Why understanding the pressures around managers can reveal a very different story about what’s actually happening at work.
Key Takeaways | TL;DR
- Managers have an enormous influence on people’s experience of work, but their behaviour doesn’t happen in isolation.
- What looks like a manager problem from an employee’s perspective may look very different when you understand what the manager is experiencing.
- Organisational systems, targets, workload, information and senior leadership decisions can all shape how somebody manages.
- Understanding context doesn’t remove accountability. It helps organisations respond to the right problem.
- Before deciding who needs fixing, understand the different sides of the story.
When Calum and I started our first businesses, they were incredibly seasonal.
There were periods where everything seemed to happen at once. The workload increased, expectations rose and we needed people to perform quickly because there simply wasn’t much room for error.
At the time, I remember becoming frustrated with certain members of the team who I felt weren’t performing at the level we needed.
It was easy to see it as a people problem.
With hindsight, I can see something I couldn’t see as clearly at the time. Some of those people had joined us at terrible moments. They walked into an organisation under pressure, with a mountain of work already waiting for them, and we expected them to somehow hit the ground running.
We hadn’t necessarily created the conditions for them to succeed.
That doesn’t mean nobody should be accountable for their performance. But it does change the story.
And I think we sometimes make the same mistake with managers.
The manager is often the most visible part of the problem
If an employee says, “My manager is constantly putting pressure on us”, that’s important.
That is their experience.
But imagine speaking to the manager next.
They tell you: “I’ve been given a target I don’t believe is achievable. I’m under pressure every week to improve the team’s performance and I’m worried about my own job.”
Then you speak to the executive responsible.
Their story is different again: “If we don’t improve performance, the consequences could affect hundreds of jobs.”
Same organisation. Same situation. Three human beings experiencing it from very different positions.
Who is telling the truth?
Potentially, all three.
There is rarely only one side to the story
I’ve become increasingly interested in this because managers occupy a strange position inside organisations.
To employees, they can represent “the company”. They’re the person assigning the work, communicating decisions, approving leave, giving feedback and having difficult conversations.
But managers are employees too.
They’re experiencing targets, systems, organisational changes, workloads and leadership decisions of their own. They’re often expected to translate decisions they didn’t make, answer questions they don’t yet have answers to and support other people while managing their own response to what’s happening.
None of that excuses poor management.
If somebody behaves disrespectfully, avoids difficult conversations or consistently creates a damaging experience for their team, understanding the context shouldn’t make that behaviour acceptable.
But context can change what we decide to do about it.
A manager struggling because they lack capability may need development. A capable manager buckling under an impossible workload may need something entirely different. A manager repeatedly giving their team contradictory priorities may actually be receiving contradictory priorities from above.
If we diagnose all three as “manager problems”, we risk treating the most visible symptom rather than understanding what’s creating it.
I’ve seen the other side of this myself
As a founder, I’ve had to learn this personally.
Calum and I are unusually visible inside our businesses. Our moods, behaviours and reactions can affect the atmosphere around us incredibly quickly.
There have been periods where I’ve been under significant capacity pressure and become shorter with people than I would normally want to be. From my perspective, I might have been juggling several problems simultaneously. From somebody else’s perspective, they simply experienced their boss being short with them.
Both things can be true.
Some coaching I received through GiANT helped me become much more conscious of that. Understanding why I was behaving a certain way was useful, but it didn’t remove my responsibility for how that behaviour affected somebody else.
That’s the distinction I think matters.
Context should improve accountability, not replace it.
Four questions to ask before calling it a manager problem
- What are employees actually experiencing?
Get specific about the behaviour rather than relying solely on a low “manager” score or broad feedback about management. - What is the manager experiencing?
Understand their workload, expectations, information, capability, support and the pressures they’re responding to. - What is happening around them?
Look at targets, systems, processes, senior leadership decisions and organisational conditions that may be influencing the behaviour you’re seeing. - What genuinely needs to change?
The answer might be Leadership Development. It might be workload, clearer decision-making, better systems or a change further up the organisation. Follow the evidence.
Where belonging can help us look deeper
Managers have an enormous influence on whether people experience Authenticity, Connection and Value at work.
But managers need conditions that allow them to lead like human beings too.
If they’re permanently overwhelmed, disconnected from decisions or afraid to admit they’re struggling, that experience can travel through them into their team.
Our Lens of Belonging can help us understand the employee experience, but the diagnosis needs to remain open to the wider story surrounding it.
Final thought
I don’t think the answer is to stop holding managers accountable.
It’s to become more curious before deciding what we’re holding them accountable for.
People at every level of an organisation are responding to circumstances that somebody else may not be able to see. Employees have a story. Managers have a story. Executives have one too.
Nobody necessarily has the complete picture.
That doesn’t mean every behaviour is acceptable or every perspective is equally accurate. It means that if we want to change people’s experience of work, we should understand enough of the story to know where change actually needs to happen.
Sometimes that will be the manager.
Sometimes it won’t.
Before we decide who the problem is, perhaps we should understand the system they’re operating inside.
Look Beyond the Manager Score
Understand the story before deciding the solution
At Thrive at Work, our Discover work combines organisational evidence, in-person listening and our Lens of Belonging to understand people’s experience from different perspectives and explore what may be contributing to it.
We don’t begin by deciding what needs fixing. We begin by understanding the story.
