Some of my worst managers have been great people—friendly, kind, and open-hearted. What made them bad managers was not that they were malicious, narcissistic, or uncaring, but that our relationship was off-kilter.

Writing this I wonder if some people would put me on their “best manager” list or list me as their worst. A manager-employee relationship is just that: a relationship. It is a two-way street. Without true alignment and partnership, the relationship can—and will—sour.

This misalignment led to many hard lessons. Here are some of them:

A transactional relationship is damaging

There is a huge difference between a partnership and a transactional relationship. If you have ever been in the latter, you probably know that. For those who haven’t, a transactional relationship is one where your manager only wants to know about the work. Some of my worst managers used 1:1s not to help me grow, but as a way to extract information from me for their singular purpose. They would dole out assignments without context or explanation and only saw projects in the light of whether they could help move the metrics they cared about.

These managers made me feel like a cog in their machine with a single-use purpose: to provide whatever it was they needed from me at any given time. I felt interchangeable and replaceable. It was frustrating—not to mention demotivating—and it hampered our relationship.

When you don’t care about your reports, you risk losing them

Some of my best managers cared about the challenges I faced outside work. Some of my worst managers didn’t care at all.

I can not share too much of a personal example but what I will say is that life is about people, and people have personal battles about whether and seeing a manager not act in a manner which I felt showed empathy and care for a line report highlighted to me that they were not a considerate person. The natural progression you arrive at is that that same cold treatment Person A experienced is always around the corner, waiting for you.

I take this mistreatment to heart, especially when the reports are junior in their careers and have not been hardened by life or experiences. The unfortunate story behind Oliver Bredski (may God bless his soul and bring peace to his family) troubles me

Having too much ego

Everyone wants to be told they are doing a great job and everyone wants to look good to other stakeholders in an org. Some of my worst managers did not understand that your line reports should be better than you in certain areas.

Why is this important? If have or hire smart people oftentimes you just need to get out of their way and course correct. Their doing good work is reflective of your good judgement as a manager. Easy to conceptualise, right? My worst managers were in a battle with me for praise and adulation and so would take credit from myself when it came to company-wide meetings as an attempt not to uplift me but to use me as a tool to bolster themselves.

This spoke to a bigger issue which was an inability to want to learn or grasp how and what motivated people in both the short and long run

Plays favourites in damaging

Everyone has favourites, if you are fortunate enough to have a sibling then the odds are your parents have a favourite. The challenge here is to not make it blatantly obvious and this can cause unnecessary friction between siblings.

How does this materialise in the workplace? Managers that pick out certain team members as their favourites, maybe due to some members of the team being more similar to them in terms of culture, values or gender or whatever the explanation as to why they find it easier to relate to these people easier. Again, nothing is wrong with this, however, poor managers allow this to materialise when promoting their work over others, giving more weight to their opinions, or giving more assistance. Naturally, other team members are quick to notice and can easily become disengaged as a result. This here shatters the idea that you work in a meritocracy, speaking from personal experience, once this has been shattered in an org it is near impossible to put these shards of broken glass back to