Where Did all The Managers Go?
The world could be a better place if only we knew when to scrap useless vocabulary and jettison antiquated ideas…
Peter Gibbons worked as a computer programmer at IniTech and he didn’t like his job. OK, let’s be frank. He really hated it. And more than that he despised his management. Well, it’s a small wonder, he reported to eight different bosses.
This misery at the office trickled into his home and his romantic relationship began to unravel. Desperate times called for desperate measures. So Peter Gibbons signed up for an occupational hypnotherapy session.
It went terribly wrong! It was a disaster! The pent-up frustration that Peter brought into the therapy session was too much for the hypnotist to take.
Dr. Swanson collapsed. He suffered a heart attack. He dropped dead right in front of Peter’s eyes.
This was a cathartic experience, as you’d imagine. But also a liberating one for Peter. He finally understood that now was the time to take back control of his life. From that point forward, Peter was no longer prepared to tolerate the oppression of the Office…
Wow! There is a lot of drama in this story! Someone should’ve made a movie out of it. Well, somebody did! The film, Office Space, was released in 1999 and Peter Gibbons spoke for his generation when he said this:
“It’s not that I’m lazy… it’s that I just don’t care!” Peter was referring to his job!
He is a fictional character, but we are real and we want to care, we want our jobs to have meaning, we want to make a difference…
So, what is holding us back? It is outdated ideas! Ideas and the vocabulary we’ve inherited from the industrial age: the hierarchy, the bureaucracy, the command & control logic or running a company.
All of that made a lot of sense in the age of assembly lines and conveyor belts. But we now live in the world of open offices and remote work. Yet those ideas remain a hallmark of a modern enterprise. Those terms are two centuries old, but we are sticking with them for some reason. We have no one to blame but ourselves! And, also, the dictionary.
Our vocabulary is where ideas reside. They get entrenched in the language we use. Let’s take the term manager for example. It’s the linchpin of a hierarchy and it was the bane of Peter’s existence. It is often said that employees join a company, but they leave a manager. A quick google search reveals why
Well… This is really depressing. But, let’s be clear, blaming the manager is not the answer. They are the victims of the same outdated systems, just like the rest of us. Being a cog in a machine isn’t fun regardless of how important a cog one is.
To be fair, most managers I’ve encountered in my life were great. They were competent and they were good at their jobs, and I’m sure the same is true for you. But the problem is that in a command & control structure, the managers are expected to do exactly that: command & control.
For good or for bad, neither command nor control adds that much value to running a successful, innovative enterprise these days. The world has changed since the times the steam engine was invented and ushered in the industrial revolution. There are a few megatrends, which are putting conventional organizational models under serious strain.
The #1 megatrend that’s driving everything else is the accelerating pace of technological development. The social media, the smartphone, the internet, the computer, they have fundamentally reshaped our lives.
But so did the abacus and a printing press. The important distinction is that it took 2,000 years between those major breakthroughs, whereas we’ve experienced a handful in your lifetimes.
What this means is that we can no longer forecast, plan, and execute. In other words, the strategy, as we know it, is dead. But strategy formulation and execution is how managers earn their keep. So if it is gone for good, where does it leave the manager?
Another megatrend to consider is the automation of everything. Some estimates suggest that we could lose as many as 2 billion within a decade! Well, you are right to be skeptical. We are talking about more than half of the jobs that exist today. Such pronouncements have been made with every wave of automation, but what we’ve seen is that some jobs disappear and new ones get invented.
Actually, it doesn’t matter which view you subscribe to, the broad consensus is that all routine work, the tasks that can be parsed out is being outsourced to the machines. Non-standard, creative, experimental work, tasks that require intuition and cross-team collaboration will remain, but it doesn’t naturally lend itself to management. It’s not just the cashless stores and driverless cars, it’s the tasks performed by doctors, lawyers, and teachers.
The robots and algorithms may or may not steal your job, but they will surely take some of the boring and pointless tasks off your plate. And believe me, it’ll be much harder to manage you once you are no longer burdened with routine and repetitive minutia.
What else is happening in the world is that the millennials will soon dominate the global workforce. The millennials have gotten their priorities down. They will not join your firm until you’ve got a ping-pong table, but they’ll sure push the limits of the industrial era thinking. They grew up digital, they understand networks much better than they understand the hierarchy.
Information is power, we all know that. The traditional managers, when they encounter information, will hoard it. But the first instinct of a millennial would be to share it, to become an influencer, an important hub in the network. And, thus, gain a different type of power. Can a rigid hierarchy survive these fundamental shifts in attitudes?
Those 3 megatrends: ever-accelerating pace of technological advancement; the automation of everything, and the millennials coming of age are pushing the traditional manager, literally, out of the door. Some companies are struggling to cope, some take half-measures and that creates apathy, confusion, and distrust; but others are thriving. Steve Jobs was one of the first people to sense the zeitgeist.
I guess that kind of thinking worked out pretty well for Apple, as it became the first public company in the world to reach a $1 trillion valuation.
Another example to consider is a Swedish company called Crisp that has no CEO. It runs as a holacracy, which is a true alternative to Command & Control. No one is in charge. Well, actually, everyone is in charge. Staff is empowered to take responsibility and to make decisions at their level, which happens to be one and only level at Crisp. The authority and decision-making are distributed throughout the organization, rather than being vested in a management hierarchy.
