Arguing Agile

AA222 - People Don't Quit Jobs, They Quit Bosses - Or Do They?

• Brian Orlando • Season 1 • Episode 222

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We're challenging the most accepted wisdom in workplace culture - do people really quit bad bosses, or are they really fleeing broken systems?

Join Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel as they engage in this heated debate and explore whether blaming individual managers lets dysfunctional organizations off the hook.

🔥 Listen or watch as we also cover:

  • Why good managers turn "bad" under systemic pressure
  • The broken promotion pipeline from individual contributor to leader
  • How measuring individuals while preaching teamwork creates conflict
  • Why psychological safety can't survive in hierarchical power structures

Spoiler alert - we don't end up agreeing in this episode, and that's OK! Whether you're a struggling manager or frustrated employee, this conversation will change how you view workplace dysfunction.

#Leadership #Management #WorkplaceCulture

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INTRO MUSIC
Toronto Is My Beat
By Whitewolf (Source: https://ccmixter.org/files/whitewolf225/60181)
CC BY 4.0 DEED (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en)

Everybody knows that people don't quit jobs, they quit bosses. Is that true? Yeah. Yeah, I think it's true. Okay. Well, look, quit bad bosses. What if what I just said what if it's not true? It's, it's just so ingrained in the psyche of everyone that it's not true. What if blaming bad bosses is just a scapegoat that lets the broken system off the hook? Well, and the whole system's broke because everybody pretty much blames their bosses. When you say, why do you wanna leave? Oh, have we already reached that part of the podcast where we say, burn it all down? Okay. We can go there. All right. Well, I came here ready to burn it all down. And yes, I'm on the side of defending bad managers. That's where I am on this podcast because someone has to do it. It's 'cause someone's gotta do the dirty work. That's right. I Googled it before when we were prepping for the podcast. I did Google it, and it's a real stat. It says that manager managers account for at least 70% of variants in employee engagement scores. That's a real Gallup poll. I did Google it. It's a real thing. I can link that. I can, I can pull up the article here in a second if we want to actually read what it says.'cause again, who knows what. There's like a study of three dudes in the bathroom on a lunch break or something says, I guess 70% couldn't be three dudes. So it must be 10 dudes. I don't know why we're hanging in bathrooms so much. It's, it's, it was a weird study. That's what I'm saying. I don't know anything about Gallup. We'll go with that Gallup study. This is all the stu, let's go with Gallop stuff. All the best stuff gets cut of in podcasts. 70%. 70% variance. Okay so let that, let that be a data point, right. What did the study say? Oh, it says that the manager is as the main contributor to employee engagement or not? It's using this Gallup poll and I'm sure there's a bunch of other polls, but this one's the most specific to this. There it is. Look, I even have it in my history right there. Great managers create the right environment. Only 30% of US employees, 30% worldwide are engaged, whatever that means. And here's your, so it says not, well, I guess I'm on the study, so I might as well put it on the screen. So it says, not every team is led by a great manager. That's why managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. Gallup estimates in the state of the American manager analytics and advice for leaders. And I can find out if I could work a mouse when this study was done. Oh, that's, that's a, this is a fun one. It says 35% of US managers are engaged in their job. Whatever engage means. So it says, oh, there, it's is a study over four decades. 2.5 million manager led teams in 195 countries. 27 million employees. Now because I work at the role that I work in right now, I'm very critical about these kind of studies that are the way I ask you these 10 questions leads you in the way I want to present the data from these 10 questions. The point being made in the study is the manager makes a big impact on the employee's engagement and I think the study sites 30 odd percent in the US so 30% are engaged, is what it's saying and even like, I think when it considered just globally, I think that number even went even further down. It's half that. Less than half that, which is funny. and so I'm trying to reconcile that in my mind. Why would that be? Right? And I, and I can only come up with the fact that here people have to get along, otherwise you, they're showing the door, right? We are, we are very much the leaders in this higher and fire thing. And I don't know if that plays a, a, a, a factor into that. I was gonna say, I have a theory and it also advances my arguing point on this one. I have a theory. The theory is everyone globally is just looking to the US and copying there terrible ways of working and then doing it poorly because it doesn't work here. I mean, it only works in 30% of the cases and they're even struggling with implementing something they saw somewhere else in their own culture that really doesn't adapt to other people's cultures. Because it really doesn't even work for American culture. So how's it gonna work for the does this sound like any other models being adopted? That people being copied? Yeah yeah. Does it sound like anybody, any particular company's model that may be named after the company and have a model? Probably won't mention names. You know, just like the theory of it being copied and someone actually puts it into practice and say, this doesn't work at all. In fact, none of this works yeah. Except in that case, it never was implemented in the first place, but, okay, so let's, although you, that would require you to read past the first paragraph. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We don't have time for that. So on your side, the reason, like the reasons that support the managers. Are the primary reason people quit and I think some of that is borne out by evidence from exit interviews mm-hmm. Where people are asked why, what are the main factors, why you're quitting this job? And more often than not, people cite their managers as the main factors. Now bear in mind, not everyone's gonna say that, even if it was true some people will simply say, it's just not for me, or, I've had a change of heart, I wanna work in a different direction now. But that's because they don't feel safe saying that it's because of their manager. So if the ones that are saying that the exit interviews bear out, that was the majority of them I a hundred percent am am on board with what you're saying right now, I don't have any pushback , I've worked for managers that are great. They're great and we're all cool but when the pressure's on, when they're getting pressured, when things blow up or there's deadlines or whatever, they're completely different