Living in the COVID-19 World ... and Beyond #11: On Being a Manager

I have been a manager for most of the last 40+ years.   I have worked as a manager in big and small enterprises, in for-profit and non-profit organizations.   And for most of those years, I have also coached other managers, both internally as a colleague or human resources professional and externally as an executive coach.

There are some common themes that I have discerned about the life of a manager.

1st, being a manager is hard work.   Let’s not pretend that it is easy.  It is not easy.   It is challenging and difficult work.   There is a misconception in some people’s minds that once someone becomes a manager they are on the proverbial “easy street”.   That is not how it looks to me.   Managers work just as many hours as others but have a different set of complexities to deal with on a daily basis than those whom they manage.  Let’s face it – being a manager is hard work.

Isolation

 One thing that I believe that makes being a manager uniquely difficult is isolation.   Work is difficult for everyone for sure.   And many workers feel a sense of camaraderie with other co-workers, a sense that they are in it together.   Who are managers able to connect with?  Who can managers be open and honest with about how work is going for them?

Can managers be open with the people we manage?   We are supposed  to maintain the pretense of “knowing” and “being in charge.”   These messages about how managers are expected to behave can interfere with our being able to truly connect in an authentic manner with the people that we manage.

Can managers be open with their manager?   We are always at risk of being fired or evaluated in a negative manner.  Managers tend to tell our bosses about our accomplishments and often shy away from sharing our challenges and/or our mistakes with our boss.  In other words, one impact of the management system is to that it encourages managers to put up a strong front, to pretend … rather than risk exposing where we need help.

Can managers be open with their peers?   In many ways, our peers should be a natural source of support – we have similar roles and common challenges within a shared context.   However, in many organizations, we are also competing against our peers, competing for resources and for promotions and salary increases.   So, people who could be allies and compatriots instead, based on the impact of most management systems, are turned into competitors with whom we have to maintain our guard.

So, to various degrees that vary based on the organization and the culture, managers cannot really show ourselves and be honest with anyone else in the workplace.

But we can go home after work (or in COVID times, move away from our makeshift desks and move to the dining table) and tell our family about our workday.   And many of us can do that.   But there is also a norm that many of us grew up with: that we are supposed to leave work at work.  Somewhere on that commute home (or from one room to the other) we are somehow magically supposed to make whatever might have been hard at work disappear.   

Given all of these obstacles that managers confront about being honest about the situations and challenges that they face, one thing that I have found to be really useful for managers is to provide a space where they can talk openly without judgment about what work is like for them on a daily basis.   Just asking a question like: tell me about your day -- can open a flood of thoughts and feelings.  I remember once listening to a manager talk for an hour and only relating to me about the 1st hour of his day at work.  There is so much that goes on in a manager’s work life, so much of it invisible to others, that managers need opportunities to be open about their daily challenges at work.

There are more themes about the work lives of managers that I will discuss in future blogs.