Yaniv Preiss

A good manager helps people do their best work. They remove obstacles, attract and develop talent, create clarity, and make it possible for a team to achieve more together than its members could achieve alone.

An anti-manager does the opposite.

An anti-manager treats the people they manage not as individuals with ambitions, expertise, and potential, but as resources to be controlled, risks to be contained, and instruments for advancing their own career. They migth create an anti-team, as their priority is not the success of their team, the satisfaction of their customers, or the growth of their employees. It is protecting their position, maintaining control, and ensuring that nobody threatens their authority.

They may have the title, the authority, and even the appearance of a successful manager. They may know how to present themselves to senior leadership and navigate organizational politics. But beneath the surface, they undermine the very purpose of management, and definitely an ethical one.

And the damage they cause can extend far beyond the people who report to them.

Power Over People, Instead of Power Through People

The anti-manager does not see their role as making people more effective. They see it as keeping people in their place.

A talented employee who wants to grow, take on more responsibility, or contribute beyond their assigned duties is not necessarily seen as an asset. They may be perceived as a threat. Someone who challenges the status quo, proposes better solutions, or demonstrates expertise beyond their job title can expose the manager’s limitations or make their own position less secure.

The response is often to limit that person’s opportunities.

Keep them focused on their narrow function. Deny them exposure to senior stakeholders. Avoid delegating meaningful responsibilities. Never ask them to represent the team in important meetings. Delay promotions, resist salary increases, and dismiss requests for professional development.

When the employee proposes an innovative solution, the anti-manager may criticize it before properly evaluating it, quietly bury it, or ensure that it never receives the attention it deserves. Even when the proposal comes with evidence of significant revenue or cost savings, reduced development time, or benefits to other teams, the numbers may be ignored.

The employee might be repeatedly told that they are merely a low-level executer of tasks who should concentrate on those, regardless of the value they actually deliver.

This is not performance management. It is the management of perceived threats.

The anti-manager is not asking, “How can I help this person contribute more?” They are asking, “How can I make sure this person does not become more powerful, visible, or influential than I am?”

The Suppression of Talent

One of the most destructive characteristics of the anti-manager is their ability to turn initiative into a liability.

In a healthy organization, employees are encouraged to identify problems, experiment with solutions, challenge assumptions, and share ideas. Not every proposal will succeed, and not every experiment deserves investment. The manager’s job is to evaluate these contributions fairly, help refine promising ideas, and ensure that worthwhile work receives appropriate support.

The anti-manager reverses this relationship.

Initiative invites criticism. Innovation creates friction. Success is minimized. Ideas are ignored or appropriated. Employees learn that doing more than expected does not lead to recognition or opportunity, but to more resistance.

Imagine an engineer who develops a proof of concept for a technical improvement at a global scale, validates the expected benefits with data, and demonstrates that the solution could save substantial time or money. Rather than exploring the opportunity, their manager dismisses the work, conceals it from others, or finds reasons to keep the engineer focused on routine tasks.

Over time, the engineer faces a choice: continue investing effort in work that may be suppressed, or stop trying.

Most people eventually adapt to the incentives they experience. If initiative is punished and compliance is rewarded, initiative declines.

The anti-manager then has the audacity to complain that their employees lack ownership, creativity, or ambition. They have created the very behavior they criticize.

Feedback as a Weapon

Feedback should help employees understand their strengths, recognize areas for improvement, and take concrete steps toward more effective future performance.

For the anti-manager, feedback can become a means of maintaining dominance.

Positive feedback is conspicuously absent, even when employees deliver measurable results. Achievements are treated as ordinary expectations, attributed to circumstances, or dismissed as irrelevant. There is always a reason why the work was not good enough.

General discontent is prevalent, and specific negative feedback is delivered selectively and often too late to be useful. Concerns are withheld until the formal performance review, when the employee has little opportunity to address them before the assessment is recorded.

Instead of providing timely examples, discussing expectations, and agreeing on corrective actions, the anti-manager presents a verdict.

The employee is labeled a low performer. Their accomplishments are discounted. Their shortcomings are documented for senior leadership, while the evidence that contradicts the assessment receives little attention, even, or especially for employees who have impact of two role levels above their current official level.

