I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a manager I had, and I kind of hate admitting this lol, but I think I understand her a lot better now than I did when I was actually working for her.
At the time, some of her feedback really annoyed me. I felt like I was doing a lot, working hard, getting good results, and instead of just recognizing that, she would keep pushing me on things like having a bigger impact, making things scalable, thinking beyond my own team, and not just solving the problem in front of me.
There were definitely times when I walked away thinking, “Why isn’t what I’m doing enough?”
Now that I have some distance from it, I realize that probably wasn’t what she was saying at all.
She was trying to get me to think differently.
A lot of the things she pushed me on — being more independent, bringing solutions instead of just problems, thinking about whether something would still work without me, influencing people outside of my immediate team — are things I understand much better now.
And honestly, some of the feedback that bothered me the most at the time is probably the feedback that stuck with me the most.
I still don’t think she was right about everything, and I’m sure I wasn’t either. But I can appreciate now that she wasn’t trying to make things harder for me. She was trying to help me grow, even if I didn’t always receive it that way.
It’s funny how sometimes you need to leave a situation before you can really understand it.
So yeah… if you’re a manager who has ever given someone advice and wondered if any of it actually landed, sometimes it does. It just might take a while.
I’m grateful now in a way I probably wasn’t capable of being at the time.