TCW #022 | The 6 dysfunctions of manager-employee relationships
When manager-employee relationships go wrong, it's usually the employee who suffers the greatest impact. Learn how to detect these dysfunctions so you can avert them entirely or fix them quickly.
This week, we’ll talk about the most common issues in manager-employee relationships and how to diagnose when one is present in your working relationship with your manager (or employee).
Most people know when something isn’t working in their manager relationship, but sometimes it’s hard to find the right words to describe what’s wrong.
It’s also hard to understand or quantify the impact before things have gone too far awry.
This post is all about:
helping you identify when a manager relationship is no longer productive
understanding the impacts (to you, the employee)
finding the words to articulate what’s wrong (and why it needs to be fixed)
Let’s dive in.
Manager-employee relationship dysfunctions, by category
As with any relationship, there are many ways that a manager-employee relationship can become under-productive or even destructive. Below are the six most common dysfunctions I’ve seen in manager-employee relationships:
🥶 Lack of trust: The Cold War
🤠 Unclear expectations: The Wild West
🚁 Micromanagement: The Helicopter Manager
🤐 Lack of communication: The Silent Treatment
🏹 Unfair treatment: The Hunger Games
☠️ No opportunities for growth: The Dead End Job
Each of these common dysfunctions is resolvable, as long as both sides want to work toward a healthier and more productive working relationship.
Before you can determine how to fix them, though, you need to know if one of these is present in your own manager-employee relationship.
For each of these dysfunctions, I walk through
a definition of what’s going wrong
the telltale signs that this dysfunction is present
the types and magnitudes of impact if this dysfunction isn’t resolved
🥶 The Cold War aka Lack of Trust
The Cold War is fundamentally about a loss of trust or confidence. This can happen on both sides, though it’s more detrimental to the employee when a manager loses trust in their employee, versus the other way around.
Some telltale signs that The Cold War is icing you out:
Coldness: As the name suggests, there will be a distinct chill to your relationship. This will be especially noticeable when there is a sudden loss of trust in an otherwise healthy prior relationship.
Avoidance: Your manager may avoid you and only communicate when absolutely necessary. They may be trying to figure out what to do, but in the meantime, they may stay away — sometimes, this is for the best. They may need to cool down after a single trust-eroding event. If this is a long-standing symptom, however, it should not be downplayed.
Guardedness: When you do communicate, you may notice your manager has a guard up. They may give you vague directions or leave out key information that would expedite your efforts.
Resentment: If this dysfunction goes on for too long, you may feel resentful and angry towards each other. You may even take out your anger on each other using either passive or active aggression. When the Cold War is at its worse, you may even actively try to dismantle each other’s success (sabotaging projects, speaking negatively about the other, withholding assistance when it’s clearly needed).
Feeling alone: While managers are not our parents, we do have a collective expectation that our managers should look out for us and be “on our team” — and certainly this is true in healthy, functioning manager relationships. When you and your manager are in a Cold War, you may feel deeply alone, even abandoned, in the workplace.
Employee impact
Employee impacts for this dysfunction are vast. You may feel constant stress or anxiety, feel that your manager is “out to get you,” or feel abandoned without resources or support. I’ve written before about the tight correlation and impact of work stress on mental health overall — TLDR: it’s huge.
For this dysfunction, the mental health impacts can be tremendous and impact areas range from:
your emotional well-being
to your sense of self-confidence
to your career trajectory and financial wellness
Please do not sweep this one under the rug.
🔜 In next week’s post, I will walk through what you can do to raise the white flag, call a truce, write the treaty, and get back on a path toward a high-trust relationship.
🤠 The Wild West aka Unclear Expectations
The Wild West happens when there are no clear expectations for what is expected of employees. This can happen for many reasons, including:
a manager who is overwhelmed themselves and unable to give clear direction
communication chemistry issues between the employee and manager (“talking past one another”)
shifting goalposts, which can cascade all the way from the top of the organization down to your manager and then to you
Some telltale signs that you’re living in The Wild West:
Lack of direction: You legitimately can’t write down the top 3 priorities for your role, or how success will be measured. Even if you have a good guess, you aren’t at least 80% confident that your manager would agree with what you wrote.
Confusion: You’re constantly unsure of what you should be doing. Even if you are making progress, you aren’t totally sure you are able to piece together the full picture.
