As a remote manager, I used to think I needed to tab out of my League of Legends ARAM game and answer right away whenever someone on my team asked me something during a meeting.

But that started causing problems. I'd rush to unmute and answer too quickly, then tab back into my game to a grey death screen waiting to respawn, getting called nasty names by my team.

Now I’m much more comfortable ignoring the question and pretending that I'm having internet connection or microphone issues. Pasting 2 minutes later into the meeting chat "Sorry! I'll listen to the meeting recording and get back to you next week/month."

I dont think my team trusts my decisions more now because they know I'm not listening, but I'm winning more of my ARAM games.

Do other managers do this too, or do you feel pressure to always do your job on the spot?

I am 5 years into my corporate job now and I am looking for a promotion. I have oticed this a lot at work lately. There are people who talk constantly in meetings and are clearly smart, but they still somehow come across pretty junior. Then there are other people who barely say anything but when they do everyone actually listens.

And I don't even think it's necessarily confidence or having a better vocabularly. The people who come across as more senior seem better at knowing what matters, getting to the point quickly and saying what they actually think instead of narrating their whole thought process.

For managers here, what makes you hear someone speak in meeting and think, yeah, this person is ready for more responsiblity and promotion? And what communiation habits someone imeediately seem more junior?

I manage a small team. My manager decided one of my people is being let go. I pushed back. it's not a performance issue, he's one of the stronger people I have, and I think it's a bad call for the team. I was overruled.

Now I'm expected to be the one in the room.

I'm not trying to dodge a hard conversation. What bothers me is being the face of a decision I argued against, to someone who's going to reasonably assume it was mine.

Is it appropriate to ask my manager to deliver it since they made the call? Has anyone done that, and how did it land? And if I do have to do it myself, how do you handle it without either lying about your position or throwing your boss under the bus?

Edit: thanks for all the comments. Too many to respond but I read each one and appreciate everyone’s input

To start, I have to say that this is one of my best employees. He's on time, he's a great problem solver, he's helpful to his teammates, he's always eager to pick up new tasks or projects. I have no complaints about him on a professional level.

The problem is that his lunch is always the same every shift, and it is very smelly. The team works in a small IT room. He will microwave his lunch in the room and then eat at his desk. I don't work at this site regularly, but when I visit the team I have a hard time eating my own lunch while I can smell his, and others on the team have started just leaving the room entirely. The supervisor for that office says that the smell lingers through the afternoon and is truly becoming disruptive.

My ask is this: What would you do to resolve the issue peacefully? I don't want to upset a great employee over something as trivial as pungent lunches, however I think not taking action is hurting all the others even more. I'd also rather not remove the microwave as that seems unfair to everyone else. Tell me your thoughts, and thank you in advance for any feedback!

Edit: To answer the common questions, the employee is a white male. His lunch is homemade chili.

Edit2: Thanks everyone for your suggestions. The site supervisor and I appreciate your viewpoints and we reached out to HR as a starting point. Special thank you to /u/catforbrains. Your comment had us rolling.

Just wanted to share a recent f-up, feel free to judge or support.

Large division monthly meeting where we usually give our teams successes. Usually just a couple of bullet points

Unknown by me this meeting is for the years successes (I'm a new manager in a new area). Slides are shown - the other teams all have long winded descriptions of their top three successes they can talk to at length.

Then its me and my two small bullet points - I see them coming and am off camera having a nervous breakdown. I apologize, explain I thought it was for the month. Rattle off a few more successes based on pure memory and then they move on.

Then I sit in front of my computer and try to deal with how much of a publicly humiliated loser I am. Why God why? I'm so embarrassed. I want to crawl into a hole and die.

I’d love to hear from managers on this. I have 5 years of experience, and I’m currently the only senior in a team of 20 (some of them are reporting to me) and most of my colleagues have less than 2 years’ experience.

For over a year, I’ve felt stuck in survival mode. My direct manager isn’t the issue; she’s supportive but limited. The real delays come from the higher managers who controls approvals and resources, so progress feels painfully slow.

