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Comment by gwbas1c

2 hours ago

Please don't compare employee relationships to dog training. I've had a few encounters with poor managers (or potential managers) who wanted to treat me like a dog.

I turned heel and ran in those cases. It's a bad analogy for managing people and should not be perpetuated.

I read gps comment as the reverse: in their analogy, the manager is the dog.

On a related note, I wouldn't mind being treated like a dog by someone who is up to date with modern dog training practices: instant rewards for success, no negative feedback(unless I'm being aggressive, but I think I can manage that much), and tons of belly and/or back rubs! Where do I sign?

It sounds to me that they are actually saying that managing an employee is _not_ like training a dog

  • It is, rather, that managing a manager is like training a dog. As in, if you take a day off later in the week after feeling slighted, the manager will never realize that your absenteeism is a result of what they did and not just some other random life event that came your way, such as becoming sick. Much like training a dog, it posits that you need to give the feedback soon after in order for the association to become recognizable by the manager.