How not to manage a team: the lessons I learned from my previous manager
Well, this is not a happy story. I had a job that I really liked. It was a great match for my taste, and I had lovely colleagues. I was also enjoying working with my manager up to some point but over time he turned to another person and took the joy away from the job. So, despite enjoying the job itself, I decided to respect my boundaries and quit my job. I wasn’t alone, some other teammates did the same.
Therefore, I am writing the lessons I learned from this situation to be more mindful of them in the future. It can be helpful for myself, also for himself, and for whoever might find him/herself in a similar situation.
Here are the main lessons I learned:
- Do not become a dictator
- Do not micromanage
- Do not play politics
All 3 of them are quite obvious and with a bit of googling, you can easily find long lists of reasons why a manager should not do so. In this post, I will not focus on why these behaviors damage the team spirit, but instead mainly on how I experienced them. The reason to do so is that these seemingly obvious behaviors do not show up very bluntly, but rather in a low-profile and undercover way. So sharing real-life examples might help people notice the patterns more easily elsewhere.
A. Do Not Become a Dictator
When I joined the team, he was recently promoted to the role of manager, which means that he was now managing his previous peers. Like most people in this situation, he was taking it easy in the beginning and trying to keep a similar dynamic as when he was just a colleague. He was modest and was trying to mainly give trust and support to the team members without intervening in their jobs. In a nutshell, he was an inspiring leader who was focused on encouraging people to grow personally and professionally.
However, as time went by the situation changed and he started to force his opinions in different ways. He slowly shifted from being an inspiring leader to a pushy boss, and over time it turned out that these changes were not coincidences but instead the results of the deliberate decisions he had chosen to make. He had his own techniques that he was using repetitively, and it wasn’t hard to notice if you were paying attention to the patterns. Some of these techniques were surprisingly similar to the playbook that big dictators play with:
A1. Lack of Transparency
Transparency is one of the main enemies of dictators since it makes them accountable. His management style wasn’t transparent. He was deciding how much information others should know because he believed, as he said a few times, that the more information you provide, the more questions you will face.
The decision-making processes and the calculations behind them were hidden and barely documented. He was a big fan of using concise PowerPoints for communication and even documentation. He was in favor of just putting the final numbers in a slide and not disclosing any details. So, even when extensive docs were needed, the de facto tool to make “documentation” was PowerPoint and not something like Confluence.
As you can imagine, among the important policy-making calculations that were hidden, there happened to be small calculation errors that resulted in big mistakes. These mistakes could have been caught much earlier if there was more transparency.
A2. God Complex
In religious dictatorships, the decisions made by the dictator are immune to criticism. The reason is that they are always regarded as “what God wants”. The dictators know that people will not disagree with God, so they use the label of “God” and put it on their own preferences to push what they want forward.
I witnessed a somewhat similar behavior in his management style. He had his own preferences, and he referred to them as “what the company wants”. The best example is his obsession with PowerPoint. According to him, we had to put the discussions and documentation in PowerPoint, and the reasoning was not that this was what he wanted, but instead because it was expected by the company.
Well, if you look for proof that the company wants this, you probably can find something, but you can also find other expectations from the company like a need for detailed documentation. After all, if he keeps all the calculations to himself, and he decides to leave the company at any point, the company will be in big trouble.
However, similarly, if you look in the holy book of that religious dictatorship to find proof that what the dictator says is what God wants, you will probably find supportive arguments for that decision. But you will also find supportive arguments against that decision. Generally, this is why the label of “God/Company” should not be (ab)used in pushing personal preferences and making decisions.
A3. Exaggerating Opposition
This one is a good example of him following the playbook of big dictators. The technique is to take the ideas of opposition, bring them to the extreme, reject the exaggerated version, and then change the topic.
He was using it quite often, but the case that I clearly remember is in a meeting where a senior developer was asking him for better documentation in confluence. His response was that it was not possible to make documentation for everything, and then he rejected the suggestion and moved on. But the suggestion was not to make documentation for everything, it was about improving the current situation.
This response was very similar to an answer that one of the greatest dictators alive gave a few months ago. There was an ask for a referendum to change the regime of the country and his response was “What are you talking about, we can not hold a referendum for everything.” But it wasn’t about a referendum on everything, but about only one thing. One thing that he didn’t like.
B. Do Not Micromanage
During the first months after his promotion, when the management was more based on trust, the workflow was quite smooth, but over time he got his hands on the details of the tasks and intervened in the method used in them. This caused lots of friction in the workflow and even prolonged some of the tasks up to months. Instead of focusing on the goal and giving freedom, he was pushing toward the way he believed that things should be done.
Things become worse, if you imagine this micromanagement combined with becoming a dictator. He had his own ideas and he was very determined to achieve them. On top of that, he was very peculiar about the small details and he was trying to obtain the very exact thing on his mind. Every deviation from that was not acceptable.
No surprise that it resulted in lots of friction. But friction was not the only downside of this micromanagement. It also resulted in wrong prioritizations. Busy with the details, he didn’t pay enough attention to the high-level planning, and that moved the team in the wrong direction. Combined with a lack of transparency in decision-making, this wrong direction was understood only after a long period of time.
C. Do Not Play Politics
One of the biggest differences between the two versions of him was something that he was doing and also was very proud of. Playing politics.
He started to use every social interaction as an opportunity to practice his negotiation skills, and it is not hard to imagine the negative impact of such behavior on the team’s spirit. Let me quote something from him. Once, during a meeting, he proudly said “All of my friends hate me because I always debate with them”! Well, this kind of behavior might be fun in a group of friends (which I still don’t think is fun) but in a professional environment it is definitely toxic and frustrating.
Again, try to imagine this behavior combined with the previous two sections. He had his own ideas and he was very determined to achieve them with all of the details in them. And on top of them, in order to achieve them, he was playing politics and trying to use his negotiation techniques to get what he wanted, which resulted in lots of debates.
Interestingly enough, in that very same meeting, he also complained about too many debates in the team, not mentioning his role in the debates. And even more interesting, he also had a proposal to solve the issue of endless debates. He asked the team if they were okay with a top-down approach to end the debates, which means that in the case of disagreement, the team should say yes to the ideas of him! Of course, the proposal was rejected with 0 votes in favor of it since the proposal was like an attempt to bring the dictatorship to the next level!
Conclusion
Let me finish the way I started. This was not a happy story, and I believe there wasn’t an evil intention in it. It was the story of a young and ambitious person who was promoted to a management role and he had decided to make a better manager than himself, while he was getting only worse. This can happen to other people as well, and this is why it is important to share the experience.
