Photo by Felix Mittermeier.
Betterboss starts in 5 days. The content is locked, the event materiel is packed up, and the catering counts are finalized. And it’s got us… well mostly it’s got us sleepy, y’all. But it’s also got us thinking about the problem with a lot of management advice.
The first problem, the loudest problem, is that there’s a lot of desperately awful writing out there about working with other people. Advice that is bad without nuance. “Shit sandwich” bad. “Hire A players and get out of their way” bad. “Get rid of the concept of management and organize everyone in loops” bad.
The good news is that it doesn’t take too long to recognize this stuff. Advice that claims to make a complex and hard thing (e.g. giving difficult feedback, managing humans) into a simple and easy thing (“wrap it in patronizing praise!”, “look, loops!) is generally not worth your time. There are exceptions, as in all things. But in general, management is hard and complex. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
The harder problem with management advice is that some of it is good, but only if we can’t count on each other. There’s a lot of this advice, once you know to look for it. Jason Fried and DHH don’t set goals. Amazon can’t count on leaders to do pre-reading, so they force it at the beginning of each meeting.
There’s truth to this kind of advice. Most goals processes suck. Most meetings are badly run, with participants who don’t do the homework. If you take these things as read, then you’d be right to skip the worthless goals process, and waste the time in the meeting.
But isn’t that so disappointing?
It’s like each of us is in this prisoner’s dilemma at work. If we can count on each other to do the heavy lifting, we can go so fast and do great, important things together. If we can’t, then our best hope is to be equally crappy all around and to plan our processes on that assumption.
We understand the wisdom of advice like this. Especially if you’re in a culture you can’t change, and a job you can’t afford to leave. But we don’t like it. Because there is an alternative that is so much better.
You can start counting on each other. You can hold each other accountable for reading the thing. You can run a goals process that is great and motivating. There are teams that do these things. We’ve been on them, and we’ve built them. But management is hard and complex. You need to learn a bunch of skills that most of us were never taught. And you need the repetition of practicing those skills over and over for them to become second nature.
It’s worth it. Imagine being able to count on the people you work with. Holy shit, right? What a world that could be.
— Melissa & Johnathan
What Melissa’s reading
“I’m a Terrible Person”: Behind the Epic Meltdown That Ended Travis Kalanick
Mike Isaac from The New York Times just released his book, Super Pumped: The Battle For Uber. He’s got a Vanity Fair piece to promote the book and it’s a cringe of a read. It’s a glimpse into the months after Susan Fowler’s blog post came out but still before Travis is forced to step down as CEO.
I don’t need to find out that Uber under Travis is worse than I thought. I’ll be honest, in my mind it was already pretty bad. But the vignette here is too awful for someone to make up. There’s a data-driven team splicing brand sentiment from CEO sentiment and finding some unpleasant things. There’s an exec team trying to figure out how to clean up one giant mess after another. And then there is Travis, curled up in the fetal position on the floor of his pr lead’s living room.
And while the details are grim, there’s so much that’s disturbingly familiar.
The charming CEO. The incredible vision. The schoolboy antics. The bad behavior. The partying. The consequences be damned, disruption at all costs, oops I moved too fast and broke democracy. Followed by the long, agonizing wait for someone to grow the fuck up who has never had to. Who is only now, in his late 30s or early 40s, stopping to consider that there might be other people in the world. If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the tech industry over the past decade, I promise you’ve seen this movie a thousand times.
There’s an old Valley saying that I’ve heard altered a few times. The first time I heard it, it was “money hides all sins.” That so long as you were bringing in cash, it didn’t matter what other hijinx you were up to. The investors and your board would mostly sit back and let you do your thing.
Later, toward the end of my time in SF, it was “growth hides all sins.” So long as your numbers were going up and to the right, went the reasoning, everything else was justified. It was an essential component of that growth. The excess, the toxic workplace, the asshole CEO.
When I was younger, I thought it was unfair that people could do terrible things and still have it all turn out ok for them. I wanted there to be some comeuppance. Some universal righting that would restore order.
It’s 2019. I no longer believe that this is coming in the form of a board or investors or lps, or swift karmic action. Sometimes bad people get away with doing bad shit for a long time. And sometimes it makes them rich. And sometimes it makes them president.
The thing I come back to. The thing that saves me when I go too deep on indignation. Is the idea that for those of us who are lucky enough, we can decide. We don’t have to work for assholes. We don’t have to stay in toxic workplaces. The Adam Smith stuff cuts both ways. And in an unencumbered, competitive labor market, the asshole CEOs will lose. Every time.
What Johnathan’s reading
We joke that RSG HQ has over 100 books on the shelf and we don’t agree with any of them. We don’t mean they’re each all-wrong, just that none of them is all-right. Behold, a short VC tweet thread demonstrating the principle:
“1/ Here’s a contrarian take (or not?): Ignoring the need to sell a role, a great manager can hire A+ people just by looking at a resume and doing about 8 hours of references. No interview needed.” – 9:45 PM – Aug 21, 2019 – by @davidu
David Ulevitch is a partner at a16z now, but has run big orgs in the past. He’s drawing from genuine experience in this thread. You can tell, because this thread includes a specific flavour of truth. Operator truth. The truth that things don’t work in practice the way they work in theory.
He’s right when he says that most interviewers are under-trained. It’s true that most interview processes are a mess, and that candidates give off a mix of cues. And he’s right that most hiring managers under-use references. The result is ineffective and unsatisfying for everyone involved.
But this advice is also pretty terrible. He acknowledges some of that down-thread – that you should still do interviews, for candidate experience, for ~legal reasons~. But he leaves most of it really unexamined. And even when people bring it up in reply, he equivocates it away.
Here’s what he’s failing to say: references are a haven for systemic bias. Even in academic letters of recommendation, where the format is more structured and visible, gender bias is rampant. I will bet you one million earth dollars that back-channel, off-the-record conversations between executives do worse. How could they not? I’ve had past-CEOs try to blackball minority candidates who turned into exceptional contributors on my teams. I’m pretty fucking happy I didn’t go on references alone there. I bet they are, too.
I meant it when I said David’s pointing at some truth. Managers do under-invest in references, and they can be a useful tool. But treat them with care and caution, cross-calibrate for bias, and get training on how to use them well. You know, just like you would in building the rest of a respectful, inclusive interview process.
And as for seemingly-uncurious investors giving one-sided management advice. Well, treat them with the most caution of all.
