from Hacker News

Employees leave managers, not companies

by kirkus on 2/6/13, 1:11 PM with 257 comments

• by cletus on 2/6/13, 2:44 PM

  The problem here is that the modern company embodies a lot of the principles of medieval serfdom.

  Serfs occupied a portion of land and owed a portion of their crops to the lord of the manor or their feudal lord. It was slavery in all but name.

  The modern company is a kingdom. Managers are feudal lords. Managers can decide to hire (and fire) employees such that the employee is essentially beholden to that manager. Employment status is analagous to the land serfs worked.

  The problem is that most companies have little internal mobility. If you don't get on with your manager the best thing for you and the company is to work for a different manager yet most companies make this exceedingly difficult.

  At Google, individual engineers are far more empowered than that. There is a strong internal process for simply changing projects.

  Also, most companies have performance feedback come solely from managers. Managers are an important source at Google but peer feedback carries a huge amount of weight.

  So in many companies employees leave because they can't escape their feudal lord. I get it. The problem here is corporate feudalism.

  Companies need to stop making it easier to move to a better team or getting a pay raise by leaving the company rather than moving within the company.

• by bobsy on 2/6/13, 2:02 PM

  I am considering leaving my job for this precise reason. I feel if I worked under anyone else I would enjoy what I am doing but currently it is impossible.

  The problem is the guy has no managerial skills. Employee moral across the company is rock bottom. We get tasks day-to-day because he cannot plan ahead. We often drop projects to work on something else, only to drop them and work on what we was originally. Manager never sends final designs or when he does they later change anyway. (These are not tweaks, tweaks are understandable. This is the entire page layout) I could go on...

  Why haven't I quit already? I am currently indispensable to the company I work for. I need to support my family. Not sure if I want to risk it on a new job in the current climate. The short term plan is to continue being miserable.

  NOTE: I would go around my manager if I could. Unfortunately it is a team of 7 and its this guys company.

• by acslater00 on 2/6/13, 1:58 PM

  Anecdotally, I spent 2 years at Microsoft (MSN division). I loved my manager to death, and telling him I was leaving felt kind of like breaking up with a long-term girlfriend. But MSN was a supremely depressing place to work because there was a palpable sense that nothing we did mattered, and Microsoft was simply running out the clock on those [hundreds of millions] of people who haven't figured out how to change their browser homepage away from msn.com. I left the company, not the person.

  So while the lesson of this post -- that managing is important and a good manager can greatly increase employee retention -- is well taken, the headline is certainly overstated.

• by binarymax on 2/6/13, 1:31 PM

  I spent 5 years as a full time consultant building 'Human Capital Management' software for enterprise companies. I learned many things about enterprise dynamics in those 5 years, but my biggest takeaway analytically is that performance management is backwards. The people actually doing the work are graded by their managers, and in very few cases are managers formally reviewed by their employees. I can't speak for small companies, but enterprises would do much better if the employees had a formal process to get a manager on some sort of performance track - without the fear of going above their head in an informal process.

• by josephlord on 2/6/13, 1:54 PM

  I've left two organisations (BBC and Sony) and neither time did I have any problem with my direct manager in fact in both cases I liked them although I did have a lack of faith the top management and the direction of at least my area of the organisation.

  In the BBC case (amongst other issues) my department was earmarked to be moved to Manchester (about 200 miles away) in about 4 years. I was clear (for family reasons) that I wouldn't be moving so staying would have felt like a personal dead end to me (although later the BBC's plan changed and much of the department moved into London instead which might have been OK but the lack of thought through initial decision was a really bad sign about the senior management).

  At Sony it was a general lack of faith that the management had enough capability that Sony could become a profitable, viable, mass market electronics company again. That made me happy to leave to see what I could do on my own and be home to take and collect my son from school.

• by speeder on 2/6/13, 1:20 PM

  I agree that employees might leave managers.

  But I disagree that people don't leave companies.

