Managing a talented but stressful report
Shifting from over-care to care
It’s one thing to describe psychological development academically as I did in this previous post. It’s another to understand it well enough to produce diagnoses and prescriptions. Human relational dynamics are incredibly complex, yet certain patterns start to emerge across relationships. This is what makes compelling fictional narratives possible.
Each essay in this series is derived from a composite of people, situations and patterns I’ve noticed during my decade at Google and across my life. Each essay attempts to capture the through-line going through such patterns in a way that clarifies a diagnosis and offers a specific prescription. It’s impossible to offer diagnoses and prescriptions that capture the sum totality of the interaction, and so these essays don’t even try. Rather, they’re an attempt at providing a developmental pathway for the protagonist of each story to grow and develop. Eventually, I’ll start providing examples of how such developmental pathways could be accelerated with AI.
This essay is for you if you manage someone brilliant who exhausts you. His passion and drive allows him to produce magic no one else on the team can. However, you find him to be deeply illegible and therefore unpredictable. You want to help but you’re stuck. It’s especially for you if the dynamics below match your experience.
Your report’s reasons for why he does what he does are totally illegible. His career goals don’t make any sense and he claims he doesn’t care about promotion even though all comparable peers are getting rapidly promoted. Probing deeper, he often says he finds the promotion process tiresome yet claims he only wants to work on the most “interesting” problems. He has the ability to amplify the energy of his collaborators when he becomes deeply excited about something. Unfortunately, he’ll often unpredictably lose interest and move onto something else before properly landing his first thing. His actions become somewhat clear in retrospect if his efforts succeed, but you’re often left holding the bag if they don’t.
You’d like to understand and help him. But his pace of work constantly outstrips the bandwidth you have. You’re already so oversubscribed across so many projects and other reports that you often can’t deliver on your commitments to him. So he subsequently decreases the frequency with which he keeps you in the loop. But then you start falling even further behind in understanding what he’s doing and why.
This growing opacity increasingly triggers your anxiety. Sitting still while he’s “running amok” feels negligent and intolerable, so you ask him more questions and check in more often. You try to generally supervise him more closely, but each interaction is now layered with ever increasing anxiety. He perceives this sudden increase in anxious contact as a form of micromanagement which triggers and increases his own anxiety and defensiveness. For example, perhaps he starts increasingly over-explaining everything he’s doing but these voluminous and energetic explanations make him even more illegible to you. Moreover, if he doesn’t feel heard, he’ll start sharing these insights with many other senior people within the company which spikes your anxiety even further. The more you push, the more he digs in. The more he digs in, the more you feel compelled to push.
1:1 meetings feel increasingly unproductive as everything happening in the backdrop escalates. Unlike with your other reports, your meetings with him generally function to feed your respective anxieties. He routinely offers diagnoses and justifications for his work, for the state of your org, the overall company and ecosystem that you instinctively want to disagree with. They’re often insightful if you stew on them for a bit. However, his prescriptions often feel scary, wildly unrealistic or otherwise out of touch with reality.
It’d be far easier if he were obviously an asshole or a low performer. Then the conversation would be about firing him. Unfortunately, it’s obvious that his actions aren’t malicious and that he’s broadly respected within the company. You can’t fire him and you can’t ignore him, so you feel trapped.
You’d like to build a connection with him to grow a relationship that doesn’t constantly spike your anxiety. Unfortunately, over time, you’re torn between two choices that each feel scary. You could potentially back off and give him more space. But if you do, you’re scared that he’ll eventually get frustrated that his efforts aren’t getting him promoted, blame you and then leave. Eventually, you’ll get blamed by leadership for not retaining him. Or maybe you’d see yourself as a “bad manager” who abandoned your report when it was your job to insulate him from the broader “dysfunction” of the org if he doesn’t get promoted or recognized for the value he creates. On the other hand, you could attempt to get far more involved with his work. Perhaps you could ask far more questions about his work and decisions. But you don’t really have the bandwidth to do this “properly”. So he perceives all of this as “micromanagement” which makes him increasingly defensive. Going down this path long enough starts turning you into the controlling manager you never wanted to be.
Locking into either choice feels untenable. So you feel increasingly stressed and stuck the longer you put off either choice.
The first step is to recognize that you’re both locked in a feedback loop of drama and reactivity. This feedback loop is sustained by three interconnected dynamics.
First, your anxiety distorts your perception. Your emotional state has become attached to feeling in control of the situation by way of your report’s emotional state. Anxiety floods in when he shows distress, confusion or makes choices you don’t understand. This anxiety acts as a filter and colors his actions as being more threatening than they actually are. In this flooded state you respond to this distorted picture of reality rather than what’s actually happening.
