Somewhere in your third year of being a manager, the management pixies will appear in your office in a puff of sweet-smelling black smoke. There will be three of them, and one will be carrying a gorgeous black top hat.
“Are you LeRoy McManager ?”
“I am.”
The pixies laugh. “Congratulations, you have passed successfully through three years of management and we’re here to reward you. But first, one question: Have you seen Spider-Man?”
“The first one or the sequel?”
“The first one.”
“I have.”
The pixies laugh again. “What do you think is the primary theme in Spider-Man, LeRoy McManager?”
“Um, hmmmm . . . Life’s a bitch?”
Strangely, the pixies don’t laugh. “No, try again. It’s important.”
“OK, well. Hmmmm . . . Peter’s uncle said something they kept yammering about . . . Oh, I know . . . With great power comes great responsibility.”
The pixies cheer and the one carrying the top hat flutters over to you and drops it in your lap. It’s soft and strangely warm. The hat-bearing pixie looks up at you and grins, “You wear this hat when you want people to know who you are.”
“And who am I?” You look down at the hat and notice massive white block letters on the front. It says:
I’M THE BOSS.
A slow grin stretches across your face, and you realize the hat has the vague smell of your mom’s fresh baked bread. That smell has always given you a strange sense of confidence and you know that whenever you wear that hat, you’ll be infused with that sense of confidence.
All three pixies leap into the air, giggling. “Good luck, LeRoy McManager , use your hat well!” More laughing. Another puff of black smoke and they’re gone.
You lift the hat slowly in front of your face, staring at the white block letters, soaking in the sense of power the hat gives you, and you put it on.
You stride out of your office, never once wondering why the pixies were giggling so much because, well, you’re the boss. The first person sees you walk by in your cloud of confidence, and once you walk around the corner, you don’t hear them snicker because, again, you’re the boss.
They’re laughing because while they know you’re the boss, they can see the other side of the hat. It reads:
. . . FOR NOW
Managers Lose It
I mean it. There are managers out there who are absolutely punch drunk with power, and if you’re working for one of these folks, I’m really sorry. You’re a resident of Crazy Town, and that means you never know what random crap is going to happen next, and that sucks.
Managers don’t start crazy. It’s a learned trait, and this chapter explores the single best tactic you can take with both your manager and yourself to avoid trips to Crazy Town. Let’s tackle it first with a story about your manager.
You’re merrily typing away at your keyboard, hard at work at the next great product, when your boss walks in and says, “Hey, can you work on a Gizzy Flibbet project ?”
“Uh, aren’t we supposed to be finishing Flubjam? We’ve barely even started it. It’s going to take awhile.”
“Oh yes yes, we’re still doing Flubjam , but I need you to prototype the Gizzy Flibbet and I need it in two days for a meeting with the execs.”
“Ooooooooo-K, you’re the boss.”
“That’s right. I am the boss.”
Two days pass and your team briefly pours its soul into the prototype project. Like all investigations, you discover each step of discovery takes three times as long as expected. The final prototype conveys the idea, but the process to create that result has left your team drained and pretty sure finishing the remaining work is going to take a really long time.
When your boss walks into your office, you summarize, “Here it is. It looks good, it’ll take awhile to finish, and we’re now very behind on our Flubjam work. Can we please get back to it?”
Squinting her eyes, she runs her fingertips along the front rim of her top hat. She nods and stares, “OK, this is great. Let’s do this and Flubjam, and let’s hit the same schedule! Go us!” She turns and leaves the room, leaving your office with the faint smell of bread.
I’ll recap. Your boss has just picked the one scenario that involves the most work and has the least chance of succeeding. You’re screwed, and while you might think your boss has lost it, you are a coconspirator in this disaster because you didn’t do one simple thing: you didn’t say no.
Losing It
Managers don’t lose it simply because the pixies showed up with the top hat, they lose it because those they work with forget to look at the back of the hat. Remember:
Front: I’M THE BOSS.
