New York's hottest club is Competent Management

Photo by Pixabay.

There's little in the known universe as adorable as very small children playing soccer. They line up in their tiny jerseys. Some of them have tiny knee pads. And then a kid, often the biggest kid there, manages to make contact with the ball. Suddenly, they all set off running.

This phenomenon is called Bunch Ball. Because if you're watching from the hill full of parents, all you see is a tight clump of children making their way down the field. Slowly.

It's not good soccer. The kids haven't learned to pass. Their defensive instincts are atrocious. It's cute, but that's about all you can say for it. 

Make sure to mention the snacks

Right now, every tech company on the planet would like you to know about their snacks. Either the ones they have in their dog-friendly offices. Or the ones they ship to you, regardless of where you are in the world. They want you to know about stipends to upgrade your home office. Their choose-your-own-technology program. The in-office yoga and the distributed team sound baths. And how they've modified insurance premiums to cover more mental health supports and services.

Don't forget to mention flexible work. If possible, let's put that all over the posting. Maybe we can say "Flexible Software Developer" or "Head of Flexible Growth Marketing" - that way the SEO robots will know we're serious. In fact, let's put it in the H1.

Oh oh oh, and also, be sure to remind candidates about the Flexible 4-day work week. The four hours per week of Flex time they can apply any way they like. And our newly rebranded summer hours. Now called Flexible Summers. And our rebranded sick days. Now called Flex Days.

It would help a lot if you could be sitting in lotus position while you're talking to potential hires. Just to reinforce the whole flexible thing. Wait, why are you rolling your eyes? Ok, fine, half-lotus.

The massive competition for talent has every HR and Talent leader running after the same ball. And the visual effect, from up here on the hill, looks a lot like Bunch Ball.

You can still burn out in four days a week

We're not saying that those perks don't matter. Or that the conversation around a 4-day work week isn't an important one. We love the experimentation that's happening, even if it is all clustering at certain points on the field. It makes us hopeful that so many leaders want to make things better. Like there could be real, substantive change in the air.

But if we're going to talk about the future of work, at some point we need to actually talk about the work. Every company out there wants to tell us how nicely we'll be treated for doing the work. About the time off from the work. And the mental health supports for the work.

But what about the actual work?

The snack deliveries aren't a replacement for actionable feedback from your boss. A sound bath won't wash away the daily harassment that no one ever acts on. And without clear priorities and healthy expectations, a four-day work week can still be a burnout workload.

We have worked in companies with fantastic perks and toxic, burnout cultures. We have seen abusers promoted and survivors marginalized, despite well-stocked snack stations and off-sites in luxe hotels.

A better future of work can include many of the perks everyone's talking about right now. We hope that it does. But those perks aren't enough. At its core, if you want to change the future of work, there is a key ingredient missing from the conversation.

Competent, accountable management

We've never loved that old saying about how, "people don't leave jobs, they leave bosses." There's truth in it, but not universally, and what truth there is lives in the negative space. Like so much management advice out there, it trades nuance for pithiness.

When we talk with bosses, we try to bring it into a more constructive place. "My relationship with my employer is primarily influenced by my relationship with my direct manager." If that relationship is harmful – or even just negligent – then yes, you're going to see a lot of resignations. But this framing at least invites in the possibility of other kinds of relationship.

So many of the Bunch Ball benefits we see these days are expressions of care. It's such a tender word, but really it's what they are. Sound baths. Meditation. More coverage for therapy, or massage, or SAD lamps. Extra time off, working hour flexibility, shortened work weeks. Food. These are things you do to take care of people.

Good management is also care. Helpful feedback and clear expectations are care. Open and inventive career discussions are care. One on ones are care. It takes skill to do those things well. But when a manager knows what they're doing, the safety and the engagement and the joy that flows is everything that work should be.

When a manager doesn't know what they're doing, you can't fix it with a home office upgrade. In fact, the juxtaposition of spending so much on perks while letting shitty bosses run things is extra galling. It feels like gaslighting to tell your people how happy they should be while making their lives miserable. It breeds disengagement and cynicism. Not things most orgs would choose to spend money on.

How to actually build the future

Any athlete past the Bunch Ball stage will tell you the same thing. If you try to rapidly increase your flexibility, without also building your core strength, you're going to hurt yourself. In a body, that pain is going to show up in a tendon somewhere. Organizations put their injuries on people.

Flexibility is a four-day work week. But when your team has six top-line Objectives, each hiding a dozen Key Results? And half of those are deliberately unrealistic "stretch goals"? That's an injury waiting to happen. That's your team being afraid to take the flexibility on offer. Feeling guilty if they do, for letting down their teammates. And feeling guilty if they don't, for letting down themselves.

You can announce a four-day work week with an all@ email, and an update to the careers page. It can happen in an afternoon. But building the core strength across your management team to absorb that change smoothly: that takes longer. It means changes to everything about how your organization does its work. How you set goals. How you assess performance. How you pay and promote. How you hire and how you fire.

It's not just four-day work-weeks, either. We see this in the move to hybrid work. Or to globally distributed teams. What's so exciting about the conversation today is that major, structural changes to work are happening. Generational changes. And what's so dangerous is talking about them like they can happen in an afternoon.

We're excited for a future of work with more care. With more thought given to what employees need, and more proactive supports on offer. But the current conversation is upside down. Care starts with the work. Not with how we compensate for, or offset, the work.

The future will not be built by the organizations that promise the most flexibility. It will be built by the ones who can actually provide it.

- Melissa and Johnathan