A plant manager asked me in a corridor whether his team disliked him. He had evidence he trusted: the room going quiet when he walked in, one-to-ones that kept getting moved, and a resignation he had not seen coming. He wanted a verdict. I asked what he had done in the past month that the team could actually have seen. It took him a while to answer, and the pause was more informative than anything he said afterwards.
Dislike is probably the wrong diagnosis
Dislike is a feeling. Distrust is a prediction, and prediction is what people actually run on at work. Most employees can survive a manager they find abrasive. Very few can survive a manager whose next reaction they cannot guess, because guessing your manager correctly is a survival skill, and doing it all day is exhausting.
This matters because the diagnosis determines the fix. If the problem is dislike, you might organise a team lunch and a slightly warmer tone. If the problem is distrust, the lunch makes things worse, because it reads as a tactic and the team will spend it wondering what you want.
A team that can predict a difficult manager often stays and complains. A team that cannot predict a reasonable one leaves quietly, and the exit interview blames the role.
Distrust has symptoms, and none look like dislike:
- people bring you the version of the news that is already safe to hear
- decisions get settled in corridors before the meeting starts
- the meeting itself becomes a performance, with quick agreement and no dissent
- good people ask for a transfer rather than a conversation
The three behaviours that do the damage
Managers worry about the wrong things: being demanding, saying no, holding a standard. Those cost very little as long as they are consistent. What actually costs is smaller and more ordinary.
Inconsistent standards. The same missed deadline gets a shrug on Tuesday and a lecture on Friday. The team’s conclusion is not that you were stressed. It is that the rules are not the rules, you are. Once people believe the standard moves with the manager’s mood, they stop investing in meeting it, because effort against a moving standard is a bad bet.
Public correction. The correction may be entirely correct. The audience is the problem. People remember the exposure long after they have forgotten the content, and the lesson they take is not “do not make that mistake” but “do not bring this manager information that could go wrong”. You have traded one corrected error for a permanent reduction in what you are told.
Taking credit. You present the team’s work upward and the names come out. Or, more commonly, they simply do not. It is a small act, repeated, and it is remembered precisely, because it answers a question every employee is quietly asking: when this goes well, will I exist?
Each one attacks something different: fairness, safety, recognition. Each is cheap to do and expensive to undo.
What your team is actually tracking
None of this is measured by a survey. It is measured continuously and mostly unconsciously, in small tests that nobody writes down.
| What you believe you are signalling | What the team is testing | How they test it |
|---|---|---|
| “My door is open” | Whether an awkward question gets answered or routed | Asking something with an inconvenient answer |
| “I am fair” | Whether two similar mistakes get two similar responses | Watching how a colleague was treated |
| “I back my team” | Whether you defend the decision upward or relay the criticism down | What happens after the next escalation |
| “I develop people” | Whether you can name something specific they did well | The next review conversation |
The fourth row is the one managers fail most often without noticing. “You are doing well” is not feedback. “The way you handled that supplier call, holding the price without souring the relationship, is exactly what I want the team doing” is feedback, and it takes eight seconds.
The test that settles whether it is true
Do not run an engagement survey to find out whether your own team trusts you. You will get a number about the company.
Use a smaller instrument. Name three things you did in the last fortnight that your team saw, and say what each one told them about how you operate. If you cannot name three, you are not managing the signal, only the intention, and the team can only see the signal.
The second instrument is harder. Ask one person, privately, what is one thing you do that makes their work harder than it needs to be. Then say thank you and change one thing. Do not explain yourself, do not add context, do not ask whether they really meant it. The value is entirely in what you do with the answer, and they will be watching for it within the week.
Trust is not the sum of what a manager intends, it is the sum of what a team could predict.
What to change first, in order
Sequence matters here. Predictability before warmth, because warmth offered by an unpredictable manager reads as a mood, not a relationship.
- Fix one inconsistent standard. Pick the thing you know you handle differently depending on the day: late arrival, leave approval, a missed deadline. Write down what the response will be, tell the team, and hold it for a quarter, including on the days you do not feel like it. Consistency is the cheapest trust available to you.
- Move correction behind a closed door. Praise in public, correct in private, every time. If you have to correct in the room, correct the process rather than the person, and follow up privately the same day.
- Name people upward. When you present team work, say who did which part, in the same message, in writing. One sentence, highest return on this list.
- Then do the warmth. Team lunches and genuine interest in people’s lives are good things. They do not repair distrust, and they work much better once the standard is predictable.
Do not announce any of this. Saying “I am going to be more approachable” turns a change into a performance the team will watch and grade. Change the behaviour and let them notice, which takes about six weeks.
If you cannot see your own pattern, that is the specific thing coaching is for: not encouragement, but a second pair of eyes on what you actually do under pressure. If the pattern runs across a whole layer of managers, it is a programme problem rather than an individual one, and treating it as individual is how the same corridor conversation keeps happening in different buildings.
There is a limit worth stating. Sometimes the behaviour is not a character flaw but a consequence of a decision made two years ago, when someone was promoted for technical excellence and given no preparation for managing people. The behaviour can still be changed. But the promotion decision deserves a second look, because otherwise you are coaching a person into a job nobody equipped them for. The pattern behind this is well documented: people do not leave jobs, they leave managers.