Happy Thursday, everyone. I'm Frank Richardson, an organisational psychologist observing the workplace with curiosity and care. Each week, I share insights to help HR leaders better understand the people behind the processes and build cultures where both individuals and organisations can thrive.
At some point, the job of managing people expanded. Nobody sent an announcement. The job title stayed the same. The salary didn't always change. But the list of things managers are now expected to handle grew: career coaching, mental health conversations, conflict mediation, team motivation, and sometimes just being the person someone calls when everything falls apart. Four essays on how that happened, and what it costs.
How one bad appointment can do more damage than months of poor management.
When someone lands a role they don't deserve, the people around them lose faith in the whole system, not just the person in front of them. And the manager left explaining it is usually the one who had nothing to do with the decision. This piece looks at why nepotism is so corrosive to team trust, and what it means for everyone who stays and keeps doing the work anyway.
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How managers form impressions of their team faster than they realise. And how hard those impressions are to reverse.
Once someone gets labelled as "the quiet one" or "the difficult one" or "the one who needs hand-holding," that label tends to stick. The person wearing it rarely gets a chance to show they've moved past it. This piece looks at how those assessments form, why managers hold onto them well after the evidence has moved on, and what it takes to actually see your team as they are now.
We tend to blame ego, control, or trust issues. The psychology might be more complicated than that.
Micromanagement rarely starts with someone deciding to become a terrible boss. It usually starts with a project going sideways, a deadline moving, or an outcome that has your name on it that you don't fully control. This piece looks at what pressure does to leadership behaviour, and why telling people to just delegate rarely fixes it.
How managers became the default support system for everything from burnout to breakups.
One of my direct reports once added her menstrual cycle to the shared work calendar. Not an appointment. The cycle itself. An extreme example, but people share far more of themselves at work than they used to, and somebody has to receive all of that. More often than not, that person is the manager. This piece looks at what happens when the job description keeps expanding to include everything else.
How's the depth of today's edition?
If any of these land differently read together, I'd genuinely love to hear it. Hit reply.
Until next week,
Frank
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