One thing that I’ve found over the years is that almost all good managers I’ve worked for or with, didn’t learn from good managers. They learned how to be good managers by having bad managers.
While it’s easy to understand how being managed by someone awful would teach you what you don’t want to do when you have the chance to manage others, it’s a little un-obvious why having great managers wouldn’t teach you the things you *want* to do when you have a chance to manage others.
The main problem is that when you’ve been managed by great people, you don’t get yelled at. You never feel what it’s like to be humiliated in public. You get a chance for your career to develop, and you often don’t feel the unjustness of being passed over for something you genuinely deserve. There’s a lot of things like that. When you’re managed by someone good, these things happen, and they feel natural. They often don’t feel like someone’s put in a ton of work to make those things happen. You don’t see the effort they put in to remain calm, to ask “why” instead of lashing out, to build structures that are fair and responsible and foster growth.
And so when someone who’s never had a bad manager then gets a chance to manage folks, they can be frustrated when things go wrong and lash out. Why did (underling) screw up?!? Why weren’t they paying attention?!?! And while there are some folks who are observant enough to have understood that a great manager walked them through some of *their* mistakes, I’ve found that a lot of folks don’t understand the work that made their experience great.
So they respond with emotion. They nitpick. They think career progression “just happens”. They promise their managers work that their team is underequipped to do. They manage up, because that’s what got them here, and they didn’t see the work that was required to manage down.
Someone who had a terrible boss? Well, some of them get into power and say, “My turn.” Those – those are the absolute worst. But they’re also obvious. Having a bad manager who only ever had good managers? They can be *super confusing*, because their behavior makes almost no sense. They seem to want the right things, but are just incapable of actually doing them.
This pattern has been so consistent for me that I hesitate to hire someone who *hasn’t* had a garbage manager at some point in their career. And I don’t honestly know if I’ve ever worked (above OR below) a great manager who didn’t have someone looming in their past that they didn’t like.
What’s your experience been?