Caretaking can, of course, be healthy—but being too caring can often manifest in managers constantly picking up the slack for their employees and “rescuing” their team. This behavior hurts employees’ growth and often makes managers feel like they are being taken advantage of.
Men and women are equally likely to be caretaker-style managers. But that quality can manifest—and be perceived—in different ways. For men, this may look like being a superhero, jumping in when they notice their team is busy. Women, on the other hand, often take their team’s feelings into consideration, not wanting anyone to feel badly if they push too hard, Nawaz shares.
“In many ways, that’s great,” Nawaz says. “It’s that richness of emotional intelligence and that awareness of my impact on other people, which helps with all the other traps that we talk about.”
Through her coaching, Nawaz has heard from women who get that feedback when they are first promoted to manager. “I realize, ‘Oh, you’re plenty strategic. There’s nothing wrong with your strategic thinking,’” she says. “It’s some of that caretaking…and how you’re doing that that get[s] in the way.”
Nawaz, who was Microsoft’s senior director of HR, wrote this book after reflecting on how she changed after her boss left the company—and left Nawaz in charge of professional development for Microsoft’s 90,000 employees. Plus, with increased responsibility came increased visibility, as she was now working more directly with Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and former CEO Steve Ballmer.
She wasn’t the boss she wanted or needed to be, she discovered. “Without realizing it, I slid from being a caring and supportive boss to one who was snippy and belligerent,” Nawaz writes. She lost connection with her team. Feeling the pressure that came with a bigger job, she became a micromanager. In You’re the Boss, Nawaz describes a low point: when she made team members come in early to individually test the 50 pens gifted in swag bags after an attendee received a defective one. A colleague staged an intervention, and told her she wasn’t aware how her actions were coming across to her team.
“We love to put these binary judgments [on people]: good boss, bad boss. Good person, bad person. No! All of that is inside us,” says Nawaz. “For me, it was about coming clean, showing people that all of us succumb to this, and being as open and vulnerable as I could be. Was it easy? No. But if I am, then other people hopefully are as well, and then they can get to what’s really at play.”
