Personal relations as a manager
fev.al
fev.al
> I was desperately trying to prove that I didn’t feel superior, wrapping feedback in all sorts of caveats...
This is how your instincts get you as a manager. The strong desire to dictate how the relationship will flow is the little monkey inside coming out to show dominance. In extreme cases, managers show off by neglecting their leadership duties under the guise of being friendly but actually just lazing around in a conspicuous consumption style display. Humans are very tuned to status, his reports were not fooled for a moment. Unless they were hopelessly naive, they knew that this man could get them fired.
A much fairer and more effective approach is to focus on the realities of the situation as best as is possible. Don't pretend to be equal, you have more power. Don't pretend to be better, you're just another opinion as far as the realities of the situation are concerned. Only force someone to do something if there is a reason or a necessity to it, ideally just find the overlap between what the reports think is high value work and what you agree with them on. Be scrupulously fair and reasonable, fight instinct and bias.
There is no such thing as autonomy when a manager's opinions will influence how a report's career progresses. To pretend otherwise is negligent, unprofessional management. Managers have power, they should exercise their influence to the betterment of their team. People in notional positions of leadership have a responsibility to make sure people are going somewhere that is better than where they are. Good managers lead. Although sometimes they lead by identifying a technical expert and leaving them alone to do something.
This is also why Marxism is always a lie. There will be people who have power over others. Saying otherwise is just an authoritarian lie.
Progressives: beware of the reality of power and responsibility; it is better to be aware of your power and bear it, then to lie about it and ignore it as if you don't have influence over others. We are not all equal in our authority, but we should all be given the same procedural processes to advance or in discipline.
Maybe that's one reason I am not a manager, but I do feel my current manager, unlike a couple of others before, is in this ballpark. In these conditions, I do feel there is space for genuine friendships. A true friend is respectful of their friends station in life. If you are friends with someone in more humble financial circumstances than yourself, you go to affordable places for get togethers. If you are friends with someone more junior professionally, you make sure that personal and professional boundaries are clearly separated and that you will never act to their detriment for your own selfish gain. If it's a real friendship, they will also understand that you have your job to do and so do they.
Now if you plan to use people for your own ends, it's certainly very creepy and unfair to imply you care about them on a personal level. But on the other hand, who wouldn't want a senior person at a new company to be their mentor and ally? Act with honesty, compassion and integrity and then friendships are not a problem.
Yep, that is what ended my management career. I became a middle manager a few years before the pandemic, but I'm back to being an IC again. I just couldn't handle managing through that first few months of the pandemic and how my bosses wanted me to treat my direct reports. Unless you are working on some lifesaving or world changing job, which almost none of us are, I just couldn't imagine prioritizing my job over my coworkers. Why put the profits of some people I don't know above the lives of people I worked with every day? It's a messed-up world that this opinion makes me a bad manager.
I really hope that the execs realize that they need to make VPs and directors more responsible for their reports. Not just accountable. These managers should be the first to go in a layoff or a PIP. Only then will this industry change.
> These managers should be the first to go in a layoff or a PIP
I'm not sure what to do with a truly unqualified employee, but implying a manager should be fired if, eg. an employee refuses to work, seems a little much.
A PIP should be used only for project failures in the first place, not for people failures. And, a manager should be responsible for allocating the right amount of resources and tools to get a project done. They should not be able to abscond from this responsibility by Pipping ICs.
If a truly unqualified employee doesn't work, they can just fire them.
Maintaining a strong personal relationship with staff doesn't preclude giving tough feedback; on the contrary, it supports it by creating a base of trust that you can rely on when things get difficult.
Even letting someone go can be done with compassion, and that is supported by a strong relationship.
Whenever I've been in seriously challenging situations at work, having real, deep, personal relationships with my team made it far easier to have difficult conversations.
Forging real bonds gives you a foundation that you can actually build a strong team on top of: you can have tough conversations from a position of empathy and compassion; and if you need people to just "get it done", it's much easier to ask a friend to do you a solid and just get the work over the line.
Not just that, but people are willing to go above and beyond for empathetic leaders without being asked/cajoled/whatever.
Yeah, the article is right that laying off your friends, who likely did nothing wrong, sucks, but I think everything else can be done more or as effectively if you take time to build a better relationship with your team.
