📗Book Review: Nine Lies About Work — part 1

Denholm Renholm with a picture of the A-team. From The IT Crowd.

Management books for the most part are filled with platitudes and truisms. Many also contain recommendations that are just plain wrong and that are based on half-baked theories backed up by unpublished and inaccessible “research” and/or extrapolated from warped science. Thus the bar is low for Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall in Nine Lies About Work. One hopes that a book whose title suggests it will be debunking lies contains more critical thinking than usual. In this series, I will review each of the nine alleged lies in turn, confirm what can be corroborated elsewhere, and debunk what does not hold up.

Lie #1: People care which company they work for

As with most of the lies addressed in this book, the title is somewhat misleading and it takes some effort to follow the meandering storytelling to understand the point that the authors are truly trying to make.

It seems to me that the authors are arguing that the day-to-day experience on a team is what people truly care about, not what the company culture is. They also make some other claims which I will respond to in the rest of the article.

Main idea: Day-to-day team experience trumps company culture

While there is some small truth to this, it is not entirely correct, and I doubt that it is a lie that has widespread belief. The closest thing I’ve come to this belief is a manager assuming that a team’s work will be good because they assume that everyone shares their high opinion of the company.

Daily interactions do make a large impact on an employee’s experience and therefore the likelihood of staying or leaving. Yet the local culture is not entirely separate from the common aspects of the company culture. Certain company perks will bear little weight compared to how annoying the boss is. However, there are still many important issues that can be decided at the company level, such as paid leave policies, bonuses, pay grades, career tracks, and how sexual harassment is handled. A bad manager remains because they have top cover which speaks to the true culture of middle management.

I think that Elon Musk’s management of Twitter singlehandedly debunks this lie. The company’s identity or aura doesn’t mean everything, but it does mean something.

My current employer, Zenika, isn’t perfect. But I am proud to wear the colours and three years in, I’m happy to be a part of this company. The culture in the Nantes office isn’t quite the same as at Rennes, Lyon, Paris, Montreal or any of the other locations, and these differences are a strength. But there are aspects that we share. I’m grateful to have chats with our CEO, Carl Azoury, from time to time. What he does and the image he projects is important to me. How he handles certain issues sets the tone. The fact that the whole company has made real efforts to address a lack of diversity in our industry is crucial for me. That issue concerns multiple levels: team, office, country, and company.

The authors argue that they conducted extensive research on thousands of teams, building on existing research, mainly Gallup’s Q12 questionnaire. They claim that their eight-question survey validly predicts sustained team performance.

What is troubling with this claim is that neither the authors nor Gallup have ever published any of their research in any scientific journals. The validity claim is not backed up by any accessible data. The authors also make some odd statements, mainly the following.

The statistical measure of variation is range, and we’ve found that these scores always have a greater range within a company than between companies. Experience varies more within a company than between companies.

This is mathematically impossible! The range is the difference between a data set's maximum and minimum values. What then do the authors mean by “range between companies”? An explanation can be found in a later sentence.

They vary more team-to-team, than they do company-to-company.

The authors fail to mention certain likely possibilities.

1. This result could prove that their survey is invalid.
2. The range in the results could be attributed to the type of subject being surveyed. The question of confidence in a company’s future is a rather subjective one. If one surveyed people’s favourite meal, one might find similar range. Especially given a scale of 1 to 5.
3. The range is not the only useful summary statistic. There’s also standard deviation and mean average. How about a series of box plots of the companies and teams they surveyed?

Claim 1: The description of a company’s culture is mostly fictional

This is pretty much the only true part of this chapter. Sociologist François Dupuy says that the list of values a company displays on their website is what it aspires to and invariably what it lacks.

The example the authors give of people using explicit cultural values as weapons is particularly poignant. Dave Snowden warns that when an organisation writes down its values, it has just lost them, as the temptation to simply speak the language but not act accordingly is too strong. People will tend to game the values and post-rationalise their behaviour.

Claim 2: Company culture is only plumage

The authors argue that the perks and company policies are simply there to attract new hires and then have little impact on an employee’s experience. Again this may be true of foosball tables, free coffee, but is less true of other company policies. Clearly, the authors have never participated in a picket line.

Claim 3: Company culture is a social construction — A team is not

The authors start off by quoting Yuval Noah Harari’s books Sapiens and Homo Deus, which is unfortunate since they have been panned by experts. They use these references to explain the difference between what Harari calls objective reality, subjective reality, and intersubjective reality. These are also called reality, perception and social construction. The authors underline Harari’s argument that social construction is unique to humans and that it is what explains the Anthropocene — the dominance of the human race. They then argue that companies and company cultures are social constructions — if people stop believing in them they cease to exist — but that teams are not.

Team experience, on the other hand (how you talk to one another and work with one another), has large and lasting impact on how you do your work, and it doesn’t require all of you to agree to believe in it. It is what it is.

There are a lot of mistakes in this reasoning. Firstly, humans are not the only animals to create social constructions, as some animals have language which is socially constructed. Secondly, some philosophers and scientists have argued that social constructions such as shared narratives can have agency. Deleuze and Guattari talk of tropes as being attractors in a system from which people find it hard to escape unless they find a line of flight. New Materialism posits that information is another state alongside matter and energy, and it could even have mass, providing another explanation for dark matter. Thirdly, it is quite obvious that a team is also socially constructed. For instance, trust is socially constructed. A team formed of people with very diverse backgrounds may have trouble working together at first, partly because each member will perceive the others’ actions through different lenses. It is rarely what it is. We perceive reality “as through a glass darkly”. Culture does in fact make us focus on certain things. People don’t value the same things in France as they do in England, China, or South Africa. This cultural lens may not be enough to determine what to work on each day and how to do it, but it does place a constraint.

Ironically, the authors complain about the lack of quality in the literature on teams. This is in contradiction with the fact that the next chapter is almost entirely a summary of Stanley A. McChrystal’s Team of Teams. It also shows the authors’ lack of awareness of Lean thinking or works such as Team Topologies (previously DevOps Topologies), Google’s extensive research into what makes teams effective, and Dave Snowden’s talks and articles.

Conclusion

While the authors are mostly right to call this a lie, the devil is in the details. A company’s true culture is rarely what it explicitly shows. That doesn’t mean it can’t have a big impact on why people stay or leave a company. The authors’ view is somewhat Manichaeistic and fails to provide a good alternative. Both teams and company cultures are important and influence each other. Both should be monitored, but neither are directly actionable. The survey, while interesting, is limiting, and will fail to capture unforeseeable aspects that may arise.

And most importantly, hobbits did have jobs.