person. All the good, like psychological safety and we gotta have planning and blah, blah, blah. Like all that stuff goes completely out the window when the stress is on. I was at a company one time working with the CEO. We had to talk to the investors about something that was happening in the company. We presented the roadmap to the investors and, and he brought me along as the product manager. I was trying to separate product from the C level. They were trying to bring in a product manager for the first time. And we went in front of the investors and presented the roadmap. Okay. We brought in a product manager, he helped us work this out, this is what we think the roadmap's gonna be. This is the next three to six months and this is where we could go a year out from there. Basically like short term, longer term, a two tier type of thing something they've never done before with the investors and they brought me in to present basically. The investors basically grilled me and the CEO together in that call. The investors had ideas of how we could. Expand the business that the CEO, he, he had other ideas, I'm not gonna say it was contentious, but I didn't know those people, so I don't feel completely open to push back also I was pretty new on that contract. Right. You know, I'd only been there like a couple weeks, Oh wow. Before going in front of the investors. Not, not that I was out of outta my depth.'cause like I, I know product management. Sure. So, okay. That reason. But I remember we, we, the investors wanted us to go back, weigh what they said, get some evidence, look at the software, look at the market, and think about it, and then come back and do whatever. And I remember tho those two weeks before we went back to the investors because he was under that pressure, like pressure from his board, pressure from the other founders.'cause they had ideas that like, we should go in different directions. Pressure from the industry about oh, why aren't you doing what? And then like, technical pressures of like technical debt and things like that. in that two week period, he was just super stressed and just became a different person. When we were on the other side of it, he went back to being we were cool and very laid back and that kind of stuff. That was like a little window, a little switch in my head, in my career. I was like, oh yeah, people go and revert to these bad habits when they're under all these pressure. The team members I wanna be on the team with they don't change when the pressure's on. I just want them to stay. I want even team members, I want even handed. Even this tempered team members. I don't want someone to melt down when pressure's gonna gonna be applied. Yeah. I think on a team level, you have more chance of encountering those kinds of people and those behaviors than you do at the leadership level. Only because the pressures are different at the team level versus higher up. You would hope so. You would hope. But, but also I, I think at that level, the leadership level, it's the, it's the culture that will put up with whatever whatever behaviors are being exhibited. I like where you're going because you're making my case for me right now. It wasn't that CEO in this case, it was directly to the top of the company. There was no chain. In that case this CEO was undertrained. He came from an industry of doing the thing. Like he was the subject matter expert. Like product people get into the field he was definitely the product person that got into the field because he was a great subject matter expert. A master of his domain. But that's not product management. That's solving a particular problem. It transitions to product management. Sure. But he didn't have the skill of product management and then he was overworked 'cause he was asked to do all his normal jobs.'cause the CEO does a ton and a small company does a ton. This is like a small company under 30 employees yeah. He was working at the strategy level and the team level. That's really all I have to say, like at tactical level and strategy level and has to deal with his founders and has to deal with his board slash investors. And he is got no training that helps him with this. And the board is like, we, we don't like what you presented to us. So take two weeks and then present us a new vision. Basically a strategy pivot. We don't like any of this. Come back with what you could do differently or evidence to support why this is the right thing to do and we are wrong which they were. To their credit, I did. So I was there the whole time. I was there to see you were to present the evidence. Yeah, we did a little bit of both. We did a little bit of like, no, these are the right things to do and we do need to do them, but when it comes time to do what you want done, we'll be positioned to do that. And we ended up working out something that, we all came away amicably from the divorce. Like each of us got one of the children held hands and sang kumbaya. I mean something. We all had a Coke. Is that what it is? Yeah. This is the longest diatribe to get to it's not the manager, it was the system that he was involved in. Managers are an inextricable part of the system, right? They propagate the system quite often. And you made a point earlier that this person didn't have the background to deal with this situation. Typically, this happens when it's a solo entrepreneur that comes up with a shiny new thing and now they're trying to scale up, right? So they may be technically in nature, they can invent something, but it's one thing to do that. It's completely another thing to take it to the market, get seed corn funding, get various rounds of funding, and actually commercialize the idea. If you haven't had training in that, which is really, I guess it's just. Like training in business aspects mm-hmm. Of running, growing, and running a company. Right? I mean, you just listed several, like the, the sales, the marketing aspect of it, the actual product and product development aspect of it. And the operations of like driving it to market, actually keeping things on deadline, keeping things moving. Like those are way different skillset you just listed out. So I'm like, yeah, we could blame one person for that. But again just like the investors, the incentives that those investors were moving forward with I don't, I had no idea, even now I have no idea how often they were taking cash outta the business, how often they were demanding to get paid or not. Maybe they were never taking anything outta the business I don't know about any of that. With the demands of the system, those guys could very easily have shaped, I mean, they could have fired the CEO every quarter and brought another CEO in, and they still would've the same problems. They would've just crushed the new CEO and been like, oh, you're not delivering widgets fast enough, and it didn't matter who you sat in that seat, the system would've crushed the same person and any employee that worked for them would've equally been crushed. No doubt. And we've seen that revolving door at several organizations and not necessarily even