A new manager once approached me, a few months into her job. She was finding it hard. Hardest of all was the lack of gratitude. She had sorted out several problems for her team, but no one had said “thank you”. All they did was complain about something else.
You have teenagers, I said. How often did they thank her? She smiled. Hardly ever. How much did they complain? All the time. Well, being a manager was like parenting teenagers, I told her. As with teenagers, it doesn’t occur to your team that you have your own needs or might benefit from a kind word.
Many management commentators have written about the loneliness that comes with promotion to a senior job: the sudden wariness of those who used to be your friends, and their (often well-founded) suspicion that you now have to take the organisation’s side rather than theirs.