MC75 Why Does Management Have a Bad Name?

i feel like like this is going to be something this might be triggering this should come with a warning yes why does management have a bad there's going to be some examples and uh everybody everybody who's had a little bit of work experience doesn't have to be much you're going to come across as bad managers and it's hard to get that taste out of your mouth once once you've experienced it you know my father was uh he was quite a senior engineer in two different companies big corporations and he couldn't stand just this the word manager eventually he became a team leader which he hated it was so bad for him that did you ever watch the office the uk version the sitcom oh i couldn't i couldn't it was too um yeah i couldn't yeah exactly this is exactly too cringy too cringy for me too cringy i think for my father it was it just reminded him of real life because i loved it i did watch it for a while and i showed it to him and he just couldn't he couldn't he couldn't deal with it so yeah so listeners this will be a fun episode come on i think it's good to understand though this uh why why does management have a bad name because i do think it does which is a shame and i would say it's actually bad management that gives managers a bad name so anyway welcome to management cafe my name is pilar orti and with me as always is co-host tim burges we're gonna be here hopefully not too long so hopefully it'll be a short episode but you're very welcome to join a cup of coffee or tea if you want to hang around yeah you see this is the issue so this is i'm already going off on we've got a few notes to go with but come on so i was um i was a member of a group so the royal society the rsa the royal society of arts is a very traditional organization in the uk which is like i see it like a think tank is where people come together to discuss things a lot of thinking going on and i used to be a member and there was a group set up by lovely julie reese and other people to discuss and look at self-management and everything around the frederick laloux book reinventing organizations it really was about that and i was very active in there but i used to get very annoyed and going back to our episode where we talk about the importance of being calm and empathetic that was not me i used to get so annoyed because everyone was talking badly about managers and i was just saying i'm sorry you're not talking about managers you're talking about bad managers and there's a big difference but i think like you were saying earlier that we've all had experiences of this and sometimes that might be the only experience we have of management is a bad manager or the experience is so bad that we can't see past it so oh so but it'd be interesting to see why this is happening well there's a lot of bad managers and there's a lot of bad management experiences that people have there's just so much here but you know there's a power dynamic but let's say you have an average manager you know a bland neither good nor there exactly right on the middle line but they make one mistake once that has a bad impact on you they're not a they're not a nothing manager anymore they're a bad manager you know and they probably have to do 10 extraordinary things to get back to being a nothing manager as opposed to being a good one because i think those the bad experiences that we have with managers you know they can be tied to our compensation they can be tied to our ability to earn a livelihood they can be tied to our job which can be tied to our sense of self-worth they can be tied they can be tied to who we are as people you know uh things we're really proud to be deflating like there's so much at stake that the potential to have a bad experience is quite quite high and then when you look at the supply side of who becomes managers the environments that they're putting in you know company culture the hiring process sit between the manager and the individual managing the team a lot of scope for um problems the bit i hadn't thought about was the fact that actually sometimes it's not that you have an experience with a bad manager is that you have a bad experience with a manager which for me exactly that thing that sometimes these mistakes have a disproportionate impact even on us so that doesn't help so even when a manager is good whatever good means uh to you then there's the potential that one mistake there or something they don't just it makes them be a bad manager rather than someone who did one you know made one mistake just because yeah yeah well that was something that i was very well something that i became very conscious of when in my management journey was that your mistakes all have a human impact and you know last time we had coffee we talked a little about regret and you know how as you learn things you wish you could go back and do some things differently and as a manager oh i mean it's brutal it's brutal realizing that um that you've you've held people in a space of sort of vulnerability and you've done the wrong thing or you've acted in a way that you're not proud of or that you would never do again if you knew then what you know now and that's hard that's hard that's a really tough thing to live with but yeah that's part of um unfortunately you know if you're growing as a manager uh you know no one comes into that role fully formed so you're going to learn as you go which means you're going to make mistakes and those mistakes are going to impact people and i think that's still not given enough importance in organizations like this and the fact that it's for me it's not even about training or even about