I appreciate the more nuanced reply, and I think those are pretty reasonable positions. Your original reply, again, seemed like you were angry that a manager might care about how you're doing as a person and that they had ulterior motives for wanting to talk to you. My personal position isn't that you need to love or even like your coworkers/managers/employees as friends, or spend time with them without compensation, but caring about others as people and not as cogs in a machine is important in building a professional career.
I've seen too many people in the workplace wall themselves off, actively resist building any connections, never see advancement or try to grasp any opportunities, and then they leave for whatever reason and not a single person in their orbit gave a fuck that that they ever existed.
I've seen too many people in the workplace wall themselves off, actively resist building any connections, never see advancement or try to grasp any opportunities, and then they leave for whatever reason and not a single person in their orbit gave a fuck that that they ever existed.