Your manager isn't your best friend, but they don't have to be your enemy, either. People like to go "oh managers are faceless executors of company policy" and that is true in certain situations but not all of them. You can still provide value to your reports (and as a report, value to your manager) by explaining your grievances with what's going on. I don't think the article is saying that people should completely shut up, but I actually think the filter doesn't have to be anywhere near where they say it is.
Another team is slow to deliver? It's fine to discuss that. As a manager your job, of course, is to make sure that your report isn't denigrating their coworkers. But it's fairly useful to decide how you want to prioritize your work, or whether you want to depend on that team in the future. Layoffs? There is zero reason to shut up about how dumb your CEO is and how they're doing it for Wall Street. They're coming for you just as they're coming for your reports. Better you talk about it than both people silently bottling up their feelings to please someone way up in their leadership chain.
The best friends I’ve made at work have usually been in non-competitive departments. As in, I’m in marketing and they’re in graphic design, or programming, or doing something else.
Practically, this means 1) I will never be their superior, and vice versa and 2) we aren’t competing for the same position.
In general I think this is a decent approximation for friendships, at work or otherwise.
I wish I had followed this advice when I was first a tech lead a few years ago. I wasn't a manager per say, but I had two junior engineers. We had way too much to do in too little time. I explained how the PM had messed up the project plan. I figured I was just letting them know what was going on, but it just brought the mood down.
I think it's ideal that some level of commiseration happens, so people can try to find ways to fix problems that can be fixed or accept that they can't. It really depends on the people, relationship, and culture. Some people aren't willing to do anything for anyone else. Some cultures discourage trying to fix anything.
Years ago when Google still maintained a facade that they weren't a Corporate America defense contractor, theyconducted a 2 year study study into what made a team effective: Project Aristotle [1]. The key factor? Psychological safety.
Fast forward to the present day and we are in permanent layoff culture. The maverick facade from Big Tech was dropped long ago. Employees are graded on a curve and 5-10% of those regardless of their actual performance will be deemed substandard just to fit the curve. A good portion of those will end up on PIPs or just be laid off. But even those on PIPs are more likely than not to be working there 6 months later.
This is an inherently cutthroat environment. Any pretense of psychological safety has been abandoned in favor of short-term profit seeking. While this is sold as a way of weeding out low performers and cutting costs (despite record high profits that's somehow still necessary), it's really a method of suppressing labor costs.
But having experienced this kind of toxic environment, it doesn't select high-performers, it selects the people who are most liked by management. People who are neurodivergent suffer disproportionately (IME).
My point is that in general nobbody is your friend at work. Not your colleagues, not your manager and not HR> They are to varying degrees protecting their own asses and you will be shocked how quickly someone who is nice to you at work will throw you under the bus to protect themselves ot simply to get ahead.
In a desperate bid to cut and suppress labor costs, managemen thas ramped up the toxicity and further undermined and destroyed any social connections you may make at work. But they've also destroyed the psychological safety that allowed them to do great things. Stack-ranking employees for likability on a curve and OKRs are not what drives success. Those things destroy success.
I feel sorry for people who work in environments where this sort of adversarial thinking, politicking, and commiseration is necessary.
You spend the better part of your waking hours at work. Treating your coworkers as human beings is a sine qua non for me. I've never worked in a place with strict hierarchies, and I've never not become friends with at least most of my managers and coworkers.
You don't gel as well with everyone, which is fine as long as it doesn't hinder professionalism and productivity. But working with people I view as competitors or adversaries? No thanks.
> If I think that HR sucks, and I commiserate with my directs about it, my team is going to treat them poorly.
HR is definitely not your friend though
The word commiserate in this (otherwise useful!) article feels like a stone in my shoe. If anyone else feels the same thing try re-reading it as “grumbling with”. It’s less flowery, but a closer meaning than the kind of empathetic solace-in-hard-times associated with commiserate.
Another fun, orthogonal substitution: instead of reading this from the manager/report perspective, try teacher/pupil or parent/pre-teen.
> As a manager, your empathy needs to be highly conditional. Your job is to get to the truth of a matter in a respectful way, not make your team feel good. You are largely stuck with your coworkers, and you need to get stuff done together or everyone suffers.
I was an inexperienced manager in my late 20s managing a team with a very odd member composition (2 folks with +50 y/o, 3 folks with less than 21 y/o, and 2 apprentices (between 16-18)) and I related with it, but from the part where they became my good acquaintances.
