Manager As Parent: Now More Than Ever
What's in this month's Newsletter?
Main Feature: Manager As Parent
Jobs and Talent
What I’ve Been Reading
Personal and Professional Updates
Brief Advertisement: Upcoming NYC Workshop
I’m hosting an in-person Presentational Storytelling workshop in NYC on July 21. We walk through the 10-step ‘Extreme Presentation’ method for designing compelling slides and decks – it is one of the most impactful skills trainings I get to facilitate. We still have a few seats left – please message me for details and join me!
Manager As Parent?
Hey, managers: Does it feel like you’re spending significantly more time dealing with people and their drama than you used to?
If there’s one thing I’ve heard across the spectrum of clients in recent months – across industries and levels of seniority – it’s some version of this complaint. (And yes, I am using the word complaint intentionally. It is a complaint. That doesn’t make it untrue or unprofessional. It’s okay to have complaints!)
My intuition – and I have no data to support this, it’s just a hunch – is that this situation has felt particularly pronounced in the last 6-12 months as the pandemic has entered the Pretendemic Phase (not an actual term, sadly). It’s as if managers expected to need to be more nurturing during those hard initial months of the pandemic, but since vaccines have arrived and we’ve settled into this new pseudo-rhythm of work and life, there’s less patience for intra and inter-personal grievance management.
(And yes, I am using the word nurturing intentionally. More on that in a moment).
A coaching client of mine said to me just last week “I can be everyone’s parent or I can do my job, but I can’t do both. And I don’t want to [do both].”
Now, this tension between the “people management” parts of a manager’s formal responsibilities and the “rest of the job” is not new. In fact, if I were to create an imaginary ranking of the top reasons managers struggle, managing the tension between attending to their people and attending to everything else might top that list. But I agree that for many this past year this tension feels different. It feels harder.
What do we make of this?
I’ve heard a lot of explanations: The challenge of managing Gen Zers, the broad shift in expectations around the employee value proposition spurred by the pandemic, even the exacerbated difficulty of managing people at not-for-profits consumed internally by their progressive politics.
I actually think there’s some truth to many of the explanations, though I want to offer a superordinate hypothesis that has to do with my client’s comment above. In particular, there was one word they mentioned that really hammered this home for me: parent.
My hypothesis is that in recent years management has felt more like parenting recently because organizations have taken on an outsized role as nurturer to their employees.
A core theme of psychoanalytic theory is that we as humans have an underlying need for attachment and emotional nurturing. If the womb is effectively a perfect state where all of our needs are met, then our journey from cradle to grave is marked by the continuous need to recreate environments that meet our needs and enable us to flourish. In this paradigm, healthy growth and development requires an environment that balances restrictions and elbowroom which allows us to experiment safely and progressively (Winnicott, 1960). Authority figures therefore function as the overlords of these environments which nurture us (or fail to do so adequately). This starts at childhood with an individual’s parental and core caretaking figures and then progresses to other authorities into adolescence (teachers, other parents, coaches, etc.). Through emerging adulthood (Arnett, 2000) and throughout our adult lives, the overlord authority figures take the shape of formal entities to which we intentionally cede authority for parenting such as police and “the state,” experts, and our institutions. (One might argue that fully abstract authorities – deities – play the ultimate parenting role for us as they are conveniently infallible and supreme).
What’s this got to do with management? The obvious corollary is that managers, like parents, function as an authority that manage the environments – “holding environments,” as Winnicott (1960) would call them – in which people are currently struggling. Managers occupy this role both directly and indirectly; directly as they can quite literally dictate the specifics of an individual's day-to-day experience, and indirectly as symbolic (and actual) representations of The Organization which is its own authority figure.
But how does that explain why people management is more difficult now?
The answer, I hypothesize, is that public trust of so many other authority figures, both tangible and abstract, is at an all-time low and thus people are looking toward their organizations, and more directly at their managers, to provide them with the psychological sustenance they might have historically gotten elsewhere. Government institutions like the CDC and Justice Department, religious institutions, companies and business leaders, not-for-profits, the fourth estate, and certainly political parties have historically-low approval ratings. This is due to a variety of reasons, some natural (a global pandemic uprooting our sense of physical security) and others more exogenous (Critical Theorists reading this would point to several years of a political climate where the main goal of leadership was to destabilize American institutions and that’s fair) all coalescing at once and perpetuating a vicious downward spiral of institutional mistrust.
What do we do in a climate of dysfunction when the authorities we look to for parenting can’t be trusted? We take it up with (or act out against) those we can most closely impact: our organizations and their shepherds. Essentially, I’m suggesting that much of the outsized people management challenges of recent months boils down to organizations, and managers by proxy, as the nearest available target for our anxieties over the decay of institutions around us.
So no, managers, it’s not just you (or it might be, in which case, call me). And no, you can’t solve this societal-level issue. But if you’ve been experiencing what seems like a torrent of people management challenges, it will hopefully be somewhat liberating to hear that not only are you not alone, but that by definition the issues are universal. And that’s okay.
What can you do?
First, it’s a reminder that good management is rarely one-size-fits-all. You can try to individualize your management by evaluating each of your team member’s specific needs (and yes, there are tools that can help you do this if need be).
Second, you can give yourself permission to set boundaries. Your job is to maximize their success at work – sometimes that can be helping them deal with some of the intra and inter-personal challenges they’re experiencing, other times it means recommending they get alternative forms of support or tackle things themselves. A manager-as-coach posture is particularly useful here.
A good rule of thumb: If you can find a reasonable line of sight between playing the role of manager-as-parent and someone’s performance at work, then the role you’re playing is necessary. If that line of sight seems murky to the point of unreasonable, then you should reset expectations and step back.
Jobs and Talent
Jobs:
From a friend: NYC-based not-for-profit OneLove is searching for an emerging leader to serve as the Director of People to help build out the talent function. The job is in either their NYC or Westchester offices, is hybrid (at the moment), and pays approximately $105-120K to start.
Talent:
Are you – or is someone you know – on the job hunt? Let me know. Maybe I can showcase them here!
What I’ve Been Reading:
This section has moved to a separate monthly posting on LinkedIn. It would make me very happy if you would subscribe to the LinkedIn version right here.
Personal & Professional Updates
Little Charlotte is now 2.5 years old and every bit a goofy toddler. She has discovered what makes her parents laugh – like intentionally singing off-key – and clearly enjoys the attention. She’s clearly got an independent streak, is still a total goofball, and I’m terrified of her as a teenager.
There are still seats for an upcoming open-cohort in-person workshop of Extreme Presentation in NYC. Message me for details!
That's it for this edition - please reach out if I can be at all helpful.
Be compassionate and intentional.