r/managers

EDIT: Thank you. We can stop here for now. It’s not possible for me to respond to every answer individually. I didn’t ask for people’s feelings or opinions about it. I asked for concrete, action-oriented feedback from managers and leaders. It seems everyone except managers has an opinion. Unless you’re in a leadership role, you don’t really have an idea of what the current market is like or the decisions managers have to make.

I am managing a team of 10 people, and recently our company has been going through a major restructuring and leadership changes across several functions. They also made significant changes to my team. I had four high performers, one of whom was the best of the best. Three of these high performers were transferred to other teams and promoted. They also changed my reporting line to another department.
In my old team, they replaced me by hiring a new director below my previous level, reporting to the new senior director who effectively replaced me. They placed my best high performer under this new leader. Although his job level did not change, he is now reporting one layer lower in the organization.
He was assigned a new project while also being expected to train a new manager. At the same time, other leaders were changing, and several of his peers were being rewarded. He was reassured that these changes would lead to advancement once the restructuring was settled.
However, he suddenly resigned and is not talking to anyone, which is completely out of character for him. He has cut off communication with all of leadership, even those who were not involved in the restructuring decisions.
Do you think we have lost him for good? Several ex managers of him reached out to him but he doesn’t talk to anyone and doesn’t want negotiation.
The reason he was kept in place because he was critical for business continuity and leadership needed some time before moving him as well.

I’m looking for advice on a difficult situation and how to protect myself as a manager.

I was recently promoted into a manager role, this individual was moved out of said management role into a technical lead role due to performance concerns, as the organisation needed to act quickly. No formal PIP was put in place at that time.

I now manage this person directly, and they are still not performing.

Since taking over, I’ve set clear expectations, documented missed deliverables, and provided ongoing feedback. I’ve also tried to support them directly through templates, clarification, and working through tasks with them, but I’m still regularly having to correct or complete work myself.

There are also concerns around communication and adherence to direction, including bypassing me to engage senior management and at least one instance of ignoring a direct instruction that resulted in a compliance issue.

HR and my manager are now aligned that a formal PIP should go ahead.

I’m fine with documenting performance and setting clear expectations, but I’m struggling with the expectation that I also need to fix the underlying capability gap.

This person was hired for their technical skill set, so the expectation is that they should already be able to do the core parts of the role. I don’t have that level of technical expertise in this specific area, so I can’t realistically train them up to that standard while also completing the other aspects of my job.

Has anyone dealt with something similar?
How do you push back on being made the “owner” of a PIP when you don’t believe you’re in a position to actually remediate the underlying issue?

I'm facing this challenge right now, to manage a department with high technical focus but I'm from a business background.

I know the company, it's products, strategy and all of that with the palm of my hand, but i can barely undertsand the technical employees.

I do have a tech lead partner that helps with that, the thing is I'm noticing they respect him much more than me. They do not really validate me as a leader.

Have you guys faced this challenge? How to earn trust, respect and authority?

If you aren't familiar with the Veronica skits, I highly recommend a quick search on YouTube. Essentially these are skits parodying the sometimes ironic and often awful situations we deal with in various fields (mostly corporate but also customer service, etc).

At any rate, I'm a seasoned corporate professional (double digit years of experience, degrees in my field, etc). I'm in my late 40s and currently hold an IC role that the next step up would be leadership. I currently work remotely and the closest physical office to my home is 700 miles away.

My boss and her boss both told me this time last year that I could not move up any further at the company because I'm fully remote. My performance reviews are always good and I have good rapport with the team but leadership way above me has decided that they don't want remote leaders at our company anymore. Fair enough. I love what I do and the pay/benefits are great, so no complaints from me.

Fast forward to now. My boss is going out on a lengthy medical leave and I've been told (not asked) to lead the team while the boss is out. Now, I've always had (somewhat to my detriment) a very binary brain - things either are or they aren't. I struggle with ambiguity. In my mind, if I can't lead ALL the time, I can't lead ANY of the time. However, I don't want to be insubordinate. If I was asked, I would have said no. But I wasn't asked.