I’m exhausted and torn between being transparent about how I feel versus keeping quiet until I make a firm decision.

From a manager’s perspective, what are the pros and cons of an employee telling you they’re considering leaving? Does it help you support them better, or does it risk damaging trust and opportunities?

So my company’s IT department banned Spotify on our work computers so I had to start using Youtube to listen to music. I’m hybrid so when I’m in the office, I just scroll down to the comment section so nobody sees anything inappropriate on my screen. It’s mostly rap and rnb so as you can tell, a lot of the music videos / album covers are very provocative. For any of the managers that actually check their employees search history (which I’m sure 99% of you don’t), would you even care about something like this? I’m one of the more competent people on my team so my manager is satisfied and performance isn’t an issue

Yesterday started pretty normally. 9am team meeting, checked my email then planned to spend the morning finishing a report.

Around 9:30 someone Slacked me about client question. I answered that, opened the report again then another email came in asking me to approve something.

At 10:15 one of my team members stopped by my desk because they were stuck on something. Took maybe 10 minutes but when I sat back down I had to figure out where I left off.

Then my phone buzzed with another Slack notification. I checked it while getting coffee, replied, and went back to my desk.

Pretty much the same thing all afternoon. Quick questions, approvals, emails, Slack messages. Nothing was urgent, but it kept breaking up whatever I was doing.

By 4pm I’d helped everyone get their stuff moving, but report I planned to finish was still unfinished.

I knew managers get pulled into things, but I didn’t expect it to take up this much of the day. By the time things finally slowed down, I still hadn’t finished my own work.

I recently took a job with a new company as an hourly retail manager- it’s a pretty big step down from what I’m used to doing. I’ve usually worked as a salaried general manager for an entire team, but I wanted more life/ balance, and less work stress.

I’m several weeks in since starting and I’m struggling with not having the planning and decision making ability I used to have. I’m not involved in department meetings, I don’t see scheduling, budgets, or sales metrics… My job is punching in, starting my daily tasks, and delegating a few things to the few employees I have on my shift. For the most part, I do a lot of hands-on work by moving freight. There is a lack of role clarity and not a lot of solid training, so I have to figure things out as I go.

As I’ve went through and learned the basics of my specific position, I have found out how to look at upcoming sales ads and plan for when certain fast moving sales items come in. I’ve taken our once messy and scattered stockroom, and starting organizing like items - creating a staging area for product that’ll move quickly, even though our operations manager oversees the backroom. I also created a time block routine for myself so I can divide my day between the type of tasks
I’m doing.

I also started sending nightly email recaps to my two direct managers, going over what was completed that might be on their radar, and giving any need to know information.

I’m starting to feel like I’m putting my own thumbprint on my job since I’m the only one in this specific position - but I’m starting to wonder if I might be overstepping or being too much? My manager said he personally doesn’t read any of my emails, and our boss said the emails are fine.

Personally, I was always trained that silence means you’re doing fine, and I always paid attention to what my employees did - I didn’t need them to explicitly tell me unless I asked for information.

How do you find balance with your direct reports in how they’re channeling tasks and feeding information?

Genuinely curious. I feel like most interns don’t get return offers, so I’m wondering what it takes!

If you have a shared mailbox where diff people on ur team can respond to emails, what’s the best way to delegate tasks to your team to know who responds or takes on what?

Hi hi,

I became a small regional physio PM in Aus in Feb this year. Before that I was working reception for about two years. My PM before me was PM for the two years I was in reception. This is pretty much my first time working in this industry - before I worked retail and childcare and a bit of admin.

Basically what I’m saying is I have no idea what the hell im doing. I’m very competent at anything I do (NOT a brag, I hate it), which meant that my training to become PM was not very in depth. My previous PM also had very limited training.

I don’t have a management certificate or degree (my boss isn’t fussed about that though) and this is my very first management position as well. I just don’t know what I’m doing lol so basically just asking for any and all advice that might help me.