being ready it's about that acknowledgement of how difficult it is and the impact it has and having the support systems for people to to go through that because a lot of the time that that isn't there it is just not there and as i said when you consider how people come into it but sometimes they come into it because they're good individual contributors and that's where they end up with it because that's the next thing they can do if they want to earn a bit more money then this is a mess yeah we know this and some of the anti-patterns that we see in management like uh you know cold-heartedness or you know this oh it's just business like some of those are protective measures it's a defensive stance that the leader is taking to try to protect themselves against vulnerability like if you put forward that stance that this is just business it's not personal and that's why i'm not going to give you a chance to improve i'm going to sack it or like whatever it is uh you know maybe it makes it easier for that person to process it or they feel like it makes it easier to process it but on the receiving end it's a bad measure yeah but it might be someone who's just trying their best given the limited resources that they have available in the situation and i think that's also often overlooked is we had we had coffee last time we were talking about the importance of context to bring out the best kind of leader possible and i think this also is not being given enough importance it's if we want someone to be in a place where they want to do their best for themselves and those around them the environment has to be right and there needs to be a right fit and it doesn't mean when i'm saying the environment needs to be right i'm not thinking of a specific kind of environment because it'll be different for different people but again we're not i don't think we're thinking enough about that this person they they're being interviewed and they sound like they would be good but how are they doing in this specific kind of environment oh for sure i'm thinking of one person that i managed that at the beginning uh we got on like a house on fire and i remember at one point relatively early this person said to me like oh you know i'm so enjoying working with you like this is you know you're one of the best managers i've ever had whatever and i thought oh that's great and then the um you know the relationship changed uh we were the same people but oh the circumstances changed i guess and i guarantee they didn't think i was the best manager they'd ever had by the end of it and i didn't think they were the best employee i'd ever managed by the end of it you know we really struggled to interact and uh you know so even within the um relationship things can change and you know that's not something that you reflect on with a great deal of pride but like i was a bad manager for that person uh and even then at the same time i feel like i was a good manager for other people that i was managing and maybe a good manager overall but not that in a hundred yeah well also i think maybe that also contributes to the fact that management has a bad name is that everyone in the end is experiencing it differently and it relies so much on the one-to-one even if you're not very close but the one-to-one perception and the one-to-one everything well another thing that i'm very conscious of and i particularly noticed this as we were hiring was so many people bring i don't i'm gonna say baggage but i don't mean that in a derogatory way i mean that they have the negative experiences that they've accumulated over the course of their work interaction and they bring that with them you could see it when you were interviewing people and you would ask them experience about the work that they like and why they left their previous job why they were looking for what they were looking for and how they like to be managed and you could see the scars on people you could see that they that they had bad experiences and they were you know they were tentative about some issues they were nervous or guided you know sometimes people would be limiting themselves or you know be very cautious about what they were doing because they'd had bad experiences in the workplace typically with a manager and it's hard to recover from that and certainly not something that you want to um if you can't you want to get away from it you don't want to stay in that situation yeah and i mean yes there are experiences i think we underestimate sometimes how much then those experiences are taken to the next relationship with the next manager and this is one of the things that um a very long time ago i did a summer course at lsc on organizational behavior just so much fun because i've never studied this academically and there was a lady who specialized on the psychological contract so we did a few sessions around that and actually i think it came up in the exam or we had to write i think it came up in the exam and it was about the importance of managing the psychological contract which is the psychological contract is those expectations that we have about what the workplace is going to look like how they're going to treat us if we do certain things and we have that of course with the manager that you say and what feeds into that is from family experience to all your experience at work with all of that you bring it into the workplace and if as a manager you can understand that and make some of your assumptions explicit about some of the way in which you're working explicit then the person can adjust but if we always leave this underneath and we're never touching on it and we're just assuming that