At that time, at the time that some of them had serious problems**, I usually did step in to cover their shoes until their problem was solved. I did it from the outside because I wanted to have things done, but internally I did know that they would work hard for the team when others needed to go.
I got a lot of personal issues along the way (e.g., middle managers wanting to fire me because of their problems, other managers telling me (rightly) that I was wrong, and so on) but we definitely were in the mix for the top teams, and eventually everyone of the team got promoted in the time span that I was manager until 1 year after I left.
** - In that time there were some things like a DBA that ended up in jail, our trainee that had miscarriages a couple of times, an SWE that got hijacked in Colombia, and one apprentice whose parents divorced and she cannot work with us due to the custody agreement between her parents.
I’m not a native English speaker, can someone point me to a definition of “commiserate” that matches the usage in this article? It seems to have a different meaning according to the dictionaries.
You're a bad manager or a bad friend if attempted "commiseration" doesn't involve a push for attempting to interpret a situation in the light of everyone having the best intentions first (not only but definitely first). Going around constantly complaining about how X and Y are awful bad intentioned monsters out to get you makes you a bad manager, bad friend, bad person. If there are instances of bad intentions at work, it is the role of the manager to get to the bottom of them and try to get them fixed, not to sit around and complain / listen to complaints. We all get frustrated, make mistakes, and even are intentionally mean at weak points; having it met with private bitchfests just fans the flames.
The insinuation that friends are for this kind of negativity breeding behavior is wrong, it's just as bad if your friends engage in it with you as if your manager does.
Managing is a hard job, which is why so many managers are bad and yet, in spite of the efforts of C-levels for decades, the role hasn't been eliminated. There's some wisdom in here, but I would not give this article to a new manager to read. I think it's easy to read too much into this and appear inhuman to your directs.
Is there a line? Sure. Don't shit on your company, but don't do it for your directs...do it for you, because that's just not a healthy way to manage frustration. However, learn to lead in a way that's authentic. Authenticity requires candor.
On balance I really like this advice. However, I think there are times when bad or lacking behavior is most appropriately called out privately. Providing critical feedback publicly is often a bad idea unless you’ve done a dress rehearsal.
IMO it is appropriate for managers to work with subordinates to help them level up other members of the team. That’s pretty delicate and usually happens by first acknowledging that someone is falling behind privately.
Half of the article is discussing situation that shouldn’t even taken in the first place.
I understand if your relative/friend/pet you grew up with dies, but if your gf/bf dumps you - keep this out of work. Request some time off and be done with it, more than that and you’re oversharing.
Complaining about organization - take the feedback and move it higher up, it’s not managers responsibility to solve all injustice in the world.
> As a manager, your empathy needs to be highly conditional.
I don't see that as true. Your empathy always needs to be there, but your response is conditional on the situation. "I feel you, but..." and then offer a perspective that pushes the solution forward. Or even better, "I feel you, and..." to remove the defensive wall of your direct report.
I am blessed that I work in a really switched on team. We focus on keep the talent density high, and on open and transparent communication. Practically everyone in our 70 odd team is a killer, so I have not heard any word of complaint from my team members around other teams. But if I did, I definitely would try to fix it via the open and transparent communcation policy.
I highly recommend reading (or rereading) No rules rules..the culture at Netflix. That's the kind of culture that I strive for, and that I want to foster across the organizations that I work with.
This is generally good advice but not universal. I’ve seen how complaining about other teams within one’s own team stifles collaboration and can kill cross-functional projects before they get started. But also, if there’s a real problem on another team, there needs to be a channel for people to be real with their direct reports about the problems, so they can build a case to fix it. And if there’s a big and obvious problem that you wilfully ignore or talk around as a manager, it can also hurt your credibility with your team. So it’s a fine line, and one that I’ve never really seen walked perfectly. I’ve had C-level bosses who were constantly complaining about other teams. Happened to be one of my favorite managers actually.
I do think it’s common for managers (especially new ones) to desire too much validation from their reports. James Stockdale offered some advice here in a 1980 Proceedings article [1]
> [Leaders] must be fair and they may be compassionate, but they cannot be addicted to being loved by everybody. The man who needs to be loved is an extortionist’s dream. That man will do anything to avoid face-to-face unpleasantness; he will sell his soul down the river for praise. He can be had.
[1] https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1980/september/le...
A manager is my class enemy. Not my friend.