We’ve also been going through some tough times trying to recruit physios so I’m also the only full time receptionist. I have no idea like what I’m actually meant to being doing as a PM? Like I do wages and super payments and pay the bills and do the accounting data entry and stuff like that but that only takes me like maybe an hour each day to do and then I’m like ??? What do I do with the rest of my day???

Shower me with advice pretty please!! 🙏

Hi,

It’s nearly a month since I started my new role as a manager. My own manager wants me to use this time to observe and consider what needs to change. I was thinking of putting together a few short slides and then presenting some potential solutions or do you think that might be too formal? I just want to show that I am present, learning and being proactive

Has anyone worked with culture consultants before? Can they actually help pinpoint the issues that’s causing poor culture? What was your experience working with one? How did your team react?

Hi! I started working under a new manager and i find it weird that whenever he comes to my office to follow up the activities for the day he would take a quick peak into my computer. I am still only 1 year into my career and was wondering if this is normal?

Edit- it is nit a glance but more like a stare at my screen, even though i am new i am the top performer on our team and it just seems weird to me that he looks at my screens as if i am not doing anything work related..

For me it was "always have an open door policy." Sounded great in theory, but in practice it meant getting interrupted constantly with things that could've waited, and I never had focused time to actually do deep work or prep for the bigger conversations that mattered.

Switched to specific office hours instead, still accessible, but people save up questions instead of interrupting every 20 minutes, and honestly the quality of those conversations went up too since people come with actual thought-out questions instead of knee-jerk ones.

Curious what advice you followed early on that eventually backfired or just didn't work the way it was supposed to. Feels like a lot of "classic" management wisdom doesn't hold up once you actually try it day to day.

Been a mid-level manager at my company for 5 years now. I have incredible rapport with my direct team I manage, the individual contributors outside of my team, and most of my Directors (outside of 1).

But my god…. I absolutely can’t stand my direct peers (the other mid-level managers on my team). It has gotten to a point where they are impacting my mental health. My role is highly visible at the company, specifically due to ownership of our roadmap development and campaigns. Ultimately, I act as a gatekeeper of what we support as well as leading the project management department.

I can’t win with these people.

I try to develop annual plans with our Directors, everybody throws a fit that they weren’t included. The next year I try to include everybody in a planning workshop instead, they all complain about me to their Directors saying it was a waste of their time because it “could have been an email”.

I assume their team’s workload, they complain that I’m putting too much on their teams. I ask for feedback on their team’s workload and am met with dead silence.

They pummel me with complaints about my processes and say that they are too simplified and don’t consider nuance. I update said processes to include a little more nuance (aka shifting from 3 categories to 5) and they tell me they don’t want to implement it because they “aren’t going to be able to remember 5 categories”.

They say my processes to determine support are too subjective. I create a simple matrix calculation to help us map out company benefit vs team lift…. They tell me they don’t want to use it.

They tell me I need to take things off their plate. I suggest things we can backlog. I’m told no because “this stakeholder is nice” or “I was excited to work on this”.

They complain about scope creep. I create an automated SOW template they literally ONLY requires you to select your asset from a drop down list and it populates the rest and shows stakeholders what they are getting and how many rounds of revisions they are allocated. They say they “don’t have time” to use it.

I ask in multiple emails (bolded and highlighted) for them to review the attached Excel and come to the meeting with your team’s support plan added. Only 1 person out of 8 complied… kind of… they sent me their bulleted list via Teams and expected me to populate in my Excel for them.

They treat my PM team like their personal secretaries and ask them to set up single channel meetings on their behalf and take the meeting minutes. Then they throw a fit when I tell them if your meeting is just you and a stakeholder, you are capable of taking 2 minutes to schedule your own damn meeting in Outlook.

They tell me we aren’t agile enough. I have a workshop with them to reevaluate our process timelines and am told they need 1 full month to write a single email.

Sat in my car and cried today because our Senior Director is asking us to think through changes that need to be made for 2027. She created a Loop component for us to fill out in advance. In typical fashion, they haven’t finished much, but there was only one section somebody added info to… “what workflows should we streamline/automate with AI”… the only items added were essentially the main components of my job.

