The Dangers of Feelgood Management
A lot of companies fret about perks like allowing employees to bring their dogs to work. Maybe they should worry more about whether employees are bringing their A game to work.
BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN
One of the biggest issues that large and
complex businesses are experiencing as they try to promulgate company-wide
post-Covid policies is that the lives, behaviors, expectations and working
conditions of all of their employees aren't remotely the same.
Folks in the factory aren't focused on bringing Fido to work because they've
got much bigger fish to fry. White collar workers want four-day, flexible
work weeks, long weekends, and raises for no good reason. Anyone under 35
(especially in tech) wants it all as well as a special engraved
invitation to return. One size solutions never did fit everyone and today, with
increasingly dispersed and diverse workforces, the challenges are more
complicated than ever. This is a growing problem that's not going to get any
easier or go away any time soon.
For entrepreneurs with newer and smaller
businesses, it's actually just as much a problem - maybe even more of one -
because much of the current conventional wisdom along with the gratuitous
personnel advice being so freely handed out by various "experts" is
likely to make their lives even tougher. People with safe and secure jobs in
corporate America love to lecture the rest of us. They're charter members in
the "do as I say, not as I do" school since they've never worked for
themselves or spent a single day in the trenches. A word of warning from
someone who's been there: never take advice from anyone who doesn't have to
live with the consequences.
Consultants, advisors, academics and authors
all fall into this bucket. They get a free pass, offer weekly doses of
touchy-feely instructions, are happy to spend your company's money for you,
but, at the end of the day, you're the one who has to clean up the messes their
mixed and simplistic messages make and explain to your team over and over that
what might seem like smart and obvious solutions are rarely well-suited to
startups. In tough times like these, new businesses need to be fully focused on
the "need to have" elements for success, not the "nice to
have" fantasies describing a world which we'll probably never see. They're
talking to your team about flying to new heights of equity, diversity,
accountability and inclusion when the core message most often needs to be that
we're going to walk before we run and re-focus on fundamentals.
One of my favorite recent barrages of this
kind of BS has been the whole series of articles reminding employers of just
how important it was to make sure that every employee takes every last bit of
the vacation time they are entitled to. I'm sure mental health is an important
goal in the grown-up world, but when you're barely making ends meet and you're
constantly down a bunch of critical workers and looking to hire more, it's much
more important to have all hands on deck and a few ringers in reserve to make
sure that you can get the day-to-day business done and don't leave your
customers and clients in the lurch. Sleep is still mainly for sissies,
vacations are for vagrants, and tomorrow is always the best time for an
entrepreneur to relax and, of course, tomorrow never comes.
And if the glut of free and useless advice
wasn't enough of an impediment in the midst of a pandemic, and likely to
confuse and defocus too many members of your team, the fact that your team is
still largely scattered to the four winds and the economy can't seem to
consistently get started again just make things even worse. Creating, building
and maintaining your company's culture and a viable work ethic is a hard enough
in a normal economy. The degree of difficulty goes off the charts when
most of your people, (including newbies who've never been to the office), are
still working from home and they're all reading blog posts and articles about:
(a) how desperate employers are to find, hire and overpay talented workers; (b)
companies which are providing special vans and shuttles to encourage their
workers to come back so they don't have to worry about taking public
transportation; (c) not
having to work for bosses who are jerks; and (d) booming businesses where everyone
gets a vote on everything.
Democracy in our political system - especially
these days - needs to be aggressively defended by anyone and everyone with a
brain, but democracy in every
business and every meeting is a fantasy that will quickly paralyze and eventually
kill your company. The idea that every idea is a great one is just as stupid as
the concept of giving every kid a trophy, so their feelings won't be hurt.
Building a business is always about facing facts and - in the real world - the
facts don't care about anyone's feelings, just their results.
In fact, now's probably a pretty good time to
offer your team a little dose of reality to offset the overwhelming flow of
warm and fuzzy findings from the "feelings" philosophers. You may be
short on people overall, but it's even more short-sighted to keep folks around
who aren't getting the job done. Taking the time to set out your approach, your
expectations and the kind of team you're building will help separate your
hard-core keepers from the half-hearted hangers-on who are totally deluded by
all the great resignation videos on Tik-Tok and just waiting for a better
offer.
Building a new business from the bottom up
isn't that much fun these days - it's tough, grinding, hard daily work. The end
goal isn't enjoyment or entertainment. The end goal is the pride and
satisfaction that comes from making a difference and accomplishing something of
value and importance for yourself, your team, and others as well. People
desperately looking for a pleasant experience and much appreciation are most
likely to end up at the bottom of the pile.
The best entrepreneurs take for granted that
much of what they put into the startup process will be thankless, but they
still keep moving forward and they never lose hope. Not because hope is a
strategy - at best, it's a salve, but because leaders are everyday dealers in
hope even if these days the main hope for many of us is that the feelings that
we're presently feeling won't last forever.
As that great rock philosopher Florence Welch
(of Florence + The Machine) always sang about the demons and ghouls: "It's
always darkest before the dawn." So, Shake it Out.