It’s funny (or weird) seeing hot takes on HN like, actually you should seek meaning and friendships in your free time and not rely on your work providing it. Like what 80% of everyone knows already.
> For evidence of this, light autists often make very effective managers.
This idea is turning my world upside down, having avoided management roles my whole career yet ending up “managing” a small team of like minded experienced engineers despite actively avoiding the formal title. I put it in quotes because I don’t feel like I manage them in any way other than they technically report to me. I could tell them what to do but have only done so twice in 8 years. We chat once a week about whatever we feel like chatting about.
Please could you share any context or insight into this idea so I can understand more deeply?
The word "Best" could truthfully be omitted from this title...
Your manager isn't your "bro" nor are they an uncaring faceless agent of the corporate bureaucracy. The best managers know how to be diplomatic and sympathize with grievances without over-committing. As a manager, you are as responsible for managing UP (and sideways) as well as down. Part of your job is being the "big gun" that your reports cc on emails when another team is absolutely just being a jerk.
The idea that managers are special people who can, among other things, control their emotions, get to the bottom of things, and communicate properly with their team is a ridiculous one.
The author seems to have an idea of what a manager is that does not fit the reality in 95% of the cases, in my estimation. The article also has a crude and arrogant view of people as employees, who are portrayed as second class to "managers". I really hope the author is nobody's manager...
Solid article and great advice in my opinion. One simple takeaway for me is managing well means being accessible to your team at all times. I completely agree that managers shouldn't encourage criticism of other team members, even by staying silent when it happens.
If you need to call something out, do it as a team, making yourself accountable as well. That keeps trust intact and avoids finger-pointing. Thanks for sharing.
prompt: write a long text about something with management and use all possible inflections of "to commiserate" in every second sentence.
> it’s often better to give the most optimistic view for why another team is behaving the way that they are.
Slightly disagree. I’d rather explain that the other team is doing an opportunity cost calculation that your team may not have access to. Sugar coating does not remove frustration
As an autistic person, I read this and shook my head (meaning "no way," not stimming!) and wonder at the ways allistic people think they handle things better by having specific rules about how to fake emotions with one another.
i feel like i might be in a situation where commiseration is becoming too common and causing our team to lose focus on our goals. As someone not in a manager position, and more of a senior member, is there any way I can steer away from fostering negativity towards empowering the team to make change?
This article, like most of its kind, ignores culture, individuality, and circumstances.
Empathy from your manager and reality mixes like entropy and the vacuum of space...
If you're someone who tends to be candid, and maybe empathetic, it helps to think through this in advance, and to set expectations in advance.
My current thinking about established companies (flat early startup might be different):
In a superior position on the org chart, your people should know that you'll be capable, honest, trustworthy, and fair, and also that you'll look out for them in some ways, but also that it's often your job to be diplomatic, as part of helping the company work together well.
So, even if you secretly agree with a subordinate that you don't understand what the CEO is doing, or that an adjacent team keeps dropping the ball, you have to be diplomatic.
And hopefully the person already knows that, since literally saying "I have to be diplomatic on this" in the moment probably wouldn't come across right.
You can be informed by, and work with, that concern, and you can convey that you're taking their concerns seriously, but probably don't commiserate.
Maybe one way to think of it (just thought of this one): It's duty of the manager to be more diplomatic, so that subordinates can be more candid within the team. This is another way that a manager can be a bit like helpful insulation.
Having diplomacy as SOP can also help when it's not yet clear that the person is correct in an interpretation. It's still a concern to be looked into, but there's no expectation for you to commiserate.
Of course, if a subordinate is going through a difficult personal/family event, you can express genuine sympathy (while you're also being practically supportive) -- that's not commiserating.
Just want to say this is an interesting and excellent insight.
People don’t quit jobs, they quit bosses
> As your best friend, if you come to me saying that you were just dumped by your girlfriend, you will get unconditional sympathy beyond words. ... Unless you did something totally crazy or illegal, my loyalty will be immediate and unconditional, because – let’s be real – none of it matters. You’re going your way, she’s going hers, and it’s over.
Wow, hard disagree. For someone wanting to maintain a relationship, there's a teachable moment only a friend can give being gleefully run past. Loyalty isn't blind support.
Great article. This bit in particular:
"Bad therapists just let you rant. Good therapists let you vent, but they ask clarifying questions, and they sometimes push back. [...] You want to be a good therapist."
I wish it had a less clickbaity and more relevant title though. I would have shared it on LinkedIn, but that title makes it looks as the sort of passive aggressive content people post when holding a grudge.