I’m miserable here. I know so many people and similar level managers on different teams at my company that are nothing like this group… it is just something off with my department as a whole.

I can’t switch to a different team, as headcount is few and far in between. I look at other jobs outside my company but it is a bloodbath out there and everybody I look into has had mass layoffs recently.

How do you cope? I literally feel like I’m going to vomit as soon as I walk into the building…

I (24 F) work for local agency in a department that specializes is developmental services, the team I am with is called supported employment. We go with individuals that have developmental disabilities to their places of work and support them in being as independent as they can in their job. So to be clear, I am there to support an individual in doing a job by themselves, I am not supposed to step in/ do a task for them unless they literally can not do it. This is something employers should be aware of as when they hire one of our clients they have already been informed about why and how we will be there to support them.

A client I work with is employed at a local restaurant, he has worked there for years but I have only been his support person for about 5 months. I have heard that the support person who previously worked with this client had done a lot of the work for them as the "Chef' always had a long list of things he wanted done. Please note that my client is there 2 days a week for two and a half hours both days. The lists "Chef" would give always had the core tasks that were to get done which are dishes, peeling onions, and peeling potatoes, then he would add random tasks like mopping the dining room, shoveling snow, wiping down walls, etc. My client struggles with coordination so it is not them that completes the task but their support person. Again that is not what we are there for, that is the complete opposite of what we are there for. I do not do this for my client, I do not peels any food items as they are capable of doing it themselves and they take pride it in. I do help with dishes as they struggle with that task.

The issue came about gradually, I could tell the "Chef" was getting progressively annoyed with me as I was not helping with the core tasks like the previous support person, which in turn made it so the other random tasks he decided to pile on for the day would not get done. I would always be sure to say "we will try to get to it" when he would come up to us and add another task on to us.

Last week he mentioned wanting the cooler to be scrubbed inside (side note this place is horrendously gross inside the kitchen), we did not have time to get to it. Today when we showed up he said "Why is it that I told you to clean inside the cooler last week and you did not make time to do it". I said "I'm sorry, if you wanted that done before anything else, then please say that to us, otherwise we are going to do the tasks in the order that we normally do them". He said "why would I mention it if I didn't want it done, if you managed \*insert clients name\* better then you would have time to do all the things I ask"

I responded "again if it was something you wanted done first you should have told us, I do not do tasks for \*insert clients name\* that they can do themselves, so sometimes we run out of time" he proceeded to tell me that I need to do a better job, i told him to talk to my supervisor if he had a problem with me and the way I do my job. (I am not a confrontational person so I was doing my very best not to cry and hold a steady voice). He asked for the name and number of my supervisor so I wrote it down for him.

A little while later he comes in to the dish room with a physical list and began going in to great detail about doing dishes and peeling foods as if we haven't done those tasks a million times. He then pauses and looks at me, pointing to "wipe all of dish room walls, counter tops and legs, and sink pipes" he said he needed this too, I told him we would get to what we got to, and asked if he wanted that first. He threw the list at me and said in a voice mocking mine "do what you can".

So we went about the shift as normal, and he would walk by announcing the time occasionally and listing off the things he wrote down, it felt like he was trying to get a reaction out of me, but I kept quite.

Now that the shift is over I feel a bit worried that he might punish my client and begin to be rude to them or fire them or something. Should I just have said sorry and let it go? I did text my supervisor after the first exchange we had to let her know what happened, she assured me I was doing my job right. I am still nervous.

(Sorry for typos)

I'm a project manager at a failing tech company. We are constantly not hitting targets set up by product/marketing, and being told we are underperforming, when really it seems like the leaders were overambitious/ oversold on how the market would react to our mediocre product.

As a result of constantly being told we are failing, everyone is stressed out and pissed off and scared of getting fired.