Another possibility in situations where it is possible, might be approaching your team and saying, "I've been ordered to lay off one person from this team. None of you deserve to be laid off. I want to discuss if there is anyone who has other opportunities available and how we can help that person land on their feet, and I want to be clear that I can be the one to go if that's the best option."
Of course, either of these decisions happens in a context that has to be considered. For example if you have kids who will legitimately go hungry if you don't lay people off and get fired, you have to balance your responsibility to your coworkers with your responsibility to your kids. There are no silver bullets.
This isn't about never making mistakes, it's about taking responsibility for your mistakes when (not if) you make them. If you really have no choice but to lay people off, then you can do it yourself, to their face, with a clear conscience.
People at the top of organizations make the decision to lay people off, but it's middle and lower management that delivers the news. That's not right, and it's part of a pattern in corporations of upper management taking the profits and credit from success, and taking none of the costs or blame for failure. If that's what you want to do, you can do it without me.
What I hear in this post is people taking orders of magnitude more credit for successes but whining when they're held equally responsible for failures.
OP says:
> And worst of all, as is happening to the friend I mentioned, you will have to lay-off people who don’t deserve it, just because the company says so. > > Good luck doing that if everyone in your team is your buddy. I learned it the hard way, the first time I had to fire someone.
Having had to do this a few to times, my perspective remains that I want to build strong, personal bonds with my team. Doesn’t matter where I sit in the hierarchy, people that connect and communicate well just work better together.
It absolutely fucking sucks having to fire good colleagues and workplace friends, but that’s a feature, not a bug. It should feel bad! That’s part of the human experience. If you make yourself mute to these emotions, you’re doing yourself a disservice in the long run.
I understand your point and view, but I don't agree. I don't agree because, as a manager myself, it's already hard enough to do this even if I don't have any special relationship with the person. If I had it, it would become stress and mental health issues.
So if true personal friendships are allowed, either the kind of person like the one I am should never get into management or we have to endure this extra pain that ends up affecting our personal lives.
It's not healthy to dissociate yourself so you can do harm to others. Doing harm to other people should be hard and if it's not hard, that is a mental health issue. The society we live in is fucked up, and being well-adjusted to a sick society isn't a measure of health.
That doesn't mean you never do harm to others: sometimes all your options harm someone, and the best option is the one that does the least harm. But in those situations you can have a clear conscience if you do your best to minimize the damage within the options you have.
> So if true personal friendships are allowed, either the kind of person like the one I am should never get into management or we have to endure this extra pain that ends up affecting our personal lives.
Good people aren't ideal capitalist robots, and ideal capitalist robots aren't good people.
That doesn't mean good people can't ever be in positions of power, but it's certainly more difficult to get there without making ethical compromises.
The book "Crucial Conversations" might help some in this situation.
It's also possible that there are other issues with management style at play here- being friends doesn't necessarily require a particular management style all the time. In "Thinking Like a Software Engineering Manager" Leadership styles are reviewed (autocratic, democratic, delegative, transactional, transformational, servant). For choosing a style, it states "choosing a leadership style is very situational".
Personally i'd rather people not ignore the elephant in the room. The fact is, the company didn't hire me out of the goodness of their heart; they hired me because they want something from me. Now of course, i dont want the company to be an asshole about it, but pretending the relationship is something other than it is just causes pain in the long run.
But at the end of the day, these decisions could be decentralized, and most of the time they already are anyway, and the manager just ends up being the messenger.
Besides that, a manager doesn't add much to a team I find (especially when they're not really technical, which is often the case as the tech lead usually is an IC). To me, it's another role with too much free time, and when people have too much free time they end up filling that time doing politics.
One thing the post doesn’t exactly mention but is a very strong reason to be careful befriending your reports: favoritism. In my experience on data science and machine learning teams, it’s often the case that there are more and less glamorous work assignments on the team, and if you’re befriending of someone means they start to avoid all the undesirable work, you’ll end up damaging team chemistry and churning out good but unrewarded team members.
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> To do all that in a honest way, you need to keep some distance with the folks you manage.
I disagree. I would like each of my friends to treat me the way described above. If I’m sucking as a human, friend, spouse, etc I want my friends to take me aside and ask how they can help.
I think it’s difficult to manage this balance, VERY difficult, but it can be done.
