Some were born to lead. But many are just “accidental managers.” Take, Dustin Moskovitz. The millennial co-founded Facebook with his Harvard roommate, Mark Zuckerberg, and went on to become the company’s first CTO before leaving to found Asana, a project management platform, in 2008.
Again, Moskovitz led the startup (this time as CEO), taking the company public in September 2020 and growing it into the $3.4 billion giant it is today, before stepping down earlier this year. But now, looking back, he admits the top job was never really for him.
“I just found it quite exhausting,” Moskovitz told Stratechery, while adding that he’s really an introvert.
“I don’t like to manage teams,” he admitted, while adding that it was never his intention to do so, even after founding his second startup, Asana, with Justin Rosenstein. “I’d intended to be more of an independent or Head of Engineering… Then one thing led to another and I was CEO for 13 years…”
The result? Having to “put on this face day after day”.
The CEO hoped that putting on a mask would get easier as the company scaled and he could delegate more to focus on actually running the company from behind the scenes, but actually the opposite was true: “The world just kept getting more chaotic — the first Trump presidency and the pandemic and all the race stuff, it made it just a lot less of the company building, being a CEO is a lot more reacting to problems and doing this sort of thing.”
Like Moskovitz, nearly all bosses are ‘accidental’—and it’s actually the top reason they end up quitting
Moskovirz isn’t the first boss to admit that he never intended to manage people. Just like Gen Z, who admit they would rather remain individual contributors forever than climb the greasy pole, many managers before them have secretly thought the same.
In fact, research shows that as many as 82% of bosses are “accidental”—they had zero training and were simply thrust into the role because they were at the functional or technical aspects of the job. So it made sense to promote them to show others how it’s done, whether they actually want to lead or not. A quarter of them wind up in senior leadership roles.
As a direct result of this, businesses end up with managers who aren’t confident in their ability to lead, and who struggle to deal with the various challenges that come with managing people, leading both employees and struggling managers to resign.
Gerrit Bouckaert, CEO of Robert Walters, the recruitment firm that works in 31 countries, said the trend of accidental management has become more “pronounced” in recent years—all the while the demands of the job are only getting tougher.
“In the past, a manager’s primary role was to keep employees motivated and productive,” he previously told Fortune. “In today’s world, they are required to drive the culture and inclusion in the team, lead on digital adoption, possess an innate ability to know if a member of their team is struggling mentally, and also be the bearer of bad news—be it delayed promotions, or muted pay rises.”
