Managers are Terrible People (and other lies social media tells us)

so today I wanted to look through a couple of LinkedIn articles that touch on some themes that I've been seeing recently and I think not necessarily I'm getting bothered by them but I thought it was an interesting kind of focus and it's something that I've been thinking about a lot because I find myself sort of disagreeing with the stance that we see in these and actually there's one article or one Post in particular that I thought was pretty insightful and I think I was a little bit more aligned with it seems like someone else is agreeing and the topic of discussion is going to be comparing uh things like leadership uh with you know the leadership versus manager like Boss versus leader that kind of thing and sort of pitting these two things against each other I see this a lot I don't really agree with it I think I understand where it comes from but I wanted to chat through a couple of posts today and yeah so let's go flip over to LinkedIn we'll read through it and then I'll give some analysis on that alright so the first post that we're going to be looking at comes from Jason Kaplan again I just want to call out that this is nothing you know we're going to look at two posts but nothing about these individuals am I trying to call out from them specifically I just wanted to go through some of the content because I think that this is applicable with other posts that I see so this one is really saying you know boss is someone who tells people what to do how to do it and you know the people follow blindly it's kind of starting off by saying like a boss is basically a bad thing and then the leader encourages people to do their jobs with guide and support Direction motivation so it's really like you know boss is the bad thing we need leaders and then it has this graphic below that kind of uh again like pits the two against each other so you know boss has all these bad things like demands needs control ultimatums focuses on I uses people right micromanages and then leader on the other side is all these uh like positive spins on the same thing and I see this a lot right like you'll see micromanage versus Empower um I personally think that people are putting out content like this kind of just to to get interactions um I'm kind of hopeful at this point that people understand that we need the the stuff on the right you know we need this the leadership characteristics here but um the reality is and I I just don't think that it's fair to be saying like boss is a bad thing like I have a boss my manager is technically my boss and I think that they are also a leader I don't think that these things these titles are mutually exclusive and I think that's where I start to have a bit of a challenge with this kind of uh this kind of phrasing and this framing so I don't think this is necessarily me just being pedantic about this I think that like I said I think people are putting out content like this to get engagement and interactions and stuff like that that's that's fine but I I just want to start maybe drawing attention to the fact that like these are not mutually exclusive titles right um You and the next article we look at the next post is going to touch on this as well where it's comparing managers to leaders right um like I am a manager by title but I also hope that I lead people and you can also see that you can have individual contributors that are great informal leaders so they don't have to be these like mutually exclusive things so on the boss versus leader thing just to kind of summarize my my point on this is I think that you can have bosses that are amazing leaders right a boss is just someone that you report to a boss does not necessarily carry all of these negative connotations just the way a manager should not carry all these negative connotations it's it's quite literally a title and a role it's a relation right so should not carry the negative connotation but I would say that if you have as someone in this position who is supposed to be a leader the traits that these things start to call out in these diagrams or when you see these comparisons and stuff online of course they have these positive traits these are the things that we're looking for in good bosses in good managers because they're leadership traits right you want I'm just kind of glancing back over at the post here but like you want leaders that coach people right they're not demanding things with people you want leaders that are going to develop people um that's just the nature of it but something else and again we're going to see in this next post is that you're going to have a little bit of both sides of this there are going to be situations where you have a great leader who is constantly trying to develop people and get the most out of it and when it comes to business there will be situations where they they may have to ask a little bit more of their team and when you have a really good relationship with your team and you have a good you know good trust a lot of respect between you and your team there are going to be situations where you lean on them a little bit more and they're there for you because they know that you're there to support them the rest of the time so I just want to call out that you know when we start to look at some of these other things like on the negative side of the you know the boss Spectrum we're saying like oh it demands things of people I don't demand things of my team but there are situations where I will say to my team like we have really tight deadlines and maybe I need to ask a little bit more of people and I think that when you try to like call like tapping into The Well of like extra energy there when you have like I said when you have really good trust relationships and respect with your team I think that you can pull on that a little bit because your team trusts you they respect you and they know that that's not a common thing that you're always trying to do so just wanted to kind of mention that let's go ahead and jump over to this other post um that talks about management versus leadership all right this one is from Steve Wood it says in our analysis of what good leadership looks like we really need to stop the comparison with management and increasing the trend of belittling the importance of management skills in that analysis so I'm not going to read through this whole post I'm just going to kind of glean a couple of things out of here if a manager is responsible for people that's not necessarily the case then to be equipped with good leadership skills is hugely important but they need both the functional skills of management and the people skills of leadership to be effective so what this person's getting at is that often times when we're talking about people in management roles yes they're responsible for people of course they're people managers however it's not always the case where it's completely isolated to just developing people a lot of the time these people managers say in an engineering manager role the expectation is that you're also responsible for projects and business deliverables as well so it's two sides of it now this individual Steve Wood is kind of trying to say that if we scroll down he has a diagram here so he talks about the management side of things being more about like a project oriented right and then the leadership side being the more people related side of things so if we look at the left hand side managers are organizing aligning with objectives direct line responsibility so again these are like business deliverables right um and then on the right hand side we see leaders so you're inspiring you're challenging support serving others first so it's really about like focusing on the people side of things and your direct reports but you'll notice as you go through these if you're thinking about traditional engineering manager roles you need all of the stuff that's in here right again we see these other comparisons where people are uh it's not you know obvious in this one because I don't think this individual Steve Wood is saying like you know managers are bad but you'll see these other comparisons where it's like people basically try to do the boss versus leader thing where it's like managers are the the ones that demand things of people and leaders are the ones that do all these like you know hero things for their teams and the reality is that when you're trying to be you know fulfilling an engineering manager role and this this isn't just applicable to Engineering Management but when you have this dual responsibility role you have a responsibility to business deliverables and to the people that you're developing and that often means that you are trying to ride this line that's kind of in the middle of you know how do you plan effectively to get things done how do you make sure that the people that you have working on these projects are motivated by them they're challenged by them they're learning from them and they're engaged and growing from them while at the same time able to deliver on them effectively right it's not an easy balance but you need sides from both here so I'll keep this video pretty short but I really just wanted to start trying to draw some attention to you know this Mutual exclusion between bosses versus leaders and managers versus leaders where you have the Spectrum where leadership is all of the perfect good things and you know management and bosses or all these negative things that we need to avoid the reality is in my opinion that people that are in management roles should be responsible I mean it depends on your role obviously but if you're responsible for people as well then you are riding this line between the two worlds of trying to focus on business deliverables as well as growing and leading people my opinion the best way to get you know the most productivity and the best value out of people is to grow them it is to motivate them have them engaged have them challenged investing into people in my opinion so doing all of these awesome leadership things allows you to be a better manager when it comes to trying to get projects um you know done on time or if you need to have a crunch time and you need to rely more on your team to have a little bit more output all of these good leadership traits in my opinion afford you this opportunity where you have a lot of trust and respect with your team and it can go a little bit further with that so I just wanted to kind of touch on these two posts because um they seem more relevant to me in some of the content I'm seeing recently and uh yeah I don't think that there's a you know this spectrum where you can only focus on the people leadership and all of these other things are bad um it is really kind of uh you know both sides of the coin so that's just some perspective for me today uh from you know an engineering manager uh curious to see what your opinions are on this uh sound off in the comments I'd be happy to kind of have a discussion with you so thanks for watching hope you found this valuable we'll see you next time