You don’t have to be an empathetic manager to succeed.
You don’t have to check in on how people are feeling about their careers. Seriously. You can just skip that.
You don’t have to be considerate towards people’s time when you ask them for things.
You don’t have to work to provide psychological safety for your team. You can just let them sink or swim.
You don’t have to be organized and stay on track with pacing the work and delegating it appropriately. That’s what PMs are for, right? If it gets forgotten, it’s on them!
You don't have to help people get a promotion or a pay raise. You can just say “Yeah, I’m totally working on it! ” and then not bother to do any paperwork.
You don’t have to do ANY of that to make money, get a Cannes Lion, or an office all your own.
Actually, I’ve met a few managers who would vehemently argue that being “too empathetic” to your employees actually gets in the way of running a team well.
Those same folks might call trusting your employees to do what you hired them to do a recipe for disaster or for bad quality assets.
Who’d say that an approach rooted in kindness and trust is “lax” or “lazy.”
Here’s the thing…if you’re here…I’m guessing you are (or have been or will be) one of the empathetic ones.
So I want to tell you: Your approach isn’t lax. It’s just the opposite.
It takes a 10X level of effort to be a manager who gives a shit about their employee’s careers above and beyond their current employment agreement.
It takes a HUGE amount of discipline to creatively direct a project without letting your human desire to control everything make you pixel-f*ck everything to death (and take all the joy out of it for everyone else).
And, it's often thankless because people perceive not yelling and publicly humiliating anyone who's not "up to snuff" as "not doing anything."
But the results…the results are quite frankly...AMAZING.
Piles of every kind of award in every kind and color as the people you hired to be smart creatives do their smart creative things — having acquired the confidence to trust their own decisions by not constantly being criticized, rejected and/or told minutely what to do every five fucking seconds.
Tens of thousands in cost savings in recruiting — as people do not tend to get burnt out and do not constantly turn over.
An inclusive and nurturing team culture where people with differing perspectives get opportunities to put their ideas in front of decision-makers.
Multiple promotions once people recognize that they have no idea how you are doing this crazy magic and they don’t want to get along without you.
A few years later, getting to see some of those same people you nurtured going out and taking the loving-kindness-leadership you taught them to other places…evolving it and spreading it even more.
You may not be valued for speaking candidly about this type of approach to other creative leadership. You might have to be sneakily empathetic!
And some employees who were expecting the yelling and the public humiliation kind of leadership? They may HATE how you do it.
When a project takes off and gets a ton of critical success, they might even accuse you of CHEATING to get that result.
It’s WEIRD how attached people are to the idea that being an utter dick to people makes creative work better.
But it’s so, so worth it to do it the way you do.
Don’t give up…your [future or current] team needs you more than they say they do. You are doing a great job.
XOXO,
Cathy