small ones. I would argue that at smaller ones, that tends to happen much less frequently the entrepreneur who invented this thing, whatever it is, they're vested in that they're a hundred percent behind their product, so am mid to large companies. Now you have several layers and maybe even a matrix environment. And the whole culture becomes, more of a blame culture, right? Yeah. So you're more likely to have CEOs that are going round and round with that revolving door, bring in a new one, give them enough time, and boom, they're gone. In among all of the stuff I listed earlier when I missed financial jobs mm-hmm. They don't necessarily have that, perhaps because they haven't had the training. Yeah so we do see this quite often, but people that come with them, let's say you have a person who's invented something and they have people that. We're number 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 in the company. Mm-hmm this is just formation, right? Early formation those people will be more trusted going forward by that person than some of the new people that these investors bring in, right? Because typically investors will bring in their own posse, right? Yeah. They'll, and so when they do that, it's like, well, I invented this thing. I know what it takes to make this work, but you're coming in and telling me about all these things about leveraging finance and this and that. None of that matters. Yeah. Sad reality is it. All of that matters, right? So either learn it or let them do their thing. You do your thing. And that requires the entrepreneur to step back and say, I'm good at inventing things. I'm not necessarily good at running and building and running companies. So let those people do that and let me just sit in the lab and start inventing things. Looking at you. My pillow guy. I mean, oh my God. Are we pointing out people like I, I think I remember Bea mentioned about the bankruptcy of Joann, or she did another, another company. I looked into the company and, and I, I love it was Joanne's fabrics. I love going straight to like, what people are saying about it online.'cause people are like, well, they, they got bought by private equity and I don't remember what it was like, 2011 or like a decade ago, basically and they're like, oh, nobody was crying about Joann when they were profitable a decade ago. But I looked into, I looked into, and I was like, they've had like nine different CEOs in that period of time so I was like, I don't know, I don't know if you really want to hang your hat on that one, there may have been editing here because Om and I had a whole sidetrack where I was like, I don't know if, I don't know if I really want to throw Joanne fabrics Joanne's fabric under the bus because I can't remember if they're the ones that got bought by private equity. And then pretty much, changed CEOs every year for like, the last decade. But I googled how many CEOs has Joanne's fabric had, and it get the AI response gave me a list of 11 CEOs since 2006. And I don't like, I don't know if anyone's counting, but that's a lot. That is a lot. Obviously no, no, CEO no matter how successful they are, can survive in this ecosystem. Right? And, and which brings me back to my point, which is the systemic issues, like a lot, I've been on a lot of development teams that have had these bad systemic issues of like unrealistic deadlines just keep getting set no matter how unrealistic and how many times the team misses it, that they, we just cannot ever. Set a realistic deadline, insufficient resources, people get pulled from teams contradictory KPIs competing KPIs, stuff like that. You know what I mean? or OKRs or whatever fake system you want to use. That's another podcast. These games are the system. They're systemic., The only thing you can do in this situation like yeah, that manager was bad. That might be true, but also you keep that resume updated.'cause there's, that's stage advice. There's no success that you're ever gonna find yeah. I've seen organizations like this that are super dysfunctional what are the organizational types, the three organizational types? This is the. Not psychotic. There's a term I can't remember that. It starts with a p. Generative, bureaucratic and psychotic. We did a pathological Western. Western. That's pathological. Pathological. It's pathological. It was a p Oh, psychotic pathological. Listen, it's all the same thing. It's all the same thing. So than I. That's right, that's right. That's right. So, so what I'm saying is going back to the Western model, theorem, I don't construct, construct, I don't know, robot mega villain like these are the pathological. These are the, the, the, the, the system. The type of organization, the system is pathological, and this stuff's just gonna happen you're gonna have OKRs and goals and all kinds of stuff that like compete and competition's gonna be a thing, cooperation's not gonna be a thing. It's all like, it's the anti Deming organization. Very much so. You might have good managers in that system, but those good managers are like the, the, the clock is ticking because the system will destroy those people. And then, here's my central thesis to the whole podcast. You as the employee will sit there and say, wow, I was great when I was working for this one manager and they were great. They were lovely, they were awesome. We're on the same page. And then I got transitioned over to this other manager and they were terrible. So people, fully bad managers. But I will posit the organization that is pathological the regression to the mean there is to always have you ending up as an employee back working for one of these type of people that are bad managers and then from your perspective, you're like, oh no Brian, no, you're wrong. No, there's just bad managers and that's why most people leave. They leave bad managers. So then the moniker sticks of like, people don't leave whatever they leave. They leave bad bad managers and I'm like, no, they flea bad systems. Or they get pushed out by bad systems. One or the other at the end of the day you know you're reporting to a person at the end of the day, right? That your manager is a person. So the organization is nothing more than the sum of its people and it's these people. There's a lot of things that play into. Managers being quote unquote bad managers you know, the wrong hires no training people being put into jobs that they're not qualified for some, and those are just three off the top of my head there are plenty like that. And you could be a victim of the circumstance in that case. And you're, you are fleeing the system, but it looks like you're fleeing your boss at the end of the day. But having said that, maybe another person that you work for isn't like that other person. So they actually take the trouble to understand what you need to be successful. They set you up for success by giving you what you need. Which could be. Maybe you need training on the job, maybe you need specific types of teams that they can say, okay go ahead and form those teams, well, maybe you can come in with new ideas and say, well