Why your ‘nice’ manager may be ruining your career

 When Andy Coley first started managing his team, he tried to be as nice as possible. He would give ‘nice’ feedback, and avoid hard conversations. He was so afraid of conflict that he would choose to do most of the work himself. This meant 18-hour days.

Some might have considered Coley appeasing and flexible, but his version of events is that he was simply untrained and avoidant. “I didn’t know how to coach my team and support them.” Coley, who was working in a tech startup, dubs his time in middle management as his “mid-30s fail”.

Struggling to delegate to underperforming staff, he either avoided his team completely or snapped at them when the stress became too much. He wasn’t getting the outcomes he wanted. “My team were unmotivated,” he admits. “Having to have conversations that I knew was going to cause emotional conflict was extremely difficult and I avoided it.”

Fourteen months later, the startup Coley worked for closed down. Some of the team quit. “We didn’t make the website we’d planned and ultimately we had to dissolve the company and abandon the project,” he says. His health also suffered. “I became 23kg overweight because all I did was eat pizza, drink Coke and work. I was massively burnt out from not being able to cope with managing the team,” he says.

Britain has a management problem – and experts are warning that part of the issue is that our bosses are too mild-mannered and not, well, bossy enough. There is fierce debate over ‘gentle parenting‘ – an approach dictating empathy, respect, and positive discipline, which critics say can backfire without a clear sense of rules and authority for children. Is the same problem permeating the workplace?

Will, 32 from Southampton, works in the charity sector. He is used to having no direction at work. “My managers are so chill which you think is good at first,” he says. “But now, five years later, I am realising it’s weird that I have never had a catch-up meeting or an appraisal. It’s nice sometimes that they are hands-off, it means you can get on with your work efficiently but the laissez-faire attitude also means if you need anything you’re on your own.” Colleagues who want to do the minimum get away with it, he says. “One of my colleagues has six months of holiday to take because her manager never kept track of the fact she wasn’t taking any holiday.”

His theory is that the problem is a lack of training: “I have had to train my managers when they arrived,” says Will. With no idea what his next steps are or the future of the company, he is looking for a job elsewhere.

Coley agrees – like 82 per cent of managers, he had received zero training. Now 48, he is a workplace coach and the author of Leadership is A Skill. He has seen firsthand that being avoidant and ‘gentle’ in the workplace can be terrible for productivity: “Ultimately, if the manager is stressed and dysfunctional, productivity and results are not going to be met.”

Productivity remains stubbornly low in this country: our output per hour fell by 1.8 per cent last year. Recent analysis shows that the UK’s economic output is approximately 20 per cent lower than France and Germany.

“Bad management isn’t just frustrating, it’s costing the economy billions,” says Ann Francke, CEO of the Chartered Management Institute (CMI). “Poor leadership leads to disengaged employees, high turnover, and lower productivity, all of which hit businesses where it hurts”. According to Francke, when compared to top-performing economies like the US and Germany, 50 per cent of the UK’s productivity gap comes down to management capability.