That's not how any of this works
Photo by Pixabay.
This might be the very last newsletter we write you from our Distillery office. And we are deeply in our feels about it.
There's prepping for an office move where some operations person brings you two frog boxes and you get no fewer than six emails reminding you to label with the cubicle number you're moving to, not the one you're leaving. We've both done those moves before. But this is different.
Our current space has been HQ for nearly six years. There was only one year we weren't here, when we worked from our kitchen table and from flex spaces around the city. Which means almost every in-person program and definitely every digital program we've ever done has happened here.
The neat part about a setup for digital programs is that we could say yes to events and guest lecturing that would otherwise require significant travel. We love travel. It's hard to overstate how much we adore globe-hopping. But we also have school-aged kids. So anything where we can participate and still make it to after-care ahead of the per-minute charges is a net win.
It means the past few years, we've had the chance to speak to more varied groups. Yes bosses. Always bosses. Bosses on every continent (except Antarctica). But also non-bosses. People early in their careers. Near retirees. And a shit ton of students. High school students. College students. And B-school students. All asking some variation of the same question.
Can you teach us about management?
Specifically, can you say something to us now that will prepare us to run teams at some undetermined point in the future? Not really. Like, "try not to be a shithead" will carry you surprisingly far in life, but it's not really management advice, per se. It's more of a posture you can and should adopt.
And so we say no. No, it doesn't make sense to feed you a bunch about management and hope that any of it sticks by the time you go to put it into practice. Which, oh by the way, could be anywhere from six months to never from now. Even when they understand the rationale, student groups don't love that answer.
Look, we say, it's unsatisfying for us and for you to go over things you may never need. But there's a lot that you're going to need. What if we spend some time on that instead? You all are joining a workforce where the rules are increasingly murky. And there's so much bad advice out there. Instead of teaching you how to be the boss, we should spend some time dismantling some of the worst and least helpful ideas about how work works.
That's not how work works
We've gotta start from a place of empathy. Most students, whatever they study, have spent years absorbing facts and strategies and systems for how things work. Great teachers will encourage you to bring a critical eye, and not take everything at face value, sure. But so much of life as a student is clicking each piece of knowledge in like a lego brick, so that you can build on it with the next piece. When someone gives you advice about how work works, you can be forgiven for just adding it to your spaceship.
The problem is that most advice about work is wrong, and usually for the same reason. It's rooted in how work ought to work, is imagined to work, says that it works, instead of how it actually does. It's puzzle theory all over again, only this time instead of holding up a personality test as the key to unlocking everything, it's some story about a corporate Pleasantville.
Be the first one in and the last one out. Get face time with executives. Do what you love and you'll never work again. Find a great mentor. Keep your head down. Don't make waves. But remember that closed mouths don't get fed.
This leads to just a massive amount of confusion. Absorbing and applying that advice can mean years of disappointments when things don't go as expected. That thing you thought was a lego brick is actually off-brand duplo. It will attach to your lego, sure, but nothing else will attach to it. And as the frustration piles up, so does a creeping cynicism that nothing works or can work. Because it feels like everything you've been told was a lie. Which, you know, kinda?
People theory works better than cynicism
The best test of a scientific theory is whether it predicts actual outcomes or not. The best test of advice is whether it works. So the lens we usually offer is this:
Your bosses are people who got promoted for doing some other work, and are now trying to figure out this job. They're accountable for your team's work, but are gonna be all over the map in terms of competency and skillset to actually manage that work. You might get very lucky, or very unlucky, but for the most part they don't want to hate their job and don't need you to hate yours. They are just struggling to stay on top of it, and have less time for reflection and self-awareness than they, or you, would like.
This is not to let your boss off the hook! We are firm believers that if you cash a management paycheque you should be doing a management job — no uncooked lumps of dough here, please. But from a place of praxis, advice that requires or assumes a consistently competent management corps is going to fail. To navigate this stuff, you need advice that is grounded in work as it actually is.
Take "Be the first one in and the last one out" for example. The theory here, whether it's coming from your prof or your uncle or your roommate or your mom, is that your boss will notice your striving, and that striving will be systematically rewarded with recognition and promotion. Occasionally it works, but most of the time it fails, and burns people out in the process.
If you apply the lens above, you know why. Your boss is accountable for the team's results, not for the team's striving, and certainly not for their chair occupancy. Working more hours might drive those results — which your boss probably does care about! — but it might also be a complete waste of time. Your future in the organization is going to depend a lot on which one it is, and you can even use that lens to transform the advice into something much better. "Figure out how your team is measured, and nail that to the wall" is a roughly equivalent sentiment, but with a substantially higher success rate.
This approach generalizes very well to other advice. "Find a great mentor" would be great advice if it worked, but it usually won't. Most rushed, overwhelmed, under-skilled bosses don't have the time to be one-stop-shop fairy godmentors to anyone who asks. And the imperative to find one as the path to career growth makes a lot of junior employees come off thirsty and desperate whenever they have time with a senior leader. You would be so much better off finding a dozen tactical mentors than finding one all-encompassing patron saint, but that's a topic for another week's newsletter.
We won't workshop every piece of bad advice. Suffice it to say that there's a lot of it out there and it's not just the fresh grads who are struggling. If you're holding on to some misshapen lego bricks, this is our invitation to toss them back in the bin. Honestly, at risk of offending the master builders, most work is more mutable and moldable modelling clay than lego bricks anyhow.
And bosses, a reminder that when you hire someone, especially someone new in their career, this is what you're getting. You're not just managing them, you're managing every weird thing about work that's been loaded into them, with all of its contradictions and fairytale beliefs about how work works. No feigning surprise. It is never out of place to have a conversation about how things actually work in your organization. What the expectations actually are. What success actually looks like. It's literally your job.
— Melissa & Johnathan