  First, there are some companies that kinda act on their own, they are very old, and people just obey tradition and old rules and policies. This sometimes the managers can fight hard against, and several will fail anyway.

  Sometimes, the company is in a field that make the employee leave, I know for example many IT people that after they realised how banks operate, they felt bad about it and quit.

  Sometimes the company itself is having problems, like being sued, or going bankrupt...

  So no, sometimes the fault is of the company.

  But sometimes.

  Asshat managers can make people go away too.

• by robotmay on 2/6/13, 2:05 PM

  When my dad left one of his previous jobs, in which he was a manager of about 10-15 people; 3 of his team quit within the week. One of them told him that he was the best manager he'd ever worked under, and that he couldn't face working in that company with anyone else.

  If I ever end up in a management position, that's the sort of manager I want to be.

• by erikj54 on 2/6/13, 1:55 PM

  This article unfortunately resonates on a personal level. This is why I believe I enjoy consulting so much. On a short term basis I can put up with ignorance, credit taking, silent treatment etc (All the qualities respondents mentioned in the survey). For a long term career I'm not sure I could last.

  I'm curious if anyone has any stories of how they overcame a Manager that was not their Champion? I have been thinking about this a lot. In my short time at large corporations it seems you really need someone on your side to move up the ladder a bit.

• by gadders on 2/6/13, 2:12 PM

  Yeah, but companies pay mortgages, not managers.

  In other words, I could be working for the most awesome, charismatic manager in the world but if I'm being paid significantly below Market Rate, I'd still leave.

• by darkspaten on 2/6/13, 1:56 PM

  I offer a corollary, "Employees follow leaders, not managers."

  At one time I considered leaving a company I believed strongly in, due to an immediate manager with which I didn't work well. However, I looked higher in the organization to the leader(ship) I believed in and decided to stay. I'm glad I did, because the management problem rectified itself soon enough and now I follow good leaders and learn from a great mentor.

• by lifeisstillgood on 2/6/13, 2:33 PM

  I think there is a tidal change in software at the moment - imagine the Venn diagram of remote working technologies, continuous integration technologies and a willingness to shed middle manager white collar jobs like never before.

  As we can enable people to work from home, because we can see the code they wrote today up and working on the CI server, we can do away with needing a boss to telll them what to do and watch if they do it - in fact we can pass the autonomy many bosses have down the line - and I hope see a world where the developer says - I have done this cool thing and it has improved our bottom line because I measured this change.

  A culture of Continuous Integration, testing changes for business KPIs allows us to let go of the middle rank of supervision, and allows us to change the working conditions now the supervision is unnecessary

• by lifeisstillgood on 2/6/13, 4:34 PM

  For me the best solution is to stay small - keep the organisation under the dunbar number. That way a competant CEO can manage the politics personally, and guide the culture effectively.

  But if you are going to grow, you need one of these proxy solutions.

  To me there are two outstanding solutions:

  1. Free Labour Market 2. "add or out"

  1. Google-like - have projects and allow engineers to move around to join different projects, and adjust via funding. THis is trying to create an internal job market, and may or may not be effective but its a response to Dunbars number problem.

  2. "add or out" - add measurable value, or the worst performing 10% leave. This forces a culture of testing and measuring value, and whilst it is subject to being gamed, it might be workable.

• by PonyGumbo on 2/6/13, 1:52 PM

  I've had fantastic managers at terrible companies. In each case, I left because of the company, not because of the manager.

• by seivan on 2/6/13, 3:09 PM

  Best way to handle this? Get rid of management. Flat hierarchy. Just to make sure to hire really smart engineers. Code it, test it, ship it. If two forces opposite each other, put it in a hackathon and gain votes.

• by 16s on 2/6/13, 3:52 PM

  If the manager does not provide direction, ask for it. If they still do not provide direction, set your own. The grass always looks greener on the other side. Sometimes, you are the problem, not the manager.