I did however, push back somewhat. I asked if taking on this temporary role would make me eligible for leadership roles in the future, despite my remote status ... and was told no.

So, taking all this in: I am not eligible for leadership roles due to remote status, but I will need to take on a leadership role while my boss is out. Taking on this role will not help me in any material way. I'm not getting a bump in pay or anything like that. Our team is incredibly self-sufficient and there's not much I could do to help them in any meaningful way either.

Having said all that, how do I make the most of this situation? Note: I've led teams for many years before, so this won't even be an opportunity to learn about leadership or "get my feet wet".

I am working at an organization where my manager is a literal 'god.' He fires people for little to no reason, or for super silly reasons like "ego hurt."

And sadly, we are not blue-collar workers — instead, we're highly paid tech workers.

Hey all - my annual review is coming up and I'm in a bit of a weird position, and I thought managers would have great insight on how to approach.

Here is the general layout -

I have a lot of freedom at current role--fully remote, not micromanaged, mostly left alone so long as my work is done, good time off and benefits, and manager/coworkers are cool, workload is manageable. 

On the other hand, I believe I am underpaid by a good 15% or so compared to the market. And I think if I looked, I could eventually find something that would be higher. But I am reluctant to lose the freedom and end up maybe in-office or hybrid, or micromanaged, etc. 

Also, full disclosure, I've been at this company for a long time and have a weird history. I was part of a huge layoff a few years back (30% of staff) but I was the only person they offered a part time 1099 contract to stay half on board. Eventually that converted back to full time in a different, lower paid, role, where I am now. But we are busy and there's a solid amount of work on my plate and I have generally good feedback. But given the prior layoff, I don't feel like I'm top tier value to the company. They've obviously already slashed me once. 

So my question is, would asking for 15% raise be too high, or some kind of red flag? Do I put myself at risk of coming in too high and being flagged for eventual cutting? My assumption is if I ask for 15% I might not get it, but might get 10%. Also, if I ask and they flat out say no and offer a much lower raise, then I kinda just feel unvalued and disrespected. 

Part of the problem is I'm ambivalent about whether to stay in the cushy setup, or risk higher stress elsewhere for better pay, presuming I can even land something in this terrible market. 

Not sure how best to handle this and would appreciate advice. I've been at one company so long that my interview/negotiation/etc skills have lost their edge.  

FWIW - current pay is $100k - so the ask I'm considering would be up to $115k, hoping to at least land at $110k. And I'm in NYC, so COL is very high.

Needing some advice on an overwhelming day. I became a program manager for this department almost 6 months ago, because of the changes I made, we are now growing exponentially. The team is doubling, we've doubled the work load, it's a good problem to have.

But I am just starting to feel very overwhelmed. My boss is great and helps out when she can and always checks in, but I don't know what to ask for help on when I feel overwhelmed like this. I'm young and it's a big weight on my shoulder to know that I'm carrying the company.

My colleagues collect money for floods, babies and weddings while asking about our weekends with a smile. They fund your life event and then mock you behind your back, twisting your words to management without any exception.
Maybe I'm reading too much into harmless social rituals that are just part of office culture. What should I actually do to protect myself without becoming paranoid and is this toxic duality just a normal part of corporate life that I need to accept?

I am in a supervisory role and will be resigning this week. Industry standard is to provide at least a 30 day notice for this specific role, and that’s what I plan to do in this case as well.

I saw on our company calendar that we have an applicant coming in for an interview for an entry-level role (directly under my level in the org chart) this week. I used to be this applicant’s direct supervisor at a different company (our industry is small lol), and she is fantastic! I have no doubt she will be hired on the spot, and given our positive history I think she would want to work here after seeing me when she comes in.

Should I reach out and let her know that I am quitting and why? I would feel awful if she came on board assuming we get to work together again just for me to leave right after she was to get started. I’m also leaving due to a significantly negative work environment and would feel awful if she’s stuck in similar circumstances because she takes a job assuming it’s good because I’m there right now.

