust. The first point was about focusing on looking at the trust and figuring out how it could be built up.

And I'm saying there are points where it doesn't make sense too do that. I believe that's the most effective path 90% of the time, but you are not a complete manager if you can't deal with the 10% edge cases effectively.

> Sometimes people underperform for other reasons that have nothing to do with you.

You can still try to find out what causes their behavior (by showing interests into their perspective) and may be able to help them and therefore the team.

- If they have a different perspective, it should be helpful to listen to their perspective.

- If they have a bad day, it will go away.

- If they have family or health problems, you might not want know the details, but simply knowing that a person is going through a difficult time might give you enough information to know how to improve the situation.

Even if you are not the cause of the situation, you might still be able to improve it as a manager.

I agree. If you just assume it's your own bad communication that's at fault, you deny your report the opportunity to ask for help they may need..

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