everyone assumes and wants the same from us as we would want from our manager that's where it gets tricky so i think there's also that is that people don't often talk enough about what they want from what they need from the managers and managers what they need from them it always takes so much time and energy but i think that's another reason is there's no time to really work on that yeah yeah and exactly you said like we have our preconceptions so if you've been micro if you've only ever been micromanaged you know and you had two or three jobs you've been micromanaged every time and your boss has been overbearing and difficult what do you like it's not like you're walking around going well i know management's like this i just had that run you know you think well this is what management's like because that's all i've ever experienced and so then when you go into your next role you're expecting that that's how your manager's going to behave and it might be even that they're not that way but you interpret it as that because that's all you know to your point like that's maybe that's one reason why those manager read me's became so popular is because it was helping decode who the manager was and what their behavior meant what their expectations were what a manager read me like a user manual oh yeah it's like a user manual for manager so um it was probably in text for a while i have one i did for a while it was like you know if i'm grumpy this is how i'm gonna look this is this is you know my core traits these are my weaknesses that i'm aware of you know this is how i like to operate this is stuff that makes me nervous uh the idea being you give that to people in your team or whoever you want yeah and you know obviously our brains are very good at hiding things from us the way if you're aware of it you know your brain's not doing a very good job of hiding but the conscious things cannot make it in there yes at least there's something i want to just look at why i mean we're taking a very um compassionate approach to the topic trying to understand but i think what i'm saying is sometimes that there is a disconnection especially from more senior management there's such a disconnection between the people who make the decisions and the people who are impacted by the decisions and especially in traditional organizations these things are done and without proper consultation it's not even consultation it's input and understanding like i think that the people were not making those decisions that impacted are not being used as a resource of information enough i don't think enough sometimes i think it's about acknowledging the importance and complexity of their work and the fact that they know their work better than management because that's their job um and i want to give you an example that was sorry can i can i give you an example um and um it's like an example from the article we discussed in a previous cafe which was leading in the flow of work in a published in the hbr january february i'll just read you it really made me laugh and i just thought oh my god this is so true i'll read it out it's faster than me summarizing it so consider how adrian a physician resolved the disruptive situation that occurred at his hospital when the administration suddenly mandated a daily morning huddle for clinicians and staff without consulting them the clinicians and staff were deeply upset because the huddle was held during patient appointment hours and they felt it would negatively affect patient care then he goes to say how adrian who's so wonderful selfish in a wonderful way but this kind of thing this kind of thing i hear about it way too often and and that's no wonder that uh you know because these are the managers that made this decision they haven't consulted us they don't know what what our work is like and oh yeah no wonder yeah that happens all the time well it's uh the basic premise of a lot of companies is to make money you know and people seem very comfortable with that that you know capitalism companies exist to make money and you look at what we're february 2024 at the time that we're talking and in the last 12 months there's been uh a whole bunch of companies particularly technology companies that have uh had mass layoffs i've read something today facebook have laid off 21 000 people in the last whatever period you know six months 12 months 21 000 people and the stock price has gone up like 20 in that time so that core principle is treating people as objects not people and we saw this with when uh companies hit a lot of companies when they hit this period of economic instability or uh where growth wasn't what they expected it to be then they just sacrifice people layoffs and they also sacrifice a lot of their people programs their well-being programs out the window their unlimited pto out the window the right to flexible work out the window that's that's a high level that's a societal capitalism level that feeds into the senior level of organizations how organizations to run which feeds into how they're managed and it's not a good experience for people because it's not treating people as humans as valuable contributors as meaningful people involved in a joint contribution towards something it's treating them as you know widgets that you can buy and sell or grab and discard as you please and that is how a lot of managers behave you know the behavior you're just talking about where decisions just get handed down without any thought or discussion with people who are actually impacting that's the sort of stuff that you think you can do when you know it's only what happens at the manager level that