Some were born to lead. But many are just “accidental managers.” Take, for example, Dustin Moskovitz. The millennial co-founded Facebook with his Harvard roommate Mark Zuckerberg and became the company’s first CTO before leaving to found Asana, a project management platform, in 2008.
Once again, Moskovitz led the startup (this time as CEO), taking the company public in September 2020 and growing it into the $3.4 billion behemoth 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, adding that he is actually an introvert.
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“I don’t like managing teams,” he admitted, adding that he never intended to do so, even after founding his second startup, Asana, with Justin Rosenstein. “I 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 mask day after day.”
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The CEO hoped that putting on this mask would get easier as the company grew and he could delegate more to focus on actually running the company behind the scenes, but in fact the opposite happened: “The world kept getting more chaotic — the first Trump presidency, the pandemic and the whole race thing, it made it a lot less about building the company, being a CEO is a lot more about reacting to problems and doing that kind of thing.”
Like Moskovitz, almost all bosses are ‘accidental’ — and that’s the main reason they end up quitting
Moskovitz isn’t the first boss to admit he never intended to manage people. Just like Gen Z, who admit they would rather remain individual contributors forever than climb the career ladder, many managers before them have secretly thought the same.
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In fact, research shows that up to 82% of bosses are “accidental”—they have had no training and were simply placed in the role because they were in the technical or operational functions of the job. So it made sense to promote them to show others how it’s done, whether they want to lead or not. A quarter of them end up in senior leadership roles.
As a direct result of this, companies end up with managers who lack confidence in their ability to lead and who struggle to deal with the various challenges of managing people, leading both struggling employees and managers to quit.
Gerrit Bouckaert, CEO of Robert Walters, a recruitment company that operates in 31 countries, said the trend toward accidental management has become more “pronounced” in recent years — while job demands have only increased.
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“In the past, a manager’s primary role was to keep employees motivated and productive,” he previously told Fortune. “In today’s world, they need to drive team culture and inclusion, lead digital adoption, have an innate ability to know if a team member is struggling mentally, and also be the bearer of bad news — whether it’s delayed promotions or held-back pay raises.”
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