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> If everyone just sucks it up then nothing gets solved That’s not what anyone is saying. The parent comment specifically said that the OP needed to work on ch

> If everyone just sucks it up then nothing gets solved That’s not what anyone is saying. The parent comment specifically said that the OP needed to work on changing teams, not going to war with his own manager. As a manager of managers, it’s not that hard to see when a manager’s own team doesn’t like them. Getting multiple requests from people on a team who want to escape it is a huge warning sign that warrants further investigation. However, if I instead get reports that a team member is combative and fighting with their manager at every turn, I have to approach it as interpersonal conflict. Some times (like this story), both parties can be in the wrong. If the situation as written is accurate and honest, I’d be moving toward heavy mentorship for both parties involved but they’d both be up for removal if they couldn’t improve. One person behaving badly doesn’t give a free license for the other person in the conflict to also behave badly. “But he started it first” isn’t even a valid excuse in elementary school and it’s not valid in the workplace either.

nailer 4y ago
> > If everyone just sucks it up then nothing gets solved > The parent comment specifically said that the OP needed to work on changing teams I don't have any further thoughts, but changing teams to avoid a poor manager seems precisely like 'sucking it up'.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  “Sucking it up” means dealing with your situation and not trying to change anything. If you want to change something, you have to demonstrate that you’re acting in good faith and trying to work with the system rather than against it. Asking to change teams is working with the system. Getting into personal fights with your manager and escalating the battle at every opportunity is working against it. People who work with the system and behave professionally are going to improve the overall health of a company. People who escalate every battle and want to fight every conflict until one party loses (in this case this backfired on the OP and they became the loser) generally only make the system worse. The thing to keep in mind is that the company doesn’t have to choose which person is “right”. A manager and employee blowing up conflicts can both be wrong and can both be removed.
  - nailer 4y ago
    > Asking to change teams is working with the system. Getting into personal fights with your manager and escalating the battle at every opportunity is working against it. False dichotomy. Asking to change teams is being complacent and making it someone else's problem. "escalating the battle at every opportunity" isn't an accurate summary of OPs actions.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      >Asking to change teams is being complacent and making it someone else's problem. So? Not every battle needs to be your battle--especially those where common sense says you're going to lose. You're under no obligation to try to work things out at a given job.
    - Umberla 4y ago
      It might be "being complacent" if you switch teams. It's still better than what this person did. He probably chose the worst path forward that he could have taken amongst many different paths he could have chosen. He could have tried to talk with the managers manager, talked with HR, or done anything except behaving as a passive aggressive child...
    - addicted 4y ago
      It depends on what you think the problem is. Is the problem that the company you’re working for has bad managers? Is your goal to ensure that there are absolutely no bad managers in a company the size of Spotify? Because that sounds like a Sisyphean task on a good day. If that isn’t the goal then why is switching managers not a perfectly adequate solution? And about making it someone else’s problem, potentially that person may get on better with the manager and they may both be more effective. Alternatively, when there is a second person who also chooses to change, that would lead to either the manager reconsidering their approach or the manager’s manager wondering why no one sticks under them. If the company has a decent HR policy they will allow for anonymous feedback on the manager and when it gets similar feedback from multiple people they can work on improving the managers training and/or get rid of them.
shalmanese 4y ago
You have to approach it as interpersonal conflict? What, does the international federation of manager of managers take away your manager of managers license for not following the manager of managers code to the letter? Managers are expected to be held up to a higher standard because they were presumed to be better at interpersonal relationships as a reason for moving into the role. Yes, it's certainly not great when an IC is unprofessional but they're expected to be maturing over time and the range of issues that could provoke an IC to be unprofessional is vast and could conceivably never reoccur. Managers have less excuse, they're the ones placing the people on their team and they're the ones responsible for dealing with issues within their team. Your role as a manager of managers is just to do what works. By pretending there's some external force that binds you from reaching the right decision is a way of externalizing responsibility so you can enact a decision you secretly want to but are unwilling to morally admit to yourself.
- acoard 4y ago
  The person you're responding to said they'd approach it as an interpersonal conflict if the IC "is combative and fighting with their manager at every turn." Everyone has to be mature and professional at work. Yes, management might be held to slightly higher standards, but being combative and fighting with your manager at every turn is below the standard for anyone.
  - shalmanese 4y ago
    Which a) They made up wholly out of thin air just so they could drop their "have to" line and b) If an IC "is combative and fighting with their manager at every turn.", then holy hell, is it not an interpersonal conflict, it's even more of a management failure. The manager was the one who put the person on the team, how did they evaluate this person? Why did they not pick up on the warning signs? What stopped them from letting them go even faster? The IC is 100% fired in this scenario but the responsibility is also 100% on the manager that this should have never happened in the first place. An interpersonal conflict is when there is genuine differences of opinion that come from honest differences in values. Not when one or both sides are clearly wrong. A lot of this entire thread sounds like "perfect victim" blaming. Only the perfect victims are allowed to point out abuse in the system, if you have some prior criminal history or you've made some sexual missteps in the past, then you "deserve" the police brutality/sexual harassment that was put upon you. Standards are made wholly out of whole cloth over who gets to be the perfect victim and if you fail at any minor point of decorum, then we "have to" disregard your critique of the system because you "weren't professional enough" to have suffered management abuse.
watwut 4y ago
While I think OP was in the wrong (or that at least there are many red flags), I think that the approach you describes enables bad managers. It is a system that has literally zero accountability for them. > As a manager of managers, it’s not that hard to see when a manager’s own team doesn’t like them. Getting multiple requests from people on a team who want to escape it is a huge warning sign that warrants further investigation. This means that situation was very bad and escalated for months. This means that the team is well beyond the "own team doesn’t like them" situation. This is why it is impossible to change or fix bad managers before the team is decomposed and people suffered. If your only feedback about leadership quality and attitudes is "multiple people are escaping", then it means you are not checking on leadership quality at all. > However, if I instead get reports that a team member is combative and fighting with their manager at every turn, I have to approach it as interpersonal conflict. If the situation as written is accurate and honest, I’d be moving toward heavy mentorship for both parties involved but they’d both be up for removal if they couldn’t improve. This enables bully managers big time. This could be unclear competences, this could be professional disagreement, this could be manager picking on employee, mismatch of ideas about roles and it could be employee being entirely in the wrong. You start assuming interpersonal conflict, which means that if there actual causes for issues wont ever get fixed. > if the situation as written is accurate and honest Gotta love this assumption given that especially middle management selects for people who are neither accurate nor honest. Now, engineers are not better people in principle, but when engineers lie, it is faster to find out. Meanwhile, your rules have no "check whether the manager is telling the truth" moment.
plorkyeran 4y ago
> As a manager of managers, it’s not that hard to see when a manager’s own team doesn’t like them. Getting multiple requests from people on a team who want to escape it is a huge warning sign that warrants further investigation. Doing a good job of identifying teams who don't like their manager means discovering it before you have multiple people trying to transfer away from that team. By the time you've reached that point you've already failed in your job as the manager's manager.