Second, beneath the anxiety are needs you haven’t owned or articulated. For example, perhaps you have needs like certainty, feeling competent, not being blamed by leadership. You can’t articulate these needs to him cleanly. So you try to meet them indirectly through control rather than making clean requests that your report could negotiate on. Eventually, control becomes your proxy for safety.
Third, beneath the unmet needs are insecurities he triggers. For example, perhaps you fear failure, being exposed as inadequate or feel guilt about not doing enough. These un-integrated shadows drive the anxiety that distort your perception and actions.
This dynamic works both ways. Your report also likely has needs he struggles to articulate without triggering you. You’re both unable to create clean agreements to get your respective needs met when you’re stuck in this reactive feedback loop. Neither of you can hold space for your own emotions and the other’s simultaneously. But notice that he’s a trigger for your reactivity rather than its cause. You can’t control his participation in this feedback loop, but you can change yourself.
Your authority as a manager gives you more levers to shift the dynamics of this relationship. It’s worth mentioning that you also have a greater responsibility to do so since you’re the leader in this relationship. Your work is to shift from a state of being in over-care to a state of caring.
Over-care might look superficially helpful but it’s caring distorted by your anxiety, unmet needs and shadows. It’s actually an attempt at managing your discomfort via control. Caring involves helping people by holding space for them to own their developmental work, without your anxiety contaminating the interaction.
Shifting from over-care to care involves both internal and external work. External work involves changing your actions (e.g. behaviors, practices and habits). Internal work changes your being (e.g. noticing, accepting and healing shadows). External work without internal work is limiting because it’ll quickly get undermined by your unhealed internal resistances. Internal work without external work is limiting because you won’t build the external skills necessary to actually change your situation.
Internal resistances are deeply contextual so it’s difficult to offer concrete prescriptions via an essay format. However, I’ll create subsequent posts to attempt exactly that. Internal resistances are best explored with the help of a therapist or executive coach. However, recognizing some of these resistances may nevertheless help. They include a desire for certainty, impatience, impulsivity to act, a fear of failure and blame, fear of job loss, needing to appear in control of leadership and guilt/shame about not doing enough or being enough. Your internal resistances map to the shadows that drive this entire feedback loop.
External work in contrast is far easier to describe and specify. The steps below illustrate the actions you can take to gradually shift from over-care to care.
Set an intention before every 1:1 to shift from “I am responsible for protecting him and myself” to “I’d like to better understand and empower him, and hold healthy agreements with him”.
Practice cultivating your presence within the conversation. For example:
Pause before acting or responding to anything he says. Specifically, pause immediately when you feel the impulse to intervene, correct or control. Try waiting for one whole breath. This pause creates space for your over-care to get interrupted and reprogrammed.
Use invitations rather than insertions. “Let me help you with that.” or “I’ll take care of this for you.” inserts yourself into his situation to soothe your need for control, but “Would you like help with that?” invites him to grow his agency.
Use any instances of surprise at his behavior as fuel for developing mutual understanding rather than as an opportunity to correct or control.
“You’re going to do $BLAH?? I don’t think $BLAH is going to work. $BAD_THING will happen if you do $BLAH” demonstrates an immediate judgement despite you most likely lacking sufficient context.
“I’m curious about $BLAH. I think I can see how succeeding at $BLAH would lead to $BENEFIT. But have you considered $BAD_THING as a consequence?” demonstrates curiosity and creates an opportunity for shared understanding.
If an invitation to participate from your report isn’t present, ask yourself what specifically you’d change before inserting yourself into the situation. Use the Bad/Good/Better/Best framework to check whether things are genuinely below the “red line” to warrant inserting yourself without an invitation. Moreover, prepare communication for your report to explain why you believe the situation to be below the red line.
His every answer whenever you ask him “why?” is an opportunity to deepen your understanding of what’s actually animating him. Reflect back what you’ve understood until he feels seen and heard. If his “why?” is aligned with yours, vulnerably articulate what you need from him as he progresses in his work. Ask him to reflect back your needs so that you feel heard.
Co-create explicit and specific agreements between the two of you once sufficient mutual understanding has been reached. For example, suppose he says he doesn’t care about promotion in the next cycle. Ask him to write a paragraph about what his career goals are, what broader purpose animates those goals, and what trade-offs he sees in achieving that purpose via those goals. This document can act as a formal agreement, and can be used as a tool for generating clarity when either one of you deviates from the principles and behavior articulated in the agreement. Such agreements can become anchors when the relationship starts growing in reactivity.
Shifting from over-care to care isn’t an outcome but rather an ongoing practice cultivated by the sort of habits articulated above. Success won’t be overnight but you should gradually feel less anxious in your 1:1s and more capable of holding space. Over time, you should see deeper alignment with your report while he grows increasingly empowered.
The next essay will explore this dynamic from the report’s perspective. It’ll explore what he can do to improve his participation in it.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Brian Whetten for teaching me everything I’ve articulated in this essay.