Managers are expected to be held up to a higher standard because they were presumed to be better at interpersonal relationships as a reason for moving into the role.
Yes, it's certainly not great when an IC is unprofessional but they're expected to be maturing over time and the range of issues that could provoke an IC to be unprofessional is vast and could conceivably never reoccur. Managers have less excuse, they're the ones placing the people on their team and they're the ones responsible for dealing with issues within their team.
Your role as a manager of managers is just to do what works. By pretending there's some external force that binds you from reaching the right decision is a way of externalizing responsibility so you can enact a decision you secretly want to but are unwilling to morally admit to yourself.
Everyone has to be mature and professional at work. Yes, management might be held to slightly higher standards, but being combative and fighting with your manager at every turn is below the standard for anyone.
a) They made up wholly out of thin air just so they could drop their "have to" line
and b) If an IC "is combative and fighting with their manager at every turn.", then holy hell, is it not an interpersonal conflict, it's even more of a management failure. The manager was the one who put the person on the team, how did they evaluate this person? Why did they not pick up on the warning signs? What stopped them from letting them go even faster?
The IC is 100% fired in this scenario but the responsibility is also 100% on the manager that this should have never happened in the first place.
An interpersonal conflict is when there is genuine differences of opinion that come from honest differences in values. Not when one or both sides are clearly wrong.
A lot of this entire thread sounds like "perfect victim" blaming. Only the perfect victims are allowed to point out abuse in the system, if you have some prior criminal history or you've made some sexual missteps in the past, then you "deserve" the police brutality/sexual harassment that was put upon you.
Standards are made wholly out of whole cloth over who gets to be the perfect victim and if you fail at any minor point of decorum, then we "have to" disregard your critique of the system because you "weren't professional enough" to have suffered management abuse.
I mean, you made up international federations of managers "out of thin air" too. That's how conversations work, people introduce things, if you have issue with a particular point you can discuss that.
>and b) If an IC "is combative and fighting with their manager at every turn.", then holy hell, is it not an interpersonal conflict, it's even more of a management failure.
It's possible some people are just combative and unprofessional, and should never have been hired in the first place (or changed over time). I agree that a manager has more responsibility for a relationship with their reports than vice versa. But, I also think it's entirely possible for an employee/contractor to just be too combative and hostile, and it not necessarily reflect on the manager too.
>A lot of this entire thread sounds like "perfect victim" blaming. Only the perfect victims are allowed to point out abuse in the system, if you have some prior criminal history or you've made some sexual missteps in the past, then you "deserve" the police brutality/sexual harassment that was put upon you.
I'm seeing the view that everyone always remain professional at work - even if other people are not. I don't think that means you "have to" disregard someone's opinion. But it means if you're not professional there can be consequences. If someone is insubordinate at work (disobeying a manager, creating sarcastic/mocking backlog issues) its common grounds for termination and blacklisting. I'm not saying this to support the status quo, I'm saying this as advice for people reading these threads and trying to navigate professional waters. It would be bad advice to suggest otherwise.
Ultimately, businesses generally function by paying you for your time. If they pay for your time, but you're not doing what they want with it, they're going to stop paying you for your time. If you have a bad manager, you need to frame it in terms of how it's detrimental to the whole business.
I disagree this has anything to do with police brutality or that those parallels are helpful. I have no requirement to be professional to the police (although, for better or worse, it's often unwise to be an asshole to cops, it is legal). Whereas I do have a requirement to be professional at work. I see the point you're trying to make, how often people who suffer police brutality are maligned due to unrelated crimes they may have commited. And that's fair, that's just personality assassination. But I would say the issues have to be taken separately - the police abuse is clearly heinous and should be stopped, but also the crimes should be treated in isolation (as they likely had been in the past). Returning to our manager/IC discussion, I'd say the unprofessional behaviour of both parties would lead to both parties getting terminated. But in reality, companies will protect management more readily than IC contractors, so I'd advise anyone in the IC's waters to tread carefully.
> An interpersonal conflict is when there is genuine differences of opinion that come from honest differences in values. Not when one or both sides are clearly wrong.
That's a good point, I agree with your framing.
But this is the exact same depersonalization rhetoric. It's some nebulous "world" that is enforcing all of these oh so unfair rules that I certainly don't agree with but have no choice but to follow also because we all agreed ahead of time what is "professional" and "unprofessional" and if you are "unprofessional", I "have to" punish you according to a formula rather than listen to your actual human complaint.
But it's all bullshit, there is no "have to" in this equation, nothing bad happens to you if you do the actual right thing. Let's call it for what it is, you want to treat it as an interpersonal conflict rather than a management failure because that absolves you from confronting structural failings in the system. But you also know that admitting such things, to yourself or others, would make you a moral hypocrite, so you invent a hypothetical other that makes you "have to" do it that way because the system has been good to you so far out of good fortune and you are afraid of what will happen if the same flawed system is now flawed against you.
That's why people do the perfect victim blaming. They want to be convinced that if the system ever came for them, a just outcome would arise because they, of course, would be totally justified and above reproach as a victim while the manifest failures of the system against other people are a result of individual exceptionalism that causes those instances not to count because they had it coming.
I'm simply asking people be honest and admit that this is what this is rather than hiding behind cowardly "professionalism" as a bunch of made up nonsense that is simply there to protect the system.
