Comment by taway112233
14 days ago
This article hits close to home. Recently management provided some 'training' for everybody at where i work, specially focused at team leaders/supervisors, about being courteous based on a training that Disney offers around the world. The focus was not only to be courteous to your end-users, but also to those who you manage and are on your team.
I'm really good at my job, and a few years ago i became a supervisor. But not because i was good with people, simply because i am technically competent. My company was (and still is) rather small (less than 20 on the technical side, but almost 200 overall) and there was no one else remotely apt for the job. I was always a 'cold' person, didn't care much about closeness at work, didn't cared about birthdays, company parties (people absolutely love those where i work, and the company spends a good money on it), and i had to make an effort to remind myself to say 'Good morning' to everybody, because it didn't felt necessary. While i treated everybody with the same respect i wished for myself, eventually i found that that wasn't enough. Fast forward a few years i got better at the basics, but I'm still struggling on the people aspect of it. My team's productivity is good and so is mine, everybody receives good pay and they are happy on that aspect. The only reason to why my team may not have fallen apart, is probably because we still closely interact with other people from other teams, who are way better at this.
> "An easy place to start is simply acknowledging what’s important to people outside of their jobs: birthdays, graduations, marriages, a new baby, death of a loved one, or religious observances. Doing so makes them feel valued as human beings, not just human capital."
For a long time i never considered others would find that important, not at the workplace anyway. When you don't care about that stuff yourself, caring for the sake of work feels fake and people can spot it which may backfire. Is it a case of "fake it until you make it", or just brute-force until you get better on it? I admit it is exhausting. I love my work and what i do on the technical side, and i cannot complain about the company or the pay, but i do sometimes regret accepting that offer.
Sometimes the best managers are the ones that aren’t emotionally vested and just expect the work to be done right.
You don’t have to be anyone but yourself. You don’t have to change who you are simply because you’re a manager now. You can simply continue being you. Allow those under you to be them. The hardest part of management is managing up.
“They don’t pay you to be perfect, they pay you to be yourself.” -Ted Lasso
Keep meaning to watch that series
Ok actually you sound kind of awesome. The article is about how thoughtless, petty slights demotivate employees. You are talking about the opposite of thoughtlessness: doing something that takes effort for you, going out of your way to stretch out of your default for their benefit. They see you making the effort. And on a team that size, you’re not fooling anybody—they know it’s effort. I imagine they appreciate that quite a lot.
People like dazzling conversation from their manager for like two weeks. Manager who will flex against their own instincts out of respect for my needs? I’ll line up behind that person every time, even if they’re a little awkward here and there.
I hear you on the line of thought that here at work we do work and we keep personal things to ourselves.
I also commend you on your concern for doing things that appear fake, because people indeed are good at spotting fakeness. And I bet they appreciate that you are not acting fake, because that’s often refreshing to see, and they probably value what you have to say more as a result, and quite likely respect you considerably because of that.
For birthdays, wish the employees a happy birthday. You don’t need to get a cake or throw a party (getting cakes for birthdays stops scaling past 10 employees). But everyone should feel a little bit special on their birthday. If you don’t feel that way on your birthday, or you grew up in a family that didn’t celebrate birthdays (e.g. in a Jehovah’s Witness cult), it can be difficult to understand why it matters. But look at it as a technical challenge: can your manager “database” of people hold a birthday field? And can you trigger a smile and a “happy birthday!” greeting on each employee’s birthday? You probably can. The risk for fakeness is quite low (so don’t get a cake and make a big deal out of it), your effort is very low, but the upside for employees is a higher feeling of you caring about them as a person.
Death of a loved one is a really important thing to be aware of. Grief fucks people up and it takes at least a year to come back for it. Grieving employees will need more time and space, and are likely to struggle more. They will come back. And they will stick around more if they felt supported. Offer them to take some time off right away and support them by making sure they can take at least a few days off right away. So if someone tells you of a death of a loved one, you must take note! There’s no good advice to give, so don’t feel pressure to give any advice. Offer condolences and acknowledge that it really sucks (“I’m so sorry for your loss, I can’t imagine how difficult it is right now”). You have to be aware of this as a people manager, because your people.
Religious observances? I’m meh on that one. You can try to develop curiosity about it if the employee talks about it. Ask them why is the observance important to them? If they don’t talk about it, I leave it. For winter time, it’s happy holidays, and done with it.
Okay, a new baby is another one that’s important because your employee will have reduced sleep or be sleep-deprived and have a whole lot of new worries. Be more forgiving with the schedule, let them leave work ad hoc for baby emergencies. You do that, they are much more likely to make up work on their own time as gratitude. Ask them how they feel they are handling the workload—-is there an opportunity to change the type of tasks they are doing? Maybe they are not in a position to be writing deep design docs while they are sleep-deprived. I don’t know, but you can check in when you do your one-on-ones.
