I Hate You. So Much.

Have you ever really contemplated how much we all hate “work?” For example, there are entire comic series, most notably Dilbert, dedicated to the workplace gallows humor -

• The most notable characters include a pointy-haired boss made to look like the devil whose incompetence is matched only by his arrogance.
• Yet another is a feckless coworker who can avoid work and accountability like Neo dodging bullets in the Matrix.
• ·Then there is the one woman, imminently qualified yet burdened with speaking sanity in an insane system.
• Finally, there is Dilbert himself, qualified, competent, and utterly ignored and left to complain to characters that aren’t even human.

“It’s funny because it’s true” — Sheldon from Big Bang theory.

How many movies or TV shows can you think of that shine a humorous spotlight on workplace misery? How about –

• “9 to 5” which depicts deplorable sexual harassment as a punch line
• “Office Space” which makes light of the array of workplace tropes including (a) Arrogant consultants come to help “right-size” the workforce (b) Ambivalence rewarded as “management material” © Demoralizing processes with origin stories nobody can remember (e.g., the TPS report)
• “Joe Versus the Volcano” — perhaps one of the best caricatures of workplace misery. This movie is based on the premise that the main character’s job, played by none other than Tom Hanks, was so horrible it had riddled him with misery induced symptoms that convinced him he was dying. So, he decided to kill himself… by jumping into a volcano.
• “The Devil Wears Prada” — The official summary of this movie reads “Upon landing a job at prestigious Runway magazine, she finds herself the assistant to diabolical editor Miranda Priestly. Andy questions her ability to survive her grim tour as Miranda’s whipping girl without getting scorched.” This movie is classified as a comedy.

We even nick-name days of the week after our general loathing of the workplace –

• Monday morning blues
• Hump day (Wednesday)
• Faux Friday (Thursday’s excuse to drink)
• Thank God it’s Friday (TGIF)

There is even a restaurant chain named after that last one. Apparently, the only day of the week that doesn’t deserve a misery induced moniker is Tuesday. So, enjoy Tuesday everyone.

Then, there is LinkedIn where users are treated to a steady diet of cries from the darkness about the tyranny of feckless or cruel managers. Think about how many times you’ve seen quotes like these in your LinkedIn feed:

• “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” — Steve Jobs
• “I was raised to treat the janitor the same as the CEO” — Janelle Monae
• “Leadership is not about power. It is about responsibility.” — Thalapathy MK Stalin
• “Great leaders don’t set out to be a leader… they set out to make a difference. It is never about the role — always about the goal.” — Lisa Haisha
• “Don’t pick a job. Pick a boss. Your first boss is the biggest factor in your career success. A boss who doesn’t trust you won’t give you opportunities to grow.” — William Raduchel

My hypothesis is that people post these quotes often because they work for someone who doesn’t embody these quotes. For example, there was the executive I once heard yell “I was appointed by the CEO to lead this group and until I am replaced that is exactly what I’m going to do.” This is an actual quote from an actual executive who clearly missed the irony of their invective. You can’t be appointed to lead. You lead because people are inspired to follow you. You can, however, be appointed to manage.

But the heart of the problem is right there — companies regularly confuse leadership with management and the disconnect drives us all crazy. The manager, minimally tasked with enforcing the org chart, aligning resources around operational, and strategic imperatives are the “de facto” leader because of the positional power granted to them by people higher up in the org chart.

The actual leader is often someone else in the organization who has built up a tremendous amount of “soft power.” Since 2004 I’ve been doing applied R&D around how work actually gets done in countless organizations, functional departments, and teams. Throughout that research, I’ve found, time and time again, that leaders are often not the manager. This is less true in highly effective organizations and truer in dysfunctional ones, but it is pervasive everywhere. Another constant — when presented with the data, most managers are shocked to learn the truth!

Whenever positional power is granted to an actual leader, most of the time by coincidence but some of the time by design, we typically call that person a “great boss.” Think about the last great boss you had (hopefully you have at least a few data points). They were probably an awesome servant leader that fit those pithy quotes above –

1. They didn’t assign work to you but instead helped you understand the problem that needed solving and then made sure you had the resources available to solve that problem. Most critically — they then cheered you on from the sidelines.