> As a manager of managers, it’s not that hard to see when a manager’s own team doesn’t like them. Getting multiple requests from people on a team who want to escape it is a huge warning sign that warrants further investigation.
This means that situation was very bad and escalated for months. This means that the team is well beyond the "own team doesn’t like them" situation. This is why it is impossible to change or fix bad managers before the team is decomposed and people suffered. If your only feedback about leadership quality and attitudes is "multiple people are escaping", then it means you are not checking on leadership quality at all.
> However, if I instead get reports that a team member is combative and fighting with their manager at every turn, I have to approach it as interpersonal conflict. If the situation as written is accurate and honest, I’d be moving toward heavy mentorship for both parties involved but they’d both be up for removal if they couldn’t improve.
This enables bully managers big time. This could be unclear competences, this could be professional disagreement, this could be manager picking on employee, mismatch of ideas about roles and it could be employee being entirely in the wrong. You start assuming interpersonal conflict, which means that if there actual causes for issues wont ever get fixed.
> if the situation as written is accurate and honest
Gotta love this assumption given that especially middle management selects for people who are neither accurate nor honest. Now, engineers are not better people in principle, but when engineers lie, it is faster to find out. Meanwhile, your rules have no "check whether the manager is telling the truth" moment.
Doing a good job of identifying teams who don't like their manager means discovering it before you have multiple people trying to transfer away from that team. By the time you've reached that point you've already failed in your job as the manager's manager.
> The parent comment specifically said that the OP needed to work on changing teams
I don't have any further thoughts, but changing teams to avoid a poor manager seems precisely like 'sucking it up'.
If you want to change something, you have to demonstrate that you’re acting in good faith and trying to work with the system rather than against it. Asking to change teams is working with the system. Getting into personal fights with your manager and escalating the battle at every opportunity is working against it.
People who work with the system and behave professionally are going to improve the overall health of a company. People who escalate every battle and want to fight every conflict until one party loses (in this case this backfired on the OP and they became the loser) generally only make the system worse.
The thing to keep in mind is that the company doesn’t have to choose which person is “right”. A manager and employee blowing up conflicts can both be wrong and can both be removed.
False dichotomy. Asking to change teams is being complacent and making it someone else's problem. "escalating the battle at every opportunity" isn't an accurate summary of OPs actions.
So? Not every battle needs to be your battle--especially those where common sense says you're going to lose. You're under no obligation to try to work things out at a given job.
Is the problem that the company you’re working for has bad managers? Is your goal to ensure that there are absolutely no bad managers in a company the size of Spotify? Because that sounds like a Sisyphean task on a good day.
If that isn’t the goal then why is switching managers not a perfectly adequate solution?
And about making it someone else’s problem, potentially that person may get on better with the manager and they may both be more effective. Alternatively, when there is a second person who also chooses to change, that would lead to either the manager reconsidering their approach or the manager’s manager wondering why no one sticks under them.
If the company has a decent HR policy they will allow for anonymous feedback on the manager and when it gets similar feedback from multiple people they can work on improving the managers training and/or get rid of them.
No, obviously not.
> Is your goal to ensure that there are absolutely no bad managers in a company the size of Spotify?
No, obviously not.
I believe the OPs goal was improve a specific failing manager. I think he didn't do this very well, but let's not straw man him.
Employees have 0 responsibility or incentive to improve their managers (the converse is not true). In fact, it’s a terrible idea to do so, because there’s probably only single digit % of managers who would take that positively, if even.
Especially if it isn’t the manager taking the initiative to ask for improvement ideas.
It isn't? Whoever inherits the role will have the same issues, so how isn't swapping teams punting the issue to someone else?
> Employees have 0 responsibility or incentive to improve their managers (the converse is not true).
Employees have a responsibility to make sure their job gets done, and can (and should) identify obstructions to that happening.
> there’s probably only single digit % of managers who would take that positively, if even.
'Managing up' is a well-known and fairly common skill at large companies.
Sort of, but the person whose problem it becomes is the person who can and should deal with it.
A manager’s manager should notice if the manager’s team has a bunch of attrition. Certainly the best path is to work with your manager but if your manager is not amenable to that then changing teams is a signal to the rest of the org that the manager has issues.
He could have tried to talk with the managers manager, talked with HR, or done anything except behaving as a passive aggressive child...
It always was someone else's problem. If your manager wants the benefit of your insight and perspective, it is their responsibility to create a team culture which enables you to share it.
That’s not what anyone is saying. The parent comment specifically said that the OP needed to work on changing teams, not going to war with his own manager.
As a manager of managers, it’s not that hard to see when a manager’s own team doesn’t like them. Getting multiple requests from people on a team who want to escape it is a huge warning sign that warrants further investigation.
However, if I instead get reports that a team member is combative and fighting with their manager at every turn, I have to approach it as interpersonal conflict. Some times (like this story), both parties can be in the wrong. If the situation as written is accurate and honest, I’d be moving toward heavy mentorship for both parties involved but they’d both be up for removal if they couldn’t improve.
One person behaving badly doesn’t give a free license for the other person in the conflict to also behave badly. “But he started it first” isn’t even a valid excuse in elementary school and it’s not valid in the workplace either.