Manager Bad Days: Doing Not-so-nice-things to People You Like

Life as a manager is great when all you have to do is nice things to people you like.

• paying for lunches
• approving vacation time off
• giving raises or promotions

If this was all the job of a manager - everyone would line up. I’ll do this job for half the pay of being an individual contributor.

Not-so-nice Things

What makes management life hard is doing not-so-nice things to people you like:

• asking to work late
• denying raises or promotions
• executing performance improvement plans
• firing or layoffs

On these days, the feeling I have would be the worst of the worst days as an individual contributor. I would not wish the feeling I had on my worst enemy.

For the Company!

At some point as a manager, you will have to do these not-so-nice things - “for the good of the company”, to maintain the company.

This is part of management rarely written about - nobody wakes up wanting to do not-so-nice things to people they like.

Interview Gauntlets

At the same time, this is precisely why companies make it so hard to get into - they want to avoid doing these things to people they can setup systems to prevent it. To save themselves these situations wherever they can.