Standing alone at a cocktail party

Photo by Vi Tran.

In early 2017, we had to tell our CEOs that we were quitting to go build a thing together. And because our CEOs were friendly in real life, we had to time those conversations perfectly. Lest one of them text the other and accidentally spill the beans.

They had the same two questions. What are you building and do you have a co-founder?

We joke that there's nothing worse than telling people you do management training. That there is no faster way to get people to leave you alone at a cocktail party.

But there's something slightly worse. Telling people you're leaving your tech exec jobs. To start something new together. And you're not building a tech company, or a VC-backed startup of any kind.

Where's the app?

Coming from tech, there's a foregone conclusion that technology will be at the center of what you're building. That whatever problem you've fallen in love with, the solution involves computers. We were both technical humans who were managing in tech-forward environments. Yet the hardest part of management wasn't a lack of software.

The most common question we got in the first year of building Raw Signal Group was, "where's the app?" People didn't believe us when we told them there wasn't one. We even got calls from multiple software companies who were building management apps. They poked around for competitive intel. We explained that truly, truly, we're not making an app. It wasn't at the heart of where leaders were getting tripped up.

The problem we wanted to solve was incompetence. That sounds like a dig. Not incompetence as in stupidity. Incompetence as in lacking competence. Lacking the basic frameworks for knowing good from bad. To even assess whether what you're doing is helping or causing harm.

This was the thing we wanted to work on. Not GPS or self-driving cars, but Driver's Ed. The slow and sweaty work of helping bosses understand the power and responsibility they hold. To get them the judgement and expertise that comes only after you have core skills in place.

And not, to be clear, because GPS and self-driving cars aren't awesome. They are. Well-executed software is fucking magical. But it's not a replacement for basic competence.

Truffle oil management

Three months ago we boldly asserted that there were managers out there using ChatGPT to write their goals, and now that seems too obvious to mention. Of course there are. In three months these bots have become absolutely ubiquitous. Like the entire B2B SaaS industry just discovered truffle oil and is adding that shit to everything on the menu.

If you've played with any of these bots much you know the deal. It's not that they're brilliant on any particular subject. It's that they know how to sound like experts. They have chewed through billions of words across a wide range of topics and can spit them out in ways that mostly sound like an expert giving advice. Sure, the illusion collapses when you ask them about something you actually know about. And yes, they bullshit constantly, by design. But they're a neat trick for sounding like an expert when you aren't.

And so now we see people putting these AIs anywhere they have a gap that they feel like some expert-sounding words would help. And managers, they figure, have a lot of those gaps. ChatGPT to write your OKRs. ChatGPT to generate interesting 1:1 prompts. ChatGPT to write your team's annual performance reviews, so you don't have to.

The appeal is obvious. Performance reviews are high-effort to do well, and high-agony when done badly. They're often so uneven from one manager to the next that the org-wide process manages to be both high-effort and high-agony, all for a dubious return. Growth? Employee retention? It's definitely true that most employees want to know how their boss thinks they're doing, want feedback, want a sense of what they can do to advance. But is your org's performance review process accomplishing that?

Wouldn't it be better if an app could at least make sure everyone got one, and that it was well-written?

No, it wouldn't.

We asked ChatGPT to write a performance review for a software engineer named Alex, who is underperforming. It dutifully spat out several clear, passive-voice paragraphs. It said that Alex lacked attention to detail, and should consider using project management software. It said that Alex's teammates had complained that they were hard to reach. And that Alex should be attending more webinars and courses to stay updated with engineering trends and technologies. We didn't tell it those were Alex's failures. We told it Alex was underperforming, and it generated some expert-sounding stuff to fill in the gaps.

It was professionally written. It sounded like Big, Important Feedback From My Boss. Despite the fact that it was actually Wizard of Oz style fuckery. Pay no attention to the bot behind the curtain.

Now imagine a real Alex. Not another performance review you don't have time to complete. But an actual human being. Walking into a performance review with all the anxiety, all the wonder, all the baggage from past bosses. Imagine them receiving this thing. Reading it top to bottom. Trying to figure out which colleagues they had snubbed. Unsure of whether it's combative to bring up the conference they went to last month that seems not to be reflected here. And trying not to cry.

We have a name for this. It's gaslighting.

You can't outsource reflection

The reason people walk away at cocktail parties is because so much of the hard work of management is unsexy. Unglamorous. It is a grind, and often thankless. And nowhere is this more true than in performance reviews.

Performance reviews, when they're done well, are an opportunity for reflection, and alignment. Reflection because we both get a chance to really think about what the quarter/half/year has been. A chance to pull a broader narrative out of the day-to-day work, and build a thoughtful opinion about what we could each have done differently. And then to discuss those, and see where they match and where they don't, and get to a clearer shared sense of where to go next.

We get that you may never have had a performance review that did that effectively. There are a lot of bosses out there that don't have the competence or support to do them that way. But, for what it's worth: if they're done well, that's what they are. They are a cosmically magical tool for navigating the complicated power dynamics of two people in a management relationship and getting to a shared understanding of how it's going.

We're told that the opportunity for AI is to take the unsexy and unglamorous parts of our work and automate them. To leave us to the parts of our jobs that only humans can do. The creative, reflective, synthesizing, new ideas parts.

Management is those parts. If you're going to hold power in an organization. Power over other people. Over how their work feels, over their career growth, over the opportunities they see and the ones they never knew were there. If you're going to cash the paycheque, we need you to bring your creative, reflective, and human self to the work. Technology can support you in a hundred ways, but you've gotta be the one holding the pen. It's hard work but it's important and worthy and you can get better at it, we promise. And no, we still don't have an app.

- Melissa and Johnathan