The worst thing you can do as a manager is inflict your anxiety on your subordinates
As a manager, you need to be able to handle the pressure. If you lash out at your team you will do long-term damage both to your reputation and also to the team's dynamics.
This happened last year at SugarPopMusic, after the first round of layoffs hit. My friend Jacob is a good mid-level engineer, with 6 years experience, and had been hired in 2020 during the early part of the pandemic. A woman named Amanda was his manager, and at first they had a terrific working relationship, open, honest, straightforward. But after the layoffs, Amanda was under pressure. Her team was put in charge of a project to build a data -lake that would combine data from the many, many data sources they had internally, and they’d made an excellent start, but the project had dragged on for 18 months and now top leadership was wondering whether perfecting the data-lake would be worth the investment. If the project was killed, her team would be broken up.
Then this happened: Amanda was traveling for a week and reached out to tell Jacob that she was taking all of his work away from him and re-assigning it to others because she had the perception that he was running late. She got back to the office a day later and they had this conversation:
Amanda: You were supposed to warn me when you were running behind.
Jacob: I wasn’t running behind.
Amanda: I didn’t see any progress on these tickets, at all. You had one ticket stalled for three days.
Jacob: One of those days was a vacation day that you authorized.
Amanda: Okay, so you made zero progress on two days. Do you realize how bad it looks when we cannot complete the work we committed to for a sprint?
Jacob: That ticket was much deeper than what we thought. The original ticket was for a frontend bug, a field that was missing value, we assumed the bug was a prop not getting passed correctly in React. But when I looked into it the problem was actually in the API we were drawing from. The real issue is that we use to track just one value for the copyright holder of a song, but we’ve switched to allowing multiple values for that field. In the database we created a new table and a new one-to-many relationship. But the API still has a contract that enforces the old idea that it is a single value. So I had to make changes to the API.
Amanda: That’s what I’m talking about. I need to be informed about those things. Your lack of transparency is sabotaging my ability to manage this project.
Jacob: I posted a comment on the ticket in Jira.
Amanda: I didn’t see any comment related to this.
Jacob: I posted a comment that said the real problem was in the API.
Amanda: That is not nearly enough information! When you get stuck this badly, you need to email me directly, and you need to update the ticket directly, not just post some comment that no will see.
Jacob: Two months ago we talked about this as a team, and you said a good way to update you is to post a comment on the ticket in Jira.
Amanda: I do not remember that conversation.
Jacob: But that is how most of us have been updating you about progress on tickets, right?
Amanda: When the ticket is moving along and the process is smooth then that is fine, but when you get stuck for day after day, you need to escalate the issue. You need to tell me that you are dealing with an emergency.
Jacob: There was no emergency.
Amanda: That is what I am trying to explain to you! This was an emergency! If you cannot get your work done for the sprint, that is an emergency!
Jacob: But I could get that work done. If you’d let me finish my tickets I would have gotten my work done.
Amanda: Not at the speed you were moving!
Jacob: I was way ahead of schedule until I got that one difficult ticket, and then I was simply back to where I would have been anyway. I was on schedule.
Amanda: We could not risk it! And I had too little insight into what you were doing because you were not communicating with me!
Jacob: We have the daily standup meeting, so we can update you about where we are with each ticket, but you’ve missed the standup for several days.
Amanda: I sometimes have meetings that conflict with the standup, so I cannot make it every day. I’ve explained this several times. If I cannot make it to the standup, then I expect you to send me an email with your standup update.
Jacob: I did send you an email everyday.
Amanda: But in those emails you hid the fact that you had fallen behind!
Jacob: I had not fallen behind! I had 4 days left to finish the difficult ticket and then after that I had three very easy tickets.
Amanda: And what if they’re not easy? What if you get ambushed again with another surprise?
Jacob: Then I would escalate the issue with you, but I can’t know if an easy ticket is secretly difficult until I’m working on it.
Amanda: So here we are with the sprint more than half over and I have no idea how many more days you will need to finish the difficult ticket!
Jacob: I’ll be done today! Or I would be done except you’ve taken the ticket away from me. I’ve made all the changes to the API so now we’re back to adjusting the frontend, which was the original issue that we thought would be easy.
Amanda: Your lack of transparency leaves me feeling like I don’t know if your current estimate is accurate, that is why I’m giving the work to Chennai. She knows how to handle difficult tickets. She has the experience. You go talk to her and explain where you were at and help her understand what was blocking you.
Jacob: I already told you that nothing was blocking me, I simply had to make adjustments to the API so the ticket was bigger and more complex than what we had first estimated.
Amanda: You go talk to Chennai. Let her look it over. She can figure out if the problem has been solved or if there are still more problems.