For example, if you are the commander and you have a child, it's against the rules for one of your children to date the child of one of your subordinates. The thought is that if you let that happen, it's possible that favoritism or at a minimum clouded judgement might come into play. Specifically, this is for times where you have to send troops into combat and you should be picking the best troops for the mission regardless of other factors.
Now, I agree with many other people here that you can have a good relationship with your team members so the above is merely showing the extreme.
[citation needed]
Neither your children, nor your subordinate's children are in the military, so the military's authority over either is very limited, almost entirely limited to what they can do on base. There's even a trope about a young troop unknowingly ending up dating his base commander's daughter, and only finding out when he shows up for dinner at her father's house. And nothing happens to them.
There are rules about who can date who, but it's only for military members, and amounts to: officer can't date enlisted, and you can't date people in your chain of command.
So you can (and should) be friendly with the staff you manage but you have to remember your position is fundamentally antagonistic to theirs. You are not their friend, you are not their family member. You wield incredible power over their lives and you need to remember and respect that.
If one is not an owner then I can see it being possible, however challenging.
yes it is harder being a manager in that situation, yes the friendship may not survive, but its not some insurmountable obstacle.
I have personally learned that acceptance of a harder truth is a privilege that has to be earned. I think it's more about trust than friendship, at least in the management context.
It is entirely possible to be friends with employees. You are not a king, or a despot, or a colonel in the armed forces. The first big mistake new managers make is to try to still act like a single contributor. The second one is taking the management part of the job too seriously.
Conversely: you're in charge - in some way, of hiring, firing, salary and promotions even if not directly. People don't generally have multiple jobs, the relationship of employee to business is a direct stake in their private financial situation.
You spend so much time around the people you work with. (With. Even managers "work with." I hate the phrase "work for." We "work with" each other and have different roles and areas of expertise. Both an IC and a CEO are adults trading their time and expertise for money and are working with each other to grow the company.) There are other options besides being besties with someone and artificially keeping them at arm's length.
1. Manager A is a Good Person but actually an incompetent manager. Everyone likes him, but he's terrible at teaching people and developing their careers. Eventually, people go elsewhere for growth.
2. Manager A is actually fantastic as career development, so much so that he convinces his team that they are capable of so much more. He builds them up and then sends them out into the world with his blessing to do something bigger.
FWIW, I think option #1 is most likely.
For Manager B, this is a person who is steady and low drama, but also not super invested on the personal level. Likely does what he has to for his team, and the folks who stay are not super ambitious but also appreciate the low drama environment.
The article seems predicated on this idea; that there are unpleasant parts of management and they're made more unpleasant by being friendlier than one needs to be with the people one is responsible for.
I won't dispute that, but I would like to say that ideally they should not be the 'steady state' of management. Is it a sure thing, a universal thing, that the benefits of being friendly across the team do not outweigh the costs of these infrequent, unpleasant interactions typically between only two people?
Seems to be another topic where nuance is important; not sure I'd suggest any hard and fast rules about the distance one should keep between themselves and people they're responsible for.
You relationship with your manager is like your relationship with the company at large - it's a symbiosis, a contract, something that benefits both parties... until one day when it inevitably doesn't.
One day you will either leave the company or the company will leave you. Once the arrangement isn't mutually beneficial any more, the relationship is finished. There's nothing personal about that. In the meantime, you expect your manager to support and help you, set clear expectations, resolve disputes, etc and they expect you to meet the expectations of your role.
Do you mean the scenario where one of you is promoted internally to be manager to people with whom you were formerly peers?
Depends on the company's culture and whether it does internal development/promotion.
Just be the boss, be honest, and be kind.
Becoming friends or more than friends is cool, but if the manager can't remain professional, no one can.
If you have a wife and kids a lot becomes easier. You're not single/dating, you're serious about the bread you win, and you don't have any friends or time for them anymore anyway!
If you are indeed superior across every dimension, you either have a bad team & should go work somewhere else, or you are clipping your teammates wings & obstructing their development.
Do you have a position of superiority in the org chart? In many companies, yes. But also: you are overhead. You are a resource there to keep the engineers doing the thing. They are the ones doing the actual task the company actually wants done, not you: you may be higher up the org chart, but you are actually playing a superior, not lead role.
If you're in management, you have the decision making power - and are the superior.