This creates an environment in which performance reviews stop being tools for development and become instruments for controlling careers.

The employee cannot reliably predict what success looks like because the criteria are unclear, inconsistently applied, or disconnected from actual results.

And without fair recognition, there is little reason to believe that exceptional effort will lead to anything better.

Neglect Is Also a Management Decision

Not every anti-manager is openly aggressive. Some cause just as much damage through indifference.

They frequently cancel one-to-ones and arrive late without warning because they to deal with supposedly more important matters. They rarely ask about an employee’s ambitions, provide coaching, or discuss how to overcome obstacles.

They do not delegate meaningful responsibilities because delegation requires trust and creates opportunities for others to grow. They do not invest in preparing employees for larger roles because their development is not a priority.

When an employee needs support, the manager is unavailable. When the employee makes a mistake, the manager appears.

The message is clear: your time is not valuable, your development is your own problem, and your career matters only when it becomes relevant to me.

Management is not merely assigning work and monitoring output. It includes creating the conditions in which people can perform, learn, and take on greater responsibility.

A manager who consistently neglects these responsibilities is not simply busy. They are failing at a fundamental part of the job.

Divide and Conquer

The anti-manager understands that informed, connected employees are harder to control than isolated ones.

Knowledge sharing allows people to solve problems independently. Collaboration makes the team less dependent on a single authority. Transparency helps employees understand decisions and challenge inconsistencies. Collective expertise makes it easier to identify poor leadership.

These are all desirable characteristics of a high-performing team. They can also feel threatening to a manager whose authority depends on controlling access to information.

So the anti-manager may discourage collaboration, withhold context, distribute incomplete information, or prevent team members from helping one another. Employees are kept focused on their individual responsibilities rather than encouraged to solve shared problems.

The result is a collection of isolated workers rather than a functioning team.

A particularly damaging variation is favoritism. Employees who share the manager’s background, personal loyalties, or preferred style may receive opportunities and promotions despite evident weaker performance, while stronger contributors are overlooked.

The problem is not that managers have trusted colleagues or that people with similar backgrounds necessarily favor one another. The problem is using personal affinity and perceived loyalty instead of fair, job-related criteria to allocate opportunities.

When employees see that advancement depends more on pleasing the manager than on delivering results, meritocracy becomes a slogan rather than a reality.

Trust erodes. Collaboration becomes risky. People begin protecting their own positions instead of working toward shared goals.

The anti-manager has successfully centralized control, but the organization has paid for it with its collective capability.

Punishing Questions and Dissent

Healthy teams need people who ask questions, challenge assumptions, and point out problems before they become expensive failures.

The anti-manager often interprets these behaviors as challenges to authority.

A question becomes an act of disrespect. A suggestion becomes an attempt to undermine the manager. Disagreement becomes disloyalty.

Sometimes the response is public anger. Sometimes it is humiliation, exclusion, a poor performance assessment, or the quiet withdrawal of future opportunities.

The punishment does not have to be explicit. Employees quickly learn to recognize the consequences of speaking up. Eventually, they stop asking questions, raising concerns, and offering ideas.

From the manager’s perspective, the team may appear more cooperative and easier to manage. Meetings become quieter. Disagreements disappear. Decisions face less resistance.

But silence is not agreement, and compliance is not commitment. The absence of dissent may simply mean that employees no longer believe it is safe or worthwhile to contribute their judgment.

This is how organizations destroy psychological safety without necessarily realizing what they have lost. They remove the conditions under which people can identify mistakes, challenge bad decisions, and prevent avoidable failures.

The anti-manager mistakes the absence of resistance for evidence of good leadership.

Industrial Peace at Any Cost

Perhaps the most revealing feature of the anti-manager is their indifference to whether the team is actually succeeding.

Healthy management requires attention to outcomes. Are customers receiving value? Are important problems being solved? Are teams meeting their commitments? Are processes improving? Are employees becoming more capable? When results fall short, what needs to change?

The anti-manager is often far less interested in these questions than their role requires.

OKRs and KPIs may exist, but they are treated as administrative artifacts. Targets can be missed repeatedly without serious investigation. Individual performance can be poor without meaningful intervention. Team processes can remain dysfunctional even when everyone knows they need improvement.

