Choice vs. Control
Here’s a halfway decent article about how employers need to provide employees with choice. There are other terms for choice, often “autonomy” being one, or “the ability to work on one’s own.” If you’ve ever worked in white-collar, you know that basically how the game works is you come in, you get tested a little bit (relative to what level you came in at), for a while you can work with a decent degree of choice and autonomy, and then usually the first/second time you fuck up, virtually all choice and autonomy is stripped from you and you have to file 52 tracking documents just to go to the bathroom on a Wednesday. That’s kind of how the game is played. Along the way some people get put on the ol’ PIP, which usually leads to the ol’ PIPE down the road, and some others — usually top sales guys and people that high middle managers trust — can operate with impunity, i.e. tons of choice.
If you want to truly understand the different back-and-forths of the working world, you need to start with a list of concepts like this:
That’s six terms. There is a complex interplay between the six that determines how any given individual will experience work, and the interplay between the six is based on the senior leadership team, the history of the company, and the vague notions of “culture” within it. The other factor that can light it up in either a positive or negative direction is annual recurring revenue and growth position. If a company isn’t making money, everything gets tossed out the window except trying to find ways to make money or raise capital. Nothing else matters. If a company is doing 15% growth per year, some of these concepts above matter more, but they matter in different ways.
To unpack the six terms, basically those who rise up in companies are most concerned with status, relevance, and control; that’s why the hybrid work discussion even has to happen. Because of course, productivity should matter, and some are most productive from their kitchen table. But some bosses won’t let them work from there, even though they’re productive. Why? Control. And then control helps you feel status and relevance — “I dictate how these people work!” — and that’s meaningful. It’s certainly more meaningful than productivity. (To most people, that is.)
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Autonomy and choice tend to be things you want in the early- to mid-stages of a career, when you’re predominantly working for others in complex labor trees that no one put much thought into. When you have a shitty, micromanaging boss, typically all you want is some degree of autonomy. As you rise up a chain and ideally don’t become that boss yourself, you tend to care more about status and relevance. This happens as you get less of it at home, or your kids start resenting you and talking back to you. Then relevance at work becomes more and more tangible.
Now, around the “A” words here, one of the biggest problems with modern work, especially post-COVID, is that employers tend to want automation, whereas employees still want autonomy. That’s a big disconnect that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. If you can be replaced by a thing that works 24 hours/day and does not need health insurance, I don’t care how amazing and personable and “Oh but I have 3 kids” you are — you’re eventually getting replaced. There’s legitimate research from the last 50+ years that — getting back to status and relevance here — as people rise up in organizations, they view you as a resource, not a human being. (Hence the HR title.) If you’re a resource to Executive Eddie, your mom having early-stage Alzheimer’s doesn’t resonate for him. He views you as a margin to grab. A bot might do that for him in ways you cannot.
These are the terms and concepts to understand when thinking about the dynamics of knowledge work. They play out daily in hybrid decisions, future of work decisions, real estate decisions, automation decisions, layoff decisions, and more. If you can understand where choice vs. control and status vs. autonomy play out in your organization, and make individual decisions to maximize where you end up in those dynamics, you can probably do alright for yourself.
Takes?