Write down their spouse or partner’s names, and write down their children’s names. Keep it in your personal manager file. You probably don’t have people with 5+ children. It’s not a lot. It’s hard to remember. But if the employee feels like they don’t have to say “my son” or “my daughter” or “my wife”, but can just say their names to you and you know who they are, it makes them feel more comfortable and more like a human being. This is another one where it’s hard to be fake—-nobody expects you to remember these things, but it sure feels nicer if you do.
Regarding feeling like you have to fake it till you make it, it’s like picking up a new habit. You have to practice. You will get better at it. It’s part of your job as a manager.
If you find it exhausting, adopt things incrementally. What’s most exhausting? Why is it exhausting? Is it because it’s on top of everything else you’re already doing for 40 hrs a week?
As a manager, you have to care about the people, because they are human beings. It’s a part of your job. You can’t not do your job. If it means you spend less time being technical, so you can spend more time managing people as people and not feel exhausted, then that’s what it means. Push back on your manager to make room to do more people stuff and less technical stuff. You can’t spend 90% of your time being technical and 10% managing, unless you have completely self-directed staff. You’re a person too—-and if you job is to manage, you must make time for it, and if there’s not time for it, then that’s your boss’s problem. If your boss doesn’t think it’s a problem, that’s on you because you haven’t told them.
Managing engineers is like herding cats. They won’t respond to lashing. And cats don’t show that they are sick because they don’t want to show weakness. So if you don’t ask about what’s going on in their personal lives, you’ll be blind to how it’s affecting their work. And because ultimately they get paid to do work, it is therefore in your interest (and company’s interest) to not be blind to how their personal life is impacting their work.
Going back to “fake it till you make it” or brute-forcing until you get better at it—-what you’re not considering is the additional information you will get or increased personal response/appreciation from your people. It might feel like brute force at first, but consider the very real possibility that it can start feeling like a smart thing to do because of the results.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply and all the tips. Truly appreciated.
> I hear you on the line of thought that here at work we do work and we keep personal things to ourselves.
For me that is precisely it. It's how i always worked to avoid possible conflicts, but also because i like to focus on the tasks. At least where i work (and have worked for the past decade) people are somehow personal, and i believe that it is good for them since they seem to like it, but they do find it weird when others aren't like that. I guess that's where culture plays a big role.
> I also commend you on your concern for doing things that appear fake, because people indeed are good at spotting fakeness. And I bet they appreciate that you are not acting fake, because that’s often refreshing to see, and they probably value what you have to say more as a result, and quite likely respect you considerably because of that.
Thanks. Being honest is something i always valued, i really dislike doing things for appearances, and i believe people (including yourself) only grow if you show them the truth. I stopped showing on casual company events/hangouts because i didn't want just to be there as work while not having fun at all. People still expect you to do it tho.
> If you don’t feel that way on your birthday, or you grew up in a family that didn’t celebrate birthdays (e.g. in a Jehovah’s Witness cult), it can be difficult to understand why it matters.
Also that's spot on. My family was never actually religious (although that was the only church they ever went), as far as i remember, and i never correlated the not caring about birthdays with that. But indeed, i forget my own most of the time. The company do provide simple birthday gifts and even a day off, so that is covered i suppose, people do appreciate it. And it was the day my upper manager handed me over my gift that i got called out, because apparently my reaction to it wasn't "human enough" upon receiving a gift, i was so focused in something else that i didn't even thought about a reaction, and took me a second to understand what was the gift for. But the call out was not because of only that.
> If you find it exhausting, adopt things incrementally. What’s most exhausting? Why is it exhausting? Is it because it’s on top of everything else you’re already doing for 40 hrs a week?
Both in and outside of work i do tech related stuff, that ranges from creating scripts for games as a hobby to finding firmware bugs in devices of popular vendors. My whole drive is to solve problems and create things, and make both my life better and improve what (and who) is around me, and for most of the time is also fun. The whole process of people managing is exhausting because, even as a human, i don't understand how to deal with other humans entirely. It's exhausting because that one aspect of my professional life is something i haven't been able to improve despite years trying, as i feel i would need to be somebody else entirely to have a chance on it. It's a "unsolvable problem" that i have to deal day after day, 'punching the nail with my bare hands' as a popular saying goes. I have known lots of engineers who refused management positions because of that same thing, but also a few that accepted because they believed it was a problem they could solve and the offer was too good to pass.
> Push back on your manager to make room to do more people stuff and less technical stuff.
In that aspect i am at fault. Management does give me a lot of room, despite still having technical tasks, but it's up to me to make my team able to solve the tasks that i would have to otherwise. Failing to manage and delegate tasks results in a pile of tasks that i need to finish anyway.
In order to improve my management skills i did many courses, including the Dale Carnegie one (paid by the company). While i don't think those courses are 100% useful, i didn't find them worthless either. You get to see different point of views from people like you, with problems similar to yours, which will make you think different on how you approach them. After those i think i understand the basics, at least in theory, on how to manage people properly but the challenge still in making it natural as to type on a keyboard. You don't look at the keys, you just know where they are and how to do it.