  Reminds me of the story about the traveler and the new city. He left because he thought the people there were horrible. Upon arriving at the gate of the new city, he asked a man sitting by the gate, "How are the people here in this city?" To which the sitting man replied, "How were they in the city you came from?" "Oh... they were horrible, mean people."

  "You'll find them the same here."

• by talmand on 2/6/13, 3:47 PM

  On the day I put in my notice for my last job I found out that my immediate manager had put in his notice as well the day before, much for the same reasons I did. I liked working for the guy so quitting felt bad. Basically choices made by upper management made the working environment not so good and we had decided to move on. Turns out we weren't the only ones, within three weeks five out of six of the web team left and gutted the department.

• by jkeel on 2/6/13, 3:07 PM

  Nice to see this discussion on HN. Back in early 2000, when I worked at Walmart's home office in Bentonville, we had a speaker come and talk to ISD about this exact topic. That was the main line that stuck with me, "Employees leave managers, not companies". It's probably not the case 100% of the time for causing the loss of an employee, but having a good manager makes all the world of a difference in an employee's happiness.

• by breckenedge on 2/6/13, 1:47 PM

  I had an MBA roommate once and frequently read her books on management culture. I've never actually seen what was used in those books put into practice, but my experience is relatively small (once a manager).

  The books talked about the Organizational Cultural Assessment Index (OCAI) and a manager capabilities assessment test (cannot remember the name). Anyone out there used these?

  These seemed like reasonable, standard approaches to improving the workplace.

• by stoodder on 2/6/13, 2:00 PM

  I've never left a company because of my managers, in fact my managers were almost always one of the reasons that I stayed as long as I did. The true reasons, at least in my case, for leaving was always the lack of freedom to make my own decisions and the companies' support for "non project related" work. In fact, my manager did as much as he could to support my endeavors, everything within his realm of power at least.

• by dylangs1030 on 2/6/13, 4:33 PM

  This issue stems, in my experience, from the top of an individual department or location (if it's a franchise). The top level management in large companies couldn't possibly supervise all their department managers at the same time. So things fly by under the radar that shouldn't because they don't have stringent enough criteria for employee satisfaction and manager competency.

  I recall this happening when I used to work at P.F. Chang's (the restaurant chain).

  We had a general manager who was absolutely loathsome to work with. We frequently ran out of the kinds of food you'd be embarrassed to lack at a Chinese restaurant (read: white and brown rice, lettuce, etc). However, he had a stellar reputation and history with "corporate" and had even won awards within the company.

  The reasons this happened were twofold: 1. he was the general manager, and in the eyes of corporate he was just saving money (they never saw the restaurant descend into chaos and dysfunction due to lack of ingredients), and 2. he was honestly kind of a dick. Unless you were above him on the pay scale he would respond to suggestions with, "I'll take that under advisement."

• by wolframarnold on 2/6/13, 4:27 PM

  There was a book in the late 1990's, "First Break All the Rules: What the world's greatest managers do differently" which was the write-up of a Gallup study about manager effectiveness. One of its conclusions is the point made in this article almost verbatim, that people leave their managers not their jobs or companies. One of the most powerful sections for the book for me was the opening chapter where they explain their assessment methodology. They compiled it down to a catalog of 12 questions and they found that if these questions were answered positively it correlated with high employee performance, good financial results, good retention, etc. The rest of the book dives into more detail on the reasons for this, one being that each employee's talent is different and managers should try to align talents with business need, focusing on employee strengths rather than weaknesses.

  Here's the Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/First-Break-All-Rules-Differently/dp/0...

• by martindelemotte on 2/6/13, 1:53 PM

  According to this meta-analysis, employees dont leave managers nor do they leave companies.

  They leave (maybe) because of the job.

  Estimated true score correlation Job Fit - Tenure: 0.18 Company Fit - Tenure: 0.03 Group Fit - Tenure: 0.06 Supervisor Fit - Tenure: 0.09

  http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-6570.2005....