this team is working in a certain way and it's not proven well for us, so how about we changed the way they work. So I came across this not too long ago where the team was failing because they couldn't estimate the work properly. And the manager came in and said, your estimation makes no sense. you talk about these points and things right. isn't it just hours at the end of the day? Can you estimate in hours? So they start doing that, but also ask the question, who are you asking to estimate the work? Is it an expert? Is it a lead? Is it an architect? Is it a novice? Anyone off the street, whoever will give the shortest answer. The shortest answer that, so that's what they were seeking, right. Is it's the smallest number. That's right. Like 10 hours instead of a hundred hours. That's right and that's what, that's the behavior that they were encouraging and that's the behavior they got. They were very happy. Oh, look at this. All this work will be done except it won't be done and it wasn't done right. That's right. So anyway, another manager on the other hand, couldn't care less how you estimate fast forward just a few more weeks until this person was sidelined to another project and we had a different manager. Yeah. This manager came in and said, I don't. Wanna be involved in how you are estimating your, that's you, that's the team and I'm, I'm with 'em. Neither do I, because like I got a lot of work to do I can't meet Exactly. In the end, the team decided they didn't even wanna go back to the old way of estimation. Using points. They decided to do Roman estimation which this manager didn't know anything about the new one but when it was explained to them, all we're doing is simply saying, what's the confidence level to get something done in a two week span? The point scale is one through five because that's all you have in your hand. Well, I guess you have zero, right? Zero through five.'cause that's what you have in your hand. Most people can play this game and you can put it in all your a LM tools. Sure. The way it is, it like super easy, very easy. And the fives aren't frowned upon. It's simply just, okay, this is a five, can we finish it in 10 days? And the answer is no. And what do we do? We break it down. Does it need to be broken down into a two and a three or two twos and a one or whatever it is? I love the fact that I have some senior devs on my team now. it hasn't always been the same, right now my team is a lot of senior devs and we just have a working agreement that says if the story is a three. Then we don't point it, we'll just put a three on it and be done, or three or below. Three or below. Then, then we'll just put a three on it and we'll call it done and if the story's above a three, we all agree that we, like if anybody on the team, anybody on the team thinks it's not a three, then we, we keep breaking it and breaking it and breaking it until everybody on the team, unanimous agreement. Unanimous. Not one person on the team. I have a small team, , this wouldn't work on a team of 30 my team is like five people. 30 is also not a team that's Oh, yeah, I understand. But this works for us and when like we always agree that like, yes, it's a three good ship. It like we, we'll send it along, put it in the backlog, we'll bring it into the sprint. And it's a, it's a very fresh process at this point when we've been together for a couple years. It, it's wonderful to think that people aren't gonna. spend or waste their time debating the difference between one and a two or two and a three. Listen, the difference is only one. We don't do any of that. Hey, just move on it's the differences that are bigger at higher ends five, three and a five, et cetera. I often wonder, had I not come from the background of working on development teams would I not have this attitude as a product manager? You know, I mean, would I, would I look at it completely differently? I wonder if I didn't have a technical background like would I be fighting the team on these things like that? I see other product managers fighting their development teams being like, I don't understand why you're not going faster. but also without the skill to conceptualize software as it's being produced and then just start slicing things and be like, Hey, I don't need the whole front end. You can fake this data. Hey, I don't need a whole API, you can fake that response , I just need the screen to show up. And it's a working background, but then it always brings back this like the shortcuts ative mindset, right? Yeah. Of working in iterative manner. Look, if you don't have a development background, I mean, we can only reflect on our own past experiences, right? My experiences have been when there's been a manager, product manager, et cetera. anybody who is. Not from a technical background. They tend to do two things, right. One is they tend to treat software development as stamping out widgets like manufacturing. So the rate of production is constant in their mind so they'll say, well, last print you did X. If we just buckle up, pull up our socks, we can do x plus plus and they always encourage a team to go faster, so that's one thing they do. The other thing they do is they will say things like, how long will it take? It's like, when will we be done? you often see this from salespeople, salespeople are wonderful, we need them, but they've gotta understand, I mean, the, how long will it take thing is I wish that I could remold that question can this be done today? because like a lot, dude, what I'll do is I'll get on a call with my team and I'll say like, Hey, we need to create a new database table, or Hey, we need to create new we're, we're on elastic., We need to create a new elastic index And work out the fields and work out the template and everything behind the scenes, right. and spin it up and throw it up there and have it functional into the development environment so we can like start contributing data and have the front end start feeding it and stuff like that. Like I know from experience, I can get my team on the phone and just start screen sharing and we will work through and contribute and we can have that form and everything up and running in like an hour. A working session. A working session yeah, yeah we have a working session. I think they're very powerful but that's like me trusting them to figure out how things are done. Yeah. But when you start cutting into like my specific expertise of like sql, I'm like, Hey, I can do this and have this up and running faster very fast. Like 15 minutes, I can get you all the sequel same as you want, because I'm a absolute wizard with regard to sql. And I try to, I try to keep it under my hat so I don't get stuck as like, oh, the, the product manager who's writing all the sql deep sequel savings or whatever. You don't be that, that's not, I don't need, like the businesses me doing, they need me doing business. They don't need me doing that kind of stuff. It's just the understanding of the issues and how people treat them as managers. I think we got sidetracked there. Where we got into the sidetrack was like we were