> 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.
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.
> 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.Gripes go up, but shit rolls down hill.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
Astute observation, and spot-on IMO.
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.
- [deleted]
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"
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'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.
I got to the same quote and stopped reading. This person would be great in charge of robots, too bad humans have emotions.