No offense, but this is the kind of thinking that leads to workplace bias. Working styles like this tend to reinforce hiring single, young men who are otherwise unencumbered so they can work long hours and push the envelope of the job description. That leads to a lot of group think, and products that are built for a very small subset of users — so there is real business value in diversity.
Reviews are important for someone with whom you don’t share a lot of built in cultural cues. Your experience with this working style has been positive, because you were born and raised speaking the jargon. If they come from a different background, they may not actually know what is important for the company because they haven’t spent their whole life interpreting these cultural cues.
This is what we call a “blind spot” — you have had success with your working style, and start to assume it’s the only effective way to do the work. I promise you it is not, and as a manager you should be doing more to communicate needs/value opportunities to your direct reports. Your view of what those are may be different from theirs.
He spoke about being a young man willing to put in the hours starting out to learn his craft. Yes, the young need to learn a lot after schooling just to keep up.
After that, he spoke about figuring out how to provide the most value for the business. I've had a 25+ year career and can verify that everyone should follow this advice.
Whatever hidden biases we are concerned about in the workplace, they all pale in comparison to the metric of fulfilling the purpose of the company. It took me a few years to realize that businesses were less interested in paying me because I was smart and could solve hard problems and more interested in how I could measure and move the purposes of the company.
The only direct value a manager provides to a company is a regular calibration of employee purpose with the purpose of the business. This is best done with regular 1-on-1s, not through semi-annual reviews.
There are other indirect things that a good manager brings to the table which mostly revolve around increasing employee happiness and satisfaction, but all of it pales in comparison to aligning employee and company purpose.
counterpoint: the harder he tries to provide value to the business, the business typically only offers the exact same basic salary value to him.
sure, there are exceptions -- but they are exceptions.
my career has taught me that adding as much value as you see the potential for adding is a surefire way to get a promotion, complete with an extra 2% salary and the new expectation of you continuing to work at 110%.
oh yeah, and you get a good reference.
but seriously give me a break. if you're in a position to add so much value to a company, you should be elsewhere in another company, two levels up. good companies don't leave easy pickings hanging.
It’s all virtue-signaling in the end, and a manager from the same background is going to be more receptive to virtue-signaling from their own cultural background than from someone with a different background.
Formal reviews distill virtue signaling into a standard process with explicit rules rather than an informal set of norms that individuals may or may not be aware of.
I think there are a lot of ways to make the rules explicit that don't require formal reviews. A formal review process can be equally biased by incentivizing people to game the system by targeting easy wins rather than tackling harder, more important problems.
For instance, tackling existing bugs or documenting code often seems to be undervalued compared with writing new code, when writing new code often just introduces new bugs and requires new documentation. If you start tracking bugs, people will benefit from creating and tackling easy bugs, while tackling harder bugs is effectively a punishment.
Regardless, defined performance metrics are better than none at all. You have to create the formality around performance evaluation or else you end up with those who understand the informal rules outperforming those who don’t simply because they grew up in a certain environment. I don’t think anyone would claim that’s fair, but that’s how the “meritocracy” works when you don’t define these things formally.
On the flip side, when you do define these things formally, you end up with those who can and will game the formal rules more effectively outperforming those who don't. This isn't fair either, and there are probably all sorts of biases in who is willing and able to game such metrics (for example, I have seen men game them more often).
Evaluating performance is tough. Evaluating performance without greatly distorting incentives is much tougher. I agree fairness should be a consideration, but it is not the primary purpose of a business.
By not defining them, you leave the priorities of the business up to what amounts to a popularity contest with each manager. Raises and promotions thus get handed out to the people who are most likable.
Senior executives (usually VP and above) at major companies typically sign contracts explicitly outlining their goals for the next 12-24 months. They are incentivized or fired based on meeting those goals. And it’s the executives who demand this, not the companies.
Point being, if the executives are demanding clear performance goals for themselves, it’s probably good practice. Managers typically are not responsive to demands from below, so guess where the mandate has to come from.
Once you start to manage people for real, you’ll realize that the truth is often very subjective and it’s easy to appear awesome to your boss without being so when he has 8 other people to evaluate.
Getting to the bottom of it all is hard, if not impossible given the power imbalance. So yeah, virtue signaling is important when different cultures teach you to show virtue in different ways.
> That leads to a lot of group think, and products that are built for a very small subset of users — so there is real business value in diversity.
