What your managers are really thinking about you

Maira Butt, The Independent

The modern workplace is in crisis. Last year, more than 2.82 million Britons were out of work with long-term sickness, a number that’s gone up by a staggering 41 per cent over the past three years. Working from home, sicknote culture, Gen Zs “quiet quitting” and approval-seeking millennials caught in the middle of it all: the theatre of workplace dynamics is where the drama of our upbringing, relationships, hopes, fears and generation wars all play out. While we’re used to the cries of staff calling out toxic workplaces and horrible bosses — over one in three people who quit their job blames bad management — we don’t hear the other side of the story. As a millennial manager, working in the third sector, I remember being shaken to my people-pleasing core when a staff member made a complaint about me. How could I — warm, supportive, an actual hand-holding angel — have possibly offended this lovely woman? How did our wires get so badly crossed? It’s clear a generational shift surrounding attitudes to the workplace has emerged between employers and their staff. It’s partly to do with the gap between managers’ and employees’ expectations of each other, says Michael Smets, a professor of management at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, who works with high-performing executives around the world.

“Managers complain about a lack of commitment, staff refusing to work long hours, the high level of expectations from superiors and demands for flexible working,” he says. “I recently had a conversation with a partner in a large consulting firm where they had exactly those kinds of complaints about their junior lawyers. The managerial generation has often come up the ranks with the attitude, ‘I’ll work long nights and weekends, and I’ll do whatever it takes’. With generational differences, but especially post-Covid, people’s priorities have simply changed.” The irony is that having a positive relationship with your boss is crucial to career success. A 2023 McKinsey report found that positive relationships with leadership accounted for 86 per cent of employee satisfaction with interpersonal ties at work. Moreover, bosses are more likely to assess staff potential by their personal connection to them than by performance metrics.

So, how can managers shift perception of workplace culture, and be better leaders? And how can the relationship between worker and boss be reset in order to make workplaces happier? One way, perhaps, is for managers to shift their thinking. Age-old stereotypes about “lazy employees” come down to the “attribution fallacy”, says Smets. “When we think someone is behaving a certain way, we assume it’s out of choice or ill-will. They’ve checked out, so they’re lazy.”

My first instinct when hearing the complaint against me was to do the same. Here was someone who clearly didn’t want to work and didn’t understand the business demand of meeting KPIs (key performance indicators), I thought haughtily. Instead, Smets advises bosses to have continuing discussions with their employees to ensure that personal circumstances aren’t affecting their performance. This resonated with my experience: it turned out that my staff member had a lot going on personally and I’d overlooked the cues that something was wrong. I couldn’t help but sympathise: I’d been there myself, being told to hurry up with a deadline at the same time as finding out my cat had cancer. “If only they knew what was REALLY going on,” I cried down the phone to a friend on my lunch break. It’s certainly all too easy for managers to dismiss “disruptive” employees, who may be challenging micromanagement, as simply difficult or irritating. “Most good managers will ask themselves, ‘What’s going on here?’ and try to get to the root of the issue,” says psychotherapist Nicola Noél. “You’ll get the odd bad manager who will take it personally, which ends ugly because that gets combative. But most managers are confused and wondering why you’re trying to disrupt the team.”

She says that one fraught relationship can affect the morale of the whole group. “It affects the team’s performance, then the profit line. When there is pushback against management, it can resemble splitting the team. So, you may get someone who is contentious in team meetings who will almost want people to start taking sides.” It may seem obvious, but the main thing a manager wants is for you to do your job. “It’s not a great place to be when you’re a manager, and you’ve got a bigger goal and people don’t want to get on board with it,” says Merrisha Gordon, who has over 20 years of experience in management across NHS hospitals and is now a career coach. “For example, if someone is constantly late, it has a ripple effect. The reality is that if people are not doing the job that they need to be there to do, there are repercussions.”