When Your Boss Don't Get Laid, It's Harder For You To Get Paid

Here's a newsletter from Stowe Boyd , in which he links to this piece . I believe the latter is written by Dror Poleg .

That article opens with, essentially:

It’s not an office crisis. It’s a crisis of work itself. Too many people, including senior executives, have no idea what they’re doing and for what purpose. Covid forced us to answer a few simple questions, and we’ve been scrambling for answers ever since.

I’ve been saying the same thing for years.

Work is typically a wasteland of priorities with an over-focus on tasks, because a lot of people don’t really understand what “work” is, the definitions and what’s important to you vary by level and life stage, “productivity” is maybe the biggest suitcase word this side of “engagement,” and most of work is a political game aimed at control. It’s not even really about doing good, quality, long-term work. To some bosses, although admittedly only a sliver, it’s that. To most bosses it’s a giant quest for personal relevance, and we never say this part out loud: the people that want to become bosses usually do, and those people are usually emotionally-stunted in some very massive way where they should never have control of other people’s time or workflows, and yet, here we are.

At issue in the second link above is this ditty from a few months ago, where a CEO (I believe of Clearlink) praised an employee for selling the family dog (???) so he could return to the office.

If you watch that clip, the CEO has absolutely — and I mean absolutely — no idea how work gets done, what type of work is important to his bottom line, or anything else, and that’s evident from essentially Second 3 of the video. And that makes perfect sense at one level: CEOs only talk to their lieutenants and maybe a top sales guy or two. That’s it. Maybe they have a personal coach, a media coach, and a few mentors. They might — and yes, I mean “might” — talk to their wife about stuff periodically, but even many of those conversations are about kid needs. They probably have a few guys at the club they’ve gotten drunk with and spilled a little tea. But hopefully some NDAs were in place, right?

cc: Clearlink

The most stunning thing to me about work has always been: managers get paid more money to have direct reports and theoretically direct their workflow and priorities, and yet managers often have no idea what those priorities are, and can — at best — loosely define the idea of “productivity.”

That’s the thing about work that COVID exposed. People went home and got to see their families more. Some of that was horrible and we had a spike in addiction, teen depression, and domestic violence. All bad. But for some people, they realized, oh, this is cool, and when I’m not being called into pointless meetings all the time and can play cards with my daughter, this isn’t so bad. They reconnected to life as opposed to work. Work to live, not live to work, etc.

That’s what drove “The Great Resignation” narrative, which was kinda dumb in the first place. That + free money for people + more free money for companies, which gave employees a decent amount of flexibility that’s now been pulled back.

The problem for workers is that they ignored the psychology of managers and executives. In early COVID, those people had to deal with remote work, because oftentimes the governments they beg for money were saying “You cannot have people in the office.” Once that eased up, though, managers and executives defaulted as they tend to default, and the ultimate default for a guy who runs a silo is “I want to be deified by those in my silo.” (Otherwise, if you were truly good at your job, why wouldn’t you just make more money as an individual contributor? Plenty of people do that — the rub is, they’re good at their jobs. Management is where you go if your only money play is to be a manager. )

The need for deification and the need for control pushed the narrative back to the office. In reality, it doesn’t matter if an employee sits six feet from their boss or 600 miles from their boss — the boss probably has very little idea what the employee does, maybe barely talks to him/her unless a fire drill pops up, defines “productivity” as “task completion” as if we’re all seven year-olds with a chore list, and spends most of their own time managing up, not developing people.

The deification stuff has personal-side impacts as well. Anand K. Chandarana sent me this article recently , about how "the sex recession" is making leadership worse. No doubt. I've had no fewer than 15 people in the last 3-5 years tell me, "I think I got laid off because my boss wasn't getting laid at home."

Sadly, that's often not wrong.

That’s where we essentially landed. Apparently we’re at 44% of the American workforce WFH some part of the week, and 20% all week. That 20% number is good, and way up from 2019, but that’s only 1 in 5 people. I think more people would want more flexibility than that, but it’s not going to come. That 20% will go down if anything.

There’s also this take I saw recently:

Some merit there. The thing is, I’m sure the guy tweeting this is deeply enmeshed in the world of startups and “the East Bay” and all that. Most people have no idea about that stuff. Startups are important to the economy, but I don’t know if they have enough clout to drive this narrative.

The narrative, to me, is more from legacy-type managers — like guys who masturbate to Jamie Dimon — and it’s about:

• Control
• Need for relevance
• Need for deification
• Thinking that people will automatically slack off if you cannot see them
• Misunderstanding “productivity”
• Misunderstanding the actual point of human existence, which isn’t updating tracking documents
• They have friends at the country club in commercial real estate and don’t want to see them struggle
• Fear that their own kids, as they age, will be lazy and like avocado toast and not slug into an office and be miserable like they did

Those are the real narratives, best I can tell. Your take?