Keeping it short today. Two things I've noticed lately.
First: I've been reading novels a lot more.
When I read fiction, I feel my emotions shifting in finer increments.
Of course I feel joy, anger, sadness, and the rest while focusing on work every day.
But the thresholds for each of those feelings seem to have risen.
I suspect one benefit of reading novels is that it lowers those emotional thresholds.
I do worry it might make me overly sensitive — but being able to notice subtle changes feels meaningful to me, so I want to keep maintaining those thresholds.
Second: a while back I saw a colleague giving a subordinate a fairly harsh talking-to. It was close to what you'd call dressing someone down.
Even as an outsider, it didn't feel pleasant — and I tended to empathize more with the person being dressed down.
I think I understand that it's extremely hard, in running an organization, for everyone to work autonomously and happily.
About the only ways I can imagine realizing that are filtering for only high-level people, or basically not scaling the organization and running it only among people who already trust each other.
"I want to work happily," "let subordinates do what they want," "flat organizations" — there are elements worth adopting in part, but from my experience so far they're quite hard, and can even feel like idealism.
That's why, even when I see a colleague dressing someone down and it doesn't feel good, I can fully understand the necessity.
At the least, dismissing it with a phrase like "lack of management skill" is itself a lack of imagination.
Limited to managing subordinates: management that just tries to keep them happy is out of the question — it's basically just taking the easy way out. Management that absorbs every opinion and grants every wish is often held up as the ideal. But from the cases I've seen and heard that resemble that (within my observation range), I only know ones that were hell, not successes.
That said, management that only goes hard on people sits at a higher layer than the soft version — but it's like a strong drug, and I don't think it's sustainable.
(Needless to say, I'm not recommending harshness. I simply see management as a means to get people to do what needs to be done.)
Looking back, this is almost a "management 101" kind of theme.
I don't think it's a theme you need a final answer for. At best, looking at real cases and learning the patterns that clearly don't work might be the wisest approach.
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