I am not sure this is true to the extent that people want it to be. You see the main benefits of diversity when groups of users use products in different ways depending on who they are. However, a large majority of products are used the same way by all people (almost all b2b products / services that I can think of and many if not most consumer products / services), so for those products I'm not sure it matters who your creators or developers are as long as they understand the industry they are making products for and they talk to users.
I can see the benefit in having a diverse workforce when it comes to discovering new markets or uses for technologies or products, but I think it would be far more important to shoot for having people from a variety of industries and backgrounds on your team to spot these opportunities as opposed to trying to preferentially hire minorities, women, parents, the elderly, lgbt, etc regardless of their backgrounds.
That being said, I do agree that communicating cultural values, mission, and expectations regularly is very, very important as many people have a suboptimal idea of how their work meshes with overall goals of the organization and what is expected of them. Regularly checking in with direct reports can help them internalize these ideas better.
I’m not talking about preferential hiring; I’m talking about removing bias from the hiring process. This must be done by the company because I guarantee the prospective employee is doing everything they can to try to virtue-signal the company in the ways they know work.
There’s an entire industry devoted to helping women and minorities better integrate with the business climate (Lean In, et al). I guarantee these people are doing a ton of work just to be able to “fit in” and close the cultural gap.
In that context, it’s not unreasonable to ask companies to do something as well. The workers most definitely are.
I agree that companies should try to help all of their employees grow and thrive, that people don't have the same cultural starting conditions, and that company led efforts need to be tailored differently for different people / groups.
It's somewhat unclear to me what you are asking managers to do in terms of removing bias. It seems natural to preferentially reward people who push the bounds of the position, who add out sized value, and who work hard. Not rewarding these people for their efforts will lead to them leaving and finding other jobs that will reward that behavior. People have different priorities in life, different aspirations, and I'm not sure why this is a problem. Those who want to work very hard and don't pursue familial obligations lose out on the benefits of having children or spending time with a SO and in return get rewarded career wise. There's an opportunity cost either way.
If I'm totally missing the point here or am off base, please correct me.
It’s more that there are people who could be rockstars, but because they weren’t immersed in startup culture or entrepreneurship since childhood, they don’t know what’s important to the business. That’s why clear goals and responsibilities are important.
I'm confused on what you mean by this. Businesses don't exist to hire and pay people, and the value a business generates for users has little to do with who they hire as long as a high quality product or service is being outputted.
> This is what we call a “blind spot” — you have had success with your working style, and start to assume it’s the only effective way to do the work.
After decades in the industry, I'm comfortable that my success is repeatable (as I have done) and is the most effective way to do the work. As if there's a debate, I'm really surprised by the endless process and bad management advice circulating on the web, among the good. "This hasn't killed my company yet and I'm happy with what we have" is the refrain from small and large companies wasting time and effort (with things like scheduled reviews). Talented Managers aren't supposed to be listeners, unless you're trapped in a byzantine/hobbesian org (these emerge in different tiers).
> Reviews are important for someone with whom you don’t share a lot of built in cultural cues.
No, they aren't. They are important for you to set standards of accountability, at best...unless you really don't have power to do anything about it, which I've seen. You don't change their culture and they don't change yours, regardless of what you tell yourself. The job description and company-necessary responsibilities aren't changing based on the person. I'm not sure there's any value in going on about it, this kind of thinking is just madness.
It seems wholly unremarkable, to me, that people who work hard, try to anticipate the needs of their employers, keep the big picture in mind, and take initiative are more valuable employees. I wouldn't want to hire indolent and apathetic people, and neither should any business that either is successful or wants to be successful.
If you're worried about building products that appeal to the indolent and apathetic, just look at the entertainment industry, where actors and screenwriters work very very long hours to produce content that reliably keeps the indolent and apathetic entertained.
If you're just worried about diversity, I assure you that there are plenty of husbands, fathers, wives, mothers, and even single women, as well as both men and women of all ethnic and national backgrounds, who are diligent and conscientious.
"It seems wholly unremarkable, to me, that people who work hard, try to anticipate the needs of their employers, keep the big picture in mind, and take initiative are more valuable employees."
Sometimes they are. Sometimes they aren't. Different roles are going to require different personality types. There are scenarios in which "complacent, trustworthy, consistent" are the 3 most important traits someone needs for a role. Those things may also combine with the other skills you're mentioning, but not always.
Some roles just don't have a career track for advancement, and there's plenty of times where advancing an employee is less beneficial to a company overall so it's best to hire for someone who's just going to settle into their role and be happy with a slight pay increase from time to time.
