All managers make mistakes; good managers acknowledge and repair

> The ~~Management~~ Skill Nobody Talks About.

Getting on with people long term is often about making them feeling acknowledged and being clear about what makes them valued.

The real trick to 'repair' is not to make hollow promises. Managers can be perceived as failing when an external event happens and they haven't planned for it, or they bet against it happening. This can kick off a whole chain of events, including pushing team members into crunch time or 'impossible positions'. Its rare that you can stop the external event or a similar one from happening, so promising it won't is hollow.

The next hollow promise commonly made is 'when it happens I won't let X happen [to you]'. The problem here is often that you probably will. In two ways: either X happening is clear in hindsight but not with foresight, so you'll probably make similar decisions again; or, the team member ending up in an unhappy situation is the best of a bad bunch of options.

I've had to place people in positions where they had insufficient support and excessive demands. Sometimes I knew this going in, and sometimes I did not.

You also have to be careful about passing the buck - if you're the manager you need to be clear with yourself about what your job is and whose issue any given problem actually is. Do you help your team interact with third parties, or do third parties interact with your team through you? How much are you supposed to represent your teams needs to management (e.g. pushback) vs how much are you supposed to represent your management's desires to the team (e.g. pushdown).

If you are caught passing the buck to shirk responsibility by your reports or by management you will lose a lot of trust and respect very quickly. You can always pushback or pushdown harder to appear 'good' to one party, but at some extreme that is going to lose you your job. Its your choice how to play this - so own the choice.

As a manager, my first priority was to project/protect the corporation interests.

I always made that clear to my employees, but after that, my employees' interests generally came second (over my own).

It seemed to work. I was a manager at the same company for over 25 years, and my bosses were really tough (but fair).

What does “tough but fair” mean?

If you’re fair, what function does being tough serve? Or does being fair allow tolerating the shortcoming that’s being tough?

An employee being tough - resilient, emotionally strong - sounds like a good idea. But manager being tough to reports? I fail to see the function/value.

They had high expectations (I suspect many here, would consider them “extreme”), and demanded that we take a great deal of accountability and responsibility. Not really big on micromanaging, but we were expected to deliver, with no excuses for failure.

If I showed that I could deliver, they would basically give me a “blank check,” for support, but I was expected to take this high level of trust seriously, and not abuse it. They wouldn’t second-guess my decisions.

They would assume that I knew what I was doing; which could be pretty scary, but I was also expected to ask for help, if I found myself over my head. They might be grumpy, but they’d give me the help. I did risk having the responsibility yanked, though.

Copping to my mistakes was expected. I was also expected to do so, in spite of possible dire consequences. If they found out about it after the fact, or if I tried to cover it up, things would go badly.

Throwing co-workers or employees under the bus was very bad. It pretty much destroyed your rep. Weasels did not do well.

High expectations, high trust, big support, a ton of agency, and really high standards on deliverables and transparency.

From what I read here, a lot of folks would have difficulty in that environment. I liked it, but it could be stressful.