The Loneliness of the Good Manager

The struggles of the manager lie neglected in the workplace mental health conversation. This must change.

The good manager is a lonely and vulnerable creature.

I repeatedly had this thought as I interviewed people last year for a story on how organisations treated employees living with grief. It hadn’t yet been a year since the brutal second wave of Covid. Even as the world limped towards recovery, many still struggled to pick up the pieces after seeing their loved ones die lonely deaths in isolation wards. For every Covid death, an estimated nine close family members had been left in grief. It was collective trauma at a catastrophic scale.

For workplaces, this posed a profound challenge. Neuroscientists talk about the ‘grief brain’ — an overwhelming state of loneliness, sadness, and confusion. Grief makes it difficult for the brain to concentrate, remember things, and process others’ perspectives. While you can’t put a price tag on human suffering, the World Economic Forum estimated that in the US alone, $942 billion of productivity and business growth had been directly affected by Covid-related grief.

I wanted to find out what employers were doing to help their people tide over this unprecedented crisis. Again and again, I heard stories that revealed that far too many of them had failed to create humane policies, systems, and structures. Instead, they pushed the responsibility of supporting distressed employees onto a few compassionate, but ultimately powerless, managers.

Fighting a battle against insensitive organisational cultures, these managers risked burnout and moral injury — the wound caused by the betrayal of one’s deeply held moral beliefs and values. Some of them even risked their own careers.

Consider what happened with Suman* and her boss. Suman had lost her mother to Covid, and her ageing father, who had several comorbidities, was also battling the infection. She had developed painful post-Covid complications herself. Still, she reported back at work — a human rights and social development nonprofit — within two weeks of her loss.

“But I found zero empathy from the organisation,” she told me. Instead, they asked her to travel for work, risking reinfection. “The stress triggered the worst anxiety attack of my life. I thought I was getting a heart attack.”

Suman’s reporting manager stepped up to protest the travesty. “She fought with the management to give me more time off so I could deal with my mother’s passing. But they told her, ‘No one needs so much time to grieve’.”

Suman decided she couldn’t continue in such a toxic workplace. And her manager had to leave as well.

Or take the story of Aditi, a journalist from Delhi who was bedridden with depression during the second wave of the pandemic. She felt that she was failing at work and wanted to resign — but her caring boss helped her get back on her feet.

“Not only did he grant me leave without any questions, he also took an interest in my treatment and encouraged me to do whatever I needed to feel better,” she told me. “It was such a huge relief.”

Aditi’s manager helped at least one other teammate survive a difficult phase. But he had to undertake all this emotional labour as a solitary Good Samaritan, with zero backing from the organisation.

“Even in the worst days of the pandemic, when journalists put their own lives at risk every day, we didn’t get a single email from the management,” Aditi said. 

Stories like these blow the cover off a hushed-up corporate truth that long predates the pandemic: if you are a manager, being a decent human being may be bad for you. At the heart of it is the outdated, feudal idea that a ‘good’ manager must be unemotional and impersonal, and that putting humanity over productivity is somehow a sign of weakness.

Pop culture is saturated with the ‘evil boss’ stereotype, but what we don’t ask enough is, how do companies treat managers who want to break this mould?

In a LinkedIn poll for this piece, I asked managers: Have you ever felt that being a “nice and kind” boss works against you because your employer’s culture doesn’t appreciate those traits? Of the 27 people who chose to publicly share their view, 22 said yes.

One of them is Shaifila Ladhani, an independent psychotherapist who refuses to work in corporate setups after being let down as a manager by her bosses in earlier jobs. “One of the CEOs (pretty young) would constantly be rude to me, to ensure I knew how to treat people ‘under me’,” she commented. “I would have lunch with my colleagues, technically juniors, and it would warrant a meeting that I shouldn’t be so casual with ‘these people’ because they don’t respect me enough to maintain deadlines. And this is a ‘mental health’ organisation. But I used to work in advertising too, and it was a divide of ‘us vs them’ even there.”

Shaifila’s story reminded me of the time when a boss had taken me aside to complain that I was “too nice”, and that “lazy employees” were using my niceness as a cover. There was no objective measure to back up the allegation. My decision to eventually quit the job was largely down to this mismatch in fundamental values.