Managers View Themselves As “Making The Trains Run.” They’re Often Annoying Distractions.

Preach on it, sister.

Good article here from Nir Eyal about how managers are ultimately distractions, not enablers of productivity, for their employees. I’ve been chasing this particular narrative for years. More people are hip to the game now because of the rise in employee surveillance software since March 2020, but the idea of managers potentially doing more harm than good has been around for generations.

Employee surveillance: The thing behind the thing (or many things)

Let me point out one nice pull-quote section from this article:

While it’s moderately ironic that a SVP at Slack would be saying that — since Slack is a pre-eminent distraction tool — it’s still true. The core problem of many workplaces, which very few people will say out loud, is that we promote the wrong people into management roles. It’s usually based on proximity to the existing power core…