nailer 4y ago

> > If everyone just sucks it up then nothing gets solved > The parent comment specifically said that the OP needed to work on changing teams I don't have any further thoughts, but changing teams to avoid a poor manager seems precisely like 'sucking it up'.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
“Sucking it up” means dealing with your situation and not trying to change anything. If you want to change something, you have to demonstrate that you’re acting in good faith and trying to work with the system rather than against it. Asking to change teams is working with the system. Getting into personal fights with your manager and escalating the battle at every opportunity is working against it. People who work with the system and behave professionally are going to improve the overall health of a company. People who escalate every battle and want to fight every conflict until one party loses (in this case this backfired on the OP and they became the loser) generally only make the system worse. The thing to keep in mind is that the company doesn’t have to choose which person is “right”. A manager and employee blowing up conflicts can both be wrong and can both be removed.
- nailer 4y ago
  > Asking to change teams is working with the system. Getting into personal fights with your manager and escalating the battle at every opportunity is working against it. False dichotomy. Asking to change teams is being complacent and making it someone else's problem. "escalating the battle at every opportunity" isn't an accurate summary of OPs actions.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >Asking to change teams is being complacent and making it someone else's problem. So? Not every battle needs to be your battle--especially those where common sense says you're going to lose. You're under no obligation to try to work things out at a given job.
  - Umberla 4y ago
    It might be "being complacent" if you switch teams. It's still better than what this person did. He probably chose the worst path forward that he could have taken amongst many different paths he could have chosen. He could have tried to talk with the managers manager, talked with HR, or done anything except behaving as a passive aggressive child...
  - addicted 4y ago
    It depends on what you think the problem is. Is the problem that the company you’re working for has bad managers? Is your goal to ensure that there are absolutely no bad managers in a company the size of Spotify? Because that sounds like a Sisyphean task on a good day. If that isn’t the goal then why is switching managers not a perfectly adequate solution? And about making it someone else’s problem, potentially that person may get on better with the manager and they may both be more effective. Alternatively, when there is a second person who also chooses to change, that would lead to either the manager reconsidering their approach or the manager’s manager wondering why no one sticks under them. If the company has a decent HR policy they will allow for anonymous feedback on the manager and when it gets similar feedback from multiple people they can work on improving the managers training and/or get rid of them.