In a meritocracy, you may expect the superior rank to be given to those with superior skill, but the skill isn't what gives them the power once they have the rank, and it's the skill to get the rank that gets the rank, not the skill of your job.
Good managers are also good with their boss, and likely a big part of how they were promoted to manager in the first place.
1. You're not superior. In fact, there's a good chance you're inferior in many ways. You have become disconnected from the "doing" part of the job, and this introduces problems. Not saying one is more important or superior. We all have our blind spots.
2. Telling yourself you're superior is the quickest path to believing it. When think you're superior, people will start noticing. A tiny fraction of people can reliably hide their feelings in the long term, and this behavior is arguably shady also.
3. People don't do well feeling that superior people are lording over them. Equality and control over one's own life brings more job satisfaction, and it's also the right thing to do.
4. We all help set cultural standards. If you think you're superior, others will too. They might not respect the same boundaries as you. ie. you're superior, but your responsibility is to be fair, so you judge by actions and don't play favorites. I heard this argument made by a drill instructor. If I start slapping a recruit, someone could throw his head into a wall. What makes you think you can effectively protect against managers that express superiority through dominance and abuse? Why would any measures be better than a culture of equality.
5. Starting a family should be joyous, not about the end of your social life. The reason sacrifice needs to be made primarily stems from our unforgiving work culture. The fact that we have to choose between family, friends, hobbies and health/fitness to such an extent is an injustice.
6. In my experience single people are often the biggest workaholics. This is because most people with families realize it's in their best interest (personally and for the family) to not prioritize work over family. Meanwhile, single people tend to have lots of disposable time, and always a little frustrated with the people with family commitments. It can go either way, with the guys hiding from their wives, and working late in the office. I find this really sad.
I could probably go on, but I'll stop. I know this is pretty rude, but I think people who think this way need help. You might find yourself at a point in your life where you understand the value of friends, because your life is in shambles without them (same with family and career). It doesn't have to be that way, and we can work to improve these conditions.
P.S. Just an example for those of you that think you don't need friends, I remember an account from reddit. Guy married for years. After a few decade wifes decides she's gonna have sex with other people. No friends. The guy was crushed.
I see this happen all the time with family and career, too. It's fun to do that easy job, and you're happy with your social life? Good luck as you advance past your 30s, you can't "hang out" like you used to (nobody left without wife and kids), living paycheck to paycheck, very few opportunities, etc... around the same time you'll take a similar hit if you have no immediate family.
You and jauntywundrkind are confusing the context of superior. The context is rank and power. As a manager and boss, you are of superior rank and power. The point being, stop dancing around that, especially in fear of comments by those who may take it out of context. So you're demonizing me based on your own context. Which is dark and toxic.
But this is important because it's so often the case. If you could choose the context, you could always see something as dark and toxic, or do the opposite. And if you do see something someway, check the context, and be sure it's considered.
To be professional is to never infer personal superiority. Superior skill, superior rank, superior attire maybe, or superior height even? None of these make anyone personally superior. Even superior character, mood, philosophy, empathy. Surely you can find something inferior if you wanted. But none of this is about the individual being inferior or superior. In fact, even at a personal level, who compares themselves with others in such a way? Who's scared to be compared? And who's after those who compare? Making it about that is the fasted path to dark and toxic.
So please don't.
All that is meant by superior here, is your superior can fire you, and you can't fire them. If this fact is damaging to your world view, I'd say your world view may need repairing.
But with a healthy understanding of the situation, if you wish to get promoted, go for it.
The end.
This is not universally accepted, and I don't necessarily agree. Definitely think this is a terrible way to word your point, even if you had a decent one.
> So you're demonizing me based on your own context. Which is dark and toxic.
No, I'm demonizing you for what you said. I don't know "your own context". I know what you said, and it sounded entitled and bigoted.
Some background: We constantly hear people say these things. We recognize the ideology that tends to go with these ideas and are rightly suspicious and critical.
I'm not going to try guess your best intention. You should use language that doesn't make me think you are an arrogant narcissist or a fascist. I'm not trying to insult you, but here I think it's important for clarity.
> So please don't.
No. I always will. Your comment was terrifying. This talk of "superiority" is a problem from the start.
> who compares themselves with others in such a way?
Lots of people. It's awful. Hence the purpose of my response.
