Your manager isn't evil; they just don't know better.

If you ask someone stressed about work to list their major sources of trouble, their manager will likely be on the list. It is not just anecdotal but alarmingly real. In fact, about one in three employees would prefer it if their manager underwent some training to manage better. 

The stress that managers create is often subtle, even accidental, but pervasive and keen on breaking boundaries between personal and professional spheres of existence. At this point, it's simple enough to point the finger at your manager. Of course, they must've burnt their breakfast and are taking it out on me! But the story is deeper, sadder.

I have spent two decades in workplaces, and during that time, I have seen workplaces and managers of all sorts—the good, bad, and ugly. Some of those experiences have stuck with me. One of the earliest people that I remember was my manager. The first manager of my life felt like a dream come true. He was supportive and caring, and at the time, he could keep a rein on the team's performance. 

Later in my career, I witnessed the other end of the spectrum, too, with a manager who believed in openly shouting at team members over mistakes, ultimately humiliating them over things that deserved private guidance at best. Of course, that was not the end of the tale; more misdemeanors and micromanagement followed.

Whenever I look back, I consistently remember these two as the two ends of people management practices. The first makes you feel good about yourself, enables your growth, and doubles down as a cheerleader. The second, on the other hand, makes you doubt yourself at every step and actively indulges in dehumanization. 

Both these managers were in a position to influence others. The only choice they had was about what that influence could look like. It could be a very positive experience that empowers me to take the lead in a new project, or it could be a really bad one that puts my prospects on the back burner for a while, at least. 

The latter usually does not start as the reincarnation of the devil, but small things pile up: 

• Micromanaging is the most common one, and to be frank, none of us like to be controlled over the smallest interactions and actions. But these managers make you so bound to directives and permissions that you forget to work independently! 
• I recently coached a manager who shared his experience with an unempathetic manager who didn't allow time off for personal needs, that being a parent's birthday. He was clear about his next steps and soon left the company, bringing to life the adage that people leave bad bosses, not organizations.
• Not investing time in being a "manager" but only being an "operator." Many managers take pride in running their teams on tight schedules and ensuring they are always at their beck and call, forgetting that those people have lives, too. On the other side, some don't care about the growth of the employees, ultimately leaving them disappointed. Both sides ultimately hurt the professionals and the team in the long run.
• Not listening to or incorporating employee suggestions or feedback makes team members feel like their voices don't matter, reducing them to passive agents of execution rather than active contributors.
• Showing favoritism or treating certain employees with more respect or benefits while neglecting others creates division and a sense of dehumanization for those excluded from preferential treatment. It is prevalent more often than not in big corps.

Ultimately, whatever dehumanization exists will continue to ruin employees' growth prospects. Without the required support and encouragement, there's no way to go except the exit route, provided they have the luxury to take it.

Why are people managers failing?‍

You must have seen or heard at least some of these in workplaces around you. But what if I tell you it does not happen because the manager hates you? Most managers list the “frequent needs for follow-ups,” “performance issues in the team,” and “difficult conversations” as their top-most challenges. We found this out while building our State of Leadership Development Report recently.

It happens because the manager needs help that they never get. Let's approach it most directly: Does investing money here change things? Does that mean everyone gets help when they need it? Not really. Research puts forth a different picture: 

• About two out of three managers never receive training. This is particularly true of those with small teams (ranging from 1 to 4 people) and in their initial managerial roles. It means bad habits are allowed to fester and go on unabated. 
• Out of those select few who are lucky enough to access training, about 75% express dissatisfaction, as per reports by Harvard Business Review. It takes us into another black hole of half-hearted manager support done by burdened L&D departments. 

Why does this happen? The trouble lies in a simple misunderstanding of what managers are supposed to do. Most organizations envision people management with a hyper-focus on getting things done - it's all about productivity and performance - and miss the people who will do those things.

For instance, if we look deeper at the top five challenges of the new managers who use Risely. 

1. Need for constant follow-ups 
2. Trouble understanding what their team is feeling 
3. Team feeling overworked
4. Team performance issues 
5. Trouble in managing remotely/hybrid mode 

We can diagnose quite simply. We have a new manager who was put up without being trained on how to delegate so they can avoid follow-ups, how to conduct review meetings with their team members and understand their challenges, what sort of questions they should ask, how to create a comfortable environment for their team to speak up, and so on.