If you believe something needs to be done, you are expected to step up and do it! Others will join in if you are able to make a persuasive pitch. That’s a self-regulating system that filters out bad decisions. The company doesn’t operate on reporting lines but on a set of principles that allows people to collaborate effectively. Crisp is a 40 ppl consulting business, but can it work at scale?
A tech unicorn called Zappos, which was acquired by Amazon for $1.2B, has been operating as a holacracy for the last 4 years.
Surely, the tech startups are experimenting with all kinds of ideas, but what about the good-old-manufacturing? Let me ask you this question, then: what do the refrigerator and YouTube have in common?
If the fridge is made by Haier than the answer is: “quite a lot.”
Haier — the largest appliance maker in the world and it set itself up as a platform.
It operates as an ecosystem of 4,000 micro-enterprises, a dozen employees each. Employees at all levels are directly accountable to the customers, and the company was able to cut the time from concept to market by 70%.
This organizational design Inspired a new term — humanocracy — and there isn’t a lot of space for managers at Haier, but plenty of space for the entrepreneurs.
So, given those three megatrends and the examples of holacracy and humanocracy, could we now say that the era of management is over? Let’s not get carried away. The tech startups get a lot of publicity but remain a tiny fraction of the global economy. There are 3,5 billion people working today, and we know that the majority of jobs don’t require creativity and spontaneity. What they do require are consistency and efficiency.
Bureaucracy may be soul-crushing, but it works, that’s why we stuck with it for so long. Bureaucracy and hierarchy create efficiency at scale. And this has been a winning formula for many successful companies.
A flat structure can be disorienting. And even the companies that have embraced holacracy, admit that it isn’t easy to implement.
We also are status-abscessed creatures, and projecting your status or even knowing what it is could be difficult in the organizations with no official titles.
We, humans, have a peculiar relationship with authority. We really like to defer difficult decisions. So we elevate them to our managers. In that sense, we are vested in the hierarchy even if we resent it. But what has always been true and remains true is that bureaucracy comes with at a cost.
Peter Gibbons was a talented programmer and he told us that he wasn’t lazy, but there was no space for him to make a meaningful contribution. He could only muster about 15 min of real actual work in a given week. Well, I’m certain we all are doing a much better job than Peter. Should we say, about an hour of real actual work on a good day?
So what are we doing the rest of the time? We are busy ticking many boxes and complying with many requirements, operating within the guidelines, waiting for decisions to come down from the top…
We could all contribute a lot more, but instead, we are stuck doing things that add very little value. And guess what, deep in their hearts, the companies where we work want exactly the same thing we wish for. They’d like to give us space to do our best, to bring all of our many talents, to step up. They just don’t know how.
This is clearly a lose-lose situation, and that can’t last.
We are living in the age of disruption. When iPhone was released it almost disrupted Nokia out of business. Netflix has shaken up the movie-making industry to its core. And the next wave of disruption is not about products or services, it is coming for the org-structures.
Can our business vocabulary survive those tectonic shifts? I sure hope NOT. Managers manage, director direct, supervisors supervise, and what do executives do? Execute?! Ok, let’s not go that far.
Every one of those terms symbolizes command & control, but what really matters today is the context in which the teams operate: market context, technology context, regulatory environment, the context of one project vis-a-vis others within the organization.
Let me give you an example. If you were the CEO of a car company a few decades ago, to compete, what you had to do is make better cars, or faster cars, or cheaper cars. The context didn’t matter much. You knew you were an automaker.
Today, if you are an automaker, are you a hardware or a software company? Are you supposed to focus on making better cars and marketing them to individual customers, or start preparing for a self-driving, mobility-as-a service ecosystem based on a subscription model?
Context is everything! And it keeps shifting. We all know that the data is the new oil. And oil has this faculty, it flows. And so does the data. Data is not static. Every business now collects it, we want to be ready for the digital age. And the data helps us define the context, but only at this very moment. Then, the data flows on and the context changes.
What used to be known as muddling through is now called agile, it is the only way for companies to survive disruption, to adjust to the highly volatile context. To lead a project now is not to assign tasks and monitor performance. It is now about understanding and curating context for the team and organically linking its work the rest of the business.
Organizations large and small sense those dynamics and try to infuse the old terms with the new meanings, but the language we use matters. Holacracy and humanocracy are the additions to our vocabulary that offer a real alternative to the hierarchy.
So what I’d like to suggest is that we retire the term manager, and from now on we start hiring context curators.
If we fail to revise the vocabulary, the managers will default to standard managerial behavior even when the organizations are no longer interested in it. Recognizing the accelerated pace of change, we have to shift from strategy to experimentation. Soon there will be nothing left to command & control, because of the automation. So the context curators will have to focus on empowering and mentoring team members. And when the millennials begin to dominate the workplace, hierarchies will have to yield to flexible networks.
The term manager has entered the English language over 4 centuries ago, and it has to do with the old Latin word “manus” — the hand; it has to do with handling things.
Curator, on the other hand, comes from caring and helping. And now we have to come back to Peter Gibbons. Remember, he reported to eight different bosses and really struggled with caring for his job. If only did he work in a team that was led by a context curator!
I don’t know if the era of management is over, but I sure hope that the era of the context curator is about to dawn.
