Facebook co-founder says being CEO was ‘stressful’ – like 82% of bosses he never intended to manage people

Once again, Moskowitz 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 found it very stressful,” Moskowitz said. Strachryadding that he’s really an introvert.

“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 a freelancer 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 in and day out.”

The CEO had hoped that masking would become easier as the company expanded and he could delegate more to focus on actually running the company behind the scenes, but in reality the opposite was true: “The world has continued to get more chaotic — the first Trump presidency and the pandemic and all the racing stuff, it’s made it a lot less about building the company, and being a CEO is more about reacting to issues and doing that kind of stuff.”

Like Moskowitz, almost all presidents are “shells” – which is actually the main reason they end up resigning.

Moscovers is not the first president to admit that he never intended to manage people. Just like Generation Z, who admit they would Rather, they remain individual shareholders Forever Instead of climbing the greasy pole, many managers before them were secretly thinking the same thing.

In fact, research shows that up to 82% of bosses are “accidental“They received no training and were simply thrust into the role because they were into 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 wanted to lead or not. A quarter of them ended up in senior leadership positions.”

As a direct result of this, companies end up with managers who are not confident in their ability to lead, and who struggle to deal with the various challenges that come with managing people, prompting both struggling employees and managers to quit.

Gerrit Bouckaert, chief executive of recruitment firm Robert Walters, which operates in 31 countries, said the trend of casual management had become more “pronounced” in recent years – while job requirements were becoming more stringent.

“In the past, the primary role of a manager was to keep employees motivated and productive,” he previously told Fortune. “In today’s world, they are asked to foster culture and inclusion in the team, drive digital adoption, have an innate ability to know when a member of their team is struggling mentally, and also be the bearer of bad news – whether it’s late promotions, or small pay increases.”