I don’t think laziness is really the root problem. You have managers who don’t really know how to add value as managers, especially with empowered teams, and you have incentives that cause motivated, non-lazy managers to focus on the wrong things.
In this episode, Richard and Peter discuss an article in Business Insider, “The reality of Big Tech’s ‘fake work’ problem.” They discuss the incentives that create over-hiring and “fake work” and the antidote to it. Is it all just lazy managers, as the article suggests?
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Episode Transcription
Richard Lawrence
Welcome to the Humanizing Work Show!
Peter Green
Today’s episode is about a situation that happens in some large companies that’s being referred to lately as “fake work.” Fake Work refers to what happens when the primary incentive for managers and other leaders is to accumulate headcount and the political power that comes with it, and then the people doing the work end up without anything meaningful, or even anything at all to do. Those employees would have a hard time answering the Two Bobs from Office Space, when they ask “So, what would you say you … do here?” We’ll share our thoughts on this phenomenon and a few antidotes for it.
Richard
Before we jump into that topic, though, a reminder that you can get your question answered on the Humanizing Work Show by emailing us at mailbag@humanizingwork.com.
Peter
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Richard
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Peter
All right. Let’s talk about fake work. So, last week, I came across a LinkedIn post that was commenting on an article in Business Insider titled “The reality of Big Tech’s ‘fake work’ problem,” authored by Hugh Langley and Grace Kay. We’ll link to the article in the show notes.
The LinkedIn post that was referencing that article, and to a certain extent the article itself, were largely complaining about the situation without much advice about what to do about it, beyond move to a company that has “good leaders.” For example, the subtitle of the article is “Inside the perverse system of ‘lazy management’ that’s wrecking the tech industry.” It shifts the pervasive blame of “lazy employees” that we hear all the time today, to “lazy management,” rather than acknowledging that everyone is responding to the incentives around them, and recognizing that system incentives can be changed.
As I read the article, it occurred to me that many of the core topics we teach leaders and managers are strong antidotes for the situation, so I pinged Richard and said, “Hey, what if we just discuss this article and share our reflections on it in real time for our Humanizing Work Show episode this week?” We haven’t talked about it this much. You’re going to get our first real conversation about this piece live. And, who knows? We may be surprised by what comes up.
Richard
All right. Before we react to it, let me quickly summarize the article, and then we’ll talk about it. The core argument seems to be that big tech companies–the ones whose names you know, and we use every day, grew faster than they needed to over the last few year because headcount confers status for managers and for execs and that, as a result, lots of people didn’t have real work to do and lots of people got promoted into many layers of management unnecessarily. The article has several anecdotes of people in roles like software development at companies like Amazon and Meta going months without projects or discovering they were working on something that was never intended to be used or that had been assigned to multiple individuals or teams at the same time. Ultimately, the blame for the problem, as Peter said, gets laid at the feet of “lazy management.” In fact the final quote of the piece is from one of the people in an earlier anecdote– it’s kind of the happy ending for that person’s story about how before they had no meaningful work, and then left the job, went to another job, and the final quote is this about the new job: “We have a good leader, which makes all the difference.”
So, there you have it. Be a good leader, or get one for your boss. So, let’s dig into this, Peter. Let’s talk first about incentives. You mentioned incentives creating this situation.
Peter
Yeah, the article describes companies that are getting a lot of funding as shifting the incentive from “Are we delivering great products? Are we profitable? Are we making a big impact for our customers and growing that over time,” to “What is my headcount?” because headcount for a manager implies status. There’s an assumption that if this person has a lot of people reporting to them, they must be doing something important. And it’s just a really fast and easy way to measure the impact of the leader, or the power or importance of any given leader; and so a lot of times when they’re looking at promotions, the first thing they scan– and I remember seeing this– that there were certain promotion levels at companies that I’ve worked for, that in order to get promoted to that level, you had to have a certain headcount. So, if that’s a requirement for it, or even the first incentive we look at for how you get promoted, then what am I going to do as a manger who’s ambitious and wants to make a difference and wants to move up in the organization, I’m going to figure out ways to grow my headcount. And so that became one of the primary incentives that managers were responding to. And that led to a lot of this, “Well, I now have 100 people reporting to me, but the thing that I’m responsible for doesn’t require 100 people; so there’s a mismatch of incentive there.
Richard
I think there’s also an incentive to, if you’re a senior leader, show investors that you’re deploying the capital you have, if that’s just sitting in savings, it looks like “Well, why are we giving you all this money if you’re not doing anything with it?” And in tech companies, the biggest place where money goes is headcount. So, you have to employ more people, and I think maybe there’s a naive assumption in there that we must have plenty of things to do, and so if we get more people, we’ll do more meaningful things.
Peter
I think there’s a mismatch there between how fast we grow our people and how fast we grow evidence that we’re on the right track with our products, with our market channels, so we’re scaling up headcount before we’ve scaled up proof, so I think that might be one of the challenges there– again, it’s easier to measure. We’ve got this much invested in the company and our headcount has grown to XYZ, it’s one of the first things that start-up founders talk about is the size of the company, and if that’s growing faster than evidence or even profitability of our product or solution, that’s going to lead to this kind of situation.
