Bosses don’t tend to care very much about emotional intelligence

I got that screenshot from some article about “the upside of playing favorites,” and the funniest part to me is that the article references a $600B market cap company. Yes, Google (Alphabet) has money to spend on stuff like emotional resilience training for middle managers. Does every company have this money, especially with a potential recession? No. And what’s the first thing to go when money is tight? Anything considered “fluffy,” and then, well, staff. Capitalism is a fickle beast.

Business journalism is notably trash and ascribes lots of conditions to management and work that don’t exist. It regularly ignores incentive structures (which drive most decision-making) in the face of utopian horse manure about “engagement” and “perspective” and “ladders of learning.” Most people come to work to make money to live their lives. Executives typically come to work because that money is a source of relevance and success in their life.

Within the dump that is most biz journalism, including the article linked above, one of the most particularly toxic things is when emotional conditions are ascribed to managers. Let me try to articulate this with a personal example as opposed to a professional one.

If you have a miscarriage or a stillborn child, and travesty is crashing down all around you, it…