Let’s put it simply, managers are people in the middle of the organization who translate strategy into work, pressure into priorities and figure out the messy people part against those deliverables.

They are the people who are expected to deliver results, motivate teams, handle difficult conversations, coach talent, manage emotions, interpret policy, protect culture and somehow keep everything moving… usually without much real training for the job they were just handed. And that’s the real crux of why management has always been one of the most contentious roles in modern business. This week on Thinking With Mitch Joel, I had a conversation with Ashley Herd (viral video sensation and author of the book, The Manager Method – A Practical Framework To Lead, Support, And Get Results) about why it’s so messy. So much of the books (and content) sounds so obvious… until you realize how rarely it actually happens. Clear expectations. Real feedback. Direct conversations. A pause before reacting. Basic human consideration. None of this sounds revolutionary. And in many organizations… it might as well be…. which is so frustrating.

It got me thinking: maybe the problem is that management was never really designed for humans?

It was designed for output… for productivity… for coordination… for making sure the work gets done. We built organizations around tasks, reporting lines, KPIs, performance reviews, escalation paths and dashboards. We created systems to track what people produce, how quickly they produce it and whether they are hitting the target. Don’t get me wrong, that is all useful… necessary. But somewhere along the way it seems plausible that we started confusing the managing of the work with the managing of the people.

And those are not the same thing.

One of the things Ashley kept coming back to is how often people are promoted into management because they were good at the work. The best salesperson becomes the sales manager. The strongest lawyer becomes the chair of the practice group. The highest performer suddenly becomes responsible for everyone else’s performance. It sounds logical… until you spend a beat thinking about it. We would never assume that the best player automatically becomes the best coach (and, in most instances, the best coaches were never the top performers themselves). And yet, in business, we keep doing exactly that…

Then we act surprised when things break.

The manager doesn’t know how to give constructive feedback (unless they’ve been trained on how to do that). The employee doesn’t know what success looks like (because that manager has never really been trained on how to define success for someone else and help that person achieve it)… and it gets awkward fast. The high performer struggles because the job is no longer about doing the work… it’s about creating the conditions for other people to do their best work. And that shift is massive (much bigger than most people realize)… and that’s the work most companies don’t design for.

We design for performance.

This is where management becomes less about process and more about culture. Because most employees don’t experience “the company.” They experience their manager… they experience the person who sets expectations, responds to mistakes, notices the work, ignores the work, makes room for questions or shuts them down. Which means a company can have a great culture and still create wildly different realities depending on who someone reports to. And that’s not culture… it’s a casino called manager roulette.

And the times they are a-confusing.

We’re living through AI, hybrid work, layoffs, monitoring software, political tension, generational shifts and a workplace that still hasn’t fully metabolized what happened during the pandemic. Everything feels more exposed. Every weak system feels weaker. The old model of management… keep people busy, measure the output, correct the mistakes… feels painfully insufficient (and tired) for the world we’re now working in. Strangely, the fix is not always complicated (check out Ashley’s “pause, consider, act” framework). People are not just sacks of fluids and outputs with emotions attached. They are people… and the emotions are not a distraction from the work… they are part of the work.

So the provocation might be that management can no longer be treated as a promotion for doing the job well.

It has to be treated as a different job altogether. A role with its own craft, practice, discipline and responsibility. Because if the work of the future is going to be more ambiguous, more automated and more complicated, then the people leading that work need more.

Because management was built to get output from people… but the opportunity now is about bringing the best out of them.

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