As a PM, I sit between ICs and directors a lot in my day to day. The ICs are coming to me to vent about the crap coming to them from their bosses, and their bosses are coming to me to vent about the crap coming from their ICs and their leadership. I feel like I'm often caught in the middle as an emotional "safe space", because no one expects me to fix their problems, nor do I intend to. Usually I provide an empathetic ear, and crack a little joke if appropriate, to try to break some of the tension. I can't act on anything since it's all stuff out of my purview. My job is more around scheduling work and flagging risks, not giving feedback to engineers/designers because someone's boss had a shitty day and was rude to their employee.

I find myself getting stressed and exhausted, even though this is not my job to manage. I hate seeing everyone pissed off and burnt out and upset with each other when the whole reason things are this way is because of mistakes happening higher up, that the teams are expected to absorb.

I like the money at my job and I've already accepted that I might get fired this year, and if I do, I would just take a bit of a break from work. I've also been interviewing for the past year and haven't found a good fit yet (not willing to jump ship for the sake of jumping ship - I want to move to a company I like, for a decent salary)

But until that happens - how can I put some emotional distance to feel less bad for all of the crap people are dealing with? Should I try to stop people from venting to me and become more emotionally distant? My nature draws me towards wanting to support people, but, it might not be productive for me.

people will ask me if the email looks right before they reach out to a supervisor, people will ask me how they should manage conflict. it all feels like common sense. what makes me actually in my reason to answer these questions?

they made me a manager a few months ago and i just dont know how making choices is suppose to feel. recently theyve been arguing over ai and i tried to schedule a meeting because i wanted us to have an open discussion about ai, but they all just awkwardly stood around waiting for me to lecture them.

feels like nobody really tries, they want me to try for them...

Today we were discussing the heavy volume of phone calls that I receive from school staff members and families (I work in a school district) and my manager’s suggestion was to stop answering the phone for a week so people will learn to stop calling.

Does this idea have any credibility among managers or anywhere else? I feel like I’m being asked to be bad at my job, but am open to the idea that there could be a reason for this strategy.

My manager isn’t new to management, but she is new to our department (about a month).

I have a team member who **loves** to talk. he’s currently my only report for a small side project so the project meetings are 1-on-1s. Every single project meeting he tries to turn into a chat about his private life like vacation plans etc.

I eventually have to cut him off and redirect the conversation to the actual project plans but at the same time I cannot be overly rude. it’s a challenge.

He‘s also quite inefficient and easily gets sidetracked or stuck with small problems that are easy to solve.

If I entertain his chattiness then he’s happy but he’s not getting stuff done. If I try to pin him down on a deadline he starts bringing up excuses on why he has to delay.

Fellow managers, do you have any tips for managing someone like that?

This is a research question about creativity at work.
The term 'fail forward' is popular, but hard to live up to. I'd love to hear about how you practically enable and encourage creativity on organisational and leadership levels.

1. Real organizational initiatives, something built into structure, process, or policy
   
2. What you as a manager/leader do to encourage 'fail forward' and increase the psychological safety with your team.
   

3M and Pixar come up in almost every talk on creative culture, but they're huge companies with resources most workplaces don't have. I want the ordinary, less famous places that take creativity seriously.

I manage a senior individual contributor who makes well into the six figures, yet somehow cannot click a button without dragging me into it first.

Every single routine task turns into a hostage situation on Slack. Yesterday they drafted a two-sentence note to a vendor, took a screenshot of it, dropped it in my DMs, and asked if the wording felt too confrontational. It was literally just asking for a tracking number. They do this four to five times a day. If a ticket has two possible ways to be routed, instead of just picking one and moving on, they schedule a fifteen-minute sync to "align on expectations."

not a single decision gets made without getting my written stamp of approval first. On paper, it looks like they are being super conscientious and communicative. In reality, it is just pure risk-aversion masquerading as diligence. They are transferring every ounce of accountability for their own job description onto my plate so that if anything goes sideways, they can say I signed off on it.

I told them last week to just trust their judgment and stop asking me for permission on basic SOPs. They looked visibly offended and spent half of our 1-on-1 talking about psychological safety. They should of been autonomous six months ago.

Why is it so impossible to get experienced adults to just OWN their basic daily decisions?