> Who's scared to be compared?
Huh? I thought comparing is bad. Now being "scared" to be compared is bad?
> And who's after those who compare?
What?!?! Are you having some victim complex and saying people are out to get you? I have no idea what you're talking about here.
> All that is meant by superior here, is your superior can fire you, and you can't fire them. If this fact is damaging to your world view, I'd say your world view may need repairing.
Did you write this on a projector? BTW, your "superior" can't necessarily fire you, nor should they be able to any more than you can fire them. I don't think that many teams give a single person dictator powers to do this anymore.
So while it might be true that some manager has an easier time firing a less powerful employee, it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, in the real world managers often feel like they can't fire anyone, and sometimes employees do have recourse.
In fact, you're wrong, you can get your manager fired! It happens more often than you'd think.
Try saying that to your boss who does in fact outrank you.
> I'm demonizing you for what you said
Do you make it a habit? You ever consider misinterpretation or do you just blame the other person's wording?
My use of the word is not incorrect, and no I do not mean superior human being. If that is what I meant, I would have put human being after superior.
> I'm not going to try guess your best intention.
You should. Always. Please do.
> language that doesn't make me think
No one's language will make you think anything. Your thoughts are your own. Own them. Think about that. And if you've misidentified an arrogant narcissist or a fascist, that's on you.
> Lots of people. It's awful. Hence the purpose of my response.
Like you? And your purpose is what? To demonize me? Why?
> your "superior" can't necessarily fire you, nor should they be able to any more than you can fire them.
So here what needs repairing. Have you ever worked "under" someone? Or is that "beneath" you? Or is this language damaging?
Yes, they can fire you, and no you can't fire them. Trying to get them fired is not the same, and already you're admitting you can't do it directly. They can do it directly. You get to quit if you don't enjoy the work being served on your plate. That's all it is.
I apologize if I offended you. That was not my intent. You could have guessed that.
However, you are personally offensive, by your own admission. Demonizing people is offensive. And you continue to do so even after I've clarified my point.
But it is actually more behind this than "just" about friendships. There are two types of managers that are toxic for their surroundings.
The too friendly one, who can't make tough decisions and the other type is the one who doesn't care at all. Both types will end with a team of juniors (who are only there to gain experience) and toxic people. Not a team you wanna be in (hopefully).
You don't have to be friends with your colleagues to be empathetic. And you don't have to be a psychopath to make tough decisions.
My advice is, be as transparent as possible (you can't tell everything). If you make a decision, tell exactly why you do so. If you cannot be fully transparent, explain why. The people you manage expect that you make decisions, when it's needed, otherwise they will not respect you.
There is something I tell to everyone who is new at managing people. The ultimate bad decision you can make is to fire someone (but it will happen). You should feel terrible, but you should still do it. Do it as quick as possible, don't push it away from you, just do it. If you need a drink in the evening afterwards, that's totally fine ;).
I remained friendships throughout the career, even with people I personally had to bring over bad messages (and made that decision by myself). And even worse, as I was in top management, more or less every bad decision will be pushed on you anyways.
Sorry for the long text ;).
No, it's not this extremely bad for your health. What would you say if I said: If you struggle with firing your employees just do it, then go home and do some cocaine, and don't worry about it. "that's totally fine" ;)
Honestly, I think you're a monster, because I would if you made the before mentioned proposition. Alcohol kills quick!!! Much like cigs, YOU WILL DIE.
It can take decades, or you can die in your 40s, even much sooner. Depending what path your on it can take months to a year or so.
First, good leadership is something we should celebrate. It is very hard, requires making a lot of tough decisions, and comes with a real personal cost. Unless you're a total psychopath, which most managers aren't, firing people or delivering bad news isn't easy--for anyone. Doing this all day is difficult.
However, there's a reason most human undertakings of any consequence involve hierarchy (armies, organized religion, etc): it works. It's needed to get things done. Companies aren't charities and in order to ensure the paychecks keep cashing, things have to get done. Goals have to be hit, decisions have to be made, and occasionally, staff let go or fired. All of this falls to management.
You don't have to do it, but someone does.
My favorite essay on this topic: https://medium.com/8vc-news/a-deficit-of-leadership-38bb888a...