I remember I really upset some coworkers a few years ago when I said coworkers can't be my friends. I made it clear that I like a lot of my coworkers, I think most of them are decent people and are OK to talk to, but that's a bit different than being a "friend".
A "friend", to me, is someone I can completely be myself around without having to worry too much about it [1]. With a coworker, in the back of my mind I am always remembering "I have to work with this person tomorrow, best not talk about that subject..." and have to bite my tongue a bit. I don't just go around spouting racial slurs or anything too crazy, but my coworkers are exposed to a "tombert-lite" all the same.
Also, if you work for startups and if you become best friends with all your coworkers, when the startup fails [2] then you can find yourself not only out of the job, but also hating a large percentage of your friends in the process.
Now, I've quit/been-fired-from jobs and kept in touch with former coworkers, and then I consider them friends, but I do try and draw boundaries for the people I'm actually working with.
[1] Within some degree of reason, obviously.
[2] Not all startups fail, but an awful lot of them do.
I resisted this conclusion for a long time, but I finally accepted that many people don't easily mode-switch between complaining and constructive action. If they complain and get positive feedback from it, like commiseration, they start doing their own job less well.
I used to value a bit of commiseration as healthy validation, a little switch of perspective to acknowledge that we have to cope with imperfect circumstances that are beyond our power to fix. It gives people relief from exaggerated feelings of responsibility, and then you can switch perspective back to the question of what can I control, what can I make better for other people.
But over time I've worked with too many people who can't easily switch between the two perspectives. If they go too far into thinking about how the circumstances could and maybe should be better, they make a comfy little nest inside that mindset and never come back to taking responsibility for their own actions and their own effect on circumstances.
I don't want to sound like a stuffy out-of-touch authority figure in a movie with a cool teenage protagonist, and I'm aware that I probably do. I try not to be a dick about it. I don't try to stamp out complaining. I just laugh politely, acknowledge, and change the focus as quickly as possible back to what is in our power to accomplish.
A lot of times one of the things that is in our power is pointing out issues that transcend our team, educating and influencing other teams, etc. You'd think complaining would help with this, and it kind of does, because the things people love to complain about are very often the things that need to be addressed through engagement with leadership or with other teams. But here again, those same people who get demotivated by complaining, complaining also turns them into poisonous communicators. They aren't capable of doing a bit of discreet whining and moaning about product behind closed doors and then coming out and communicating in a constructive way with them.
Again, that's something I didn't start out my career believing. I thought it was normal to vent a little frustration about a product manager in strong language behind closed doors, and then with that done, turn to the task of figuring out a more gracious and constructive way of understanding their perspective and engaging with it to create a better outcome. But it seems like maybe 1/2 or 1/3 of people are capable of making the turn back from talking shit to getting shit done. The rest seem to have the attitude of, well, we figured out this other guy is the problem, right, so what are you looking at me for? When in fact none of us are perfect, and other teams might have equally valid complaints about them.
(I'm not a manager, just an IC, but somewhere along the way I got gray hair and I started worrying about this stuff.)
yeah this whole “manager != friend” thing always felt like a weird flex. ok cool, you’re not my buddy, but you still control my calendar, my comp, and my stress levels.truth is, I’ve had managers who were upfront and still made the team feel safe. and I’ve had ones who used “radical candor” as an excuse to be jerks.
honestly, if you need a blog post to remind you not to be fake-friendly or overly harsh, maybe management ain’t your lane.
just be real, be human, and don’t weaponize empathy.
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> This is especially true for friendly, competent, reasonable-seeming managers – people want to commiserate with winners
Interesting. My experience working inside big tech was thinking of managers as mostly losers who are neither technically strong but psycho enough to think they are better and can manage other engineers.
So I think of them as loosers who can't build a company from scratch but have parasitic tendencies to manage other people's money and time without having skin in the game.
Especially the ones who think they know better. And are active in LinkedIn.
> As a manager, your empathy needs to be highly conditional. Your job is to get to the truth of a matter in a respectful way, not make your team feel good.
Doubt. Specifically about the call for managers to have highly conditional empathy and the assertion that making your team feel good is not close to if not the top priority in the list of managerial duties.
We're working with people and whatever the official chain of command says, unhappy people generally deliver shitty work, so even if you short sightedly believe happy teams aren't your job, you'll soon understand why happy teams are a critical component to delivering for "the business".
If not, your competitors will.