• by jmspring on 2/7/13, 4:05 AM

  Seems like there are a lot of war stories on this thread. I disagree with the article based on my personal statistics. When I have decided to move on, in all but one case it has been that either we weren't shipping or the overall product path got stale (beyond the control of day to day engineers).

  I like working on things and I like working on things people use. If we aren't shipping, I have to ask why. Periods of development are certainly reasonable but at the end of the day you have to ship.

  Where I have moved on due to management? An alpha presence who treated everyone under him as a contractor, yet we weren't hourly, and we weren't compensated for following up on inane decisions. I ended up stepping up, guiding two mis-managed resources, and pushing back on some very dumb decisions (a few were backed by the CTO). However, at the end of the day, when I stepped back anded look at the energy I put in and what I was getting out, it was time to leave.

  Decisions to leave are complex.

• by qrybam on 2/6/13, 2:17 PM

  Very timely read for me. I work in a successful company with lots of challenges and room for expansion, I am a key member of the team and work very long hours (which would be better spent on my own side project).

  My current manager has done all of the listed reasons-for-leaving in the article at one point or another - I'm not the only one this happens to; it happens to all who work with him, however I'm the only one who has to report directly to him.

  It's a sad situation because the guy is a good guy, he's just difficult to work with and as a result I'm currently looking at my options - if I can help it, I would prefer to stay at the company.

  I understand it can be difficult for a manager to be direct with their team, but it's something I know a lot of good people appreciate - honest, direct feedback. You don't want to feel like you're being "handled" or used as a crutch for the manager's own self-actualisation. It's the whole golden-goose scenario - you don't want to kill it.

  edit: typos :)

• by Whitespace on 2/6/13, 3:20 PM

  I would not wish a petty/spiteful manager on anyone. I was in a similar situation in my last company: personal problems between my manager and I forced my departure.

  In my situation the terrible fact was that my manager's inability to separate his personal and professional life caused the top four of my hierarchy of needs to be threatened (it's hard to be creative and solve problems when you're in a very shitty situation).

  At the very end of my tenure, instead of talking about and trying to resolve our personal differences, he chose to go hyper-managerial on me (in manner and communication), making it clear that this was how my day-to-day was going to be from then on.

  I loved working with my coworkers and almost everything else about working there, but I found it no longer mattered when I sat next to someone who will only communicate with me in writing with HR cc'd.

• by 11Blade on 2/7/13, 1:30 AM

  There is one thing that is overlooked here. There is as much pathology at the managerial level as is at the subordinate level. We can all say we have shitty bosses. Lets face it, there are shitty workers among us too.

  It is easy to complain about managers, but "craving credit" and "silent treatment" happen asymmetrically because the average worker is an order of magnitude different than his cube mate.

  Going from a concrete project/goal focused position with expectations to managing those people is a much harder proposition.

  I hated managing people. As a manager, you expect the same things from your crew as you would yourself. Instead you hear every excuse, tragedy and jealous rant for attention, rather than just getting the work done.

  You try to "nurture" and "empathize" but in the end, workers run the whole gamut from narcissist to kaamchor to subservient drone.

• by stonemetal on 2/6/13, 2:58 PM

  How far up the chain do you have to go before managers become come companies? At a certain point a company is defined by its management, just as to consumers a company is defined by its products. Anecdotally I have never quit a job primarily because of my direct manager.

• by MrMcDowall on 2/6/13, 1:58 PM

  This has been true of almost every single company I've ever worked for. It's also worth noting that Companies are reflective of the management constituency because they control the levers; bad managers usually mean bad companies.

• by AmandaPanda on 2/6/13, 3:56 PM

  When your company is small, your manager practically is your company. I'm a junior developer at a rather dysfunctional small company with really shoddy engineering standards. Here, due to the small number of employees, the manager and senior engineer practically are the company. Our senior dev has a cracker jack box cs degree, and has been stuck in his own bubble for the past decade writing horrible code. I also found out my company was sued by a customer 10 years ago because they thought our products and services suck. Good times.