I hope this is OK to ask this here but I thought it could help to have a managed perspective!

My manager started covering my team after about a year of managerial experience, and were are at a higher level than his previous team. The first few months were a bit awkward because our previous manager was very experienced and supposed to come back, so it was a bit of a change, but he became better and better and after a year, we started to really work well with him and like him as a manager.

He always had the same flaws, but it wasn’t that obvious before because he was really making a lot of efforts to adapt to us and was quite humble. However, around the one year mark, several people in the managerial team changed, including his own boss and several of his peers, which made him the most experienced manager in the space. We also did a few internal surveys that were pretty positive for him.

Since then, we really feel he has become overconfident and his flaws are becoming more obvious, with some of the things he was doing really well becoming less helpful for us. Several times, I praised a different person or manager, and he thought I was talking about him, and I was reiterating my trust in him. He also keeps trash talking his own boss in front of us (he loved the previous one), telling us how incompetent he is, and interprets every thing we say about that as us agreeing. Once, I met with his boss to thank him for something he did for my project and my manager came to me later to ask me why on Earth I needed to thank the guy, that it was a waste of time, etc.

His main flaws are related to his communication. He often goes on a long monologue that gets everyone lost and is quite often off-topic when he introduces a new piece of information or when someone asks a question he doesn’t clearly know the answer to or fear we won’t like the answer to. So a lot of people in the team are not even sure they understood some updates or information because of that.

Most of this comes from the fact he doesn’t listen until the end when someone speaks. You can often see he is ready to answer before you finish your question, and his answers often show he assumed he knew what you wanted without listening to the full question, and misunderstood or misinterpreted the question. He often tells me “I know exactly what you are referring to” and proceed to talk about something I am not at all referring to. Quite a few times, we asked him for something for a project , he told us “I am on it, no problem” and days later, he came back with a “fix” for something completely different that showed he didn’t understand at all what we were talking about, but we didn’t realise it because he didn’t ask follow up questions and looked very confident.

We think it would help everyone if he could work on it, including him and restore some of the good working relationship we had, but usually, in this kind of situation, we would mention it to his boss in a skip a level meeting and they could work on it together. However, it’s obvious he would not listen to his boss since he despises him, and would not take it seriously coming from him, especially after his good internal survey scores, which were better than his boss.

We are not sure at all how we can raise these issues or do anything to improve them, and we really feel our working relationship with him is deteriorating over time, and he has no clue.

How would you like to receive this kind of feedback as a manage?

I’m in need of career advice. Context: I worked in my previous company until January 2026. The company went bankrupt, and I was fired.

I joined a new company(2.5 months). Thework is super good. I love what I’m doing, but my manager is a bit different. I’m not sure if it’s good or bad.

Example: When I joined, my manager used to yell for the initial 1-2 weeks. Then she said something like “no progress in you” when I didn’t prioritise stuff according to my manager’s expectations. But the same day in the evening, I got a message saying that I have a lot of potential, etc.

I think currently it’s at a point where if I see my manager’s message, I would have some kind of panic. I applied for vacation 2 months in advance for August end, but initially, my manager said it was fine. Then my manager approved the vacation of my colleague. Now I was asked to adjust mine, which seems unfair. My colleague is out for 4 weeks, and mine is for 1.5 weeks. Essentially, I’m being told I need to cover for him, which is fair. But when I applied, I had no visibility since his vacations weren’t added yet into the system.

I’m on a limited contract, so I’m not even sure if it would lead to a full-time contract.

I got another offer(CSC generation - I can’t find any good corporate employees who moved to this company, so I’m not sure). 27% more pay, but they have this clause in their bonus which, according to Google, says it tracks activity on your laptop.

Clause they have- Did the Participant meet or exceed the set productivity target based on ActivTrak metrics
(or metrics tracked in a similar system should ActivTrak be replaced) considering their role and function?

I just have some gut feeling that my current job either I would not get a permanent contract or I wouldn’t get support to grow.

