The Evolution of Performative Work

I used to have this gig back in 2014–2015, when I first moved to Texas. One of the mid-level managers at this place was named Susan, if I recall correctly. I honestly kind of forget her name. She had a fancy-ish title, and she sat near some actual executives, but literally no one knew what she did. The thing with Susan, though, was that she walked around all day with a Bluetooth earpiece in, and if you ever tried to talk to her, she would essentially silence you and tell you how busy she was. But again, no one knew exactly what she did.

There is a “Susan” in almost every corporate ecosystem, and usually there are about 10–12 Susans. I’d argue in the last 30–40 years, it’s gotten way worse at the intersection of a lot of different things:

• Tech/SaaS makes basic work easier.
• Companies want to over-hire to show growth.
• A lot of managers are very bad and don’t know what roles they need on their team.
• People continue to confuse “busy” and “productive.”
• As layoffs became more normative, people assumed that if they consistently presented as “busy,” they would be “relevant” and thus “un-layoff-able.” That’s a comical take too.

In short, I think you can say a lot of white-collar work has become meaningless.

This screenshot above, tied to this post, is from Work/Life, and it’s arguing that work has become more performative, especially since COVID. Absolutely true.

The thing is, society as a whole has become more performative. We have too many platforms + too much anxiety and depression, so people use the platforms to showcase slivers of their life that aren’t the whole picture, thus creating more anxiety and depression in others, and around we go.

Since work is a major aspect of American society, obviously the performative-ness of society would trickle into work — that is, assuming work’s performative nature didn’t come first, which it may well have.

The real culprit here, to me, is that a lot of managers are completely clueless about who does what, what a team needs, and the manager is only in the role because they reached their own level of incompetence (which we call “The Peter Principle” casually) and they can’t lose their job because they have 2–3 kids at home who are still school-aged. So, what most managers do (and you’ve probably seen this in at least 1–2 jobs) is they hide behind meeting after meeting. If you’re in meetings all day, you don’t actually have to ship or sell anything. You don’t have to lead, manage, or guide. Basically, you go to meetings and send some emails, and when you get confronted on how you’ve never really produced anything, you blame the meetings. This is the managerial dance of the last 20 years, and we’ve only made it worse based on flawed internal structures and HR and all the other shit that comes with mid-size to large companies.

When your manager barely understands what you do, which is common (more than we admit), then real work ceases to matter and performative work — which helps cover your ass, i.e. “I’m so slammed!” — becomes the go-to. So, it’s pretty logical that this evolution is taking place.

Years ago, at a cybersecurity company, I had this new boss come in. Just for context: at our first group meeting with the new boss, he constantly talked about his house in Tahoe and how his wife did a “great job” with it, and he wanted to get it on HGTV. Could anyone on this team make that happen? Of course, us getting his wife on HGTV had nothing to do with our jobs, but whatever. He asked about 11 times. Bigger than that anecdote, though, he asked the team what the biggest problem was. Everyone said “sales and marketing relationship.” Sales said they got shitty assets and leads (noted), and marketing said sales never talked to them or contextualized what they needed (noted). The new boss said he would fix it all.

What happened instead was that every time sales and marketing were supposed to meet, five minutes into the meeting it would just be marketing people. One time, someone asked the new boss why this was.

“I can’t have sales sitting in meetings. I need them selling. We can brief them later.”

He knew what was “performative” work and what was “real” work. He was actually a decent boss in that regard. He left nine months later for a higher-paying job. Ha.

But that’s the whole thing: most of us don’t face active revenue streams, and have bad managers who think presence is productivity, so of course performative work is going to scale.

I mean, right?