An Open Letter to a Manager - From an invisible employee
The trials & tribulations of the manager-team relationship in a modern workplace as seen from an employee's lens.
Welcome to Future of Work, Future of You. I bring insightful content on the accelerating trends for the future workplace. Teams are struggling to make themselves heard in today’s workplace. Most employees within organizations feel invisible though they have much to express & desire from their work & employer. Today’s issue aims to make these voices heard through a satirical yet an honest letter to managers who should pause & listen to the daily struggles of their team member. Happy reading & don’t forget to subscribe to keep receiving such content in future!
Dear manager,
It has been a while since we spoke.
Of course our 1:1s get canceled so often that we have now begun meeting once a quarter. Trust me, I am not livid about the situation. Work happens & neither one of us gets time.
Still, it will be good to see you & talk to you outside of reviews/releases/launches/urgent/super urgent meetings. Just a meeting where neither one of us is holding a fire extinguisher to spray.
And even though you rarely ask this, I must.
How have you been?
I hear you have been getting a lot of praise for the fantastic work that our team has been doing. It will be nice to know that you got praise even if we don’t share any of it. Of course, you are the manager so you get to decide who gets credit for what.
My wife tells me that I will end up spending ~20 years worth of my time between 20-60 years of age with my managers. That’s an awful lot of time to be spending with someone.
Do you agree?
If yes, should we get to know each other a lot better?
Now please don’t say you know me well enough. Performance reviews & feedback surveys don’t count as “knowing” a person. They are like post-mortem documents when the patient has already died. I mean “knowing” more like preventive health checkups where you get to know what’s going on before something goes wrong.
Are you aware of my ambition & aspirations? Do you know what I truly care for?
Hang on. I think I see that confused look on your face.
Let me take a step back. Do you think you “should” know these things about me?
I see you nodding which is great.
I have also heard you say many times to me - “You need to grow in your career”. But rarely have you broken it down into something actionable. For a change, can we define how I can “grow” without you using below words in that conversation?
Communication
Collaboration
Initiative
Strategy/Strategic
Big picture
Vision
I think it will be a great exercise in vocabulary, clarity & actionable for both of us.
But honestly, I feel workplaces are broken & it goes beyond what you can or can’t do for me.
It takes 24 hours to ship a code & few days to generate revenue but 6 months to evaluate my performance. Business performance is tracked & rewarded daily but individuals are kept on hold for months for the same reward
Employees don't trust their managers because workplaces are marketed as a food chain that’s gets narrower as you move up
No one cares if you have a sick kid at home or a rough day with wife because results & outcomes trump perspectives & compassion
Maybe you can explain why since you are closer to the top.
Also, what is the deal with these reverse-psychology-driven PTO policies ?
We just moved from a finite PTO to an infinite PTO policy. So, you make PTOs so abundant that employees never feel the need to use it? Or still worse, send them on a guilt trip every time they try to utilize the INFINITE PTO quota & they end up not taking a single day off thinking there will come a day when they will be ready to take off for an infinite period.
Please give me back my 10 days PTO & I will never ever complain about less vacation days. I promise. This whole thing was a big mistake on part of employees.
You know manager is such an abused word in the corporate parlance today that we have forgotten the depth of what it means.
Etymologically, it means to handle or train a horse! More recently, it has come to mean directing or controlling. History & origins have clearly not been kind to how managers are perceived but I still see hope in managers redeeming themselves before it's too late.
I see a manager's role in two parts.
First is in the context of your own self. As a manager, you should be able to manage
Your priorities
Your goals / objectives
Your passion & emotions
Your tasks & activities
Apologies for being rude but I see most managers failing in this first phase of manager. They rarely know how to manage themselves.
Maybe you are different? I really hope you are.
Second is in the context of managing others. You should be able to manage:
My dreams & aspirations
My goals / objectives
My passion & emotions
My tasks & activities
I know for sure that you don't do the second part well.
If you are still thinking, maybe you do. Just reiterating.
You don’t!
Every manager today had a great manager yesterday on whose shoulders they stood tall & grew their career. The question is can you become a great manager today for tomorrow's manager?
I would love for you to become one.
P.S: I really hope I don’t get a request for a vindictive 1:1 meeting in response to the above letter. I hope that neither do I get a lot of sudden & unusually poor feedback on my past work output nor do I get called out in large meeting forums on my shortcomings.
I am sure you are better than this. I really do.
For your consideration, An invisible team member
If you have a co-worker, founder, product manager or even an entrepreneurial dreamer who needs to see this, please share. You may be helping them more than you realize.
Reach me at Tejaswi Gautam and let me know what you think about this issue. Are you ready for the future of work? See you next week!
Great leaders deliver great experiences. They help people feel good through developing a positive outlook. This includes showing gratitude & forgiveness, ensuring people enjoy themselves and have fun, developing confidence and optimism.
That leads to my belief that an ethical business is one that puts themselves in a place to align the needs of their shareholders, customers and users. The simplest way to do this is to merge customers and users, so that the service offered is to the paying customer, or, in other words, the customer who uses the core offering pays for the offering. By doing this, the company makes money by providing value to the customer, who pays for it. The better the product, the more money made from customers, and in turn, the more money to the shareholders. Hence, there is no conflict of interest here. I hope to find something better here in the future .