Good things about the role and company: the company is super amazing, and the work I do, I’m learning new things. Essentially, my manager has no guidance. Initially, I struggled for 1.5 months, but I’m coming up with my own OKRs and making decisions and then letting my manager know we should do this. What my manager committed to OKRs, I was able to come up with a plan on how to get to that margin in 2-3 months instead of the entire H2.

So my question:
Should I join another company?
Should I stay here and keep looking for new jobs?

Former advertiser, now in house for a brand. Ive been with the company for 4 years and have gone from a very understaffed team of just me, to a team of 3 in the past year. Two of them are 2 months in. We have new C Suite and have high demands, which Im happy about as it’s been really pushing me to work harder and smarter.

I am the senior lead on my team, and am taking my first few days of PTO this year and I hate the feeling of being disconnected. I understand this is bad and I’m micromanaging. I think a lot of this comes from me being so passionate about the work and my team being so new.

I made a PTO Document for my team to handle while I’m away from work and I just have this feeling of dread/anxiety that things are going to be done wrong. I’m 4 days into vacation and I am struggling.

At this point I’d rather work to calm my nerves.

What can I do to better about this so I can fully log off and be a better manager?

I have gone through so much as a leader to this team in the past year and a half. And finally things had turned around and I got the dream team. Then one of my team members went out on sick leave and has been gone for months full of ups and downs, but we covered it. Then a newer team member started requiring more attention because they were not doing a great job and people requested not to work with them (clients and other employees). Had 5 documented convos, and they still have not taken any accountability and it is an ongoing shit show. I mistakenly mentioned putting them on a plan before I found out a term was approved, so now I have to go through with it. We offered them severance to leave and they are fighting it. My favorite boss ever left the company. And, another one of my team (my favorite) also became very ill. So now, I'm covering 3 jobs besides my own. Can't hire to replace people on leave. I had to send my dog over the rainbow bridge 2 weeks ago. And today, my favorite team member passed away. I am fucking shattered. It happened so fast. We never thought they wouldn't return from leave. Now I have to tell the team, one is out of the country on vacation, and I have a follow up meeting with the one that has performance issues tomorrow.

It's too much. It is so heavy, I'm struggling to make sure I do the right things. I have to stay diplomatic, empathetic and consistent while sharing terrible news, trying not to tell someone to just STFU and leave already and come up with plans to make it all work out without dropping anything. And, make sure I don't lose my mind. Fuck

I'm a first-time manager and could use some advice. I have a meeting with HR early next week about one of my direct reports, and I'm not sure what to expect or how to approach it.

She's currently under investigation by HR/Security after trying to access one of our internal documents using a Gmail account that's associated with her dad's company instead of her work account. Access was denied, so as far as I know she never actually got into the document through that account. It happened on her day off and she didn't report it herself. I honestly don't know whether it was an accident (she was logged into the wrong Google account) or something more intentional. I do have a suspicion that she may have been trying to access it in connection with her dad's work, since he works in a similar area, but I have no evidence of that (yet) beyond the circumstances.

For some additional context, she's been a somewhat low performer and has been a challenging employee to manage for other reasons, but this is the first incident I'm aware of involving something like this.

I'm going to defer to HR and Security on the investigation and whatever conclusions they reach. But from a managerial perspective, how would you handle this?

Im a general manager at a mister car wash down here in florida and my boss came to visit the my site someone who doesn’t stand outside in the heat for 8 hours a day like my wonderful employees, someone who isn’t getting down on his knees to clean tunnel equipment for 2 long hours after closing, someone who isn’t dealing with irate customers on a day to day basis, but he can come to my site and tell me that all my employees should be fired😭. Then the even worse part i sent one of my girls to be a manager at another store she didn’t have the availability so i get a call from him saying “Hey Kristie availability doesn’t match the requirements for operational leadership program”

which is even crazier because she knows everything and the general manager of that store knows that she is ready for the position but it’s up to my boss to finalize that so she’s back at my site and he is now threatening to fire 2 of my employees who are twins because their shirts weren’t tucked in while on there 30 minute lunch break and he’s now beating down on the smallest things because of it checking in on the store every single day when visits from him should only be once per week.

just wanted to see if anyone has had a negative experience with their higher ups or bosses.

