Less Boss

 When I starting writing blogs, thirteen years ago now, I was a manager in a large corporation, and my most common topic was trying to help other employees to understand how their leaders were thinking and to give practical advice to succeed in a corporate environment.

 

Time and again I was drawn to the subject of The Boss. In my own experience, the effectiveness of my boss was the prime determinant of my own contentment at work. I took to giving presentations that demonstrated this point, and then advised people how to handle good and bad bosses, and to be better bosses themselves. If I were ever to write a business book, the title would be The Boss.

 

So it came as a pleasant surprise last week to read the Bartleby column in The Economist. I always enjoy Bartleby. In a clever innovation a couple of years ago, the magazine started it as a new column within its business section. Whereas all the other articles in the section wrote of strategy, acquisitions, profits and marketing, Bartleby wrote about people. The initial Bartleby was a grizzled corporate warrior called Philip Coggan who I imagined to be a bit like myself, curious but cynical: I enjoyed one of his books recently as well. He has now moved on, and I believe a series of guest Bartleby’s are currently writing. The material is still very strong.

 

The spin in this particular Bartleby article was about corporate delayering, a major trend of the last twenty years or so and one that I experienced myself at Shell. Many corporations started with a mindset that was rather military, with very firm fixed hierarchies and little delegation. Spans of control were small and clarity and expectation treasured. A modern buzzword, accountability, was assured in this type of organisation.

 

But the weaknesses of a hierarchical organization became apparent. It is slow, because any decision has to travel up and down a line. It is also, by its very nature, full of silos, so cross-functional teamwork is difficult to achieve.

 

As an aside, I always found it funny when I used to carry out staff surveys. Often the two most plaintive cries were that the organisation required stronger accountability but fewer silos. Nobody seemed to fathom that these two goals are more or less directly in contradiction. If you improve one, you invariably damage the other.

 

Anyway, businesses around the millennium swallowed the new logic of delayering, and, as tends to happen, took a good thing to a ridiculous extreme. In common with others, I often found myself with multiple bosses and an unmanageable number of direct reports, often spread across many countries. I developed a new metric to define how impossible a job was; multiply the number of bosses by the number of subordinates. My own personal best was in the thirties, but I know someone who achieved three figures.

 

Bartleby went down a similar logical path and indeed reached a very neat mathematical conclusion. A direct consequence of delayering for all employees is Less Boss.

 

Probably our first reaction to a world with Less Boss is to cheer. After all, what do bosses generally do beyond getting in our way and micromanaging us? Less Boss must imply more freedom, and freedom must be good, surely?

 

Predictably enough, things turned out very differently. Bartleby pointed out another corollary: having fewer bosses means that most bosses have less experience of the function when asked to manage senior staff. That is one reason why typically they were not very good at it.

 

Oh Bartleby, I can think of many more. Indeed I could even write a book about it! Start with the fact that leading a team is often a result of seniority and of success in technical fields. Many of these people appreciate the recognition, and the extra money, but have little appetite for being a line manager – indeed they resent the time lost from doing the technical things they love.

 

The wrong people are recruited for the wrong reasons and then they are given no help. Training in line management is non-existent, and good role models are few and far between. Line management is a subtle art, requiring patience and a variety of approaches to different situations and with different subordinates. Few can progress beyond a standard approach that enables survival but achieves little else.

 

Then delayering comes along and makes all of these problems a lot worse. The required time even for minimal line management was never fully appreciated. I learned this in reverse when my final job at Shell had no subordinates at all. I could not believe how much time this liberated, so much so that I became bored and even lost confidence because I could not accept that I was doing an adequate job without daily pressure.

 

Processes designed for an era of hierarchy were not modified when the structure changed, so line managers became swamped with requirements to remain involved in things subordinates could easily handle. The whole legal and compliance side only becomes tougher and takes a lot of time. A significant fraction of employees seem to be high maintenance types these days, and everybody needs more help and support navigating careers in a less structured environment. Then there is much more turnover than before, especially external turnover, and that places further strains on managers.

 

So we all end up receiving Less Boss and Bad or Unqualified or Uninterested Boss just at the time we need More and Better Boss. At Shell, I was first unlucky, suffering a breakdown largely because I imploded under the strain, but then became lucky as I rebuilt my career on a less ambitious trajectory. I decided to be a good boss first and foremost, and fortuitously ended up in a role with little pressure to do anything else but lots of potential to develop others. In the sea of line management blind mediocrity, being the one-eyed man was within my capability and my reputation flourished and good people flocked to me.

 

Bartleby’s simple mathematical proof of Less Boss allows me to see some of things we got right in that era, and also point to a more general way forward. Perhaps most important, I delegated, or at least shared, a lot of team building. The team helped to set standards and even led recruitment, so we always had momentum and peer pressure. Everybody knew I would be supportive when opportunities came to move on. I actively encouraged people to deal directly with the boss of my boss and with my peers.

 

I am not claiming miraculous foresight here. These moves started as survival strategies and experiments and I was lucky. But I can see now how they are good examples of how to escape Bartleby’s trap of Less Boss. Increasing company-wide delegated authorities would also help. So would a more analytical approach to where delayering can work and where it is doomed, but in terms of jobs and of people.

 

Thank you Bartleby, that business book I will probably never write has acquired another neat analytical lens, and perhaps even a catchy title.