Urgent customer problems may be neglected while employees work on less important tasks. Bottlenecks persist. Work piles up. Opportunities to reduce costs or improve delivery are ignored.

Meanwhile, the manager continues to attend meetings, produce status reports, manage perceptions, and cultivate relationships with senior leadership.

The objective is not necessarily to achieve good results. It is to preserve a stable arrangement in which the manager remains comfortable, influential, and unchallenged.

Call it industrial peace: a workplace in which nothing disruptive happens, nobody asks uncomfortable questions, and everyone learns to live with problems that should have been solved long ago.

This kind of peace is expensive.

Customers experience delays and poor service. Employees lose motivation. Strong contributors leave or disengage. Remaining employees become accustomed to dysfunction. The organization loses the benefits of innovation and continuous improvement. Employees believe that managers are politicians, liars, and swear to never become one.

The organization may look stable because nobody is making waves. In reality, it is accumulating organizational debt.

Managing Up, Exploiting Down

The anti-manager often understands something important about organizational life: senior leaders do not always see what happens inside a team.

That gap creates an opportunity.

Instead of directing their energy toward improving the team’s performance, the anti-manager invests in appearing successful to their own superiors. They control the narrative, emphasize favorable developments, minimize failures, and present the team’s achievements as evidence of their own effectiveness.

When employees produce valuable work, the manager may take the credit. When results disappoint, the employees become the problem.

This arrangement allows the manager to benefit from the team’s efforts without taking full responsibility for its outcomes.

The employee who creates a major improvement receives little recognition. The manager who presents the improvement to leadership receives visibility. The team that misses important targets is blamed for poor execution, while the manager avoids scrutiny of the decisions, constraints, and working conditions that contributed to the failure.

In this environment, managing upward replaces managing the team.

The anti-manager becomes skilled at protecting their reputation rather than improving their performance.

And because senior leadership may see only the polished narrative, the people closest to the actual work can struggle to make the truth visible.

Hiring for Obedience

The anti-manager’s approach to hiring follows the same logic.

A strong candidate can bring new expertise, challenge established assumptions, expose inefficient practices, and deliver results that raise expectations for everyone. For a confident manager, these are reasons to hire them.

For an insecure, unethical manager, they can be reasons to reject them.

The anti-manager may prefer candidates who appear compliant, undemanding, and unlikely to challenge authority, even when stronger candidates offer significantly more relevant experience or potential.

This preference can be disguised as a desire for cultural fit, teamwork, humility, or alignment. Those qualities can be legitimate hiring criteria. But when they are used as proxies for obedience, they become tools for protecting the manager rather than selecting the best people for the work.

The consequences compound over time.

Strong candidates are rejected. Capable employees become frustrated or leave. The team loses expertise and ambition. The manager surrounds themselves with people who are less likely to question their decisions.

Eventually, the manager may find themselves leading a team that struggles to deliver. Rather than reconsidering their hiring choices or management approach, they blame the team’s capabilities.

They have optimized for personal security at the expense of organizational performance.

Why the Organization Should Care

It is tempting to treat a bad manager as an isolated personnel problem. Replace the individual, address a complaint, or encourage them to improve.

Sometimes that is enough. But the anti-manager can survive for years because their behavior is not always immediately visible in conventional measures of managerial success.

They may be reliable in meetings, politically astute, and good at presenting their work. They may maintain low levels of visible conflict by discouraging disagreement. They may even deliver acceptable short-term results by relying on the efforts of a few talented employees whose contributions they simultaneously suppress.

Meanwhile, the costs remain distributed across the organization.

They appear as lost innovation, preventable turnover, slow delivery, unresolved customer problems, low engagement, and employees who have stopped trying to improve things.

These costs are particularly difficult to measure because the organization rarely sees the opportunities that never materialized. It cannot easily count the ideas that were abandoned, the engineers who stopped proposing solutions, or the capable candidates who were rejected because they seemed too independent.

A team can therefore look adequately staffed and operational while performing far below its potential.

The anti-manager is not merely failing to develop talent. They are actively destroying some of the value that talent could have created.

And when the organization promotes such managers, rewards their political skills, or tolerates their behavior because they appear manageable, it sends a message to everyone watching: results matter less than relationships with power.