talking about systemic reasons and I, and I wanted to talk about the organizational structure being the real culprit, but the the managers and typical modern organizations oversee a lot of employees. I think that all that stuff should go in another podcast. The, the, the Dunbar number and all that. I think, I think right sizing is a podcast or right sizing as an org and like yeah, that's a whole different podcast. Yeah. Where we're going with the org design and org size is again, assuming the org modern organization is not willing to like, break down into Dunbar's number from all the, like the rest of these numbers, like we have the Jay Richard Hackman and Harvard Haved found that small teams, 46 people were most effective. Jeffrey Jeffrey Bezos has the five to eight people, two pizza team rule and Ivan Steiner seventies research about the formula of n n minus one for communication links between people. You've got the ringman early, early 19 hundreds work on this. So this is like a lot of studies rediscovering the same thing over and over again about like five to seven teams five to seven people on a team ideal team size, right? if we're gonna forget about that for a second and ignore the team structure, the team size, the organizational size, stuff like that, you're gonna come into two categories, which is the structure of the teams and organizations and all that kind of stuff doesn't excuse bad management, which I feel that's a category that you're representing is like, Hey, listen, there's bad managers. Doesn't matter what structure it is. There are, they're just bad managers. Yes. And what I'm saying is the structure itself is. Makes the bad manager, it determines the outcome, it makes the managers bad, and it forms the experiences that you're about to give as evidence. Yeah. Yes. the structure doesn't help when it comes to turning bad managers into not so bad managers. it doesn't have the processes in place to do that meaning the way we get people in the way we train them or not train them the way we promote them, et cetera, there's flaws every step of the way. Mm-hmm because we're always chasing the cheapest possible way to obtain the talent we think we need. Mm-hmm. So you don't home grow it because that takes longer and it's not the cheapest, right? So you buy in the talent and then what happens? Right? So one of two things. Either you buy in talent that's real and they will make a difference. You hope that's the case, but the other side of it is much more prevalent and that is they don't, you've made a mistake, you don't realize you've made a mistake. They're simply padding their resume 'cause they've now been hired into a role that they've never had before that they can put on their resume and they're gonna last maybe six months and move on. Right. I would argue even Jenen Huwang's company, even our friendly neighborhood, CEO, who's just a normal guy with a wonderful jacket. Even he probably has on his, values of his company. He probably even has like, we're people first with his 60 to one ratio for management. Like his revolving door of leadership is like even if that's a little flippant, just to put the point across how many to one do you need to be to not be able to have time for anyone like 2001? You know what I mean? Realistically, and in practical terms, there is a limit, obviously, right?'cause they're only 24 hours in a day. But, but again, that's a structure. If the structure is like, well the CEO to his direct reports is 60 to one, so I mean, you om should be able to at least do 60, come on I saw that guy in the news and he does 60 to one. So, I mean, you could at least do 101, right?'cause you're, you're better than cool leather jacket guy. Get me a cool leather jacket. I can do it, I can do 60. Yeah, no, listen, organizations like that perpetuate that behavior, right? And there's no way out. But that's the system. Again, you can't blame one person. You could say like, well that's a terrible manager to work for. It is the system. But when somebody leaves, they don't leave the system necessarily. That, not necessarily, most times it's definitely the system. They can't stand. My manager. Sure and whether they actually get an interview or not even depends on the manager, right? I feel now is the time of the podcast to take the views aside and say, during your extra, during your exit interview, you say, everything was great. I'm just leaving. Thank you. Goodbye. You're leaving a company that won't listen to you. Why would you say anything on your exit interview? I don't understand why anyone says anything like, but also like, count your managers direct reports and calculate their mathematical capacity for meaningful interaction. Meaning 60 direct reports? Yeah, exactly. I, I don't even know how to start with that. Sorry. Okay, so 60. How do you have time for your direct reports? When do you meet with them one-on-one? Never. I'm gonna save you time only. You're the CEO, right? If you're doing that, let's say you do half hours, that's 30 hours of your week, right? Just doing one-on-ones. When are you doing your CEO bit? Meeting with the press, doing all of that stuff. Listen, I, you're not, I watched a interview with Zuckerberg where he says he doesn't do one-on-ones because he is constantly talking to people and like, so I don't need to do one-on-ones. That's what I, that's the thought leadership. Not, not THOT leadership ToT okay. Taught leader, taught, taught leadership. Doesn't make any sense. So perfect structure. Let me read their quotes to see if I want to use any of this. I like the humorous scoring on this one. Oh, the organizational Jenga scale, or one is stable as a pyramid and 10 is a sneeze from collapse. Well, that was me. I was sneezing. This score is an eight. We remove so many middle managers, it blocks the hole that the whole tower swing yeah. I have another episode in mind for this, which is like where does your leadership get their new ideas from? Because the diet of the media diet of the typical American, like I worry about and, but I really worry about the media diet of the typical American CEO because I'm really worried about that. I, I read a lot of those media ecosystem like outlets and oh boy, do they put out garbage. A lot of garbage. It, unfortunately, it has gotten worse. It's bad. Especially with ai now you get all these things that are spun out, like volume is huge, but the quality has gone down disproportionately. Let's pivot into a category that I really enjoy, and I think you enjoy it too, which is most organizations measure individual performance while preaching teamwork. And that creates inherent conflict that, that creates this cognitive dissonance and conflict. And then the managers have to navigate this contradictory corporate messaging and the reward system and how it doesn't really like how it's disconnected from reality and this causes a problem. So there, on one side, I see that like the, the good managers can figure out ways to game this and like that can rise above these metrics and they can push them off and deflect as best they can for them and their employees