[roenxi]

> As an EM, your role isn’t just about managing the technical—it’s about understanding the people behind the work.

Yeah it is a lovely sentiment, but it is a sweet nothing if someone doesn't understand the techniques to back up nice words with an appreciation for the people behind the work.

We discover in the follow up that to this EM it means engaging in endless debate (the GitHub issue may have more spilled ink than a Tolstoy work) over the appropriate default branch name. That isn't what prioritising people should look like in practice. In fact that sort of debate springing up and becoming a serious milestone is the sort of thing that should trigger a check for whether empathy failures are taking place. Why is a culture developing where the team is being focusing on such trivialities instead of something that promotes their success or the success of groups like the greater organisation or customers? People with empathy tend to focus on the actual success of real people; and anything more than a cursory aye/nay poll on branch naming would be a concern because it suggests that the real problems every team has aren't getting attention.

[fzeroracer]

> Why is a culture developing where the team is being focusing on such trivialities instead of something that promotes their success or the success of groups like the greater organisation or customers?

> People with empathy tend to focus on the actual success of real people; and anything more than a cursory aye/nay poll on branch naming would be a concern because it suggests that the real problems every team has aren't getting attention.

I think there's a bit of irony in your two statements because you're arguing that the EMs should lack empathy for changes you deem trivial, and have empathy for changes you don't deem trivial. This is how you destroy an organization because these small issues fester into something more poisonous for your org.

For example, the branch naming schema cuts both ways. You could have a mostly yay vote on the branch naming pass, but the nay vote interprets it highly negatively or vice versa. Which means it's the EMs job to try and defuse that situation both by being welcoming enough to address these trivial complaints and by trying to identify the root cause.

[roenxi]

> ...you're arguing that the EMs should lack empathy for changes you deem trivial

If an EM can't identify this change as trivial then they are going to be on the bottom of the spectrum of EM managers. It is trivial, everyone can tell that. Which side of the decision anyone comes down on is up to them, but if the issue of prioritising branch names becomes a subject of long talks, meaningful debate, inquiry and fact finding missions then the EM has done a bad job. OSS projects can tolerate that sort of thing because the entire OSS movement is ideological from the foundations up so they have to deal with ideological issues. But workplaces are for a different set of standards and ideally involve some professionalism.

If you have formed a genuine connection with someone, probed their emotional state and determined that the default label of the git repo is important enough to them that they are going to feel strong emotional disturbance over? And that it is the biggest issue in their professional life and deserves to be prioritised for follow up? The right thing to do is probably to send them to get some professional help. Or congratulate them on having achieved true joy in the workplace. Or reassess your ability to read people because you just probably got it wrong. Any which way such people are remarkably rare - generally more empathy will uncover that the default branch name is not the major issue that needs work.