I once worked with an insightful friend of mine and one day we decided to hire a former colleague of his from an earlier job. His colleague was a great software developer but apparently (in the eyes of my insightful friend) had some work challenges at their previous company, all of the sort that this series would hopefully have minimized, had it existed then. But my insightful friend once made this comment about his former genius-but-difficult-to-work-with colleague: “Working again with so-and-so,” he said (filling in his name there), “I really like this version of him better than the previous version.”
Years later, I still remember this exact wording because it captured an important but counter-intuitive point about human nature, and dealing with people—that’s true dealing with everyone, from employees to (especially) your own manager. This person you’re working with now isn’t the same person he was at his previous job, who wasn’t the same person at a job 5 years ago, who won’t be the same person a few years from now.
Each individual goes through different moments, different challenges, different ups and downs.
You don’t know what’s happening in your manager’s personal life. Maybe he’s getting a divorce so he’s taking it out on you. Maybe he’s under immense pressure for his unit to demonstrate awesome results. Maybe he has an illness he’s grappling with but isn’t comfortable talking about. Maybe he has an undiagnosed illness. (In fact, the heart of empathy, I argue in another book I wrote just on this topic, is in imagining the backstories that you will never know of other people, to the point where it explains their seemingly bad behavior to you.) As an old friend’s mother would often observe to her kids, in an observation that took me years to appreciate thoroughly, “imagine your schoolteachers taking a poo.”
When your manager is angry at you or being irrational, he may know something you don’t. Or he may be having a bad day. Or bad year. But in any case, it’s not personal, so don’t take it as such. And realize that as he grows and changes, he may not be the same person next year as he is now.
MIT’s Marvin Minsky makes a stronger version of this. His agency model of the mind basically argues—in my super-simplified retelling—that each human is a set of conflicting and contradictory emotions, desires, intentions, preferences, that all disagree with each other. Think about the angel and devil whispering into your ears, in the classic cartoons, but hundreds of angels and devils on every little issue. Each of these is an “agent,” in his language. And who you are at any specific moment is just whichever combination of agents happens to be winning the argument inside your mind at that particular moment. And should another agent be winning tomorrow; you’ll be a bit different and make different decisions. And taken over time, Agents A and B increasingly win less often, while Agents C and D increasingly win more. And that is how one version of your human operating system slowly installs an upgraded version. Or at least what those around you hope is an upgraded version.
