why do managers give such conflicting messaging?

A reader writes:

Do you have any insight as to why managers sometimes have conflicting messaging? Two examples:

• I work in a really intense field, directly affected by the current administration. I’ve been here for 15 years, and it’s so, so difficult right now, for our whole team. My boss recently advocated for a promotion for me, purportedly because of my excellent work under challenging circumstances. Boss announces the promotion to our team yesterday, giving me accolades in front of the team (though it’s just a title bump, no salary change, due to internal company policies, blah blah blah, to the team it’s announced as a normal promotion). Today, she tells me that I come in late too often and that she doesn’t want to micromanage me, but I really need to step it up and come in 30 minutes earlier each day. Like, why?! On a level, I get it, wanting to make sure I follow whatever policies boss prioritized, having equity for the team, etc. But I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around the seeming about-face. I feel so demoralized, and I’m not sure if that’s how I should feel, or if it’s just burnout related to the many other challenging things in our field right now. I would have honestly rather not have been promoted than this!

• My friend at a different company was given a promotion, with a title change and salary increase, to much fanfare. The very next month, they fired her because they said they were reorganizing. I’m assuming they knew about the reorganization when the promoted her. Friend is probably more upset than they would have been if they weren’t promoted.

Why do people do this?

You’re imagining this as all more cohesive than it is — that there’s a grand plan unifying all their actions, but very often there isn’t.

With your friend’s promotion and layoff, they probably didn’t know for sure that they were going to lay her off when the promotion happened; they may not have even known at that point that they would need to do layoffs at all. Or the layoffs were being discussed at much higher levels than at the management level that handled her promotion; very often those decisions are made at much higher levels than a person’s immediate manager might be at, and people’s direct managers often don’t know their teams will be affected, or who on their teams will be affected, until right before it happens. (Also, being let go during a reorg is a layoff, not a firing — which matters because a firing implies for cause, where a layoff is your position itself being eliminated. Your friend shouldn’t go around saying she was fired if she was laid off.)

With your promotion followed by your boss telling you that you’re coming in late too often, there are a bunch of reasons the timing could have worked out that way. Your boss’s own boss might have said something to her after your promotion was announced (like “she’s going to need to step it up and stop being late so often”) and your boss would have been negligent if she didn’t pass that along to you and let you know it was being noticed. Or she could be feeling pressure from her own boss about people’s time of arrival that just happened to arrive around then, or you were late again that day and she got particularly fed up with the optics of you doing it immediately after the promotion, or she saw a direct line between the promotion and expecting you to hold yourself to a higher standard now, or who knows. I don’t think you should feel demoralized by it! Choose to take it as, “Hey, we have lots of confidence in you, as this title bump shows, but you do actually need to follow our team policies on what time you come in.”

But as for why managers sometimes have conflicting messages in general, it’s very often explained by one of these:
* Plans changed, and the earlier conversations planning the change took place above their heads and they weren’t even aware it was under discussion.
* Plans changed, and they were in those earlier conversations but didn’t think it would go the way it went, or were simply juggling too many other things to game out exactly what it could end up meaning for everyone under them until it actually happened.
* Someone above them mentioned something that put pressure on them (and therefore their team) in a way they weren’t anticipating earlier.
* Something happened that you don’t know about that is changing how they’re approaching something / how much they care about it (for example, they told you last month you didn’t need to stress about expense report deadlines and they then discovered your coworker hadn’t turned any in for a year and so now they’re less laissez-faire about it).
* They’re being pulled in multiple directions and so haven’t sat down and thought things through as deliberately as you’re imagining; they are managing through chaos.
* They messed up. Sometimes this may simply be because they’re human, and other times they might not be a great (organized/thoughtful/attentive) manager.