Manager Is Not Your Best Friend

As people become managers, it’s quite common for their team members to want to commiserate with them. This is especially true for friendly, competent, reasonable-seeming managers – people want to commiserate with winners. This makes commiseration extra dangerous, as it often comes with a hint of flattery (I respect your opinion and trust your discretion).

But commiseration, especially with your direct reports, is organizational poison. It erodes the fabric of an organization and builds factions. It leads to feelings of superiority and creates a low-trust environment – even if all of the reasons for it are made up! Worst of all, it doesn’t give other teams an opportunity to improve. If I think that the HR team sucks, and I commiserate with my team about it, my team is going to treat HR poorly. They’ll never know why, will never fix the problem, and will just think that my team are jerks (and they’ll arguably be right). Commiseration is self-fulfilling because it’s a form of victimhood: The world is conspiring against us, the only truly virtuous team.

Commiseration comes naturally to most people, because it’s a totally common life situation. As your best friend, if you come to me saying that you were just dumped by your girlfriend, you will get unconditional sympathy beyond words. You’re the best, she didn’t deserve you, you can do so much better, everyone knows you’re the man, I have no idea why you ever spent time with her. There will be no questions, there will be no need for you to explain anything about the situation, even if all you did for the last 2 years was sit on your couch smoking weed and playing Warzone, Greg. Unless you did something totally crazy or illegal, my loyalty will be immediate and unconditional, because – let’s be real – none of it matters. You’re going your way, she’s going hers, and it’s over.

As a manager, your empathy needs to be highly conditional. Your job is to get to the truth of a matter in a respectful way, not make your team feel good. You are largely stuck with your coworkers, and you need to get stuff done together or everyone suffers. If you break up with your girlfriend you get unconditional sympathy. But if you break up with your girlfriend, and the 3 of us were trying to climb Mt. Everest together, I’m going to be a lot more measured in how I communicate and balance your relationship so that we can all survive the next few days.

Commiseration is generally a sensitive topic, so I’ve tried to boil down how to handle situations when a direct comes to you with grievances via some heuristics:

• You don’t really want to debate your team in every situation, but your job is to essentially be a scientist and get to the bottom of what’s going on. If someone wants to commiserate about some other team, your first job is to ask a bunch of questions about what’s going on. In my experience, 90% of the time the situation is a grey area, and probably 30% of the time the person who wants to commiserate is actually in the wrong, on balance.
• Your role as a manager is also to be a perspective-creator. Sure, that salesperson was overly optimistic on how impactful this custom feature was for a prospect. And sure, the deal wasn’t as large and didn’t close as quickly as they said it would. But sales incentives are a law of the universe, and sales directors need to manage around them just as much as product teams do, because not having sales incentives is even worse. And by the way, we’re not so great at estimating development timelines either. Everyone’s blood pressure should always be lower after they’ve spoken to you.
• Bad therapists just let you rant. Good therapists let you vent, but they ask clarifying questions, and they sometimes push back. The phrase “is that actually true?” or “Can you explain that more?” are your friends. Good therapists validate feelings but they don’t necessarily validate facts. “I know you feel like you’re being a good daughter” is not the same as “you are the best daughter.” You want to be a good therapist.
• Remove the phrase “I don’t know why they…” from your lexicon. No matter how you end this sentence, the subtext will be clear: “I don’t know why they’re so incompetent.” Instead, it’s often better to give the most optimistic view for why another team is behaving the way that they are. It might not be right, but it builds empathy which is the bedrock on which productive collaboration is built.
• If someone is trying to get you to commiserate with them, try to speak in terms of reiterating a decision framework. Rather than “marketing doesn’t know what they’re doing,” you want to say something like “our role is to build the product and have a strong POV for marketing, and their role is to make sure that our launch generates enough pipeline. If you don’t think that’s going to happen then let’s talk to them.” The goal is to focus on objective truths rather than disparaging opinions.
• When it comes to commiseration, people are highly attuned to nuanced communication – especially from their boss. “Well guys, we’ve got this” plus that little head nod and eyeroll is functionally the equivalent of saying “it’s all on us, the protagonists, because everyone else is a fucking idiot again.” Those words didn’t literally leave your mouth, but you effectively said it, and as a manager that’s 100% on you. As a manager your implicit communication is just as important as your explicit communication – this is not a courtroom, this is real life, and non-verbal actions can still have consequences.
• One of the most common people to commiserate about is your own boss, or the company’s CEO. This can get highly toxic fast, and is rarely actually productive – cases of teams changing their CEO’s behavior through commiseration are vanishingly rare. The right way to pivot this conversation (or at least, the only way I’ve ever seen this play out positively) is to discuss how you can most effectively work with your boss. This is significantly more productive, and even if you still think they’re being dumb, at least you’re tackling that problem constructively.

Of course sometimes people really are AAA grade idiots. When this happens, your response should typically address the issue, not the other team. For most situations, it’s best to say “let me follow up,” rather than “I agree that they’re dumb.” In particularly egregious cases, you can go with “I know this is a problem and I’m working on it” or “I hear you, I’m working on it, but I can’t give you every detail on how and don’t expect ongoing updates” – this avoids gaslighting them that everything is fine, but it also stops the vent session. When the door opens to commiseration with your team, you must slam it shut.

Either way, following up is the ideal next step because it commits you to respond but separates the emotion from the action. Accumulated strong emotions leave a strong impression on people, especially when they’re negative emotions like bitterness, so it’s best to suck the emotion out of the conversation as fast as possible. For evidence of this, light autists often make very effective managers.

Finally – we’re all human here, and sometimes you need to commiserate with someone before your head explodes. If you must commiserate, it’s almost always best if they’re a peer / near peer, and they’re not on your direct team (you don’t share a boss). This at least dodges the situation where your manager commiserates with you, and thereby implicitly blesses the most negative views that you have about other teams.