What Becoming a Manager Revealed — ‘So That’s Why My Boss Did That

📖 40-Something Manager Field Notes — View All ▶ Part 1: What Becoming a Manager Revealed — ‘So That’s Why My Boss Did That’ (this post) Part 2: My First 1on1 Failed — Why the Manual Doesn’t Work, and the 5 Principles I Use Instead Part 3: Delegating to New Hires — Four Methods, and Why ‘Just Trust Them’ Fails Most Often Part 4: Teaching New Hires AI — Why the First Month Decides How They Work for Life Part 5: Deadline Negotiation — 3 Sentences to Use Instead of ‘I Can’t’ Part 6: Salary Negotiation — Three Variables Bigger Than the Amount

Early in my career, there were decisions my manager made that I just couldn’t understand. “Why is this so hard? It’s clearly A.” “Why won’t he just give us a straight answer?” I’d think to myself, half frustrated, half certain that I would never run a team like that. Then I became the manager. And about half of those decisions suddenly made sense. The other half still don’t — but they don’t bother me the same way anymore.

These are the things I only understood after becoming a manager.

How I Saw It as a Junior

The decisions that frustrated me back then mostly fell into a few patterns.

• Decisions took forever. “This is obviously A. Why are we having three meetings about it?”
• No clear answers. “Should we go this way?” “Let’s hold on it a bit longer.”
• Time spent in strange places. Meetings that had nothing to do with our team, while his own work piled up.
• Apparent favoritism. Same mistake, but one person got a one-liner and another got a long talk.
• No real reasons for decisions. “Because that’s what came down from above.” End of explanation.

At the time, all of this looked like incompetence or avoidance. I’d think, “If I were in that chair, I’d never do it this way.”

Then I Sat in the Chair

The same scenes started looking different. The first thing I realized was that fast decisions aren’t always good decisions.

As a junior, a decision had two inputs: the problem and the solution. As a manager, it has at least five.

Input	Junior’s view	Manager’s view
The problem itself	✅ Sees it	✅ Sees it
The solution	✅ Sees it	✅ Sees it
Team members’ bandwidth and skills	❌ Invisible	✅ Active variable
Organizational politics above	❌ Invisible	✅ Active variable
Downstream effects in 3–6 months	❌ Invisible	✅ Active variable

About half the decisions where I thought “this is obviously A” had a real reason not to go with A. The trouble was explaining that reason to the whole team every single time. Sometimes there wasn’t enough time. Sometimes the explanation itself would have damaged someone else’s trust. Sometimes it was just a gut feeling that didn’t translate into words.

What I Got Wrong — and What I Now See

When I sat down to write out my old frustrations, the exercise turned into a two-column journal.

Junior — ‘how I read it then’	Manager — ‘how it looks now’
He just keeps delaying decisions	Forcing a call before the information is in costs more later
He won’t give us a straight answer	Sometimes giving the answer traps the team inside that answer
He spends too much time on other meetings	That meeting decides our team’s budget next quarter
He plays favorites	The same message has to be short for one person and long for another, or it doesn’t land
He won’t tell us the real reason	Sharing everything from upstairs would distract the team from their work

Writing this out, I realized my old reads weren’t wrong. From that vantage point, those readings were natural. My field of view was narrow — and I didn’t know it was narrow.

What I Still Don’t Get

Not everything makes sense, even now. There are still calls from above me that frustrate me. But the frustration is different.

As a junior, I assumed bad calls meant the boss was bad at the job. Now I assume bad calls mean the boss is a person. Maybe he didn’t sleep. Maybe he just got chewed out by his own boss. Maybe something at home is heavy. Maybe he just miscalculated the cost of that call. Sitting in the chair is the only way to learn that the person in the chair is still a person.

Gallup’s State of the American Manager analysis found that managers account for roughly 70% of the variance in employee engagement. In the same body of research, Gallup also concluded that only about 1 in 10 people have the natural talent to manage. The other nine are figuring it out on the job. The frustrating bosses I had as a junior were probably part of that nine — same as I am now.

What Becoming a Manager Really Teaches

There are things you only see from the chair. That sounds like a cliché, and from outside the chair, it lands as a cliché. From inside, you realize the cliché is just a tightly compressed version of someone’s experience.

Looking back, there’s one thing I should have asked my old bosses more often: “Can you give me one line on why?” It’s the request I most want to hear from my own team now. Receiving a decision and understanding a decision are different things, and the second one is what makes a team durable.

In an earlier post, I wrote about generational change from a mid-career manager’s view. This piece is the prequel — how that view got built in the first place. A manager’s calls are really the sum of the chairs they’ve sat in. From the junior’s chair once, from the manager’s chair next. Good collaboration starts with admitting that the view changes when the chair changes.

There’s a Korean film I don’t particularly love, but its title has stuck with me — Hong Sang-soo’s Right Now, Wrong Then (2015). Sometimes I want to flip it: right then, wrong now. Either direction, the title is brilliant. The view I had as a junior was right for that time. The view I have now is right for now. Maybe what matters isn’t which is correct, but never forgetting that the landscape changes when the chair changes.