Frequent “Gotcha” Requirements: It’s only after you share work product with your manager that you find out the full set of requirements or expectations. Instead of getting clear requirements from the beginning, you find yourself reworking your efforts over and over, and the requirements are often shifting.
Frequently Shifting Priorities: Are your role priorities shifting more frequently than you are able to start and finish a project? Corporate employees are measured by the impact of their efforts. If you aren’t able to start, scope, implement, and measure the success of your efforts before priorities shift, this will impact your perceived success — which translates to missed promotions, raises, and low performance reviews. Don’t “take one for the team” all the time and jump from Burning Thing to Burning Thing before confirming that the assumptions underlying the current prioritization are sound (and stable).
Employee impact
Employee impacts from The Wild West include:
slower-than-desired career growth (because you’re not working on the right things at the right time)
emotional stress and frustration
misconceptions about your competency
TLDR: When you work on low-priority projects, you have lower perceived impact. Knowing the expectations and True North goals for your team and company will ensure that you are working on high-impact work that will be rewarded.
🔜 In a future post, I will walk through a Socratic questioning approach you can use to clarify expectations and get a clear, consistent sense of direction from your manager.
🚁 The Helicopter Manager aka Micromanagement
The Helicopter Manager dysfunction occurs when a manager closely monitors and controls every aspect of an employee's work. This can be very suffocating and demoralizing for employees, and it can lead to decreased productivity and creativity.
Some common signs or symptoms of The Helicopter Manager include:
Micromanagement: Your manager closely monitors and controls every aspect of your work, and may often make decisions for you.
Tedious supervision: Your manager requires dedicated time for the two of you more than 2x/week, and in those sessions is double-checking progress and decisions you are making on your work. They are constantly checking in on you (more than 2x/week), and may even provide frequent and unrequested feedback or advice.
Constant critique: The manager doesn’t seem to trust your skills or judgment, and they seem to believe they can do your job better than you. They may be overly critical of your work as a result.
Demoralization: Freedom and autonomy matter more to some employees than others. If self-direction matters to you, having a Helicopter Manager will cramp your creativity and sense of agency.
Decreased productivity or Disengagement: The pressure of being watched and monitored constantly often has two impacts on employees:
(1) in some cases, the pressure causes them to make more mistakes, reinforcing the manager’s micromanagement “spider sense”
(2) the stress of being micromanaged becomes so overwhelming that your brain decides to disengage from your work — if your manager can do the work better than you anyway, why not just let them take the wheel?
Employee impact
Employee impacts include losses in emotional wellness, decaying self-confidence and perception of self-worth, and the possibility of burnout or disengagement from work.
Some employees report enjoying lots of management oversight, but the issue is that when you’re not the one making decisions and owning the consequences, your long-term development and growth are stifled, and you will quickly fall behind your peers. It’s quite insidious.
TLDR: Helicopter Managers can bomb your confidence and limit your ability to learn and grow. This needs to be dealt with immediately.
🔜 In a future post, I will walk through what you can do to raise the flag on this issue and get back into the driver’s seat in your role and work.
🤐 The Silent Treatment aka Lack of Communication
The Silent Treatment occurs when a manager or employee refuses to communicate with the other person. The “surface areas” of silence can include both in-person and digital communication channels.
Some telltale signs that The Silent Treatment is present:
Defensiveness: The manager or employee may be defensive and resistant to feedback or criticism. In fact, this is often the way that the Silent Treatment starts — one person tries to communicate an issue, and the other is so unreceptive to the conversation that the initiator tells themselves that “it’s not even worth it anymore” to try to have productive dialogue with the other. Then, the Silent Treatment sets in.
Avoidance: Either party may avoid eye contact or avoid being near the other person (in the office or at company events). They may also avoid the other person digitally, ie by not responding to emails, Slacks, or calls. Note: this can be even more damaging in a remote work culture.
Coldness: The chill in a Silent relationship is easy to feel but harder for me to describe. It’s especially noticeable when the relationship suddenly shifts from warm and engaged to more cold and distant.
Passive-Aggression: The manager or employee may be angry and resentful, and may take out their anger on the other person, though usually passive-aggressively. Why? Because treating someone with silence is fundamentally a passive approach to conflict, so it follows that the response is likely to be passive as well.
Freedom → Isolation: Being ignored can feel like welcomed autonomy for a short time. But over time, it can become isolating and contribute to information imbalances that will likely impact your job performance.
Employee impact
Employee impacts for this dysfunction are often more contained, especially if one party recognizes the issue quickly and breaks the silence.