Back: . . . FOR NOW.
Management is a myth, just like the top hat. We, as employees, believe it’s there, so we treat these management types differently. We operate under the assumption that they are the ones who can make decisions. When the team is stuck on a hard problem, we gather in our manager’s office, present our case, and then the manager nods and says, “Go that way!” More often than not, we’re so happy to be past the hard problem, we don’t even question whether it’s the right decision or not. “He’s got the top hat, so he must be right!”
No no no no. Also? No.
Managers lose it when they are no longer questioned in their decisions. When the team stops questioning authority, the manager slowly starts to believe that his decisions are always good, and while it feels great to be right all the time, it’s statistically impossible. The most experienced managers in the world make horribly bad decisions all the time. The good ones have learned how to recover from their decisions with dignity, but more importantly, with help from the team.
Saying no forces an idea to defend itself with facts. It forces a manager under the influence of his top hat to stop and think. Yes, I know that top hat can be intimidating, and yeah, he’s the guy who signs the checks, but each time you allow your manager to charge forward with unchecked blind enthusiasm, you only reinforce his perception that he’s never wrong. That’s a ticket straight to Crazy Town.
Recovering It
A good solid no can travel in any direction. Even when it’s hard to do.
My team had just been clobbered by the executive team in the boardroom. We’d been flying high on the sales of the current product and thinking that we could do no wrong, so our presentation for the next version of the product was half-baked. We’d assumed that since the current version was doing so well the executives would ignore our hand-waving about the future, but they didn’t.
The Q&A had started pleasantly, but three questions in, when it was clear we were making it up as we were going and there wasn’t some master plan behind the flimsy presentation, they started firing the big guns. There is only one extraction technique from these types of beat-downs—you say, “Well, it looks like we need to schedule a follow-up meeting.”
The team went into fire drill mode. We needed a product roadmap , we needed it in a week, and we need to rebuild the executive staff’s confidence in the team. When the brainstorming began, everyone was rattled. We’d moved from the chosen team to the team who couldn’t nail a roadmap presentation. Being shaken, the ideas bouncing around the room were timid. They were designed to appease the folks who had just yelled at us, and while my confidence was shaky, I knew it was time to say no again—to them and to the executive team that wanted a quick turnaround.
“No, we’re not going for mediocre. No, no one wants us to do me-too design. And, no, we’re not done with this roadmap until it’s something that inspires everyone in the room.”
Now, the difference between me standing up in my office and giving a speech on inspirational product roadmaps and a manager who’s flirting with Crazy Town because of an executive beat-down is slim, but therein lies the art. Saying no is saying “stop,” and in a valley full of people who thrive on endless movement, the ability to strategically choose when it’s time to stop is the sign of a manager willing to defy convention.
Never Trust a Pixie
The top hat is not what it seems. Yes, the black velvety elegance is intended to give you confidence, but remember—on the back of that hat is a threat. It’s not on the back because the pixies couldn’t fit the entire message on the front. It’s on the back because they don’t want you to live in Crazy Town, but they also don’t want you to be paralyzed by the reality that you’re potentially one big, bad decision away from being out of a job. They want you to embrace the confidence that the top hat imparts because it will help you make great decisions for yourself, your team, and your product. Some of those great decisions will be the result of blind luck, and some will be because you know what you’re doing. However, you will also make some bad decisions, which you will weather sometimes because they weren’t that bad, and sometimes purely on your top hat moxie.
And then you’re going to make a big, bad decision and you’ll remember: “With great power comes great responsibility.” As a manager, you are responsible for making great decisions and the best way to do that is to involve as much of the team as possible in every decision.
Your team is collectively smarter than you simply because there are more of them. More importantly, by including them in the decision process and creating a team where they feel they can say no, you’re creating trust.
A team that trusts you is going to look out for you. They’ll never sit back and watch as you merrily traipse into Crazy Town staring at the back of your hat thinking, “I wonder who gets the top hat next?”