2. They were focused on helping you be the best X you can be, where you define X and X may not be what you were hired to do. I once had a DevOps guy on my team that ended up being a genius at business strategy execution.

3. They provided you with constant feedback to help you level up your game, even if that feedback was uncomfortable at times. Truly great leaders can deliver critical feedback in a way that inspires you to change versus shutting you down.

4. You learned so much from their deep wells of experience that you look back at your time with them as a seminal moment in your career.

5. You loved coming to work because you knew they had your back

In other words, they weren’t operating as a manager but instead, they were a great coach helping you improve you. In fact, in my experience, every great leader was a terrible manager. They were awful at paperwork, assigning work when necessary, and annual reviews were some variation of “Gosh you are awesome. You’ve listened to all of my coaching and have grown so much this year. Thank you. I’ve also learned so much from you.”

What if all workplaces only had coaches and no managers? In other words, what if we could create a workplace where there are employees and coaches who cared deeply about helping everyone level-up their game and no managers?

I know, it sounds like utter chaos. How can you possible align people, communicate up and down the chain, perform annual reviews, terminate underperforming employees, and all of the other functions managers traditionally fulfill? You may have heard of such mythical places like Valve that has no management hierarchy. I’ve spoken with people from there and yup, it works just like they write about in their handbook. They are a privately held company so their number isn’t public but anecdotally make billions with about 400 people.

But Valve is an incredibly rare beast operating in a way that almost nobody else does which raises an important question — why do most companies organize into this very familiar, triangular shaped pattern? Because Daniel McCallum invented the org chart in 1854 to run one of the largest businesses at that time — the New York and Erie Railroad to achieve mechanical precision from a bunch of flaws humans who are decidedly not machines.

I call this the “Mechanical Business Philosophy” and it served us well through our manufacturing golden age when automation was science fiction. As we entered into the knowledge economy we forgot to ask ourselves if this whole org chart idea still made sense. The knowledge economy is more an organism that requires leadership than a machine imposes management yet we still insist on treating people like fungible cogs. Thus, the misery. Sigh.

Yet, everything the org chart was designed to do in 1856 is being rapidly replaced by technology. For example, for those of you who have used collaboration platforms like Slack, MS Teams, don’t these platforms enable employees to align themselves? I’ve seen it happen countless times where a common purpose (problem or challenge) emerges and everyone crowd-sources the solution by leveraging their collaboration platform. Communication “up and down the chain” can now occur without “the chain” by creating channels in the collaboration platform dedicated to things people should know about. In short, the collaboration platforms are enabling companies to crowd-source their own designs in response to emerging challenges without any management structure.

In addition to employees using collaboration platforms to crowdsource their own management, many rote tasks are now being automated away. A colleague of mine recently shared this amazing video that explores the new Digital Industrial Age. If something you do doesn’t require a lot of thought and you have to do it repeatedly, you’ll be happy to know that a machine will soon be helping you with that.

The Valve Employee handbook and my own research inspired me to do something a little crazy. From January 2013 to January 2019, I decided to run an applied social experiment to explore how to create this kind of organizational model in a repeatable way. The outcomes were incredible and resulted in a model I call Adaptive. Adaptive create workplaces where there are just employees and coaches based on a “purpose-driven workplace.” I won’t get into the details of Adaptive right now, that will be the topic of my upcoming book and additional articles on this experiment. In the meantime, I encourage you to watch this AMAZING video from Daniel Pink that talks about the science of why the Adaptive model works.

So, independent of how the Adaptive model works to create a workplace where there is nothing but employees and coaches that everyone loves, the role of the manager is rapidly changing as these collaboration platforms and smart algorithms begin to dramatically change the workplace. This tectonic shift is quietly forcing a conversation about the value of coaching instead of managing; a shift away from the Mechanical Business Philosophy. Call it confirmation bias, but I am seeing this conversation everywhere. Having a frank conversation about this shift is critical for companies to stay competitive because, I assure you, companies that do will have a competitive advantage over those that do not.