and their department There's only so much you can deflect Yeah. What was that game where, the old ATARI game where you're the little thing at the bottom of the screen. Space, space invaders. Remember Space Invaders? Oh, I remember those. You're a little guy at the bottom of the screen and you gotta keep shooting and, and then like the aliens and everything just keep coming and they get faster and faster, faster until you die. That's this with the system. The system is the Space Invader game, and you're down here like doing the best you can until you just get crushed and die. Wow. When you started talking about metrics and people that come in and they measure things, right? Yeah. So oftentimes I find that when people come in as managers, they don't bring with them a sense of what to measure why. Yeah and obviously when et cetera comes in later but it starts with like, why you measuring anything? And then what are you measuring to what end? Yeah. I don't think that managers get enough training in this. And here I'm just gonna say, if you are a typical manager, did you come up through the ranks? Because if you came up through the ranks, you know what to measure. Even if the organization isn't pricing that you know what to measure. If you, on the other hand just came in from a B school and you're just appointed a manager over all these people, you're gonna have certain preconceptions of what needs to be measured. It does. So that work does not include certain things. Okay. It includes all of these financial ratios. What it doesn't include is things like safety in teams team health. Get cohesion in your team. Mm-hmm you know, get team members to bond with one another. A lot of those things come reciprocal. Meaning instead of spending time and effort and energy on team building, you're focused on output why spend time on an outing somewhere?'cause the team could get to know one another where they could be doing work. I know where you're going,, there are some organizations that require stack ranking people hey, give me your people in stack rank order regardless of how much you believe it or not that's just a listen. At the end of the day, we just need like the, your seven people that work for you in orders one through seven, and then we're gonna dole out bonuses based on the they're just forcing you. Yeah. Everything you're saying is like, I a hundred percent agree with like, that's the distance of this episode. I agree with you. But again, like the system is like, well, this is the way our incentive structure is Om. And just fill out the form. Be because I like, my, my pushback against this is like, you can only fight city Hall so much until we're like, you know om he's just not a team player. on our management team. And I think there's just not a future here for him. He doesn't share our values. You're gonna find your way out because they're gonna push you out because you just fight city hall one too many times you gotta pick your battles. These are the kinds of things that are gonna get Sling, sling slung, slung, slung at you. Slung Sling on slung sling. S sl No, that's not a word. Slung. Slung at you. You're not wrong. That is absolutely right. It's about. What to measure and also measuring it so if you're thinking about teams and you're just simply paying lip service, team members will know that because they're gonna see individuals being rewarded. Typically it's your architects or your team leads or your test leads. It's the leads that get rewarded often and not the worker bees. They're gonna see that, and that's gonna have a detrimental impact on their psyche. For sure. But part of this is also, those managers don't really have a good way to assess how the whole team is performing and also reward the team and so they're probably overthinking this at this stage rewards are often thought about as monetary. They don't have to be monetary. They can be other things. The best thing I can think of to do with a team when you want to pat them on the back is say the right words, but then follow it up. Send everybody food. Food works great, right? It really helps the gel with one another when you're doing that. That's only second best because ideally you should be around the same physical table, but that's not possible in this case so you can do things like that, but managers don't see value in that. First of all, they will stymie your attempts to get like even a few bucks for pizza. Approved as expense you gotta find ways around that, right? So we used to do that. We'd find ways around that incidentals, things like that, and push it through, so my point about this is they need to know A, what to measure and then B, measure those things, Right. So measure the right things. Measure those things, right? They're not taught this, managers are not taught this in B School. I don't recall going to a single class where you taught this, it all finance and HR and marketing and all of that. But you know, it's insular, right? If I'm gonna undermine what you're saying, I will throw out, well, ohm, your bonus is tied to you following these metrics or guidelines or whatever. I understand everything you're saying, , you've gotta get these things across the finish line no matter what, by these dates, by these arbitrate things have been picked outta the air. I'm not saying that your incentives are unfair or bad incentives, but those are your incentives. So what are you gonna do? not hit any of your incentives no. You're gonna hit 'em all. So it's like saying, which horse are you gonna feed? you're gonna chariot with. S not five, four, or six horses. It's usually an even number, right? So you win the chariot race, which horse are you going to feed? Right? It's the whole thing. So you're gonna feed all of 'em, right? Hopefully. I guess a better analogy might be the Huskies whatever it is the race. I forget the name of it. But anyway, you get the idea. Sorry, I don't, I don't, I don't go many huskies. Sorry. I live in Florida. I don't go to the snow. I don't like snow doesn't exist. I don't think we have such a thing in. You can't, you can't, you can't, you can't convince me that snow's real. That's, that's what we're getting. That's a quote of this podcast. Snow's not real. I've never seen it. I don't believe in it. Coming back to the team okay if your team succeeds as a team.'cause they should, right? You don't have heroes on a team. Why not reward the whole team? So why can't the whole team be bonused the same way? It's doable. It's not hard, right. But it requires the manager's mindset to move away from playing favorites don't reward just the leads or the smartest people or the most vocal people, because it may be the quiet people that are pulling some weight. most companies promote their best individual contributors into management and then give them no training or support or consideration of leadership aptitude or anything like that. This is a systemic and constant failure that leads to a predictable outcome every time. If there's one argument I'm gonna make on this podcast that supports me, that there's no way you can argue against, oh, I will