Richard
So, for leaders, I think there’s an important consideration there, and probably for investors, which is “Am I creating the incentives for the kind of behavior I want to see? What is going to happen in the organization if people follow the incentives that I have set up?” This also makes me think about the thing I often say in Product Owner classes. Nobody ever comes to me and says “I’ve got all these teams and I don’t know what to do with them.” The refrain I always hear is “If only we had more resources.” And I guess that’s not always true. Nobody’s telling me this, but as I read the article, I’m hearing, “Oh, I have all these resources and I don’t know what to do with them.” Which is kind of mind-boggling to me, because I always have more valuable things that I could be doing than capacity to do it, but I guess this speaks to Product Management capability. At the scale of tens of thousand of people, you need a lot of good Product Managers and hierarchy of beg meaningful goals that get broken down into smaller strategy and things to move that forward, and there’s a whole set of skills around that in getting lots and lots if people pointed toward meaningful outcomes, and I think what we’re seeing is that its way easy to hire thousands of developers than it is to scale up this Product Management capability.
Peter
Yeah, as you describe that, I get slightly uncomfortable, because of the idea that we can always take a big goal and decompose it into cascading parts of it, and if we just had good Product Management then we’d be able to do that well, but the thing that made me think of is that if you did have all this excess capacity, really the smart way to use it would be to place a whole bunch of small bets. Even if you didn’t have the Product Management capability to do really good kind of impact mapping all the way from a big company vision down to here are all the different products and services and features we should be developing, if you just said, “Well, we’ve grown our headcount to 2000 and our core products and services according to our vision really need a thousand, what should we do with this other thousand people?” it seems like you should just have them all placing a tons of small bets. Like do small experiments and see what gets some traction. That would require, though, the type of leader that could probably scale the impact and the Product Management equally as fast, but it makes me wonder about that, there are so many great examples of, like, at 3M the post-it note just being a weird experiment that happened to be cool and so many companies that pivot you know– Slack starting out as the internal communication tool for a video game company and all these different examples where, if you just were able to place a whole bunch of small bets, maybe that would be the right people to use that, if you felt like “I’ve got to grow my headcount. What should we do?”
Richard
And, to be clear, I actually don’t think most companies should be this big, because I don’t think you can have a unified purpose and decompose it in that way, and so I was sort of giving them the benefit of the doubt, there, and ceding that argument, and saying “If we assume that there is a reason to have 80,000 people working on a thing, and you want to do that, you’re going to need to have some way to have clarity and alignment for those people in some way. But you probably don’t actually need to be that big, so, back to the incentive being broken in a big way.
Peter
Yeah, it reminds me of the Dunbar numbers which we refer to in various coaching and training where Dunbar, who is a sociologist, was studying groups of people and how they interact, and he found that about 5 people can really trust each other, about 15 to 20 people can kind of compromise with each other, and 150 people can gossip about each other, well enough to kind of have some loose accountability across a larger group of people and so companies like Gore Industries they don’t have a business unit that’s bigger than 150 because they know that they can’t hold each other accountable beyond that. Makes me think about that as well.
Richard
So, Product Management needs to scale as fast as your Product Development capacity scales, and if you find that you can’t do that, you’re probably scaling too much. You’re kind of outrunning your headlights. Like driving too fast– you can’t see it. And I observed that a lot of people with Product Manager or Product Owner titles really don’t have the information, skill, or authority to identify valuable things for a team to build. They’re really only equipped to funnel requests into backlogs or requirements docs. Which in large organizations, like the ones that are the subject of this article, I think points to what’s really a management problem. There needs to be some larger vision or goal even if that goal is “make a bunch of small bets around this theme,” and the Product Manager’s work needs to fit into that, and that either doesn’t exist or isn’t communicated with sufficient clarity. So, let’s talk about management a bit, because there is something to it. Not necessarily lazy management, but there’s something about management here that is a big root cause.
Peter
Yeah, Zuckerberg was recently quoted as saying “We can no longer tolerate having managers managing managers. And it reminded me of what Google did, I think this was in 2002, where they had sort of a similar frustration with management being done poorly, and it just feeling like hierarchical power grabs and “What do they even do all day?” and so they reduced the hierarchy, I can’t remember the exact number, but I think they had hundreds of people reporting to C level folks, and we’ll have to see if we can track down a link to that for the show notes. But they did that, thinking “All right! Now the developers can really just churn out code and do good stuff, and it only lasted for a year or two before they realized that “It’s a little bit chaotic here. So both of these– it’s a little like Zuckerberg repeating Google’s errors of twenty years ago. But I think what it reveals is that most people don’t really understand what good managers do, especially if we’re trying to create empowered organizations. Which is what Google was trying to do. They wanted to empower their developers, they wanted to empower those teams. So I think it was just a misunderstanding of what good management is. Maybe they never had a great manager. Zuckerberg certainly didn’t. He never had a manager. He went straight from being a student at Harvard to launching Facebook. So if you’ve never experienced really great management, I can understand why you would feel like “What do they even do? What value are they adding?” And in a company of almost 80,000 people, at Meta, even if you have highly empowered teams, you’re going to need more than one layer of management to maintain alignment.
