What I’ve Learned from My Worst Managers

Even the best people can sometimes be the worst managers

Photo by Hello I'm Nik on Unsplash

Previously, I wrote about what I learned from the best managers I’ve had in my career. Today, I will write about the worst. 

Some of my worst managers have been really great people—friendly, kind, and open-hearted. I remain in touch with several of them. What made them bad managers was not that they were malicious, narcissistic, or uncaring, but that our relationship was off-kilter. 

The interesting thing is that, while some people would put me on their “best manager” list, others would list me as their worst. A manager-employee relationship is just that: a relationship. It is a two-way street. Without true alignment and partnership, the relationship can—and will—sour. 

This misalignment led to many hard lessons. Here are some of them:

A transactional relationship is damaging

There is a huge difference between a partnership and a transactional relationship. If you have ever been in the latter, you probably know that. For those who haven’t, a transactional relationship is one where your manager only wants to know about the work. Some of my worst managers used 1:1s not to help me grow, but as a way to extract information from me for their singular purpose. They would dole out assignments without context or explanation, and only saw projects in the light of whether they could help move the metrics they cared about. 

These managers made me feel like a cog in their machine with a single-use purpose: to provide whatever it was they needed from me at any given time. I felt interchangeable and replaceable. It was frustrating—not to mention demotivating—and it definitely hampered our relationship.

When you don’t care about your reports, you risk losing them

Some of my best managers really cared about the challenges I faced outside work. Some of my worst managers didn't care at all.

I remember a time when my father was dying in hospice. My manager called a meeting and required me to be there. It ended up being a four-hour meeting during the very last days of my father's life. During the call, I repeatedly begged to get off because I was distraught, and my manager kept asking me to stay. 

Within a year, everybody who was in that meeting had left the team. My former manager probably doesn't even remember this, but I will never forget it. It showed me that they didn't care about me as a person, and that they weren’t mindful of the challenges I was facing outside work. I took that to heart.