"Let me tell you something that will happen after you become a manager: you're going to mess up. A lot. You'll give feedback that lands wrong and crushes someone's confidence. You'll make a decision that seems logical but turns out to be completely misguided. You'll forget that important thing you promised to do for someone on your team. You'll lose your temper in a meeting when you should have stayed calm."
"I recently read "Good Inside" by Dr. Becky Kennedy, a parenting book that completely changed how I think about this. She talks about how the most important parenting skill isn't being perfect - it's repair. When you inevitably lose your patience with your kid or handle something poorly, what matters most is going back and fixing it. Acknowledging what happened, taking responsibility, and reconnecting."
"Here's a pattern I see play out constantly: A manager commits to something without consulting the team. Maybe it's a feature at a client demo, a timeline in a board meeting, or just a "small favor" for another department. The team scrambles to deliver, working nights and weekends. They make it happen, but barely, and with real costs: technical debt, burned-out engineers, resentment building."
Managers will inevitably make mistakes such as giving poor feedback, making misguided decisions, breaking promises, and losing composure. The critical response is repair: acknowledge the mistake, take responsibility, apologize, and reconnect with affected team members. Failing to repair erodes trust, increases resentment, creates technical debt, and drives burnout and turnover. Repair requires humility, clear communication, concrete amends, and changes to prevent recurrence. Managers who model repair foster psychological safety, strengthen team cohesion, and retain talent by demonstrating accountability and prioritizing the team’s well-being over ego or appearances.
Read at Terrible Software
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