Advice to new managers: don't joke about firing people

This is the mindset that gave Gervais and Merchant plenty of material for The Office. Are you David Brent, by any chance?

Leadership Strategy and Tactics by Jocko Willink has a great chapter about how to act when you became a manager of your former peers. Joking around is definitely not the way to go to establish yourself as a leader.

The joking dynamic depends a lot on whether we are talking about technical leadership versus line management, a distinction that occurs in some matrix-structured organisations. I.e., where people are grouped into resource teams for admin reasons and are separately deployed to projects. So an individual will generally have at least two people who can ‘tell them what to do’, namely his line manager (who might hassle them to complete training, performance reviews, etc) and the tech lead of the project(s) to which they are assigned.

Before retiring I was a tech lead for multiple projects over three decades, so was used to having a ‘leader’ relationship with many of my colleagues, some of whom were good friends. But for a two year period I took up line management responsibilities for the resource team of grey beards I belonged to. This was much, much more stressful than the tech leading. Not because of having to fire them but because I was now the corporate voice who had to explain why they weren’t getting a good pay rise, again. Most of them knew it was my role and not me so didn’t take it personally but in one case it completely destroyed a friendship with one of my team who was particularly bitter about certain issues.

In terms of ‘joking about firing people’ – my close friends in the group and I evolved a protocol whereby conversation that took place on our regular lunchtime walks was deemed to be ‘normal me’ speaking as opposed to ‘management-me’, and where I could share jokes. The only exception to this stays-in-Vegas rule was with one guy who was a known joker: I made a ‘management sign’ that had ‘No!’ printed on one side and ‘Stop!’ on the other. This was used fairly often and was viewed positively, especially when the individual concerned was being particularly distracting in the open plan office. It also humanised the management role, especially with my friends who knew that I was not a corporate clone.

This is REALLY good advice. When you become a manager, you suddenly become all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful about peoples' jobs, pay, bonuses, benefits, time off, assignments, promotions, all that stuff.

You're actually not all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-powerful. You're only part of a management team. But you will NEVER convince your direct reports you're not. Even if you just started being a manager today.

Therefore:

* DO NOT JOKE, ever, even once, about anyone's job, pay, bonus, time off, or other terms of employment. Or your own.

* DO NOT MAKE PROMISES about people's pay, etc, unless you ALREADY KNOW you can keep them. Do not EVER say "I will give you a promotion / raise / bonus / award." Only say, "Hey, you got a raise! Good work."

* do not even say "I'll try to get you a raise" because then if you can't deliver, the person will always wonder why you didn't do it. Even if what you said wasn't a promise, it sounds like one.

People pay a lot of attention to things their managers say, and they NEVER FORGET things that threaten them or promise them something. Peoples' terms of employment are an irony-free and snark-free zone.

Describing a joke out of context can make a person sound very cruel indeed. I've been in situations where someone has made a joke about me dying, for example, and I found it to be funny and light-hearted. But if you strip out the context and say "he made a joke about me being murdered", it sounds far, far more cruel than it really was.

The reason the blog post was written is that jokes that would usually be fine among friends can take on a different tune as soon as the power dynamic changes, and that's not always obvious to the person with the upper hand.