Member-only story
If you’re a peon or rank-and-file employee at a company, you can be drilled out of the company for virtually anything. You’re constantly in a mad scramble to justify your value or worth, especially if revenue erodes across 2–3 quarters and someone has their hand on the Layoff Kill Switch. (That’s the same moment when “authenticity” seeks to be valuable in companies; the authentic people tend to get pushed off the cruise ship first.) But if you’re a manager, unless you’re literally drooling from the mouth all day or hideously bad in a revenue sense, you almost never have to justify your role to anyone. It’s almost as if “management” is some concept we inherently deify, even though we know 82% of them end up as the wrong hire.
But oh, friend, there is more: we also know that bad managers are responsible for about $3 trillion — yes, with a T — in lost economic value annually. We know that managers are not good judges of new ideas, and we know that they generally don’t pull their weight inside organizations. We know they often tend to lead with ego, and are focused too excessively on process. We’re not entirely sure how much they care about the supposed “Great Resignation.”
If someone’s job is taking orders from one person and giving them to someone else, that is not a job, that is a conveyer belt, and they should be…