try. It's the, but you will try it is this one, which is the leadership development pipeline. Look, it's, it's rigged against you , we're gonna take you outta your job role and be like, congratulations, you're a great programmer, or you're a great whatever individual contributor, subject matter expert, right the best the best pig iron carrier. The best pig iron carrier in the world now you supervise all the pig iron carrying in the world. None of those say that you're gonna be great at management or leadership or both.'cause let's be honest, it's both and that's terrible. The corporate America, the pipeline for developing leadership. Is first of all, nonexistent. So you're describing the Peter principle, right? People get promoted to their highest level of incompetence and that's very true, Peter. It's very true. But I would say this you say it's the system, but what is it really? It's the people in the system that are doing this so if you're hiring person who has authority over hiring or promoting, right? Are you promoting only those people that are the most vocal, they're your favorites, or are you looking across the team and saying, we need somebody in this role, step up. Who are, whoever wants to step up, rotate the role, if you will, right? Maybe everybody takes turns a month at a time, a sprint, at a time, whatever it might be. Let people have an opportunity to shine. If you're not doing that and you're simply picking somebody, then. You are part of the system, right? You're basically another brick in the wall. I would, so there's a couple things you just said that that I will push back against in the most polite manner possible, which is saying, are you crazy? Like, I'm like the, like good, like natural leaders will emerge regardless of we train them or not. Like they'll just step up a sink or swim approach to leadership will like it won't mostly create sinkers. It'll mostly create swimmers I don't believe that at all. Why? I'm gonna ask the five. Why, why not? Why not? Like, why, why, but why? Because I'm like a 2-year-old. Because, natural leaders will not emerge without any kind of like formal development program. Meaning like, if you don't invest in them, you will never pull out natural leader aspects that you are looking for. If we go along that line of reasoning Right. And agree that most organizations don't invest enough in this, okay. That means we are really doing a terrible job at leadership development. The only thing I would add to what you just said is I would add systemically to the end of that and then close my case, your honor, close and take your dossier and walk out the room. I would take my put all my stuff under my arms and be like, we both lawyers, and then I'd go home. Technical experts are forced into management usually. and the only way that they have to like grow their salaries or their careers or whatever, if they quote step up into management, and that's like just technical, technical people and be like, I'm good at building x, y, z system. I'm really good at orchestrating AWS or maybe I really understand Kubernetes or whatever. But I can't do that in the podcast. So how the heck does that give you any skill to move up into leadership? well, like your people at the top of the organization should know. Well, it doesn't. It absolutely doesn't. So there should be some kind of track to say. These are our best performers, and if they are going to be the cornerstone of bringing performers up under them, we need some kind of track to help them and get the skill they need to realize they're here, but they could be here. What does what does that gap look like? What does that, what does that staircase, what does every single stair on that staircase look like? Yeah. And and I would say before you even get into the next one, like corporate America does none of that. And not only do they not do any of that, there's no ROI, any of that. There's no money, any of that. They're not gonna spend a single dime. The model that you're describing here, that is the ideal one, right? Corporate America should do X, Y, ZI personally, and I think I've said this several times, I'm many podcasts. I'm a big fan of the journeyman model. You're right. That will lend itself to this, right. Because you are not just simply. Coming in and being ordained. The new manager or the new boss, you've worked your way up and you've learned through the school of hard knocks by making mistakes. But you know, in a safe environment, hopefully you have a mentor. That you're learning from over a course of time. So you can look back and say, here are all the mistakes that I've made, but I've learned from them and I can train somebody else. That is the only way to do this. There are cultures where this happens, and those cultures, their managers are those managers that recognize where they came from. Right? Which is, they were a team member not too long ago, right. They were on the shop floor as a machine operator, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And now they're a supervisor. They don't forget what it's, what pains a machine operator has, right? And, and so on. It goes all the way up. Yeah, we don't have that in corporate America, period. Yeah, that's a big problem. The leadership Hunger Games, where like one is I carefully developed and shaped athletes that are meant to win the Hunger Games, Nevada. and like 10 is I have volunteer ratio, like a random, like I volunteer as tribute like, I don't know, like this, this is a solid, eights, like congrats kid. Like you got, you got solid coding skills you've always done well. Like it worked in the middle of the night for us. Like you're the new supervisor. It's so haphazard in this category. We're well into this podcast now, like we're deep into the podcast. We're gonna, we're gonna start transitioning to the end of the podcast now, but just let everyone listening know I skipped one of the categories and also on the other side of the ones that we're about to talk about, the one that we're about to talk about, I've got like six more categories. I think we might end up splitting this podcast into a two-parter. Yes. a lot of people listening to this podcast will be in tune with the idea of psychological safety. I have a challenge here, which is like, skilled managers create safety. Like that's, that's like a, a skilled manager can like, create safety I had a manager that really propelled my career and help me get to the point where I can learn, I can do other things and they really help me accelerate my career. And yeah, that, that's a great, that you have that one manager and that might be shaping your view that like, oh no, Brian, you're, you're wrong. People flee bad managers. They don't flee bad organizations. The power structure of the system is what? Prevents that psychological safety from even being able to take root. You might be able to have one at a point in time. A manager that you work for that's really great and they create psychological safety and they keep that bubble or whatever. But eventually the regression to the mean is gonna push that manager out and that safety's