However, if it goes on too long, it can harm you. Communication and information are the building blocks of a successful career. Managers are a critical information funnel, so if this relationship is silent, you will likely be limited in your abilities to:
get the information you need to be successful in your work
take on more interesting and challenging projects
get recognition for your successes
TLDR: fix this one as soon as possible. It’s an uncomfortable problem, but one of the easier ones to fix once one of you calls out the elephant in the room 🐘
🔜 In a future post, I will walk through what you can do to take steps to break the silence, thaw the relationship, and rewire a high-throughput communication pipeline with your manager.
🏹 The Hunger Games aka Unfair Treatment, Harassment, or Bullying
The Hunger Games is a very painful manager-employee relationship dysfunction, where one party feels unfairly treated. This can be caused by a variety of factors, including favoritism, discrimination, and a scarcity mentality. It can be mild, moderate, or severe — and in some cases can have legal implications.
Some common signs or symptoms that you are a Tribute in the Hunger Games include:
Feeling Targeted: Fairness means that the same treatment is applied across the board. Being treated unfairly means that you are being treated differently from others (and likely in a way that bothers you). If you feel singled out or targeted, you might be in this kind of dysfunctional relationship.
Resentment: We all know that bullies spawn other bullies. You will likely feel scared and resentful towards your manager or employer. You may even take out your anger on your work (ie sabotaging production code), your manager, or your colleagues (especially those who seem to be drawing the long straw every time). This can be very vicious and have side effects of guilt and self-loathing, if it gets really out of control.
Demotivation, Disengagement, Isolation: If you’re feeling unfairly treated, and nothing improves — no matter what you do to get into good graces — you may eventually give up and disengage from your work and your colleagues to protect yourself emotionally.
Employee impact
Employee impacts for workplace bullying and unfair treatment are as bad as childhood bullying. There are severe emotional impacts and risks, as well as the likelihood that your work and commitment to your work quality will degrade.
TLDR: Being treated unfairly? Bullied? Harassed? Discriminated against? Flag this right away. Do not let it get worse or go unnoticed.
💡PS: You have a legal right to be treated fairly and consistently in the workplace. These rights vary by state, but you can always seek counsel from a trusted HR leader or an outside lawyer if you feel your rights have been violated and/or that you are being harassed or discriminated against.
🔜 In a future post, I will walk through what you can do to raise the flag on this issue and regain the freedom to operate without fear or judgment in your workplace.
☠️ The Dead End Job aka No Opportunities for Growth
The Dead End Job is a type of manager-employee dysfunction that occurs when employees feel like they are not being given opportunities for growth. I find that this dysfunction is often caused by miscommunication or outside factors (ie if the manager has no ability to assign more meaty work).
Some common signs or symptoms of The Dead End Job include:
Different Page, Different Book: You and your manager need to be on the same page about where you are in your career, how you’re performing, and what comes next. If any of these is misaligned, your manager might not actually think you’re ready for more.
Boredom and Loss of Productivity: You may feel bored and disengaged from your work if you don’t see the light you want to see at the end of the tunnel.
Frustration: If you’ve brought up the feeling of being stagnant multiple times with your manager with no progress, you may feel frustrated and angry at not being heard or given new growth opportunities.
Employee impact
Employee impacts include boredom, frustration, and decreased productivity, but this one is also surprisingly easy to fix, once you get on the same page as your manager.
TLDR: most managers want to see you grow, so if you’re not getting opportunities, it’s one of two things:
Your manager doesn’t think you’re ready
Your manager is unable to give you the growth opportunities you want right now
🔜 In a future post, I will walk through what you can do to get on the same page (in the same book) as your manager: how to have the conversation about your skills, capabilities, and performance, and how to translate that into a roadmap to get the growth you’re looking for.
🎉 That’s a wrap!
Because working relationship dysfunctions are so woefully common in the workplace — and so detrimental if not dealt with expeditiously — I’ve created a series dedicated to diagnosing and resolving dysfunctional workplace relationships. All posts in the series:
TCW #022: The 6 dysfunctions of manager-employee relationships
TCW #024: Clarifying unclear expectations with your manager, systematically
TCW #025: Helping your helicopter manager let go (of their tight grip on your career)
TCW #026: Dealing with unfair treatment at work (including harassment, discrimination, and retaliation)
TCW #027: Turning a dead-end job into a career catapulting growth roadmap
Subscribe to stay tuned!
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