If you have ever sat in an MBA or similar classroom, you might roughly remember the five points defining a manager's scope of work. Over a century ago, Henry Fayol defined a manager's core functions as planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling. It sounds like a factory being run because it was. It leads us to a very limited understanding of what a manager's jobs-to-be-done framework should look like. 

Present-day workplaces adhering to these principles are leagues apart; many of us are not manufacturing anything tangible. It's high time we rethink and make some changes here for a more humanized manager who is unafraid to accept their vulnerability and provide a safe space for others to express theirs. 

What can this look like? Let’s try: 

In addition to what is seen as the core ideas for a manager’s role, we need to integrate and emphasize the people aspect. It is critical because solid people skills are the key to unlocking long-term relationships and productivity from employees. It matters because they are the difference between having a devil as a manager and a people’s manager.

Is the manager training industry ready to handle the reimagined JTBD?

Training managers and leaders is not a small matter. Estimates by the Training Industry Magazine report it's worth about $3.5 billion (2019). That sounds like a lot of focus on the select few who must keep the show running. But as usual, the devil lies in the details.

Today, leadership development is looked up to as the solution, at times even the panacea, for many troubles that a company is facing. It could be high turnover or low performance—all of which takes us back to the humble manager who should just get things right. Thus, investment and the spread of leadership and management training programs continue to grow even when the economy does not show great signs of anything.

A number of these trainings are set up for failure because they are framed as one-shot booster doses to hype up performance. There are only a few critical points that they forget to mention:

• The manager needs time and space to use their newly learned tools. This means the organizational flexibility to try something new and the mental bandwidth to think and identify when something new can work. Many managers run without this privilege and have alarmingly high stress levels.
• Direct reports see managers as the bosses. However, most managers are not the ultimate bosses; they are just another cog in the machine who cannot independently set culture, drive their team's vision, or even delegate work the way they would like to. The agility and flexibility needed to allow this are missing in most places.
• The challenge of leadership development is chaos. We are in unprecedented times in many ways. Work modes went out for a toss as recently as three years back. AI has started getting significant attention, and now everyone expects execution yesterday. The role of managers is changing. To survive, they need to be more human, even when they are forced to work like machines.(4) But all of this needs to be done without access to good and in-time training that meets contextual needs or coaches who can handhold through the shuffles. 

The manager training industry is big, but it’s not deep or wide enough.  

The other side is that the new generation views people management in a very different light than we do, or at least I did. It has become clearly evident that people managers are not adequately supported and trained. More often than not, they are made the bearers of bad news like layoffs without the emotional and other forms of support needed to manage these things properly. Overall, organizations are complicit in this dehumanization as they define the role of managers with respect to productivity and performance while ignoring the people aspect. 

How can we bring out the humane face of managers? 

A lot has been said about what to do and how to do it. The first point is to acknowledge that people managers need support, and it's not an area that one can just wing if they were great as an individual contributor. I know I was excited when I became a manager for the first time, but that transition hit me hard; I know I wasn't the only one. Many are handed over promotion letters with a handbook if they are lucky, and this continues until the Peter Principle strikes when they are ultimately unpromotable. We need a reimagination of a manager's JTBD framework that includes the people side of things, as we tried above. 

Harvard Business Research has also made a pertinent point: It's not just the C-suite that needs preparation. More and more leaders in the field directly need support because they are not merely carrying out orders; they are expected to be free-thinkers, vision setters, change makers, and solid people managers.

Second, provided we have the reimagined JTBD, we need to think of ways to support managers in those areas. Unlike software development, there's no stack overflow for people managers where they can drop in and find relatable and relevant content for support and inspiration. 

Most organizations lack the infrastructure to support their people managers, wherein only the top brass come at the receiving end of repeated one-size-fits-all lectures on what are deemed to be people management skills. There's no central repository to understand what falls under the purview of people management skills and what does not. 

There’s a gap to bridge for the L&D industry at large globally. The voice of the employees is clear: They would love managers who know how to manage empathetically. Based on my interactions with many managers, I hear a similar sentiment. Managers are hungry for growth; they need the right nudges at the right spot. 

So, if you are thinking about giving your manager a book on leadership lessons this holiday season, trust me, they feel the gap, too.