this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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Every year, we do an employee survey to see how management is doing; like a report card for management. In the last 3 years, mine has come back with the highest company scores for employee engagement, job satisfaction, and project completion rate. I was asked to give a presentation to the other officers and managers about things I do to get those scores.
The presentation was basically one slide that I expanded to 10. It came down to creating the expectation, for the folks who report to me, that a work week is 37.5 hours (our full-time week) and no more. I make it clear that if my team is working overtime, I've failed. If that happens, together we look at their project commitments and reduce the workload, or get training, or whatever is needed.
Working folks to the point of burnout is NEVER a valid solution. Respecting personal time pays dividends to everyone. It's amazing how treating people like adults makes them happier and more productive. It's such a low bar and yet seems so foreign to people.
After my presentation, multiple execs argued thar I'd get more done if I pushed my team harder. Our company President pulled up all of our project completion rates, and asked them to explain the discrepancy. The three who complained the most about my approach were in the bottom five.
Data continually shows people are happy when they have a solid, predictable, work life balance. Happy people are more productive and are willing to do more in the long run. And they stick around, so you don't have to keep looking for new employees. Everyone wins. Yet, there is such a resistance to it by certain people, and I don't understand why.
Tldr: Expecting your people to give up their personal life for work, it's a clear sign that you are a terrible leader.
People are emotional driven. It might be something like "I worked 80 hour weeks. If I accept that that wasn't the right move, then I have to admit I fucked up. I'm a good smart person. I don't fuck up. Thus, this idea is wrong and I reject it"
sounds like how my parents rationalize my childhood
It’s how religious and cult members stay in and why it’s so hard to deprogram them.
Drama is much more compelling than good leadership. Martin Gutmann: good leadership is boring
shit floats
Consult your doctor
he said to cut all ceos out of my diet
Hmm... maybe it we make them into hot dogs first they'll be more digestible.
It's more cognitive dissonance than emotional drivers, with what you've described.
Is cognitive dissonance not a subcategory of emotions? If not I guess you're right
No, it's where your reality externally doesn't match your internal idea of it so you ignore it away or rationalize it away, etc.
Bingo!
This was my attitude too. If anyone has to work late or weekends, it was a failure in resource allocation, which is a management function.
The only exception was if people had to get on late night calls with people in other timezones, in which case they were expected to take the equivalent time off at their own convenience.
Another easy win is bullshit agile daily standups. I made them twice a week, and no longer than 15 minutes and only to cover potential blockers, not status reports. That alone made everyone happier. In one case, the team finished a project that had been languishing for three years in three months and shipped it out.
It's really about respecting people's time.
My last boss totally fucked up my daily stand-ups. I suggested them because, when I started, I found most work wasn't consistently tracked or even discussed. My boss's management style was panicking about everything and panic working while raging that no one else was also panicking about everything (spoiler: I also learned department turnover was high, can't imagine why), so I was trying to help implement any organization whatsoever. She quickly turned my 10 minute stand-ups into 1-1.5 hour slogs where each team member had to give an update on each of their projects, despite having earlier logged it all into the project tracker I created.
By far the worst micromanager and least competent person I ever worked for.
I dont understand how these managers get hired and stay on so long behaving that way
My promotion was fucked by an internal client like this, who’s a manager that keeps failing upwards and sideways. His team members hate him, his VP doesn’t trust him and keeps putting additional managers on his project.
My team did everything - we saved his project from the edge of the cliff, reached milestones, onboarded contractors, and made the notoriously grumpy VP satisfied.
Yet that’s not enough, as I’m supposed to make this manchild happy.
Some people just love drama and panic, and others are too soft to push back on them, as they are uncomfortable with any type of conflict.
True, although for some the conflict simply isn't worth it.
My coworkers and I were having issues getting any information from another team to do our job. Since we had a set deadline to finish the work, I set up a Monday/Wednesday meeting schedule to extract the information we needed from that team. My boss and the other team's boss turned it into a two hour update-fest with us and the other team updating our respective bosses, with both teams in the meeting. So fucking pointless, and so far away from what that meeting was supposed to be, it is truly astonishing we were able to get anything done.
Oh and the other team stopped providing the information we needed to finish when our bosses converted our meeting to update-fest.
People requesting you to say orally the same thing you typed in the task tracker that they should see if they paid attention to the tasks that are assigned to them and also notifies them by email really annoys me.
Semi-agreed on daily standups -- the regular accountability drives productivity for a lot of people, but I also agree that daily is excessive. We've settled on 3 days/week and it works pretty well for both camps - 2 is probably fine, but 1 I would argue is missing the point.
Def agreed on 15 minutes, as you say - any longer and you lose both people and the purpose of the check-in.
I worked Bay Area tech as a dev for several years; the thing they are really really good at is manipulating young people (mostly men, really) into thinking that if they aren’t living work then they are bad people. All of your free time should be spend thinking about work, building things for work, “leveling up” your skills to be better at work. Family and friends are not important, only work. The gaslighting and emotional manipulation is cult-like.
I once had the founder of the startup I was working for tell me that he had no idea I cared about the company after I gave a presentation on how we could pivot our product to be more effective. He then asked how he could get more of my time for the company. I was working 60-80 hour weeks already.
I’m an EM now and those experiences shaped how I run my team: work is work, not your life. You do your work so that you can afford to do the things you actually care about, and that is how it should be.
You're an electromagnet?
Also yes.
This is why I didn't stay in management. I had the same attitude as you. I didn't mind working late myself and if someone really wanted to because they had an interesting problem I'd usually let them cut out early Friday or come in late the next day. I got too much shit from other management and C levels about how my team never seemed to be around. I'd ask what was not getting done or what they were expecting that they didn't get. The answer was always just that they didn't see the team in the office when other teams were still there. They could have needed something!
I got tired of that shit. One of the reasons that I went into business for myself as a one man company. Now I don't have to justify anything but my own existence to anyone except who I directly report to. And the guy I directly report to likes the big ass penalty clause in my contract for terminating it early or without notice because accounting can't get rid of me without taking a hit or giving me time to finish up my projects. I'm judged solely on what I deliver. And I almost always come in ahead of time and with better results than most other teams because I'm not worked like a rented mule.
Yup. We're humans and when we get tired we make mistakes. I could work a 12 hour day, but in the twelfth hour I'll probably make a mistake that'll take more than 6 hours or to fix someday in the future. If I work 8 hours you get 8 hours of productivity. If I work 12 hours you'll end up getting 6 hours or less of productivity.
The whole thing about making people work long hours is just about bad managers that enjoy exerting power over people. It's not about productivity.
Doctors/nurses/cops/emts/firefighters/pipefitters/welders/fucktard-managers everywhere are gasping in shock and horror.
A lot of business types have a very simple view on labor. Time is money, so the more time you get somebody to work the more you earn. Of course it doesn't work like that in reality, but this mentality is spread far and wide.
I'm leaving my job at the end of the month for the same reason
The suffering is the point
What did the execs have to say after being asked to explain the discrepancy?