As someone who’s had to do it a few times, I’ve found that the actual act of firing someone for poor performance is pretty easy — getting to the decision to fire them can be very challenging though. But once the decision’s been made it’s just working through the steps to see it through.
Honestly the end result is that everyone else is better off because a poor performer isn’t holding things back. And eventually the poor performer’s life is going to be better because they’ll find something they’re excellent at.
It’s kind of like the house being on fire and you’re the one with the hose. If you choose not to use it, everyone suffers.
At least that’s my positive take on firing.
This is a nuanced topic, so don't respond to this post if you haven't read the whole thing. I'll be able to tell, and I'll call you out on it.
> But the day things go sideways, it backfires in an explosive way. Because at the end of the day, as a manager, you will have to deal with shit situations. You will have to give feedback that the receiver doesn’t want (but needs to hear). You will have to ask someone to shut up and do it anyways. You will have to not promote/give a raise to someone and tell them why. You will have to fire someone who under-performs. You will have to distribute some of the blame. And worst of all, as is happening to the friend I mentioned, you will have to lay-off people who don’t deserve it, just because the company says so.
Actually, you never have to do anything. You can refuse to give feedback you don't believe is true. You can refuse to order someone to do something you don't believe is right. You can refuse to fire someone or lay someone off, and make the person who demands it done do their own dirty work.
People in positions of economic power always use the language of freedom when discussing harm they do to others. People are free to work elsewhere, regardless of what jobs are available to them. People are free to shop elsewhere, regardless of the lies you've told them to get them to shop with you, or regardless of the monopoly you have, or regardless of their ability to pay.
But suddenly when it's with regards to their own actions, those with economic power feign that they're slaves to forces beyond their control. I had to fire them, I had to lay them off, I had to raise prices or rent, I had to underpay or cut pay or outsource, I had to reduce the size or quality of the product, I had to discontinue service.
The fact is everything you do is a choice, and being higher up almost always means you're choosing between more options and better options. For the owner of a company, these choices are often choosing between making more or less money when either amount would be enough to meet all their needs and have money to spare. For the employee or customer of the company, these choices are often choosing between spending on health insurance or spending on food, renting an apartment where your kids can go to a good school, or paying for healthier food for your kids so that they can develop better physiologically.
It's absolutely disgusting to hear people in positions of power abdicating responsibility for their choices when every choice they make has much smaller consequences for them than it does for others. Do not fucking pretend you "have to" do things when you're in power. That's a lie you're telling to yourself to make yourself feel better about doing things you know are wrong. You aren't being forced to do things you don't want to do: you're choosing the option you want from the options you have.
If anyone has a right to be saying "I had to" it's the people at the bottom: stealing is still a choice, but "I had to steal" is pretty reasonable if the alternative was letting your children starve. "I had to fire him" does not have the same weight if your literal basic survival needs aren't on the line.
That doesn't mean you never fire someone or lay someone off, that you never raise prices or rent, than you never underpay or cut pay or outsource, than you never reduce size or quality, or that you never discontinue service. Sometimes those things occur within a context and you have to choose who gets harmed in a situation. But if you make that choice to the best of your ability your conscience will be clear. The only reason you're pretending you didn't have a choice is that your conscience isn't clear.
In my career I think I've done a fairly good job of making decisions I don't feel guilty about, and don't have to pretend that they weren't my decisions. That means I've turned down money, refused to work with certain people, and refused to do certain things when I knew there would be negative consequences for me. I've been in positions of power and I've always tried to be a decent human first and a boss second, and that's resulted in me losing some of those positions. This isn't unrealistic--I've done it.
And the flipside is now I work with people who I respect. The people who have power over me, my clients/bosses, are people I trust to take responsibility for their actions and do what's right to the best of their ability. And in turn that means I'm willing to go the extra mile for those people, because I know they're not just trying to wring as much profit out of me as they can with no consideration for my well-being. I'm not rich, and I end up working hard, but it's a good life.
The norm for these conversations on hacker news is for people to read until the first thing they can disagree with, and then respond with some late-stage-capitalist bullshit that I've already responded to later in the post. To guard against that, use the word "potato" in your response, or I'll just call you out for not reading what you're responding to. I know that's against the HN guidelines, but I'm not going to participate in prioritizing surface-level politeness over genuine care for human beings, which requires taking the time to have real nuanced discussions about important topics.