Bad managers aren't just bad for your career, but your immune system too

A study by WIG has proven what I always knew to be true. For most people, their manager has a bigger impact on their mental health than their therapist and doctor; and it is equal to the impact of their partner.

Let that sink in.

We may wax eloquent that work is only one part of life - but it’s perhaps the part we spend the most time. To indulge your left brain, we spend 90,000 hours at work - that is 1/3rd of our life. No brownie points for the revelation that how we feel at work dominates how we feel about our life. 

Bad managers are aplenty. And they are not just bad for your career growth, they are bad for your heart, and your immune system, and among other things, expose you to the risk of a common cold. We’ve all heard stories of managers who steal credit, make you feel small, and chip away at your self-esteem. You perhaps know what it feels like to drudge through the week, feeling anxious and sick to your stomach, only to feel like a mountain has been moved from your chest when the weekend arrives. We’ve heard stories of how leaders get away with saying whatever comes to their mind; often passing remarks on people rather than the work; under the pretence of ‘radical candour.’ 

To love your work, and feel energised by it is a privilege. And your manager can make the biggest difference. 

The pandemic has perhaps played its biggest role in transforming the modern workplace and putting the focus on its people. There’s a new generation of young leaders with a more expansive vocabulary about mental health, and a deeper commitment to make work a safe space for every kind of person to thrive. Who knows that they don’t want their teams to go through what they did; that success doesn’t come at the cost of working yourself to emotional exhaustion. That’s the kind of leader I aspire to be every single day.

But I also see this part of the discourse stretch itself to the other extreme and manifest into another kind of - on the surface kind - but at the heart of it, equally bad manager. Who doesn't say it straight, under the garb of ‘protecting their mentees,’ but at the core, it comes from a sense of protecting their self-image as a leader? Whose style of feedback hinges on repeated insincere manipulation, where you beat around the bush, molly coddle your peers/team, instead of saying the hard truths and unspokens to help everyone rise above that? 

There’s a lot to blame for that. In a culture of rampant screenshotting, the wrong screenshot without context may make a well-meaning leader seem like the most abused T-word (toxic). But being a good leader doesn’t mean being goody all the time. 

From personal experience, I’m grateful for all the times I’ve had to hear hard feedback about my work. I know that my mentor put me before his self-image as a leader to help me raise my game. I’m grateful for all the times I got the opportunity to fail - my bio proudly reads ‘award-winning & award-losing Creative.’ But most of all - for the kind of life experience I can gather, being in different rooms where I know the stakes and pressure are fucking high, and the consequences are real.

It’s helped me inculcate life skills that have shaped me as a person, and how I respond to unpredictable, and high-stress events outside work too.  There isn't a better place than where you spend a minimum of eight hours every day to develop resilience and tenacity; to learn how to cope with high stress and pressure - which is also a part of life. Good managers know this is part of their J.D. too - that they have to put the ones they love through the heat and make them traverse across rough terrains, with the knowledge that they are not completely alone.

If you’re a leader who’s reading this, maybe we all need to take note of the impact we have in the lives of the people we work with - consider this again; it’s equal to that of their partner. This should humble us, and make us rethink how we engage. But that doesn’t mean being insincere - we need to create the conditions for high trust and be able to share criticism and praise equally unabashedly; to know that our colleagues are here to prove us right, not wrong.

At Talented, our handbook differentiates good feedback from bad feedback, and that can be a great resource to start thinking about this subject. Because the answer to the toxic manager cannot be mollycoddling a generation of amazing talent with fake positives.

This article is penned by Binaifer Dulani, Founding Partner & Creative, Talented