Work & Leadership
The Manager Who Stopped Managing
The first thing to know about Priya is that she is good at this.
Eleven years in, promoted twice on merit, the person other managers ask when something is going sideways. She can run a difficult conversation. She has run dozens. If you asked anyone on her floor whether she avoids conflict they would laugh.
The second thing to know is that there is one person on her team she has not given real feedback to in fourteen months.
She would not describe it that way. She would describe a series of reasonable individual decisions: it was not the right week, he had just had a rough sprint, the thing was small, she would raise it at the review, the review came and it seemed punitive to raise it there. Fourteen months of reasonable decisions, each one defensible, adding up to something she never chose.
Meanwhile two other people on her team have quietly concluded that the standard does not apply evenly, and one of them has started looking.
the abdication nobody notices
This is, in my experience, the single most common failure in management, and it does not look like failure. It looks like kindness.
A manager stops managing one person. Not all of them — that would be visible. One. Usually the one who reacts badly to feedback, or who cries, or who escalates, or who goes cold for three days, or who once mentioned a hard thing happening at home and has been treated with a certain carefulness ever since.
The decision is never announced, including to the manager herself. What happens instead is that the cost of the conversation gets weighed, correctly, as high — and the cost of not having it gets weighed at zero, because it is spread out over months and lands on people who are not in the room.
That asymmetry is the whole mechanism. The cost of speaking is concentrated and immediate. The cost of silence is diffuse and delayed. Anyone will make that trade a hundred times without noticing they are making it.
what it does to the person being protected
Here is the part that surprises people.
The employee who is not being managed is not being spared. He is being disqualified.
He is not getting the corrections that would let him improve. He is not getting the record that would justify promoting him. He is being handled — and being handled is legible, even when nobody names it. People can feel when they are receiving the careful version of someone. He has noticed that Priya’s feedback to him is softer and vaguer than what he hears her give others, and he has drawn the obvious conclusion, which is that she does not think he can take it.
Nothing in this is kind. It just costs less this afternoon.
And there is a second-order effect that is worse. Capacity is built the way physical capacity is built — by carrying slightly more than is comfortable, repeatedly, and recovering. An employee who is never given anything hard does not become sturdier over time. His tolerance for being told things shrinks, because it is never used. The protection produces the fragility it was responding to.
This is the book’s central claim, and I want to state it plainly: a great deal of what gets called emotional fragility at work is manufactured on site. Not brought in. Produced — by management, and at least as often by the absence of management as by its excesses.
the three ways it starts
Sometimes it starts with a genuine bad reaction. Someone received feedback badly once — really badly, tears or fury or a complaint — and the manager learned. Behavior that costs a lot gets extinguished, and managers are not exempt from that.
Sometimes it starts with sympathy. Something real was happening in that person’s life, and the accommodation was correct at the time, and then nobody moved it back because there is no natural moment to say your grandmother died eight months ago and I am going to start telling you when your work is late again.
And sometimes it starts with fear that has nothing to do with the employee at all — a manager who has watched a colleague get tangled in a process and has quietly decided never to be the subject of one. That version is not about the person in front of her. It is about a story she heard about somebody else.
All three produce identical behavior. All three are sincere. None of them are managing.
the tell
You can find this in your own team in about ten minutes, and I would encourage you to actually do it rather than think about doing it.
Take your direct reports and, without consulting any documents, write down the last substantive piece of corrective feedback you gave each one, and roughly when.
You will remember most of them. There will be one, maybe two, where the answer is a vague we talked about that thing in the spring, and a small internal flinch when you get to their name.
The flinch is the finding. You are not looking for someone you dislike. You are looking for the name that makes something in your chest tighten slightly, because that is the person whose reactions you have been organizing around.
what to do about it, which is not a dramatic conversation
The instinct is to fix fourteen months at once, in a serious meeting, with a document. Do not do that. A large correction delivered after a long silence is not accountability, it is an ambush, and it will confirm everything the person already suspects about being handled.
The repair is smaller and duller. You start giving that person ordinary, unremarkable, same-size feedback as everybody else, beginning with something genuinely minor, and you do it again the following week, and again, until it stops being an event.
You will want to preface it heavily. Resist. The preface is the tell — a manager who spends ninety seconds cushioning a thirty-second note has communicated, precisely, that this person is thought to be breakable.
And name the pattern once, briefly, taking the whole of it yourself: I’ve been softer with you than with the rest of the team, and I think I was protecting myself more than you. I’m going to be more direct from here. That sentence is uncomfortable to say and it does more than any process will.
what Scripture says about weighing things honestly
There is an old and specific complaint in the prophets about dishonest scales — shall I acquit a man with dishonest scales, with a bag of false weights? It is usually read as being about commerce, and it is, but the image is broader than the marketplace.
A false weight is not a lie. It is a measurement that is quietly wrong in a consistent direction, applied to some people and not others, by someone who has stopped noticing they are doing it.
That is what a team looks like when one person is not being managed. The standard is a bag of weights, and everybody can feel which ones are heavier, and nobody has said so out loud.
one thing you can do this week
Write the list. All of your direct reports, last real piece of corrective feedback, approximate date, from memory only.
Then find the flinch, and give that person one small, ordinary, unpadded note within seven days.
Not the big conversation. The small one. The big conversation is what you have been avoiding for fourteen months, and it is not actually what is needed — what is needed is for this person to become someone you can say ordinary things to, and that is built by saying ordinary things.
Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC. There’s No Crying in Baseball includes a section for the person on the receiving end of all this — “Is it me, or is it them?” — because the employee usually knows something is off long before anyone explains it.