Dear Manager - Please stop managing your team like an Uber driver
How managers who operate in transactional & auto-pilot mode ruin the careers of their team members
Welcome to Future of Work, Future of You. Love them or hate them but you cannot ignore them. Managers are a necessary evil & attract the ire in most organizations. But what is it that employees hate most about their managers? In this issue, we will find out how most managers are inadvertently ruining the career & growth path of their teams. I am sure the employee in each one of you will relate to this. If you like what you read, don’t forget to hit subscribe. Enjoy!
How does it feel like every time you get inside an Uber as a passenger with a driver that at best speaks sparsely with you? A few remain completely silent only to say a Thank you or Bye when they drop you at the destination. Others ask about your day & tell you about theirs. To most Uber drivers, there are only four things that matter as a driver.
Your Pick up point
Your Drop off point
Complete the ride
Your Rating
Now imagine your career sitting inside that Uber and the driver being your manager. If all that the manager cared about was these things, how far do you think your career can progress?
Most careers are Uber rides driven by different managers who don’t care about the past or future. All that managers care about is the current ride i.e. role/project/assignment and how good it was. They rarely build context or continuity whilst thinking about their teams.
Here’s how managers mimic Uber-drivers in their day-to-day behavior.
Auto-pilot: Every day is an exercise in muscle memory of the previous day. Most managers sleepwalk through their work & how they manage their team goals & tasks. Changing something requires thinking & effort which most managers run away from. Why take the headache when things are seemingly fine & team isn’t complaining?
Contact-less: Like Uber drivers, most managers avoid direct communication with their team member. They expect the system to take care of everything. ETAs, pickup point, destinations, etc. Calling up to check-in is rarely an option. Isn’t it convenient to just sit in your bubble waiting for careers to arrive & take turn automatically without intervention? The problem is it doesn’t work.
Zero context: Cab drivers don’t need a lot of context before starting a ride but managers do. Are you picking up a donkey or a hare for a resource? What makes a person tick? How far can you stretch someone? How aggressive & ambitious is someone to grow?
Blind Ratings: This one is the best. No matter how good or bad your ride went, every Uber driver expects a 5 star rating. Most riders give in to that pressure to be rated high in return. Its a perfect example of “I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine” problem. Similarly, every manager in some part of their alternate universe expects great ratings from their team no matter how shitty they were right through the year.
Cancelled Ride: I have come across many Uber drivers who will cancel the ride knowing that destination is too far from their origin place. They demonstrate an inability to step outside their comfort zone to take people home despite their initial commitment. Need I say more that managers are eerily similar in their behavior towards their team members?
Now that I have drawn unfair comparisons between your beloved Uber driver & forever-hated manager, let us move on. Lets decode those four things that matter to an Uber driver but should matter way more & beyond to a manager.
The Pickup Point
Most employees carry a sense of purpose & passion in their choice of education, profession & pursuit. What inspires them? What depletes them? What is the “Super You” version of them?
The history & origins of an individual and their struggles & failings along the way codify their attitudes & beliefs. It can be the simplest & the most powerful input to unlocking human potential inside workplace teams.
And yet we see managers ignore the past perspective of their team members. Managers who simply educate themselves & acknowledge this about their team are ahead of most others in building great careers for their employees.
The Drop-off Point
Dreams matter more than the destination. In order to nurture aspirations, you need to go beyond quarterly/annual OKRs. For most employees, they want to accomplish personal fulfillment through some sense of professional goals that come alive in their job outcomes. A coder wants technology to solve real world problems. A marketer helps people create & narrate their stories. A designer wants to bring out the craft in a product or service. We all have underlying objectives that are deeper & profane than hitting a sales quota or a product launch date. It is the job of a manager to help their team get there.
The Ride
Managers & teams end up spending years together in this ride. It is full of ups & downs for everyone. A business crisis, challenging project, new geography new team are few of those countless upheavals that teams go through on the way to their collective successes & failures.
For every employee, it takes a lot to turn up every day to work with their A-game unconditionally. There is no line of sight of a pay raise, promotion, recognition so all their good work is flying blind hoping to land some appreciation. Managers have an incredibly impactful yet sensitive role to play. They are the ones to guide teams through the dark tunnel till they see light at the end of it. Managers need to share hope, optimism, encouragement, wisdom, guidance & feedback through these tough times as employees are finding their feet in the corporate ladder. So few managers take their job seriously beyond meeting reviews & escalation calls.
Building trust trumps completing transactions. Managers don’t trust their team. Employees don’t trust their manager. Peers are wary of each other. Trust is completely broken inside the workplace.
Transaction is the most heavily used currency while trust is in short supply.
More than anything, the quality of the ride determines whether managers did their job well or not.
The Rating
Most Uber drivers expect 5 star ratings no matter how good or bad the experience. Managers expect the same.
But why?
The most ridiculous & insane part of the modern workplace is its people evaluation system.
It sucks & everyone agrees! And yet it continues to be bad. Is anyone listening?
How many more performance review cycles, teary-eyed conversations, eyebrow-raising feedback is it going to take for companies to realize how broken the system is? I mean who in their sane minds want to go to a clunky stupid portal to update their history of good performance & wait weeks for their managers to disprove every accomplishment.
Whether it is a manager or team member - what people truly need is honest, timely & actionable feedback on how they are doing.
How difficult can this possibly be?
Rating IS NOT Recognition IS NOT Personal Growth.
Professional careers are being transacted today inside modern workplaces in the garb of business growth, customer obsession, work culture & always-on mindset. In trying to nail down the next project, promotion or pay raise, careers get kicked down the road or pushed to the curbside. Doing the urgent, important thing becomes more important than doing the right thing for the career in the long term.
Great managers don’t do different things. They just do the same things differently.
Show people a dream, not just directions
Connect with them, don’t just converse
Provide a path, not just a destination
Recognize them, don’t just rate
Build trust, don’t just transact
Don’t let your career be just another Uber ride for your next manager. Take action now!
Let me know in comments what you think about below points. I would love to hear from you & share my personal experience.
Tell me about a Uber driver moment in your career.
Are you making the most of your career?
Will managers survive the workplace revolution & be relevant in 2030?
If you have a co-worker, founder, product manager or even an entrepreneurial dreamer who needs to see this, please share. You may be helping them more than you realize.
Reach me at Tejaswi Gautam and let me know what you think about this issue. Are you ready for the future of work? See you next week!