The Difference Between a Difficult Manager and an Anti-Manager

Not every unpopular decision is evidence of bad management.

Managers sometimes reject proposals because the business case is weak. They sometimes delay promotions because an employee has not yet demonstrated the required capabilities. They give timely difficult feedback because performance genuinely needs to improve. They must also balance competing priorities, manage budgets, and make decisions that disappoint people.

Good management does not mean making everyone happy.

The distinction lies in the intent, consistency, and consequences of the behavior.

A good manager can explain a decision, evaluate evidence, acknowledge contributions, and help an employee understand what needs to change. They can disagree without humiliating people. They can hire stronger people without feeling threatened by them. They can share credit because their own success is connected to the success of the team.

The anti-manager repeatedly does the opposite. They suppress contributions without a sound business reason, apply standards inconsistently, withhold opportunities, punish dissent, and prioritize their own standing over the team’s ability to deliver.

One poor decision does not make someone an anti-manager. A persistent pattern of behavior that systematically protects the manager’s power at the expense of people and results is the more meaningful signal.

This distinction matters because the goal is not to eliminate managerial authority. It is to ensure that authority serves a legitimate purpose.

What Should We Do About It?

The responsibility for addressing anti-management cannot rest solely on the employees who suffer from it.

Employees can document their contributions, preserve evidence of measurable results, seek feedback from people outside their reporting line, and use appropriate channels to raise concerns. These actions may help protect their careers and make the situation more visible.

But they cannot compensate indefinitely for a manager who is determined to suppress them. Telling employees to communicate better, demonstrate more ownership, or build stronger relationships misses the point when the manager systematically penalizes those very behaviors.

The organization must also act.

First, evaluate managers on more than their ability to manage upward. Conduct skip-level 1:1s, examine team outcomes, employee development, retention, customer impact, collaboration, and whether performance problems are addressed fairly.

Second, make performance management transparent. Employees should understand expectations, receive timely feedback, and have a meaningful opportunity to respond to assessments that conflict with documented results.

Third, scrutinize promotion and hiring decisions. Look for consistent, job-related criteria and investigate persistent disparities that cannot be explained by performance or role requirements.

Fourth, create credible ways for employees to raise concerns without retaliation. A feedback mechanism that records complaints but leaves employees exposed to the same manager is not a solution.

Finally, hold managers accountable for the environment they create. A manager who repeatedly undermines collaboration, suppresses initiative, or damages the team’s ability to deliver should not be rewarded merely because they maintain good relationships with senior leadership.

Sometimes clear expectations, feedback and coaching can change a manager’s behavior. Sometimes the manager lacks the necessary skills and needs support to develop them. And sometimes the pattern is sufficiently persistent that changing the manager’s role or removing them is the responsible decision.

The organization has to be willing to distinguish between these cases rather than assuming that every leadership problem can be solved through another training session.

Management Is a Responsibility, Not a Privilege

The anti-manager reveals an uncomfortable truth about organizational life: giving someone authority over other people does not automatically make them a leader.

A management title is not a reward for personal superiority. It is an ethical responsibility to help a group of people achieve results, develop their capabilities, and work together effectively.

The manager’s authority exists for a reason. It should enable decisions, resolve conflicts, allocate resources, remove obstacles, and create conditions for success. It should not become a personal asset to defend against the people the manager is supposed to support.

When managers treat employees as instruments of control, the organization loses more than motivation. It loses initiative, trust, expertise, and the willingness to confront problems honestly.

When managers hire for obedience rather than capability, suppress ideas rather than evaluate them, and pursue visibility rather than outcomes, they may protect their own positions for a while. But they undermine the conditions that make a team valuable in the first place.

The ultimate test of management is not whether people comply with you, whether your superiors like you, or whether you can maintain control without visible conflict.

It is whether the people, resources, and authority entrusted to you produce better outcomes because of how you lead – business outcomes and retaining the best talent.

A good manager makes the team more capable. An anti-manager makes the individuals more dependent on the manager.

One builds an organization that can succeed beyond their own involvement. The other builds a position they are afraid to lose.

Organizations that fail to recognize the difference should not be surprised when their best people stop contributing, start leaving, or decide that management itself is something to avoid.