shalmanese 4y ago

You have to approach it as interpersonal conflict? What, does the international federation of manager of managers take away your manager of managers license for not following the manager of managers code to the letter? Managers are expected to be held up to a higher standard because they were presumed to be better at interpersonal relationships as a reason for moving into the role. Yes, it's certainly not great when an IC is unprofessional but they're expected to be maturing over time and the range of issues that could provoke an IC to be unprofessional is vast and could conceivably never reoccur. Managers have less excuse, they're the ones placing the people on their team and they're the ones responsible for dealing with issues within their team. Your role as a manager of managers is just to do what works. By pretending there's some external force that binds you from reaching the right decision is a way of externalizing responsibility so you can enact a decision you secretly want to but are unwilling to morally admit to yourself.

acoard 4y ago
The person you're responding to said they'd approach it as an interpersonal conflict if the IC "is combative and fighting with their manager at every turn." Everyone has to be mature and professional at work. Yes, management might be held to slightly higher standards, but being combative and fighting with your manager at every turn is below the standard for anyone.
- shalmanese 4y ago
  Which a) They made up wholly out of thin air just so they could drop their "have to" line and b) If an IC "is combative and fighting with their manager at every turn.", then holy hell, is it not an interpersonal conflict, it's even more of a management failure. The manager was the one who put the person on the team, how did they evaluate this person? Why did they not pick up on the warning signs? What stopped them from letting them go even faster? The IC is 100% fired in this scenario but the responsibility is also 100% on the manager that this should have never happened in the first place. An interpersonal conflict is when there is genuine differences of opinion that come from honest differences in values. Not when one or both sides are clearly wrong. A lot of this entire thread sounds like "perfect victim" blaming. Only the perfect victims are allowed to point out abuse in the system, if you have some prior criminal history or you've made some sexual missteps in the past, then you "deserve" the police brutality/sexual harassment that was put upon you. Standards are made wholly out of whole cloth over who gets to be the perfect victim and if you fail at any minor point of decorum, then we "have to" disregard your critique of the system because you "weren't professional enough" to have suffered management abuse.

watwut 4y ago

While I think OP was in the wrong (or that at least there are many red flags), I think that the approach you describes enables bad managers. It is a system that has literally zero accountability for them. > As a manager of managers, it’s not that hard to see when a manager’s own team doesn’t like them. Getting multiple requests from people on a team who want to escape it is a huge warning sign that warrants further investigation. This means that situation was very bad and escalated for months. This means that the team is well beyond the "own team doesn’t like them" situation. This is why it is impossible to change or fix bad managers before the team is decomposed and people suffered. If your only feedback about leadership quality and attitudes is "multiple people are escaping", then it means you are not checking on leadership quality at all. > However, if I instead get reports that a team member is combative and fighting with their manager at every turn, I have to approach it as interpersonal conflict. If the situation as written is accurate and honest, I’d be moving toward heavy mentorship for both parties involved but they’d both be up for removal if they couldn’t improve. This enables bully managers big time. This could be unclear competences, this could be professional disagreement, this could be manager picking on employee, mismatch of ideas about roles and it could be employee being entirely in the wrong. You start assuming interpersonal conflict, which means that if there actual causes for issues wont ever get fixed. > if the situation as written is accurate and honest Gotta love this assumption given that especially middle management selects for people who are neither accurate nor honest. Now, engineers are not better people in principle, but when engineers lie, it is faster to find out. Meanwhile, your rules have no "check whether the manager is telling the truth" moment.

plorkyeran 4y ago

> As a manager of managers, it’s not that hard to see when a manager’s own team doesn’t like them. Getting multiple requests from people on a team who want to escape it is a huge warning sign that warrants further investigation. Doing a good job of identifying teams who don't like their manager means discovering it before you have multiple people trying to transfer away from that team. By the time you've reached that point you've already failed in your job as the manager's manager.