What Type of Manager Are You?
Tags: Work, Management, Leadership, Programming, Personal Development

4 Types of Managers and the Mindset that Drives Their Behaviour

A good manager feels like a fresh breeze lifting our spirits, while a bad manager feels like a heatwave sucking away into our enthusiasm. Anyone who has ever worked with a manager knows the feeling.

Based on my data collected from working with hundreds of managers over the years, I see each manager takes up a primary role in one of these four quadrants.

1. Aggressive manipulators — “As long as the work gets done”

These managers operate with extreme focus on driving business growth while losing their sense of humanity.

They do the following:

Manipulate people to get the work done by shaming them.

Create unhealthy competition between team members.

Use guilt to push through unrealistic targets.

Do not shy away from abusive language when people fall short of their expectations.

The relentless pursuit towards “outcomes at all costs” creates a toxic environment in which employees:

Play safe due to their fear of failure.

Blame others instead of taking responsibility for their mistakes.

May even engage in unethical practices to cover for themselves.

“This happens because people have no incentive to help others — but do have an incentive to undermine, bad-mouth, and demoralize coworkers, because pushing down others decreases the competition they face. Performance also suffers because hard workers who aren’t anointed A players become bitter and withhold effort.” — Robert I. Sutton

While their teams crumble behind the scenes, these managers draw attention and appreciation from senior execs due to their ability to drive business objectives.

In organisations with a toxic culture, leaders of the organisation turn a blind eye to this behaviour. As these managers continue to rise through the ranks, they feel entitled to abuse their employees.

2. People pleasers — “How can I prove my worth?”

With every decision rooted in reward and punishment, these managers care too much about what others think and how they will react.

With their sense of self-worth tied to external validation, they develop a deep desire to seek admiration, look for opportunities that make them shine, and avoid anything that might hurt their reputation.

This makes them:

Go with popular opinions as opposed to standing up for what’s right with the belief that disagreement implies disrespect

Say yes even when the request does not align with their goals with the fear that others will judge them for saying no and it will hurt their reputation.

Prefer to do things themselves instead of delegating to their team members with the assumption that independent value creation is the only path to establish credibility.

Avoid signing up for new challenges due to their fear of failure.

Ignore conflicts instead of sharing their honest opinion to avoid hurting others.

Being a people pleaser stalls the growth of their team, as employees:

Waste time doing work that does not align with their goals. \

Stick with bad decisions.

Miss opportunities to take on challenging assignments.

Do not feel empowered to make their own decisions.

Have no sense of how they are doing or what they can do to improve.

What happens then?

“People’s dissatisfaction will fester beneath the surface until one day they surprise you with their resignation. And most of the time when that happens, they’re not just quitting your company, they are also quitting you.” — Julie Zhuo

The protective armor adopted by these managers ends up in job dissatisfaction, disengagement, and ultimately high turnover.

3. Ignorant encumbers — “Things are good as they are”

Managers who live with a false sense of reality pick bits and pieces of information that validates their point of view while ignoring everything that contradicts it.

They build an illusion of greatness by ignoring signs of their poor performance and fail to gather feedback on how others perceive their actions. They do not act out of a desire to cause damage but are simply incompetent. Without proper skills to guide their team or awareness of the lack thereof, they act as a burden on their team.

They do the following:

Say one thing and do another.

Fail to keep their promises.

Cause confusion in the team with conflicting priorities.

Over-commit due to their lack of understanding of the complexity of the project.

Do not set standards on quality and acceptable behaviours in the team.

Their ignorance and incompetence hamper their team performance and nothing substantial ever gets done since they fail to provide direction and clarity to their team. They chase opportunities without proper strategies, fail to fix things before it’s too late, and do not show up when their team needs them.

Without acceptance of their incompetence and taking action to build the necessary skills, they become a source of stress, frustration, and anxiety in the team. The “things are good as they are” mindset leads to mediocre performance.

4. Growth drivers — “There’s always more to learn”

While being results-oriented, these managers genuinely care for the success and wellbeing of their people. They balance the needs of the organisation and their people by giving up traditional management styles and devising new strategies rooted in open-mindedness and learning.

They challenge directly to push people out of their comfort zone and shoot for excellence while not hesitating to speak with candor when dealing with difficult situations.

They aren’t perfect and don’t claim to be. Rather, they accept vulnerability to create a culture in which doing the right thing is considered more important than being right. They say, “I don’t know” often to highlight the importance of learning from others as opposed to being the one with all the answers. They accept mistakes and share their learnings, thereby encouraging others to feel safe in owning up to their mistakes instead of hiding behind them.

They act as a catalyst for creativity and innovation by creating the necessary space and providing opportunities to enable their team to put their critical thinking skills to use. By sharing context on why and what, they enable their team to determine the how. They empower their team to make decisions by:

Establishing decision boundaries

Building competence.

Providing clarity.

Implementing a feedback loop into the learning process.

Instead of safeguarding their team every step of the way, they lead with trust.

With a learner’s mindset, they constantly push for improvements by seeking feedback on how they are doing and what they can do to be better.

People naturally grow around them since they bring out the best in each individual by utilising their strengths. You can see it in the way people speak about work and how they love being part of their company’s growth.