Too Liked to Be Useful | Yusuf Aytas

I often get surprised when I hear someone say they like a certain manager. I usually have very different reservations about them in my head. The gap between what I think and what I hear can be hard to reconcile. It took me a lot of time to realize why. They give happy answers to everyone. They are easy to deal with.

Here’s my hypothesis. When too many people like a manager, it’s fishy. A manager should not be liked by everyone. If you are doing the job properly, it is not actually possible.

Management is trade-offs, and trade-offs disappoint people. You have limited capacity, limited money, limited time, limited attention, limited promotion slots, and limited tolerance for risk. Someone will want an exception. Someone will want a date before the work is understood. Someone will want to avoid hearing that their performance is not good enough.

So if nobody is ever disappointed with you, there is a hidden cost. Maybe other leaders love you because your teams keep absorbing messy dependencies. Maybe your directs love you because the standards are soft. Maybe your PMs love you because you rarely push back on dates.

Nice vs Useful

Being liked is a nice side effect. It cannot be an operating model. People confuse being nice with being useful. Nice makes the current conversation easier. Useful makes the next few months less painful. Those are not the same thing, and they are often opposites.

A nice manager says yes because the meeting is overwhelming. A good manager explains what needs to be true before saying yes responsibly. A nice manager delays feedback because the person is struggling. A useful manager gives the feedback while there is still time to do something with it.

No Soup for Happy Answers

Your Peers

Easy to work with has a good version and a dangerous one. The good version means other leaders can actually move work through you. The dangerous one means your org is just easy to push work into. I am not arguing for territorial nonsense where every dependency becomes a political battle. That is exhausting and usually useless. But the difference is important.

That is why my default answer is often no. I am not trying to be difficult. We can only do so much, and I need to understand what we can actually take on at a given time. If we let things loose, our own roadmap gets worse. Saying no is protecting people from priority churn, protecting teams from weak handoffs, and protecting the organization from work entering through side doors.

That same tension shows up with your peers. Everyone wants the best for their people, including them. Naturally, there is conflict. Calibration is one place where it becomes visible. If an engineer did strong work, defend it. If a manager built a healthier team under ugly constraints, make that visible. If someone challenges the impact, bring evidence. If another leader tells a cleaner story, get better at telling the truth with force.

You still cannot win every fight. That is alright. But there is a difference between losing a fight and never having one. Weak managers come back with fog. The budget was tight. More visibility next cycle. Maybe it is true. Maybe it is just what is left of a fight they avoided.

Resourcing is the same trade-off in a different room. Your org needs people. So does your sister org. Everyone pulls from the same resourcing pool. If you do not make the case, or you do not fight when the case is strong, your peers may like you. Of course they may. You are easier to negotiate against.

Your org pays for it. You keep running with too few people, too little seniority, or too much work mapped to the same two engineers. Growth slows, dependency risk goes up, and good people get tired. Eventually, people start to read the pattern.

Your Directs

If all your directs like you, you may not be distinguishing between low and high performers. You are supposed to do that. Period. That feels unfair to a lot of managers, because they think fairness means treating everyone the same. It does not. Fairness means the bar is real, visible, and applied with judgment. Someone who consistently raises the quality of the system should not have the same experience as someone who creates work for everyone around them.

A vague bar is the opposite of a visible one, and vagueness is comfortable. It makes the manager easier to like, because nobody has to hear anything too clearly. So low performers get more time, more interpretation, more benefit of the doubt, more "let's support them," and more "maybe the expectations were not clear."

Sometimes that is the right call. People need coaching, and a bad quarter does not make someone a bad employee. But there is a point where support turns into denial. The work is not at the bar, the team knows it, and the person probably knows it too.

Past that point, everyone starts working around the problem. High performers pick up the gap. The manager compensates. The team builds local hacks to...