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Blast Radius

People management is an incredibly hard job and very few do it truly well. Read this article on the lessons learned first time on the job.  One observation particularly resonated with me - about the impact of a manager expressing destructive emotions when upset with a team member who is upset with them

The only difference is that when you do it, it’s worse. Your blast radius is so large that if you let yourself get lost in your emotions, you’ll never be the safety net that your team needs you to be.

Reading this reminded me of a manager I once had - H. We hit it off well when I first started, the person was extremely mercurial and it took me a while to understand how they operated. We did good work together for the most part - there was much to learn from H and I did. And then there was the time, when they completely lost it with one of my colleagues. 

Things spiraled out from there and though the rest of us who witnessed this meltdown were not in the line of fire, everything changed from that point on. We stopped being a team in spirit almost instantly. We did not feel safe with each other or our manager anymore. In months to come the team disintegrated completely - most moved on to other jobs. The ones left behind found ways to survive the toxicity. That is the blast radius the author speaks of I think.
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