• by ChristianMarks on 2/7/13, 4:05 AM

  At my former place of employment -- I won't bore you with the "consolidation" memo and the unannounced reshuffling of titles and the change to generic job descriptions in the name of "flexibility." After the reorganization, I had to work for a smug, platitudinous, self-important, patronizing, repulsive know-nothing. I left within a couple months of the reorganization. In just about every case I've left jobs because I detested my boss. I tend to dislike bosses in general, unless they are exceptionally intelligent.

• by ownagefool on 2/6/13, 7:20 PM

  From the article:-

  "The key to being able to keep the good employees is not so much the salary you offer them or even the actual work, it is more about how you manage them and how they feel working under you as their manager. "

  Personally I don't think there is a key, instead it's a case of all of the above. You can't keep an underpaid employee happy. You can't keep a bored employee happy. You can't keep an employee happy when you don't treat them well. I've left companies for all 3 of these reasons, it only takes one reason.

• by epo on 2/7/13, 11:34 AM

  I had exactly this issue at a well known British telecommunications company, I had a personality clash with my (newly promoted) manager and leaving was impossible because the manager did not want to see a diminished headcount. I manouevered myself out by working almost all of my time on some other manager's project and it got to the point where the argument that I may as well report to, and be appraised by this other manager was unarguable.

• by toddnessa on 2/8/13, 4:02 PM

  Personally, I have observed this becoming more of an issue related to the times that we live in. Let's face it, America has been so ingrained with the survival of the fittest mentality for so long that finally it is sinking in.

  Until people start valuing others more in society I do not feel that this will change. Behaviors flow out of beliefs. When the beliefs change then people change. Loving our neighbor as ourself is not a cherished value right now.

• by kylered on 2/6/13, 5:36 PM

  This article sounds like a recap of Hertzberg's Two-Factor theory which is basically the application of Maslow's hierarchy of needs to the corporate world.

  See: http://www.businessballs.com/herzbergmotivationdiagram.pdf See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-factor_theory

• by jrarredondo on 2/6/13, 10:07 PM

  That was a great article. One issue that came to mind is how to interview for these skills when hiring managers. The more I think about this, the more I realize this is not something you can truly screen for during an interview. Reference checks are important, but they will have to be more comprehensive and less "self-selected" referrals (which would almost be very positive about a given candidate).

• by Symmetry on 2/6/13, 6:37 PM

  I'm sure that this happens a lot, but it isn't my experience.

  I lost my first job when 2/3 of the company way laid off.

  I left my second job for manangerial reasons, but that was more that my position was an experiment and when the manager who'd created it left the person who took over didn't know how to manage me.

  The company after that I left because we were bought out and I wouldn't sign the new, draconian NDA.

• by hcayless on 2/6/13, 3:46 PM

  A (good) manager's primary tasks are: 1) Make sure your team knows what to do and has what they need to do it. 2) Be a buffer between them and anything that distracts them from #1. 3) Be a resource to help them develop. All 3 require good communication.

  Every job I've quit has ultimately been because of a deficiency in one of those 3 things that led to conflict.

• by ashcairo on 2/6/13, 7:10 PM

  I'm sure this is true, but I believe that the root cause of the management practices that result in this situation is the byproduct of company direction and culture. As an example, if the direction of the company is primarily to maintain a headcount, then there is only so many mental games a manager can play to retain it's ambitious employees.

• by nanidin on 2/7/13, 12:17 PM

  I'm coming a bit late, so don't expect many to see this... but I worked at a company and had several friends leave for other jobs, but they were sad to part with their managers. They left mostly because the direction of the company as a whole wasn't satisfying them, which is a function of management, but usually not your immediate manager.

• by Shivetya on 2/6/13, 1:45 PM

  Which is why employee satisfaction surveys rarely ask the right questions or if they do they are interpreted in such a way that the managers who are the problem are not declared as such. I learned real quick to not be amazed at how such a survey can be turned upside down to blame the employees or a select group of them.

