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should I apologize to this friendly manager I had an argument with? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 day ago by ricesoup@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/36766269

I know lemmy is titled to the left, so most probable answer is going to be no, managers are our enemy, but hear me out.

I always thought like this: I'm there to work and earn money, not to make friends, not to fake a friendship with any manager. If they fire me, no manager is going to ask me how I'm holding up or what my plans for the future are. What may look like a friendship is all fake.

There is, however, a manager where I work at that everybody agrees she is friendly and goes the extra mile to help employees. When I say everybody I mean that literally, none of the coworkers I asked said anything remotely bad about this person. At my company there are other managers everybody agrees are narcissistic morons and everyone hates them.

I had an argument with this manager everyone likes and after thinking about it, it was mostly my fault we raised our voices. She raised her voice first but because I wasn't listening to her because she triggered me.

I feel bad about it and I can't believe I'm writing this, but I'd like to have a private conversation with her to apologize and explain why she triggered me. She also does typical things any manager does that I find very unfair that I want to explain so she maybe stops it.

Is being honest and having such a conversation a stupid idea?

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[–] FBJimmy@lemmus.org 5 points 1 day ago

Caveat: I don't know you or your manager, so your experience may be very different.

But as someone who has ended up in management in three previous roles (not currently) your post brought two thoughts to my mind:

For me, I'd far rather people in my team came to me and were open about things. Don't bottle it up and hope that they'll somehow guess - they won't. They're not psychic and they've probably got 101 other things to worry about. Think of it like this: Could you do your job if nobody was ever honest with you about you previous days performance.
If you're tempted to default to thinking of line manager's as the enemy, consider that in most cases they are just trying to do their best while shouldering 10x the shit from their manager than is making it through to you.

Not saying there aren't bad and/or narcissistic managers about, but I suspect most of the time they only appear that way due to the screws in their back from above.