In all of my years of management, the best thing I ever did was give my teams more room to breathe. I’d put my hours worked in my career against anyone and I can assure you that I’ve lost a lot of great chances with great people because of putting work first always. Jason should consider it as well if he wants his team to stay on. Short term his strategy works, but won’t in the long run. Burnout comes quick and with all of the current opportunities out there, people will leave when they are burned out. And when they leave, it will be at the worst time. ^
Let me tell you a tale of two offices.
In the first office, the new manager has just been promoted from his previous role as a developer. Knowing like most of us that those without money suffer, he is glad for his new salary. He is also determined to make some changes and be a success. He is also determined to be well-liked.
As a result this new manager is very gentle and deferential. He always asks the employees for their input. He is understanding about re-arranging their schedules to avoid personal life needs. He is always accessible, and answers any question. He tries to show an interest in their lives.
Knowing that he’s so easy-going, he puts into place controls and metrics to make sure he knows what’s happening. He offers suggestions right from the start of any job. He creates spreadsheets, processes, and formalized meetings to keep track of what each worker is doing, and makes sure strict time accounting is in place.
This manager is far from inaccessible. Every day, he checks in with each employee and makes sure they have the proper amount of censures and kudos. He gets everyone together for face time. He uses his charts to predict how much time is required for any project, and if it overruns as it often does, he is there late at night along with the team.
When end of the year reviews come, he explains to each employee what they have done right and what they have not done well at all. He shows them all of his statistics. He explains metrics. And if they have any critique, he counts on them to know without being reminded that he has worked more hours than any of them, spending up to twelve hours a day in the office and another six on the weekends.
In the second office, the manager has a little more experience because she has worked her way through multiple roles and not just one. She has been a developer, a copywriter, and an accountant. She is fairly cynical about the business world, and while she likes her job when she compares it to others, she knows that no one wants to be at work. They have to be there.
As a result, she does not make radical changes when she comes to a new job. Everything works as it is, albeit at what she estimates is 40% efficiency for a reasonable expectation of the time and resources which can be committed, which is not unusual for an office. Instead, she starts dropping requirements which serve no function.
She replaces metrics with her own arbitrary personal assessment. She begins to delegate more tasks. She deliberately pads these tasks with extra hours, but makes it clear that she expects a higher quality of work. She does not attempt to be accessible. Instead, she tasks one person with writing her department’s documentation and dictates to him for an hour a day for her first three months.
When the end of the year reviews come, the first manager is rated more highly than the second — by the people above him. He runs a tight ship, they think. His employees mention how friendly he is. The second manager, on the other hand, has no mention of friendliness in her review. She’s more like a boss than a friend. However, her department retained more of its talented people than the other manger’s did.
We, as those who see management structures everywhere we shop or work, are accustomed to think of managers in two modes: lazy freeloaders, or tight-minded fascists. The truth is more complex and it crosses over both roles. A manager is not a manager until he or she takes charge of the work process, adjusts it to its maximum reasonable efficiency, and then takes care of the many day-to-day questions and tasks only a manager, who centralizes the knowledge of his or her department, can do. But in order to do so, he or she is going to have to motivate people and even order them around.
The first manager in our study tried to use a measurement of the job as the way he would make it succeed. He worked on his public image. He worked on his statistics. He made sure that he was buzzword-compliant, “approachable” and responsible. It fooled the people above him, but that’s not too hard to do, for the first year. His employees knew a different story: he was nice, but almost mincingly so, and not much fun to work for.
Since he is a workaholic, the only behavior he will reward is workaholism, which means that those who work more efficiently get dinged for not spending as much time slaving away on problems. Worse, because this manager decided that control mechanisms like metrics and incentivization were necessary, he misdirected people from their actual jobs into an endless cycle of working on boring support tasks. He tried to soften the blow, but with his hands-off school of management, he can only reward more work because he is averse to efficiency. Although he’s a nice guy, he’s a management tyrant.
The second manager in our study is a management realist. She knows that the only way to do the job was to engage with the job, not try to control it with statistics or personality. So she discarded all the useless face time and the metrics, and instead concentrated on delegation and accumulation of knowledge. She is less fun, and more fascist, but because she is more realistic, the job gets done quickly and better. She is both a tyrant, in her powerdrive toward the end goal, and a reformer, because she recognizes the reality of being an employee and accomodates it.
Management realists know that human beings do not fit machine profiles, and neither for that matter do machines. Reality does not conform to the rigid categorical logic that would like to be able to divide time algebraically, make people that are interchangeable parts, or have every task be as straightforward as the “to do” list for it would seem to be. Things come up. People have stuff they have to deal with. A management realist plans for this, and gives people more individual flexibility at the cost of having firmer deadlines and higher expectations. A management realist also knows that talent beats out subservience.
When I was a consultant, and I went into many companies as an observer of brief time frame, I saw a lot of this dichotomy between people who try to use the appearance of work (metrics, face time, hours in the office) to make work happen, versus those who simply got in and organized the process by dealing with the realistic constraints of people and offices. The former approach was far more prevalent, and leant itself to a kind of “fake work.”
Fake work takes different forms:
* Managers who dally over writing and re-writing emails that are of dubious quality, or where the time spent on their edits produces dubious reward.
* Workers immersing themselves in metrics, meetings, training, desk organization, phone calls and other busywork.
* Teams overstating how deeply in trouble their project is, then working several weeks of pointless overtime.
* Individuals who claim they’re “swamped” and “busy” every day of the year and can’t take on new work, but are producing existing work slowly.
All of these in my experience are signs of bad management and bad individual work ethic. Eight hours a day is a lot of time. If you’re doing more than that, you need more people or it’s bunk, but either way, the signs of burnout will soon appear. An intelligent manager steers away from potential burnout by avoiding any kind of late work unless a radical, unexpected, and unforseeable change to the project arrived in the last third of the production schedule.
Most people try to do what is expected of them. If that is defined as spending extra hours there, doing low-impact tasks that do not achieve any steps to the goal of the company, they will do that and if they’re judged on it, will do it in preference to effective work. The sad thing is that most commonly this situation arises from employers trying to place nice, but also trying to babysit. Like the cube farm, it’s an idea that looks good but causes secondary effects which make it negative.
The management realist alternative is to delegate as much as possible, and to keep an eye on the quality of output from each person. When quality flags, you can tell apathy or confusion is reigning in that particular chair, and you need to intervene. Realists work both harder and smarter in preference to working longer. They move quickly and aggressively, get incidentals out of the way, and return to slamming away at what tasks either bring in ROI or support it one level removed.
Just like an overzealous micromanager will cow employees into tacit submission and acceptance of whatever they say, and so will create a prevailing sense of apathy in the employee pool, a manager who slips into tyranny will get what he or she asked for — mediocre work that expands to fill the time required per day. It’s the path of least resistance.
When I go into a new restaurant, the first thing I do is try to get a look into the kitchen. If I see giant piles of plates and pans waiting around, and people moving in a disorganized way, my faith in that restaurant goes down. Someone is cracking the whip without bothering to think. If I see less frenetic motion, but it is more coordinated, I’m probably about to sit down and order the lasagna.
It’s the same way with offices. If when you walk in, everyone is smiling and happy but moving with urgency toward no particular goal, back up and run. They’ve been seduced by a management tyrant. On the other hand, if people are more serious but less frivolous, consider overcoming your initial objections and working with these people. They won’t waste your time.