What’s the matter with management?
Today’s leaders are struggling. We need to help them manage.
Recently, I’ve started to see people give up. Founders who started their companies with grand aspirations of doing well while doing good are throwing in the towel. Doing good feels impossible. Doing better doesn’t even seem feasible. What’s the point of trying?
Business owners are losing hope.
I was at dinner the other night with two friends who run successful, well-respected small businesses (a restaurant and a production company), and they shared a sense of disillusionment about the path forward.
“At this point, we’re just taking what we can get in terms of client work.”
“We were the first to make this kind of food in the area. Now that everyone’s copying us, I wonder if it’s time to close up shop?”
This is burnout talking.
According to Dr. Christina Maslach (whose work inspired the World Health Organization to include burnout as an occupational phenomenon with health consequences), “burnout is a human response to stress.” She explains that it is made up of three components: exhaustion, cynicism about your job and a sense of personal inadequacy. When the leader of an organization is burnt out, that trickles down to employees, the product, the customer and the community at large.
And the result of all this burnout? Tons of businesses these days are running on empty. They’ve burned through all their human resources.
It’s time to help them refuel. We need to set up sustainable systems that recharge workers instead of draining them. We need to manage better.
Why does it feel so mean to manage?
For many years I’ve been talking to exhausted, stressed-out leaders who have worked really hard to build businesses that work better than the world around them. They’ve been intentional about hiring, transparent about compensation and clear about expectations. These founders have genuinely tried to create values-driven organizations that are in direct opposition to the toxic workplaces of their early careers that made their lives hell.
Whether it’s a restaurant trying to create an inclusive and collaborative environment in a traditionally aggressive commercial kitchen culture or a start-up committed to scaling its product without grinding its employees to a pulp, these business owners are doing the work. They are building companies that operate in ways that are more equitable, sustainable and joyful than business as usual wants us to believe is possible. This requires so much patience and creativity, which would be worth it if it didn’t feel so thankless.
Our society is desperate for leaders to save us. But at the same time, we hate authority.
When leaders start to implement the structures necessary to make their vision sustainable (policies, handbooks, job descriptions, middle managers, etc.) they tend to get pushback. Overnight, they become “the man” despite good intentions or punk rock roots.
There is a sense of valor that comes with being a leader. Management, on the other hand, is a dirty word. Managers tend to be mired in bureaucracy. They are relegated to the role of go-between, following rules and often delivering bad news with no bedside manner. Leaders break the rules–how cool! Managers follow the rules–boring. We naturally look up to leaders while we roll our eyes at management.
But the truth is that they are two sides of the same coin. Leaders hold the vision, managers make it happen. You can’t have one without the other, not if you’re in it for the long term. They work hand in hand and businesses desperately need both.
But right now, we are barely managing. And it’s not just at work, we’re having trouble managing at home too. It’s time to level up how we manage our relationships, our time, our meals — all the interlocking pieces of our lives.
Let’s make management cool again.
Management has a bad rap. We don’t give managers enough training, compensation or respect for their work. Contrary to popular belief, managing people is not intuitive. But because it often goes with the territory of getting a promotion at work, we expect people to just figure it out on the job. How hard can it be?
It’s not that management is hard per se, but it is a skill in its own right that runs horizontally across all industries, and extends from the office to our homes — and this is rarely acknowledged.
Because we don’t invest in training our managers, good models are few and far between. Many of us have never seen an excellent manager in action. So even if we are trying our best, we don’t know exactly what we are going for or how to get there.
There are not enough hours in the day to do your job, manage your team, learn all the best practices and put them to work. It can be so consuming to take care of all the tasks (the “what”) that it feels like a distant luxury to even consider the “how.”
Leadership is an individual creative act. Management is the collective follow-through. They fuel each other.
What if we shifted from barely managing to managing outside the box?
Remember that restaurant trying to create an inclusive and collaborative culture? They decided to split the role of Kitchen Manager between two folks with complementary skills. We’ve instituted regular manager meetings for the two of them that I facilitate so we can surface issues, highlight what’s going well and iron out any kinks in communication.
To run workplaces that operate with integrity, we need creative and sustainable models of management. We can’t rely on finding that jack of all trades General Manager who can somehow do it all (often coming dangerously close to destroying their body in the process). We need to implement operating structures that are not contingent on an individual, and are strong enough to function when leaders step away.
This means investing in management–but I’m not talking about a 2-day corporate retreat. We need to build far-reaching, weight-bearing structures of support for leveling up how we manage (not just staff, but other things like time, space and ourselves). This will allow businesses to profit without exploiting their people.
It’s time to take better care of our people at work. Even informal organizations have norms about how things are done. When these expectations aren’t explicit, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It just means nobody talks about them. This is dangerous to progress. As the political scientist, Jo Freeman, writes in her iconic piece The Tyranny of Structurelessness, groups that don’t have explicit rules are doomed to reproduce the dominant power dynamics that govern the status quo in society. Essentially, “‘structurelessness’ [is] a way of masking power.”
Let’s start with better structures of support.
In Homeroom, the peer support community of practice for queer small business owners, each group of entrepreneurs is guided through the exercise of creating a collective “Guardrail Manifesto”. This document outlines explicit expectations for everything from how teammates deal with conflict to how clients are charged for services. These “guardrails” are blueprints that turn abstract values into concrete operations, rather than relying on individuals to set their own boundaries. This is a concrete way of putting management in motion.
We need training models that respond to the dynamic needs of managing the modern workforce. We need places where folks can learn critical management skills and work through real-life challenges in the company of peers. We need our managers to integrate theory with practice so they can cultivate the skills needed to manage a business’s most important asset — its people.
In our manager training cohort program, we bring together folks who manage people in a range of industries. The last group included a government employee running a team of data engineers, the co-founder of a gallery and studio space for neurodiverse artists, the general manager of a restaurant in Ojai and the director of operations for a home repair company.
We met every other week for three months during which time the group learned a bunch of practical skills they could apply to leading their teams. But perhaps most importantly: they built personal relationships, got support with real-life challenges from their peers and were able to reflect together on what they were learning. It was a built-in time in their work week dedicated to something so integral, but so often neglected: the craft of management in community. (If you like the sound of this, grab a spot in the next cohort of Manager Study Hall which starts meeting in September!)
We have countless leaders out there who are proposing creative blueprints for businesses driven by more humane processes. But they can’t manage them alone. A manager is a sounding board who takes charge, takes care and follows up. What’s the point of pushing against the status quo to build better businesses if we have no pit crew to tighten the bolts, get feedback and test drive our new models?
We are navigating multiple overwhelming crises in the world these days. Leaders losing hope is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of troubling trends I’ve been noticing. It’s time to reimagine management so we can take care of each other through the hard parts. I think we can manage this. But we’ll have to work together.
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P.S. If you are a burnt-out small business owner struggling to manage and looking for help figuring out the path forward for your business, join this group. You’re not alone.
