Director means something
Photo by Paula Schmidt.
New year. New prediction about work. Ready? Here it is.
Your organization will succeed or fail on the basis of your director layer. And in most organizations, that layer is a fucking mess right now.
Specifically the directors who were promoted after 2020. And then extra much for ones promoted after 2020, laid off, rehired into a director role, and then laid off again. If you are anywhere in that cohort, you already know. It is some shakyass ground heading into this year. And just in case you haven't put the pieces together yet, we can tell you why.
When talent was hot and retention was hard and money was plentiful, we solved a lot of organizational problems with title inflation and cash. OK, so some other org is offering you more money and a new role? Well, we would like to also offer you more money and a new role and please stay put thankyouverymuch.
As salaries and titles went up and up, market rate and actual skills got further and further apart. And if your org started to kvetch about the fact that you weren't doing the role they were paying you to do, it wasn't a big deal. When everyone was hiring, you could always jump to another role. Hell, you might even get a VP nod when you did.
And for a time, that worked. Sort of.
What goes up...
As profitability became the hot new trend in business, formerly in-demand workers were rebranded as wildly over-titled and over-paid. Just in time for organizations to implement major strategic changes. And to say the quiet part out loud. Do you know where it's really easy to justify making cuts? In a director layer that is failing to provide direction.
Post-cuts, your remaining directors are nervous and running to safety. And this is the big danger for organizations this year. Directors running toward safety have a way that they behave. And it's not strategic. And it's not expansive. And it's a major problem cause strategic and expansive is where you actually need those folks.
The thing that makes directors different than managers, the reason you pay them, is strategic integration. They aren't the ones authoring the organization's strategy, but strong directors are the ones who make it go. They connect the dots. They translate overall direction into terms and priorities their teams can understand. They identify and mitigate risks early. And they light the senior team on fire with the insights and opportunities that they can't wait to jump on.
That's what a strong directorate does. That's what organizations are paying for with their director salaries, but it's not what they're getting. And there are two significant problems with that state of affairs. One is a basic value-for-money issue that's fair to scrutinize at any level of the org chart. But the larger problem with having an under-equipped director layer, specifically, is that it breaks... everything.
Everything?
Everything. But like, let's break it down.
In practice, directors who are struggling tend to draw inward and downward. They focus on their ability to perform what is asked of them so that if something fails, it's not their fault. And because they aren't sure how to do the capital-D-Director bits of their job, they fall back on the stuff they do know how to do. The direct management — and even individual — work that got them promoted in the first place.
In an org full of directors like this, timelines for new work get pushed out massively, since every bold commitment creates the risk of failure. And at the same time, headcount requests go up across the board because it's another way to de-risk (I don't need to make hard calls by reassigning my existing people) and avoid blame (recruiting didn't get me my hires in time). "Hire more to get less done" is a tough pill to swallow for most senior teams.
And it doesn't stop there. Directors who feel out of place in strategic conversations tend to fall back to their own domain. They spend more time talking with their team, or even working alongside them, and less time synthesizing the direction of the organization as a whole. Silos appear and intensify, because no one is creating the intentional links between teams, even when there are major dependencies or when there's a risk of working at cross-purposes. Junior employees grow disconnected from overall direction, because no one is helping them connect the dots.
In most organizations, when a team gets too insular, other teams start to route around them and cut them out of the critical path. Whether that team's leader is eventually held accountable varies, but at least good work can continue elsewhere. But what happens when the disease is widespread? What happens when half the directors in your org are green and making the same mistakes? You can route around a broken director, but you can't route around all of them.
Well, shit.
If you're a CEO reading this and nodding along, we'll say the thing you already know: your house is on fire. The costs to your organization — payroll, turnover, execution risk, opportunity cost — are existential. Your organization will succeed or fail on the basis of your director layer, and they need help.
If you're a manager or an individual reporting up to a director, and you're reading this and nodding along, you already know what it feels like. That disconnect from, and anxiety about, the direction of the organization isn't a thing you're imagining or a problem that will go away on its own. You can solve some of it yourself — connect with people in other teams to get some of that broader perspective, find executive mentors you can learn from. But fundamentally, your boss (or boss's boss) has a job to do and isn't doing it. And we're sorry about that but, for what it's worth, it's usually not malicious. They just genuinely don't know how to.
And if you're a director reading this. If you're doing your best to do this job but you see yourself in our description of a hunkered down and reactive boss, we see you too. It's safe to say you might not have known what you were agreeing to, when you took the director gig. But you know now and you're pretty sure you're failing at least a bit and it doesn't feel great. But listen. It's recoverable.
That recovery is one part mindset, one part relationships, one part skills. The mindset shift for every director is to stop looking at how to get your team's priorities done in the context of the org, and start looking at how to get the org's priorities done in the context of your team. And when you sit with that for a minute, you'll realize that means you need to be looking out, across, and up, not just in and down.
What pieces do your peers hold? What context do you need from your execs? Those relationships and conversations are how you break down silos and reinforce each other's work instead of cancelling it out. They are how you understand and respond to business needs.
Listen, however they got the title, having real expectations of directors and holding them accountable is a good thing. It may not feel great in the moment. But director means something. And pretending it's a title or a pay bump without a new set of responsibilities is a disservice to everyone. The director. Their reports. The entire organization.
So OK. It’s the start of 2024. And there’s a full layer of the workforce that is struggling. Here’s one more prediction for you. This won’t magically get better on its own. Dipping a ladle back in the recruiting pool won’t yield different results. You can fire and rehire as much as you like. If you need your newly minted directors to succeed (and you do), start putting in the work to bring 'em up.
— Melissa & Johnathan