Jacob: All of the problems have been solved, but yes, absolutely, I would be happy to go talk to Chennai.
Amanda: And from now on, I need you to report in twice a day. Tell me how you’re doing in the morning and then tell me if you got stuck by the early afternoon. Because if it gets to be 2 PM in the afternoon and you have not made any progress all day, then that is an emergency, and we will need to get you some help.
Jacob: Other than my first few weeks here at SugarPopMusic, I don’t recall a single day when I was unable to get anything done by 2 PM.
Amanda: From now on you check in, do you understand? From now on, you tell me when there is a problem. I need transparency. I need to know what is going on.
Jacob: Okay, no problem. I’ll check in during morning standup and then again at 2 PM, every day.
I had lunch with Jacob a few weeks after this. He was rattled. We met at a ramen noodle place up in Harlem, one of his old hangouts from 12 years before when he had been a student at Columbia.
Jacob: I don’t know what is happening. Amanda has become critical of everything I do.
Lawrence: Do you actually have to update her twice a day?
Jacob: I send her two emails a day, or if she comes to the morning standup, I talk to her then and I send her an email in the afternoon. But sometimes she wants to talk to me in the afternoon, so I meet with her twice a day. Doesn’t help.
Lawrence: Sounds like she has plenty of information about what you are working on?
Jacob: Yes, but I’m nervous all the time now. I feel like if I make even the smallest mistake she is going to pounce. So I triple check everything. But triple checking everything means going slowly, so now I’m working late at night to try to keep up.
Lawrence: And nothing you’ve done has reassured her?
Jacob: It’s just getting worse. She’s more and more convinced that I can’t get the work done.
Lawrence: But have you actually failed to get work done? Were there tickets you could not get done during the sprint?
Jacob: I always get my tickets done during the sprint, even if I have to work all weekend to do it, but recently she’s only been giving me easy tickets, so the fact that I get them done doesn’t impress her. She’s treating me like a junior level software developer.
Lawrence: And yet you were hoping to ask for more responsibilities?
Jacob: Yes, a few months ago, everything was different. I was increasingly confident and I wanted to be given a broader range of work, so I could learn new technology. But now I find myself doubting what I think I know. I think I’ve got Impostor Syndrome.
Lawrence: How will you handle it going forward?
Jacob: I’m looking for other jobs. I had an interview yesterday with Microsoft. And last week I had three rounds of interviews with AllState Insurance. I don’t think I can stay at SugarPopMusic. I don’t know if she’s ever going to trust me again. So I need to get out of there.
Lawrence: But you say her distrust came out of nowhere?
Jacob: I was not running late with my tickets. I could have gotten them done. But she lost all faith in me. I think she is under a lot of pressure. She’s been tougher and tougher with everyone on the team.
I’ve a few thoughts about this situation:
I can sympathize with Amanda to the extent that she was under pressure. I understand what it is like to have a boss who questions whether your team needs to exist, or who asks why your project is dragging slowly. If you yourself don’t know why the team is moving slowly, then your own lack of knowledge will become an additional source of anxiety. It is important to set firm expectations with employees. If an employee is running late with a project, it is important to ask some tough questions about why that is. If an employee repeatedly misses deadlines, you need to see if you can help them. If they don’t seem able to improve, then you should move quickly to fire them. Too many managers wait too long. If you want to run a team that performs well, then the most important thing you have to do is remove the weak players.
But having said all that, I disagree with the way Amanda (apparently) proceeded. I’ve previously written about a time that I had to reprimand an engineer, but note that I thoroughly investigated the issue before I accused him of anything.
You should not accuse an employee of running late until you are absolutely sure that they are running late. In the above case, Jacob had not yet missed any deadlines, but Amanda took preemptive action against him, because she was worried he might miss a deadline.
If what Jacob told me is accurate, then it seems Amanda was letting the pressure get to her. I cannot emphasize this enough: when you are a manager, your single most important skill is your ability to manage your own emotions. If you can’t do that, then find a different line of work. If you allow yourself to have an emotional meltdown, you will export your stress to your whole team, and then suddenly the people on your team will start doing interviews at other companies. As the saying goes, “People don’t quit jobs, they quit managers.”
Can a manager use their emotions to their advantage? Can emotions play a role in aiding leadership? Absolutely. Feeling your own emotions plays a role in empathy, and having empathy for your team is important for leadership. And also, we have previously looked at the controversial issue of “Is Anger Ever Strategic?” But in all of those other cases, the manager still maintained self-control. By contrast, Amanda seem to be lashing out because she was under pressure.
I’ll end this by re-emphasizing the most important point: