# The Developmental Bind of Metamodern Managers - Proposition By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2025-12-16 The metamodern manager occupies an impossible position within banal organizations. Having developed beyond achievement orientation, the game reveals itself as a game. The promotions that won't come for most, the recognition theater, and the "growth opportunities" that are just repackaged labor marketed as a gift. This clarity would be liberating if the manager existed alone. But managers have teams, and teams contain developmental diversity: achievers who still believe the metrics mean something, transitioners who suspect but haven't landed anywhere stable, and the occasional post-conventional peer who sees what you see and watches you code-switch with knowing eyes. The organization doesn't pay the metamodern manager for output. The team mostly delivers that regardless of managerial belief. The organization pays for the manager's willingness to perform coherence, to translate hollow institutional language into something that sounds like meaning, to say "I'm advocating for your development" while knowing development has no runway here, to fight for recognition within a system that's already decided not to deliver. This performance isn't purely cynical; it functions as care, a buffer the manager provides so the achievers don't metabolize the void before they're ready. But care weaponized as extraction is still extraction. Each time the metamodern manager speaks the banal language (e.g., visibility, alignment, stakeholder engagement, strategic priority), something small is taken. Not from the organization, which loses nothing, but from the manager who knows words should mean things and is spending them anyway on a game whose outcome is already determined or pointless. The developmental bind is this: refuse the performance, and you abandon the people who still need it; maintain the performance, and you become the face of promises the system never intended to keep. Both paths cost. The modern organization collects either way. #### Related Items [[Metamodernism]] [[Management]] [[Organization]] [[Development]] [[Modernity]] [[Work]]