• by protomyth on 2/6/13, 4:23 PM

  I have often thought that tech companies should pay more attention to how movies / tv series are managed then MBA programs. I get the feeling the Producer / Director / Show Runner model might work better for software. Support might complicate things though.

• by hippich on 2/6/13, 4:06 PM

  I would not down-play salary that much. I am not sure if it applies to all sectors, but at least in my limited experience more you ask for - better you are treated and better technology you work with. Because otherwise it will be to expensive to keep you.

• by stcredzero on 2/6/13, 5:41 PM

  I suspect Valve has a good way of dealing with this. There, manager is a role, and people can decide if you are good enough at that role to merit working with you in that capacity, or not. They get to vote with their feet, without leaving the company.

• by simplyinfinity on 2/6/13, 3:34 PM

  Even without reading the article i couldn't agree more. Currently i'm in the position where i like my colleagues and the company, but the management is BAD ( i could write 3 pages long explanation but i won't ). Well sorry , iQuit.

• by scorcher on 2/6/13, 3:09 PM

  Perhaps its unusual but every company I have worked for this could be sorted out with a quiet word with upper management or HR. A little disruption moving people between teams is well worth averting a potential clashes

• by pknerd on 2/6/13, 8:00 PM

  We usually don't like our managers for one reason or another unless we ourselves become one and someone else replace us. This has been happening for centuries. Point is why don't we learn lessons from past mistakes?

• by riazrizvi on 2/6/13, 4:53 PM

  Either the boss is incompetent and so that boss makes work intolerable for the employee, or the employee is incompetent and the boss makes work intolerable for the employee. It's often hard to tell.

• by mjheil on 2/12/13, 1:18 PM

  you developers have no idea how good you have it.

  Choose your boss? yes, by accepting a job offer. Move to a different team? Again, by choosing a company.

  Move internally? Yes, if you don't mind a firestorm that burns bridges, and moving to a job that won't use the skills I was hired for.

  I'm the only one -- or at best, one of a handful of people -- who can do my job at my nonprofit. Does that give me more power? Heck no. Best I can do is threaten to quit, and if the boss and I don't get along, then they probably are just aching to hire in someone else.

• by gr3yh47 on 2/6/13, 7:10 PM

  I love working for my supervisor, manager, and director.

  My company sucks, pay is sub par, benefits suck, policy sucks, forced overtime sucks....

  If I leave I'll be leaving my company, not my manager. and the company is HUGE

• by seivan on 2/6/13, 2:08 PM

  This is so true, so so true. Not neessarly "managers" per say, but people involved in "decision" making that affects you.

  For me; the people doing the UX, the people doing product, and etc.

• by kenjagi on 2/6/13, 5:42 PM

  A bad manager is going to hire a bad manager, and if you follow the organization chart to the top it stops being a bad manager, it becomes the company mantra.

• by PeterisP on 2/7/13, 1:41 AM

  That is a well known (decades+) fact - employees join companies based on their global reputation but leave mostly based on their direct supervisor quality.

• by greendot on 2/6/13, 4:03 PM

  I've left because of managers. I've left because of the company.

  When a company cuts my salary by 30% while jacking up my benefits payments by 300%, it's usually time to leave.

  But, on to the article at hand.

  As a manager now, those statistics at the end really kind of tick me off. It feels very one-sided and the following text is just me rambling on... somewhat trolling.

  39%: Their supervisor failed to keep promises

  How many of these employees fail to keep theirs? How many of these broken promises were based on things promised to the manager? How much of it was in their control? When kept at this simplistic level, this one seems like a third-grade problem.

  37%: Their supervisor failed to give credit when due

  This perception of credit and recognition is one sticking point in our team right now, especially with the people born after 1980. They want credit and recognition for every single thing they do. If they manage to successfully eat a meal without choking on a bone, they want public recognition for it. The older guys on the team, we sit down and do the work because it is our job. That's what we're here to do. The old guys can sit around and come up with ideas and realize that together as a team we designed something. The team gets credit. No one person gets the credit. The kids, if they have one key idea at any point in a process, they want to be held up high. Oh and damn if their idea comes early in the discussion and is never used directly but expanded upon and changed, hell they think they were the sole party responsible for all ideas and all further ideas were stolen.

