A Dangerous Disregard

If you’re one of the billion or so people who read Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers,” you might be familiar with what I refer to as the Law of Mastery, which loosely states: “To truly master a skill, you need to work on it for something like 10,000 hours.” It’s a good read. It turns out that the Beatles, Mozart, and Einstein did not just pop into existence in the full flower of their genius. 

Still, I am skeptical of “Laws” in general, so I always hunt for exceptions. Whenever I think I’ve found one, I dig a little. But in the case of the Law of Mastery, I unfailingly find an unsung era of labors in obscurity. But whether you think it is universal or not, the Law has truth to it. Dangerous consequences await those who ignore or disregard it. Yet in many companies there is one role where the Law is commonly disregarded: managing people.

That’s Not Us, We Don’t Do That

When asked about their attention to or investment in people management practices, most places say “Hey, we’re not bad at it, we don’t see it as a major weakness.” Okay, yet in many places and in many ways I encounter symptoms that tell the true story. Examples:

• An engineer impresses everyone and the team loves him. He has no people management experience but they promote him to Director anyway, give him direct reports, and no training on how to handle them, let alone how to uplift them as a team.
• A job description delineates in exhaustive detail all the people management and leadership responsibilities the successful candidate will conduct, and then states a requirement that managers allocate 50% of their time to coding tasks. 
• People managers are seldom paid as well as technical staff.
• A company conducts a reduction in force due to disappointing financial results, and people managers are first to go, not because they failed at their jobs, but because they are viewed as the most expendable. (We can always promote some engineers to manager roles.)
• Employees are surprised by negative ratings on their performance reviews.
• Other symptoms: Teams that often resort to heroics, teams that fail to confront poor performers, teams that fail to meet their goals, teams that lose high performers to other teams or to another company.

The list goes on. They are all clues that a company is not investing well in the skills of its people managers and they are usually paying a heavy price. 

Why Managing People Is a Crucial Role

If you consider the progress of a company from startup to either the dumpster or the echelons of glory, the path is mined with problems. The dumpster divers are separated from the ascendant by one factor – how they overcome problems. Now consider this: What if all the problems your company encounters are people problems? In my experience, they are. All of them. 

Many have argued with me, insisting that problems can reside in technical challenges, market conditions, supply chain, company policies, competitive pressures, pandemics, or any of a hundred other matters. I say “Nay, people are at the root of it every time.” Just like with the Law, dig a little into every problem confronting your company and you’ll find a sneaky human factor at the root. The real trick is to grasp that great people management is usually about preventing disasters, not so much about reacting to disasters. Here are examples of people issues that lead to significant business problems:

• Someone made a faulty assumption. 
• Someone imposed an unrealistic set of requirements or a foolish deadline. 
• Someone decided to launch before market validation. 
• Someone assigned the wrong staff member. 
• Someone decided this task was a good excuse to learn everything about Typescript. 
• Someone changed the strategy without proper vetting. 
• Someone failed to communicate decision details to stakeholders.
• Someone concluded that the Board of Directors would react positively if we conducted layoffs. 

Do any of these scenarios sound familiar? If you knew how to solve or resolve any of these people problems proactively, would the outcomes for the company have changed? 

Decomposing an Insurmountable Technical Problem

What stands apart for me as a prime example of finding people at the root of every problem is the story of Bob.

Bob was a true master of his universe, the most gifted video engineer in our company, possibly in the country, replete with his 10,000+ hours. And he was getting his ass kicked by a technical problem. It turns out that what he needed to do wasn’t possible. It was a Gordian knot. The math said it was possible, but the constraints of the device we were building negated the math. 

Maybe you want to jump on that, crying, “There you go, Ken, an insurmountable technical problem. That proves you wrong.”

Does it?

Poor Bob beat his head against this problem with everything he had. Our customer, who commissioned the product, was headed for bankruptcy. Bob worked eighty-hour weeks and then stayed up two nights straight at the deadline and got nowhere. Watching his struggles led many of us to fear that he’d end up like the Unabomber, holed up in a shack in the wilderness and plotting the overthrow of his country. Seeing him mumbling his way down the halls was like glimpsing the specter of crushed dreams.

As leader of the Project Management Office, I’d burned out two PMs on this gig and so had to parachute in myself to try to help the team slay this monster and drag it over the finish line. I investigated alleviating constraints, reducing the performance requirements, getting more time, reducing scope, delivering a reduced capability MVP, etc. etc. etc. I got nowhere. And a company was dying. And Bob had stopped showering and shaving.

What would you do? If you were convinced it was just a technical problem, your company failed.

I was not convinced. I sat down with Bob and listened to him describe his problem. I developed a suspicion and decided to test it.

I said, “Name three engineers, apart from you, who are the best in the company.” I locked him in a lab room with those engineers. “Bob, here’s your assignment. You walk these engineers through the issues you’re facing, every nit and tiny detail. Omit nothing. The rest of you listen to Bob and ask your hardest questions. Try to embarrass him. Nobody comes in, nobody goes out, turn off your phones, and I’ll slide pizza under the door every time you bang on the wall.” 

They looked at me like I was an idiot. I could see the same thought on all their faces: “Stupid ignorant manager wasting my time! This is a technical problem and pizza will not solve it.”

Three hours and 1.5 pizzas later they emerged from the lab high-fiving each other, laughing, and Bob even had a tear on his cheek. He’d done it. He’d unraveled the Gordian knot.

It wasn’t luck. I could tell from listening to him that Bob’s thinking had sunk into a rut. He treaded it again and again, and he no longer saw over the rut’s rim. Compelled to explain everything to other engineers of equal caliber, he did not instinctively dumb it down, he started anticipating what challenges and questions they would pose. They didn’t have to ask any questions. After an hour of detailed explanations, with challenges of assumptions arising in his own mind, Bob popped out of his mental rut and exploded with an inspired idea. 

Bob’s solution saved our customer’s company and around two hundred jobs. And he earned my company a hearty six figure bonus. Bob credited his breakthrough to the pizza. 

If I had seen the problem as only a technical one, none of that would have happened. 

My suggestion is, ask yourself these questions. If people problems lurk at the root of most problems, and overcoming problems is the key to success, why doesn’t your company train and grow the best people managers in the business? What problems are festering around you as less astute managers fail to spot them? Most importantly, what opportunities for ascension are you missing by underestimating this crucial capability?