gonna get pushed away with them. And you're gonna go back to that. It, it's any, any, any agile transformation where like the agile transformation goes away when the person sponsoring the transformation goes away. That is this exact category. What I'm saying is it's systemic. It has nothing to do with one manager. So I'm arguing the opposite side here, right? Yes, please. So I'm gonna say this. Yeah, of course it's systemic, but the system is nothing more than the sum of all its people policies and procedures yeah. And then who, who develops, who develops the processes? Who develops the policies? The system, right? Doesn't people develop policies? Right. Policies start somewhere. They start with an individual. Usually they start with somebody who's in charge of a domain. Sometimes they start with, people are mostly familiar with HR policies. They start with hr. so what I'm saying is at the end of the day, it is still people that create all of these factors that we're lumping together and calling it the system, right? You can't fight the system because you can't see the system. You can see policies, you can see who formed the policies. You can talk to those people if they're still around or challenge those policies, you can't fight the system you have no chance on making any impact anymore. Because the system meaning like the larger collection of people and like segments of people in this, 150 broken down pieces of organization, yeah. All together. If you have no shot at impacting or changing that, you're at the point where you're like, you gotta keep your resume updated.'cause if you have no opportunity you might as well, like even the most staunch of career coach, you'll be like, you need to look for a way out. Absolutely. You have no voice anymore and why are you still there? I feel like that's all arguing on my side of this is like the hierarchical power structure here. You just can't make an impact. You're at the point now where the employees. Will self-censor where they, they don't misalign with what leadership is saying because they're afraid like we're, we're in a real dangerous place. Now, I agree. First of all, what you just said, not only self-censor, but even cancel others that can happen too, right? Yeah in, in a fairly toxic environment. Sure. So hierarchical power structures do prevent psychological safety from being implemented, right? It's still people that are creating these fiefdoms and power dynamics, et cetera, starts with the individual, I think at the end of the day mm-hmm. It does start with, if you are not a manager, think about how you would be if you were in your manager's shoes if you are a manager, look in the mirror and say, what didn't I do? That that could have done to yield a better outcome. The reason I think this is a great podcast is because obviously we've artificially segmented the foreign against here. We're fighting, as we often do, we're fighting forward against. I think as the podcast went on, I don't think we got closer I think we got further apart. Yeah, further apart and I think this and the MVP podcasts, those are the two podcasts that are like. When I suggest people listen to arguing Agile I'm like, you should listen to the MVP podcast because that's the one that we've done where we really look, we never came together and we never came together. This is another one. We're like, we just, we are not coming together on the agreement here of like, it's a system. No, it's a person. No, it's a system. And the test of psychological safety here is can you respectfully disagree with your manager on something that's like. Maybe not something major'cause like that, that might be like a big red flag and get you in big trouble. Pick something small and be like, Hey, like I just don't see eye to eye with you on this one. Like, I just don't agree with you. And then see what their reaction is and see if they try to reach common ground or bring you in or see if they're just like, well, okay, well I'm the manager and you're have, have to figure it out. Pick something small and just see if this is like, if your organization is on Om's side where it's like you can disagree and we can work together'cause it's about the people. Or you're on my side where like the managers just a representative of the system and they're saying like, well, if you don't disagree, then you better figure out a way to disagree and then commit to my side because I'm the manager. We definitely we talk about so many different things in this podcast, and I feel we've just like, barely scratched the surface of all the things we could talk about. We haven't talked about hr, we haven't talked about. And you started talking about there's a couple of things that you started talking about that I took notes on in the podcast to take offline for another agenda. Yep. So we might have a part two of this one. Two things that I wanna point out, and if we go to another podcast, these will be on the agenda for the second podcast, which is your terrible boss. They're villain to you. But. With regards to the system, they're another victim because okay, you get fired, you get laid off, whatever, or you decide to quit 'cause you can't take it anymore. But eventually that boss will also be on the chopping block because the system that burned you is gonna eventually burn them. They just don't see it coming yet the real villain is the system, the system that promoted that person that stood them up, you know what I mean? And let them set them up to fail, set them up to burn a bunch of people and then fail. And then now it's just like the system keeps going despite everyone's misery. That's the main point number one. Main point number two is . People love saying like the bad boss. Like that was my main reason for wanting to do this podcast was we had the bad boss. Oh, I just had a really bad boss. Okay. It's cool and that narrative is great, it's, it's cheaper. Where it it doesn't lay blame on the organization to say like, oh, you have one bad individual in your organization. It makes it sound like, well, maybe if the company just got rid of that one person, they'd be all better and they'd be a great company. That's not true. The system around that person, the system that, that lifted that person up into the role, they're in that system is broken. Do people quit bad bosses or are like our systems, like is that just air cover for bad systems that are just gonna keep being bad forever? I mean maybe, but also like, again, these my favorite podcasts are the ones we don't come to a strong Sure. Agreements between the two of us talk we leave behind and you know, so if you are one of those managers in that situation where you feel like you've been set up to fail, or if you're an individual where you feel like you are experiencing a bad boss, we have the same advice for both of you. Keep that resume updated. Yes, absolutely. Well, if we can agree on one thing. That's the thing that, that's it so, hey, and also if we can agree on one thing, which is you should like us subscribe. Yes. Let us know in the, comments below. What, you want us to talk about next?