[Aurornis]

Great managers will feel natural to work with. You won't have to learn how to work with them because they'll meet you as a person and guide you toward succeeding in your role as needed.

Unfortunately, many managers are not natural managers but have instead learned how to "manage" from books, blogs, podcasts, and trying to imitate people they see as powerful.

My biggest lifehack for dealing with these people is to learn what books and other resources they used to teach themselves management, then study what those books portray as the ideal employee. Your job is now to play the role of that ideal employee and set the stage for the manager to feel like the ideal manager. It takes a bit of restraint and the performance can feel fake at times, but as long as you play the role they want to see and you make it easy for them to play the role they think they should play, you're going to do well in their eyes.

At minimum, I suggest every employee read a couple books like the Manager's Path book linked in the article so it's easier to identify when weak managers are trying to implement things they read from a book. It's like a cheat code to navigating managers who outsource their thinking to books and try to reduce every situation to something they read or heard a podcast about.

In my last case, my manager read a book about all about how managers shouldn't solve problems for their employees, they should only give coaching for employees to solve their own problems. He went full cargo cult on that advice and literally stopped helping us get things done within the company. His only response to any issues we raised would be a long string of leading questions and coaching, but he refused to actually do anything. I fought this for a long time until he mentioned the name of the book, I read it, and I realized that I had to start making him think that he was coaching me to a solution whenever I really needed him to use his position to do his job. It took some mental gymnastics, but after I unlocked his secret I became good at navigating around him to get things done.

[onthecanposting]

I really admire those with the ability to conform themselves to a work place to be successful. I've always been candid, and I am occasionally at odds with management when polite lies are expected. Those I've managed appreciate the sincerity, but I would hardly describe my career as successful.

[nine_zeros]

> whenever I really needed him to use his position to do his job

This is exactly what a large number of managers (and corporate ladders) miss.

Managers (and layers above them) are given organizational authority - not merely to coach people, rate people, calibrate people - but to use the authority to solve problems of organizational type in their domain

As an example, if a project is running behind schedule:

- A poor manager tries to hide the real status and tries to PIP and manage reports on that project out.

- Whereas, a good manager tries to bring people together and understand how the team can handle this together, sometimes with borrowed staffing, sometimes with cut scope, sometimes with negotiation of timelines, sometimes with abandoning the project altogether.

[IshKebab]

Genius idea, though I feel like you shouldn't have to do that in the first place. Like, I've been criticised by people for editing "their" code without talking to them first (in a shared project that we're all working on). My boss's ideal solution is for me to kowtow to their egos so he doesn't have to deal with it. No thank you. You go and tell them to stop being possessive of code that they don't own; they just happened to write. It's not my job to deal with their issues.