When it comes to stories about horrible bosses, you show me yours and I’ll show you mine.

People don’t leave jobs, they leave managers, the saying goes. Ever since I can remember, managers have been getting the blame for everything that is wrong with the world of work.

I loved being a manager myself. I had a great team: enthusiastic, fun, passionate, hard working. I didn’t have any formal training, but I wanted to be a good manager, so I read up on it, and took courses, and thought a lot about what being a good manager meant to me and asked them what it might mean to them. I learned to delegate and tried to help my team grow. I was proud of them, and felt we were the best team in the organisation.

A kind of hubris perhaps.

No team is an island, to paraphrase John Donne. My team began to feel disillusioned. They were becoming frustrated with me because they spoke up about issues, which I tried to get resolved and escalated to my manager, but went nowhere. They came to feel that speaking up was futile.

I struggled with my own workload with this additional responsibility for looking after both the outputs and wellbeing of those I managed.  I remember feeling emotionally exhausted after a day listening to my team, and then at 4pm finally getting started on a report with an imminent deadline for my own manager.

Manager wellbeing

I was reminded of my experiences as I read the recent review of the culture of the BBC.

The review reports that more people are positive about their immediate line manager than in 2013 and that those who felt confident to speak up often did so because they trusted their manager.

But it also highlights that managers lacked confidence and skills to have difficult conversations, for example, dealing with poor performance or behavioural issues.  Managers reported that although they had more HR responsibilities than before, they had not received the necessary people management training and were ill-equipped to deal with matters such as team members’ mental health issues.

The report recommends empowering managers by clearly defining expectations and providing specific capability training for them in matters like informal conflict resolution and workplace wellbeing.

While it should be applauded that the BBC have recognised the need for manages to be trained to deal with these things, it feels like even more pressure is being applied to the already ‘squeezed middle.’

Globally, according to Gallup’s State of Global Workplace survey, 42% of managers reported experiencing stress a lot of the day, compared to 39% of individual employees. And in Europe, 15% of managers reported feeling anger a lot of the day, and 18% reported feeling sadness.

Photo by Amin Zabardast on Unsplash

Their wellbeing doesn’t just affect engagement, but also organisational culture. Last year’s IBE Ethics at Work survey found that managers are more likely to say that they have felt pressured to compromise their organisation’s ethical standards compared to non-managers (20% vs 12%).

And if managers are feeling the pressure, they seem increasingly unable to speak up about it. For example, in the NHS Staff Survey the Freedom to Speak Up (Raising Concerns) subscore has shown a continued three-year decline in the confidence of the ‘general management’ occupational group to speak up.

Call it out culture

The BBC culture report recommends a “reset of behavioural expectations” with the promotion of a ‘Call it out Culture’ – one where feedback is normalised, and people are encouraged and feel safe to recognise when things are working well and deal with them when they are not, and to call out unacceptable behaviours.

This has a nice ring to it, but I am concerned that a ‘call it out’ culture will not support the psychologically safe environment they are hoping for.

Calling people out brings with it shame and public humiliation. If we want to foster environments where people can bring their best self to work, where feedback really is a gift, not a stick to beat each other with, then I am not convinced that calling it out is the answer.

“You cannot shame or belittle people into changing their behaviour.”

Brene Brown

While I am a firm believer that the standard you walk past is the standard you accept, dealing with issues privately, before having a values-led conversation as a team, can help us all learn and improve.

As activist and scholar Loretta J. Ross says in this inspiring TED talk “If you call people out you’re inviting them to a fight, not a conversation.” I’ll leave the debate about Gary Lineker for another day.

Giving managers the tools to have kind and supportive conversations where people can disagree well is essential in today’s workplace, where opinions are presented as binary, entwined with our identities, in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

Supporting managers

I’m not making excuses here for those people who really are awful managers – unkind, bullying, ineffectual – but wanting to start a conversation about what we are expecting managers to achieve, realistically. Perhaps if we understand and honestly articulate the what – the strategic and cultural goals we expect them to meet, that might help inform the how.

We are asking managers to do so much. To improve productivity while remaining compassionate and inclusive. To balance their team’s wellbeing in a volatile world with ever changing messages about who needs supporting and how to do so sensitively. To lead with integrity, communicate values, and set the tone. And on top of that, to take responsibility for their own workloads, meet deadlines, and be productive, all the while setting an example of healthy work/home balance.

Isn’t it time we listened and asked managers what support they need, so that the squeezed middle can take a breath and be the great managers we need them to be?