Richard
Right. If you take what Zuckerberg said literally, “No managers managing managers,” that would mean everyone reports up to a C level exec. Like, he has 50,000 directs. Voila! No more managers managing managers. Now, I think he meant it hyperbolically though, as an expression of “It feels like we have too many layers of middle management,” and it’s totally possible to have too many layers of middle management. But my guess is that the bigger problem with management there, and other companies like Meta, is more we don’t know what managers should be doing, and we’re not intentionally developing the skills in managers to do those things, which is a topic that we talk about all the time, in a lot of episodes, so I won’t belabor it here, but that is why we developed our Three Roles of Management model. Because we kept running into managers who implicitly or explicitly had that question “What actually is my job? How do I spend my days if I’m going to add value as a manager of empowered individuals and teams?” Peter, do you want to explain the model just enough at a high level and we can talk about that a little bit in this context?
Peter
Yeah, what we found is that looking from what empowered teams and individuals need, from the organization we just narrowed it down to they need three things, implying managers have three core jobs, which is to create clarity, to increase capability, and to improve the system. And there’s a human side of each of those jobs, and a more tactical or objective side to each of those jobs, Again, we won’t go into all of the details, you can check out our article on it that we’ll link to, or you can come to our next half-day intro that we have to our three jobs model.
Richard
There’s also some skills that go with it, that we see in the best managers, like managers frequently get the advice to be a good coach. In fact I think this was one of the habits that Google discovered of their good managers, but nobody actually teaches managers, or rarely do managers get taught how to be a good coach. And so you end up with people thinking, “Oh, that means I just ask questions. I don’t use my expertise anymore…” or something. And it’s more complex and more interesting than that. There are skills that managers can learn, and in fact, just this week, we taught our Coaching for Leaders workshop and dug into that, and for a lot of the participants in the course, it was kind of a breakthrough, discovering they get to bring their expertise to the table, but don’t have to direct the work out of that expertise. There are more options if you are a coach. So, coaching, facilitation, helping people set goals, and make commitments and be accountable for them, all these different skills that good managers deploy as they do those three jobs of creating clarity, increasing capability and improving the system of people who work with them.
So let, as we get close to wrapping this up, let’s give some advice. And I want to give advice to people in this situation from two perspectives: What do you do if you’re a manager, what do you do if you’re an employee in that kind of “fake work” situation. So, Peter, what would you say to a manager who realizes, “I have more headcount than I know what to do with– people are doing this kind of fake work/busy work sort of stuff.” How do I get out of this situation?
Peter
If I were in that situation, and I had– and I don’t know if they stumbled into it, right? They were responding to the incentives of “This is how you get promoted.” Then, I have to think like a mini-CEO of my part of the organization, and say, “How are we delivering value? What’s the return on investment of all of these people that we’re paying, and all of the examples, these are smart, capable, willing people who want to do good work. So how can I point them at good work that will benefit the company in some way?” And, even if it’s a small bet, you know, maybe this isn’t even part of the strategy, but maybe I can make the case that it should be part of the strategy in the future, or it could be, then treat my organization like it’s my organization– and create clarity for them, increase their capability, coach them, mentor them, help them grow, and then improve the system to help them deliver on whatever it is that we’re focused on doing. So that would be my advice: Focus on the three jobs, and treat it as if you were the CEO.
How about for employees?
Richard
I think the three jobs are actually useful there, too. So, as an employee, I would look at the three jobs as things I should be asking my manager for, and would try to get clarity about where we’re going, would ask for capability that I need– skills and resources, things like that, though we may be overstaffed on capability– and then looking for ways to improve the system and make visible things that aren’t working. So I would use that to try to get what I needed to make it work, and then ultimately I might decide that I want to go somewhere where I can have a bigger impact and make my work meaningful. And so I might actually be looking around for another job if it feels like this place really doesn’t need me. I want my life to matter. So I might go somewhere else. So, try to make this one work, as Martin Fowler I think is quoted as saying, “If you can’t change your organization, change your organization.”
Regarding the conclusion in the article, lazy management is the root, there may be some lazy managers– I’ve certainly encountered more than a few in my career–but I don’t think laziness is really the root problem. You have managers who really don’t know how to add value as managers; especially with empowered teams, and you have incentives that cause motivated non-lazy managers to focus on doing the wrong things really well. Like hiring.
Peter
Drop us a note in the comments. We’re curious to hear from you if you’ve been in this situation, either as an employee who felt like “I don’t even know what my job is here,” or if you’re a manager who was responding to those incentives and trying to do the right thing and grow your organization; what have you done to make sure that your people are engaged in work that matters on a day to day basis? So, tell us in the YouTube comments, or if you’re on our social media, drop us a note there and tell us what you’ve been up to if you’re in this situation, and especially if you found a way to get out of it, we’d love to hear about it.
Thanks for checking out today’s episode. Hope to hear from you.
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