counts and the people are there just to carry out the orders yeah i'd like to think it's a bit more that there's less money and less you don't agree with my full indictment of society from top to bottom I you know me I don't like to think I mean well the whole stock market capital all of that I think is a different thing as in you know it's too late for me that is just too late but I do think it's very difficult to lay off people companies companies don't seem to be finding it difficult well not companies I mean it might I don't know I know I know there's a lot happening now I also don't really know the you see I think it's almost I mean we're really derailing now but I see some companies that get suddenly lots of funding and start hiring like mad you see for me that is just as not wrong but irresponsible that for me is just as irresponsible as then delaying off because that's why I'm thinking yeah but I also remember I used to read loads of these business autobiographies and somebody was saying you know that how he got through having to fire thousands of people was by thinking of all the other thousands whose jobs they were saving you know it was a compromise you know we're going to go down so I don't want to trivialize how and I am too optimistic about the human race still to think that these decisions are not difficult and affecting the fact that the stock market goes high and when this happens it's gut ranging but I still think that it's I'm not sure how likely it's taken still I mean there are a whole lot of other reasons why a manager has a bad name you know a lot of it is down to bad managers you know the wrong people being in the role or the research but I do think that there's a lot of systemic issues around that you know if you're a toxic manager you don't necessarily get put in that you don't put yourself in that role necessarily you know you operate in an environment that allows you to get into that role and spread your toxicity around and that's a problem like yes the bad manager is a bad manager and that's problem but the fact that the bad manager is able to become a bad manager is also a problem because from the employee point of view you can't do anything about it if you're in a company that you know and because it often rolls up if you know all the people care about is performance or whatever and you feel like your manager is a bully what do you do go to HR we can do a whole coffee about why HR has a bad name and you see for me the issue the thing that I struggle with is not as much the very obvious what we would call toxic or bullies I mean for me those are the ones that you can see that they shouldn't be there and there is and when they're allowed to be like that you understand that there's something wrong with the culture it's just a little bit below that it's the person absolutely fine but they don't understand the work they don't consult and I think that's what management the bad name comes from oh yeah that's that's a good point that's a really good point you make and in fact you know it's a tough job there's a lot in it and if you don't put the effort in you're a bad manager yeah well yeah like yes if you put no effort yeah yeah you're bad everything so I wanted to wrap up this to say with all of this I also think that everyone loves to hate managers because how many companies are self-managed how many companies have adopted holacracy how many teams are truly self-managed I've always wondered about this and why is it we don't have more like these and I just think because actually people like having managers I've come to this conclusion whether good about it doesn't matter but hey we can have a manager to solve a lot of problems to do the managing actually yeah no I mean position but actually it's more than that as in like you said there's lots of aspects of our management that are quite difficult and a lot of people don't want to do that as well as their work or don't want to do that instead of their work therefore self-management is it does not take off well I think I've told you this before but I remember chatting to people who I worked with and it didn't happen a lot but every now and then someone would say like oh god I hate to have your job oh yeah and let me tell you it never made me feel good yeah it always made me you know I'd always and with that I'm not even going to read the quote from this writing book that I came across because I'm not going to end with that but suffice to say that this is a yes so listeners if you're still with us I wonder how many have stayed around for this coffee and I think it's really important though to understand this and to see it and just to know where it's coming from and actually you also have lots of people who have had great managers and obviously that's and who love it which is why we're here so listeners what do you think let us know managementcafépodcast at gmail.com or managementcafépodcast.com for any comments anything Tim before we drink up I just realized that people listening to this is probably managers and you don't have a bad name anyone who's listening to this you don't have a bad name you're a group manager all two of you you're finding the good fight we appreciate you we appreciate you well managers coffee is over for us now it's over to you thank you for joining us at the management cafe remember you can subscribe to the show or whatever podcast art you use to make sure you get your weekly dose of reflection our website is management.caf and on twitter we are at managementcaf that's all for this episode from myself Pilar Orti and our fellow co-hosts Dave Burgess thank you for listening for listening to the show