  31%: Their supervisor gave them the “silent treatment” in the past year.

  Yes, I do this. I usually do this when I am trying to decide what to do with spoiled or "entitled" employees. If I have asked somebody to quit looking at StupidVideos.com for 3 hours a day and they persist while their projects back up, I'm going to be silent for a while while I try and come up with a plan. I'm not going to sit and try to motivate them. Motivating geeks is a pain-in-the-ass. I'm not allowed to fire anybody or put them on disciplinary action w/out months of paperwork, especially when they know how to talk to HR and convince them that they are doing the best that they can.

  27%: Their supervisor made negative comments about them to other employees or managers.

  Agreed, this one is bad no matter how you slice it.

  24%: Their supervisor invaded their privacy.

  Again, if you're looking at Facebook and not getting your work done, you need to get over it.

  23%: Their supervisor blames others to cover up mistakes or minimize embarrassment.

  Yeah, this happens. Sucks. Lucky for my team, when I lie my eye twitches so there is a built-in lie detector. :-)

• by known on 2/6/13, 3:45 PM

  "The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them." --Einstein

• by sc0rb on 2/7/13, 10:46 AM

  I'm about to leave my company and it has nothing to do with the manager. I actually feel bad that I'm leaving him.

• by j_s on 2/6/13, 4:34 PM

  Employees also leave other employees, especially when they are the manager's favorites.

• by Shivetya on 2/7/13, 2:34 PM

  FWIW - I cannot view this site as I get malware alerts, is anyone else seeing that?

• by zwischenzug on 2/6/13, 2:48 PM

  ...and managers are bad because of companies.

  A crass generalisation, but no more than the title is.

• by michaelochurch on 2/6/13, 6:07 PM

  Companies are still fighting yesterday's war.

  Traditional industrial labor has a concave relationship between input (effort, skill) and output (diminishing returns) where the difference between mediocrity and excellence is minimal to zero. Modern technological work has a convex curve (accelerating returns) where the difference between mediocrity and failure is minimal while that between mediocrity and excellence is massive.

  When the work is concave, you want to minimize variance, which means you eliminate individuality and manage toward mediocrity. Control-freak managers and petty tyrants are good at that, because you can trust them to tighten down bolts and yell at people. ("Ahem! There's SAND in my boots!" -- Kefka.) You build out a hierarchy, give managers total control over their reports, and even though there's a lot of loss in the form of attrition (good people fired by bad bosses) and squandered capability (strong people doing mediocre tasks) that's treated as a rounding error. People are fungible and, if they're not, then something is wrong with your process. Your goal isn't excellence. It's repeatable mediocrity.

  Convex work is an entirely different game. It's much more like R&D. The problems being solved are a lot harder, although the upside of a success is much greater. Technological work is becoming increasingly convex with time.

  When you have concave work, your management strategy is to beat up on the slackers. If the best people are 1.5 times as productive as the average, then one slacker cancels out 2 excellent people, so rooting them out and disciplining them is the right strategy.

  With convex work, the danger isn't having a few slackers. It's that you don't have any excellent people, or that the excellent people you do have are unmotivated and underperforming. The best way to "manage" convex work is to hire the best people and get out of their way.

  Managerial extortion (i.e. the manager's use of his unilateral ability to damage an employee's career to put the employee toward his career goals, rather than company goals or individual growth) is ruinous when one is attempting convex work, but large companies don't see it that way. Their processes are oriented completely toward concave, commodity labor.

  So, "employees leave managers" is only half the story. Managers go bad because companies allow them to do so. A company that doesn't want managerial extortion can implement Valve-style open allocation, but few do. Companies allow them to do so because they're fighting the last century's war. They're industrial machines, and anachronistic in a technological era.