Well, yours is another type of bias: that people are unable to have an honest and just view on their employees/applicants because they have a worls view.
I prefer dealing with people to dealing with black-boxes.
What? you are saying only young single men are willing to work hard and actually function autonomously? That is so offensive I can't fathom you actually believe that.
He never said “only“. For his argument to be true it's enough that the features are more prevalent among young single men, and me didn't say more than that.
The work ethic in question involves “long hours and self learning“ self learning implies that it probably also happens outside work hours. People who are in a relationship are obviously less likely to work long hours and self learn in their free time.
Statistically, young people are also far more willing to do long hours.
I'm a bit torn on bringing gender into it. Women are more likely to work half time, but I would expect them to be better at predicting needs (yes, I'm aware that's potentially sexist).
So basically I find everything very reasonable if you assume he didn't mean the worst possible interpretation. I don't see the gender bias, but I'm sure there are arguments I'm not aware of.
But gender is only a part of it; unconscious bias is intersectional just like identity. The fewer intersectional traits you share with someone, the greater the cultural gap you have to cover.
More formality at work in terms of expectations and progress provides a clear way to cover that gap.
He is saying that people with different background a.) won't be able to guess right what is the thing to learn that will give them advantage later on and would benefit feedback b.) have less free time to play around and thus will perform better if you don't expect tell them to figure via trial and error what is needed.
Through, my experience with this organizational style was bad, mostly because people ended in quite ugly competitive behavior. Mostly due to rules being unclear, resentment being build up, people choosing highly visible tasks instead of needed tasks and so on and so forth.a lot of insecurity everywhere.
There were also a lot of of random attempts by random colleguess to take control and micromanage random people+responsibilities in attempt to look like natural leaders. Did I mentioned insecurity? Someone tring to look like autonomous leader while being completely insecure about limits of his responsibilities and powers is highly unpleasant to work with. You deal with politics like 80% of time as result.
Not that they’re the only ones willing; but they are overwhelmingly the only ones capable of operating in the way OP describes due to a variety of societal pressures, lack of family attachment, confidence/ego, etc.
Other people are certainly willing and able to work hard and independently, but you do have to provide more formal guidance because you cannot expect someone living in a different cultural context to meet all the standards you hold yourself to. There may simply be a misunderstanding, and because I guarantee the employee would be acutely aware of the understanding gap, it’s on the manager to be aware of it as well.
Informality has a lot of benefits, but it’s also necessarily exclusive to people who don’t know the unwritten, informal rules under which you operate. This can and will lead to a homogeneous team that seems productive from the inside, but may miss other goals because they’re just unaware of them.
No I think OP means that the stereotype for what managers expects it looks like usually match that profile. Not that, it's what that takes to "work hard and actually function autonomously"
>but forced myself to deliver results autonomously through self-teaching and long hours.
He's saying that it's harder to compete on self-teaching and long hours if you also, say, have a child that you're trying to teach good values to and need to pick up from school at 3:30pm during the week. Which is a reasonable critique of the parent post, IMO.
I read the comment not as saying that other people are not willing to work hard and function autonomously, but rather that they may have a harder time than the OP did transferring those capabilities into the right practical activities for the success of the company without review/feedback, and if that is not recognized, their lack of success could be incorrectly interpreted as a lack of willingness to work hard or ability to function autonomously, rather than a lack of the same background that allowed the OP to apply the same capabilities without review/feedback.
I think the issue is that many managers and business owners do believe that and confirmation bias leads them to never challenging their own beliefs.
It is an unquestioned, invisible belief, which may bring up defensiveness when pointed out, as it is no longer (as) politically correct.
As we are sloooowly transitioning from institutionalized sexism, it becomes obvious how a premise which is offensive to someone who sees and values everyone’s contribution and dignity could be seen as naive or outlandish by people carrying unquestioned old beliefs.
Reviews are important for someone with whom you don’t share a lot of built in cultural cues. Your experience with this working style has been positive, because you were born and raised speaking the jargon. If they come from a different background, they may not actually know what is important for the company because they haven’t spent their whole life interpreting these cultural cues.
This is what we call a “blind spot” — you have had success with your working style, and start to assume it’s the only effective way to do the work. I promise you it is not, and as a manager you should be doing more to communicate needs/value opportunities to your direct reports. Your view of what those are may be different from theirs.