Care fiercely.

When we work with people, there's a tendency to think that emotional detachment is helpful.

There are days I am tempted to buy into this thinking. Days I wish I cared less. Especially days when I have to do difficult things, help my clients evaluate difficult decisions, when I realise I have to step away from certain things or when I have to review research and stories that are deeply upsetting to take in and process.

Yet, at the end of these periods, I keep coming back to the realisation that caring deeply is not only inevitable for me, but it actually makes me better at what I do.

I'm only human - and so are you

For most (not all, thankfully!) part of my professional life, I've been getting the advice to care less, to not take it so personally, to be less of an idealist. When I was a manager, I had to do all the hard stuff managers have to do from giving negative feedback to dismissing members of my team. It sucked. It sucked really really bad, and it never started sucking less.

I thought something was wrong with me. I wondered how I might become this aspirational perfect manager who is able to calmly and rationally do all these really hard things. Or at the very least bottle things up until I'm in an appropriate setting where I can sigh one sad sigh and move on with my life to the next hard thing.

I was convinced that caring enough to be emotionally affected by these things made me a bad manager.

We all deal with it differently

I know for a fact I'm not alone with this feeling. I've talked about it with other managers. More interestingly, I've witnessed various strategies of dealing with these feelings amongs managers I've known, worked with and taught.

For instance, we've got our guilty manager. (I'm making these names up as I go, bear with me.) Our guilty manager will make it all about themselves. If they're your manager and you're the one getting some bad news, they'll make sure that you know that they suffer just like you. Maybe even more.

Your guilty manager might even tell you that whatever is happening is in your best interest.

The harassment you reported is fizzling out instead of something being done about your harasser at work?
Imagine, they might say, the horrible emotional and psychological toll it would take on your to follow through with this complaint. Do you really want that? Your colleagues or other managers might lose respect for you.

You're being dismissed?
This is just your opportunity to find something so much better for you, insists your guilty manager. This is a blessing in disguise. Maybe it's just straight up a blessing, not even disguised! Maybe you should be happy about being fired to ease their own feelings of guilt, please. This is the best thing that could've ever happened to you.

If you think I'm exaggerating, congratulations, I love how lucky you are to have never experienced this. You've also clearly not seen that one guy crying in a LinkedIn video about having to lay off a bunch of employees instead of maybe giving himself and other executives a lower salary even temporarily.

Or take the extra super duper hyper rational manager. They might've been having fun with you a month ago at the company dinner, but today, as they're delivering some upsetting news, they're stone-faced, neary an emotion to be seen. You're feeling confused. Who is the real person, this one or the one at the company dinner a month ago? What will their tone be when they're delivering the news of your departure to your previous team mates?

If you ask them for advice as a novice manager, the extra super duper hyper rational manager will tell you that you're not doing yourself any favours by being emotionally attached to the people you're working with. That if you're a manager, you'll have to do hard things and therefore being emotionally attached to the people who report to you is going to make your job harder. It will also make you a worse manager.

But I'm here to tell you, I honestly think the extra super duper hyper rational manager is full of shit. Be careful not to be the guilty manager either, though.

And let's not even get into the avoidant managers, simply avoiding giving the bad news for as long as they can, and when they can't anymore, they do it by email only at "best" and outsourcing it to HR or other managers at worst.

Or the asshole managers - think House (what a blast from the past, that one) or Sherlock (the horrible BBC version). These people think that being a decent human being and doing high quality work are incompatible with one another. Tough news, though, if you work with people, being a decent human is part of your job.

Listen, it sucks

Does it suck to give people bad news?

Yeah. Yeah, it does.

Does it suck more for you (giving the bad news) or for them (receiving it)?

If you said them, congrats, you're right.

If you chose you, I empathise, but remember that you're in a position of power here, even if you yourself are acting at your own managers' behest. You inherently have more information, more control and more robust support than the person you're giving the bad news to.

If you're dismissing someone, you're not the one losing your employment and income here.

If you're giving negative feedback in a traditional organisational structure, you're the one with the formal mandate to make the demands for specific changes and improvements.

However, if you embrace your caring and direct it into respect for the other person's dignity, you can, in fact, make the whole thing suck marginally less for everyone involved. Respecting the dignity of the other party might allow for the introducing of a level of autonomy for the other party.

If you're giving negative feedback while deeply respecting the other person's dignity, you might automatically be more open to feedback on that feedback. Weak performance? The other person may not be set up for success. They might be lacking resources, support, information, competent direction... And suddenly, the conversation you're having is a very different one about how to set them up for success.

If you're finding yourself in the situation of having to tell someone that they're losing their job, doing so from a deep respect for their dignity might allow you to choose your next steps in line with their wishes and preferences. It might make their handover weeks not a complete and total nightmare.

So, today I'm here to remind you that it's not only okay to care, but caring fiercely will, in fact, make you a better manager.