The protector
The manager who fails his people by protecting them
Part of The Intentional Leadership Arc, a series on leadership published every other Sunday in The Intentional Manager.
The Intentional Manager — strategy, leadership and execution for the professional who wants to lead with intention, not just effort.
If you came to this from Jenny Allen’s piece in The Bootleg Manager, you already have the lived version: one episode of grace granted without guardrails, felt from the inside. Here I take the same trap apart from first principles, the posture itself rather than a single instance of it.
If you have not read her piece, start there, because the two belong together.
Some managers treat their teams like children.
I believe this posture to be a rebound from the dominant managerial narrative of the ’80s and ‘90s, when managers were trained to squeeze every drop of value from their “resources”. Then servant leadership came along, but the version that eventually went viral is a fluffy and thin thing, closer to pure empathy with no spine.
If you currently report to this kind of manager, below you’ll find an explanation of why he does what he does and what awaits you if you don’t get out of there soon; if you are just stepping into a management role, it is a blueprint of what NOT to do.
Let’s begin.
What this manager believes
This manager sleeps very well at night, lulled by a few specific thoughts:
Towards himself
“Most managers are not empathetic. I am, and that is what makes me a better leader.”
Moral superiority grounded in empathy is the foundation: he is not just a manager - he is a better kind of manager.
Towards the team
“We are all equal on this team. I am not above anyone.”
He collapses equal in dignity, which is true, with equal in operational standing, which is not. The result is a manager who refuses to work at his level, absorbs work that should sit with his people, destroys their ownership in the process and never does the architectural work he was hired for.
“The team worked hard and you can’t fault them for the outcome because [X] was not theirs to control.”
Effort is THE moral category, irrespective of the outcome. If something doesn’t work, external attribution is the default: there is always a reason and it is always somewhere else.
Towards the company
“The system will grind the team to dust if I let it. I can’t change the system, but I will sure as hell stand between it and my team.”
The company is an opposing force that exists in tension with his people and his job is to stand between the two.
He does not believe he can win against the company, but he fights anyway because being seen as the team’s champion is core to his self-image and to his standing inside the team.
Notice that the problem is not that he holds these beliefs per se, but rather that he treats each as a whole instead of as a part of something larger.
What it looks like in practice
The net effect of the above is the collapse of accountability into the collective.
This manager does everything so that no individual ever owns the outcome - including himself.
Meetings
Meetings tend to include the whole team, aiming for alignment and contribution; in practice, no decision is ever made by one person and everybody is protected if something goes wrong.
Meetings never end with a single owner and a deadline, but with “Amy and Bob should work together on this in the near future.”
Activity gets distributed, ownership is unclear and accountability disappears altogether.
The team leaves the meeting feeling consulted. Nothing has been decided.
Development
The rhetoric is that of growth through soft exposure, as in “let’s do it together so you start learning.” The promise is real coaching, at a pace that respects the person’s comfort.
The reality is months of duplicated and confused effort, with the manager in every meeting, document and email, and the person not learning because control is never relinquished.
A year in, the team member is exactly where he started, still in the loop with his manager on tasks he should have owned in month three.
Feedback
Nonexistent.
What replaces it is a steady stream of “you’re doing great, keep going, maybe try this small thing, but really you’re great.”
The corrective version, when unavoidable, arrives as a shit sandwich: praise, criticism wrapped in qualifications, more praise.
Tough conversations
Missing In Action.
They get stalled until the moment passes and the conversation is no longer relevant or outsourced to HR. When the manager is forced into one and has to fire someone, the framing is always the same: upper management decided this, the person was great, the system was wrong, the manager is personally devastated and very sorry.
The external attribution mirrors how he treats his team and the assumption that people are never accountable extends to him when he is the one being held accountable.
Choices
Choices are made to preserve the relationship.
If one person on the team gets to attend a conference, the question is not who would benefit most or who has earned it, but who can be sent without anyone feeling slighted.
If a project needs allocation - same logic: single ownership creates the possibility of single failure and of harshness, which the manager will not tolerate, and so projects are co-owned. Nothing ever ships on time, everybody has tried really hard, no one is responsible and life goes on.
What it produces
The first few months look like a healthy team, with a caring manager and an engaged team.
This is what makes the posture survive for years: the early signs look exactly like the early signs of a team that is doing well, while the seed of failure grows in the shadows, unnoticed.
In time, the damage happens in four directions.
On people
Those who stay under this manager for long enough wither.
If they have joined already soft, they will grow even more entitled in their position.
If they started ambitious, they will first feel frustrated, then angry for the perceived betrayal, then they’ll give up.
If you find yourself in this situation and still believe in doing something with your life, there is only one solution: fly, you fool!
On the team
The team composition drifts.
The ambitious ones leave, the soft stays and, over time, the team becomes more uniformly soft, which makes the next ambitious hire more isolated, which makes him more likely to leave faster.
The feedback loop is self-reinforcing and the result compounds towards doom.
On performance
Performance drops on all three counts: ambitious people leaving, softness spreading across the rest, accountability never enforced.
Early on the decline is hidden, with loose metrics and vague and unfalsifiable goals. The manager defends the team’s effort upward whenever questioned, which buys time. From the outside, things look fine.
By the time the decline is visible, it has been compounding for months: the team produces less than the baseline assumption that justified its existence and the manager keeps defending it because “they are doing their best”.
The system that was supposed to multiply value is destroying it.
On the leader himself
The beauty is that this manager feels great about himself.
This is not a trivial point: he sleeps well at night because he is doing what he believes is right, the protagonist of a story in which he is the hero that acts morally in a system that does not value morality.
In organizations that are themselves playing not to lose, where performance matters but not that much, where soft-leadership branding promotes well and hard calls draw fire, he can thrive for years.
Then shit hits the fan.
He starts reporting to a boss who knows what leadership requires and is not willing to play along and the accountability he has been distributing across the collective gets re-concentrated on him as the leader.
He does not - cannot - adjust, because it would require admitting that he was wrong and revisiting his self-image. And so he leaves or he gets pushed out, ready to start over somewhere else.
R. I. P.
This kind of manager tends to survive in inward-facing functions, where the connection between work and outcome is weak or simply unmeasured and activity can be performed for years without anyone insisting that it ties back to a hard number - think marketing, clinical operations, medical affairs, regulatory affairs, Quality.
Where the numbers are hard and public - sales, production, customer service - this manager simply doesn’t survive.
He also requires an organization that is itself playing not to lose, because in companies that are genuinely trying to win there are hard calls everywhere and the manager who refuses to make them gets exposed early.
Conclusion
If you recognize yourself somewhere in the above, it’s time to reconsider what leadership is and is not (here and here). In any case, you’re missing your opportunity for being a great leader: act now that you still have time!
If you recognize someone you work for/with, take the opportunity to reflect on how this, in his own way, deeply kind manager is in fact purchasing kindness by abandoning the responsibility he was hired for and how this is negatively impacting you.
Thanks for reading,
Luca
If someone in your network would find this useful, forward it their way - it costs you little and might just make their Monday morning slightly less painful.
Love how theory and lived experience come together here