Management is a Myth

One of my many KPisms is that “everyone on the planet has free will for at least 30 seconds every morning. Then the reality of life sets it.” My point is that as modern day humans, we sometimes forget that people absolutely have free will, they just forget it. Machines do not have free will (even AI, at least not yet). Machines are managed, people are not. In corporations, people give 35% of their awake hours to their job. In a startup it could be even more significant. Companies do not own people, their time or their thoughts. People choose to come spend time with your startup. When they stop choosing to come work with you, they either quit or worse, they stay. Quiet quitting isn’t a new thing, planty of people have “called it in” at their job. For management, they don’t fire these people from sheer inconvenience or maybe because they have been left uninspired. In a corporation, I think the 80:20 rule likely applies. 20% of the people drive 80% of the results. In a startup, there is no room for management. There is only room for leadership. Now, I’m not a big motivational speaker type leader. I’m a high functioning ADHD, engineer-brain introvert, so I used to refrain from the word leadership. Over the years, I have adapted to think about leadership differently. I always thought when people said “that person is a great leader”, visions of Tony Robbins entered my brain (nothing wrong with Tony Robbins). I do think leadership is a fairly simple idea. A leader is the holder of the vision and the mission. A leader’s constant job is to tie the vision to the mission and remind employees how their work at hand connects respectively. In a startup, employees have to be self starters, self learners and hard workers. A founder cannot and should not spend time “managing” employees, if they are spending a lot of time managing and developing their people, that’s a good sign that you have the wrong people. A founder does not have time for PIP (Performance Improvement Plans), 360 degree reviews and such that are key tools to management. The hard part for founders is that recruiting employees is hard and sometimes they need a “butt in chair” vs having nobody. Founders are also irreverent optimists and always think the best of people. I totally understand this. Founders are ultimately great recruiters. They should be spending all of their time recruiting people to see their vision and join their mission. This recruitment isn’t just of employees. It’s the recruitment of customers, partners and supporters. None of this can be outsourced. This distills down to your vendors as well. A lawyer that isn’t in tune with the vision and mission, should be replaced. If a founder hasn’t recruited a lawyer with this in mind, then they should work on fixing it. Someone “doing a great job” is the basics. That said, very few people are bad at their job. The question is “are they giving you their best work?”. When do people give you their best work? When they are aligned with your vision and mission. Additionally, having some metrics for employees to follow is fine, everyone needs a scoreboard. However, it’s not a founder’s job to motivate and manage people to do their job. The only real goals are the company goals. Your employees should know how their work connects to these goals. If you have to explain it to them, they may not be the right people for your startup. 

Complacency is a killer. Wanna keep the right employees happy? Fire the ones that are not aligned. If you are obsessing about your goals, so should your employees.  If they aren’t, fire them. This may sound aggressive, but the best founders that I have worked with have no ego attached to poor hires, and they act quickly. If your employees get paid every 2 weeks, then you should feel great about paying them. I think one of the greatest Sunday scaries that founders experience, is the dread of dealing with employees that aren’t aligned. 

This may be a good time to revisit your vision and mission. This may be a good time to reiterate your vision and mission. It’s not meant to be a secret, nor is it meant to be static. 

So stop reading management books, they just don’t apply. I even think most OKRs and KPIs are generally dumb. Think of it this way, you are on a road trip. You only have so much fuel in the tank (cash). The people that pile into your VW van make the road trip fun, easy and get you where you are going safely and ahead of schedule OR it can look like something from The Hangover. 

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