Good Morning Parts Managers!

I was wondering if any of you have a 1 on 1 template that you could share? I have 2 younger parts people that have been in it for a couple years and I’m having an issue keeping them on task and motivated. My 3rd has been in it for the same 18 years as me and crushes it consistently. I try to have conversations and offer ideas to help but they keep reverting to wandering around and on their phone etc. Open to any other suggestions but I want to have 1 on 1’s consistently each month just to formally check in , address issues and get feedback on myself as well. ** Pay plans are being reviewed as well with myself and the GM**

Thank you!

Hi All, really stuck in a loop.
I’m a full stack developer, for the last two years, I have been working on Web Automations. Related to my tech stack only.

I recently got promoted to Manager. I’m no more interested in the work I do.

After speaking to few Senior Managers, they confirmed they have roles for my tech stack.

Now my problem is, my MD is my coach, I work under her directly. I spoke to 3 Senior Managers, all warned me to be careful as my MD can screw my ratings and bad ratings can result into PIP if I try to switch project.

So how do I proceed with this?
Entity : Deloitte Tax

One thing I struggle with is this:

Sometimes a candidate mentions a bunch of frameworks, libraries, or technical jargon that I haven't personally used. In that moment it's difficult to know whether they're genuinely experienced or just using buzzwords confidently.

As a founder, I don't know every technology out there, so evaluating depth versus confidence can be tricky.

What are the biggest challenges you face while interviewing candidates?

• Technical interviews?
• Cultural fit?
• Spotting exaggeration?
• Resume vs actual skills?
• Anything else?

I'd love to hear how experienced founders and recruiters deal with this.

When my new CFO joined we developed a good working relationship. I had been at the job 5 or so months when he started. After a couple of months of working together he said he felt he could trust me.

Then the new FC started (who I now report into). As soon as she joined I was cut out of conversations I was previously involved in and I needed to start running past my ideas and changes with her. Long story short, I had gotten used to my autonomy and the change was jarring. I became very irritable with her and reacting negatively and vocally to my CFO who was shocked by my behaviour.

Initially he wanted more people to report into me and we even discussed a pay rise, however, as soon as I started kicking off he said it was all off the table.

Because of this I started looking for another job and found one pretty quickly (about 2 weeks) for more money and a better job title. I told my CFO immediately hoping he would beg me to stay, but instead he said I was draining and difficult and told me that if I can’t be happy with the new FC I need to consider whether I want to stay or not… he told me to sleep on it.

Me and him then had a trip together for a new acquisition and we headed for lunch afterwards. He seemed nervous and wanted to know my decision. I told him what he said was brutal and I wanted reassurance which he gave me. It was a nice moment.

Then the next day I told him I wanted a pay rise to stay to which he said annual pay rises had just been and gone and he fought for me to get 3% (because I just had a different pay rise a few months ago). He told me I could get a pay rise if I get a promotion though, and he said if I can show I can get along with FC then we can discuss objectives.

That wasn’t good enough at the time so I signed the offer letter for the other job.

If I’m being honest, the new FC is no good. She takes a long time to understand things, she tries to micromanage and she has no good ideas (we are a fast growing business). On top of that, she doesn’t care about us as a team at all, she only cares what our CFO thinks of her. Overall very poor leadership. She has been at the job for 3 months now and has not talked to the wider team. The wider team still come to me and I’m involved in a lot more meetings and high level work than she is. Plus the team still come to me for support.

Anyway, she has however taken a massive step back and I know she is frustrated with how much me and the CFO get along, so much so that she tried to stop us from interacting but we are slowing having more contact again.

In the past week my CFO has reached out and taken the time to make me feel valued. He’s apologised for not handling me well at the beginning. He’s told me there’s lots of opportunities here for me if I want to stay. He’s made me feel special again.

So I decided to take the risk and stay put. At least for another 3 months to see how it all pans out. My heart wasn’t ready to let the job go. Am I crazy?