Matt Casey - The Management Delusion: What if were doing it all wrong?

Matt Casey

The Management Delusion

What if were doing it all wrong?

First published by DoThings Publishing 2020

Copyright 2020 by Matt Casey

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First edition

Cover art by Alex Jobbings

I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it

Bill Gates

Managers are usually hard workers. Thats how they got promoted. Its why they got put in charge. But hard workers tend to try to solve problems with hard work, so over the years the management role gradually expanded as these hard workers took on more and more responsibility. Its now reached a point where what we expect of our managers is completely out of balance with what most of them are capable of. The job is too hard now, and as a result most of us have had far more bad managers than good ones. Thats a disaster. The role is too important for that kind of failure rate. Imagine if wed had more bad pilots than good ones.

It wasnt supposed to be like this.

The working world the manager was created for was a far simpler place than the one it functions in today. At first, a manager pretty much only needed to be scary. There was no employee engagement, no career development, no servant leadership or performance coaching. It was just a scary guy screaming the dreams out of a group of people with low expectations and nowhere else to go. That scary guy didnt have to do anything particularly difficult to get people to do the work he wanted them to do. He just pointed them to their spot on the factory floor and said: stand there and do this as many times as you can before you die. That was being a manager.

That isnt the job now. We cant just be scary. In fact, modern managers must be all things to all people. We must be inspirational, authoritative and organised. We must be inventive, emotionally intelligent, patient and calm. We must be bold, but cautious. We must drive change, but maintain order. We must be selfless, but demanding. And we must be all of these things consistently, because the moment we make a mistake pretty much everyone hates us and loads of stuff goes wrong.

Take a moment to think about the personality traits and skills necessary to consistently be all of those things. I dont know anyone who is this person. Im pretty sure nobody is this person. In fact, I believe that if you were to ever meet this person you would know immediately, because they would physically glow. Captain America is this person. Nobody else. But in most organisations today, roughly one in seven employees perform management duties. One in seven. We are organising ourselves in such a way that success depends on one in seven people being better than the best person weve ever met, and then were surprised when everything is horrible. An entire career of working with and training managers at every level has proved to me beyond doubt that far fewer than one in seven people are capable of doing this job. Its not even close to that. Have you met people? Most of them are dreadful.

The failure of this approach has been obvious for a long time. Employee engagement studies consistently paint a horrible picture of a workforce who are disinterested in their jobs and distrustful of their managers, and this has been the case for several years with barely any sign of improvement. Almost universally, our attempts to address this problem have centred around spending more and more time and money on trying to improve the managers. We keep trying to make the managers better so they can meet the new demands we place on them. But we keep failing, and the demands keep increasing. What if were going about it all wrong? What if instead of trying to make the managers better, we try to make management easier?

I created my company, DoThings, for exactly that purpose. Its also why Im writing this book. A few years ago I stepped back from my near religious belief in management and instead of asking myself how I could be better at it, I asked myself how I could make it easier, or simply not do it at all. The result was what I have come to call Minimum Effective Management. This is the absolute minimum amount of management I need to carry out in order to generate the outcomes I want. Working this way has allowed me to create workplaces that everybody can thrive in without the need for superhuman managers whose decisions determine the working lives of everyone else. Its a way of working that any manager can adopt without needing to learn a single new skill.

I believe management is important. What we do affects the lives of other people in real and significant ways, both in and out of work. And we are failing those people far too often. But its not our fault, the job is just too hard now. Unless its made significantly simpler, this will always be the case. The approach of trying to improve the managers has failed, because the standard required is unrealistic. What Ive discovered is that almost anyone can be a great manager, as long as they dont try to take on the ridiculous level of responsibility we have come to believe the role demands. Weve been adding new structures to the old foundations of management for decades, when what we really need to do is rip it down and rebuild it from scratch based on the requirements and capabilities of todays working world.

So thats what I did. Ive tried to avoid making this book an instruction manual. I hope that I explain the approach and how I implement it in a way thats digestible, but its not a step by step guide. Im not trying to tell anyone what they should or shouldnt be doing - just what I do, and perhaps more importantly, what I dont do.

This is how I achieve everything traditional management claims it will achieve but consistently fails to. This is the approach I use to be successful without ever feeling pressured, working crazy hours, or dealing with the hassle and stress that managers routinely face.

This is the easy way to do a hard job.

Management has been failing for a long time now. Employee engagement has been appalling for years and has shown little sign of improvement. Global productivity is in decline. At the time of writing, Gallup have just released their latest State of the Global Workplace report, which shows that a shocking 85% of global employees are disengaged with their work. 18% reported being actively disengaged. Take a moment to think about that. The purpose of management is to engage employees. Thats it. We dont do anything ourselves, all our results are achieved through the actions of our employees. But only 15% of those employees even care about their job, and nearly 20% of them are so unhappy with it that they are actively trying to do it badly.

The question we have to ask ourselves isnt if management is working or not. That question has been answered emphatically: it isnt. Management is arguably the function most crucial to the success of any business, but we are accepting a failure rate from it that we wouldnt from any other role. And that failure rate clearly demonstrates that it cannot be the fault of the managers themselves. If 85% of planes crashed, we would immediately recognise there was a problem with those planes. We wouldnt blame the pilots.