Matt Ley on Reclaiming the Awesomeness of Management, Organizations vs. Communities, and Maximizing Fulfillment ROI
In Brief: Matt Ley (linkedin.com/in/mattley) a senior consultant with the consulting firm Gapingvoid and author of the book "Manage Your Gaps: Reclaiming the Awesomeness of Management," joins host Dan Freehling to discuss the importance of community in organizational culture, the role of managers as culture champions, the distinction between managing rock stars and rising stars, and the Fulfillment ROI concept. They unpack the value of one-on-one meetings and the impact of individual contributors on organizational success. Matt shares his insights on effective management practices from his management, coaching, and consulting experience.
Recommended Reading: “Radical Candor” by Kim Scott, “The Career Design Map” by Dan Freehling, “The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety” by Timothy R. Clark, “The Fearless Organization” by Amy Edmondson, and “The 6 Types of Working Genius” by Patrick Lencioni.
Transcript
Dan Freehling (00:00:01):
Welcome to Forward-Looking Leadership, a podcast for visionary leaders building future-ready organizations. I'm your host, Dan Freehling. I'm the founder of the coaching and consulting practice Contempus Leadership, developing the leaders and teams you want in charge through cutting-edge approaches and common-sense solutions. I'm honored to be joined today by Matt Ley. Matt is a senior consultant with the consulting firm Gapingvoid, and the author of the brand new book Manage Your Gaps, Reclaiming the Awesomeness of Management. Matt and I met through Steve Baue, who has also been on the podcast, and hit it off right away as thought partners on all things management and culture. Listeners, you're in for a thought provoking episode. Thanks for joining me on Forward-Looking Leadership. Matt,
Matt Ley (00:00:40):
Pleasure to be here. Dan. Thanks for having me.
Dan Freehling (00:00:43):
Thanks for taking the time. So Matt, in I think eight or nine episodes so far, you're my third Wisconsinite guest and I'm wondering if there's a pattern in leadership or management philosophy that comes from growing up in Wisconsin or operating in Wisconsin or if it's something I like about people from Wisconsin, but help me figure this out.
Matt Ley (00:01:09):
Well, I would say one of the things that I've found, and this is an interesting, maybe it's not a pure Wisconsin, but I live in Kenosha, which is halfway between Milwaukee and Chicago and there's a very different vibe between those two cities as to how you collaborate and network. I guess the networking is much more collaborative in its nature versus in Chicago it's a lot more like what can you do for me now? And so if you get hooked into the Wisconsin scene anywhere, you're going to get connected to a bunch of people. I think that's probably the network effect of how we do what we do and we're kind of independent and working together. So Wisconsin people tend to connect you with more Wisconsin people, so unfortunately you're in the loop. I've got a couple other Wisconsin people I can connect you to after this if you're looking for more, but I think that's more what's going on.
Dan Freehling (00:02:01):
That makes total sense In some ways, I guess Wisconsin is the future here with the collaborative working approaches and all of that relational networking rather than the transactional. We won't dunk on Chicago too bad and my own mentor
Matt Ley (00:02:17):
Coaches,
Dan Freehling (00:02:19):
So I want to be careful about dunking on them.
Matt Ley (00:02:22):
It's my hometown. I'm still a sports fan for everything Chicago and I love the city. It definitely, it's a different vibe when you're there versus Milwaukee.
Dan Freehling (00:02:32):
That is too funny. So we'll take those lessons from Wisconsin. So Matt, you also recently left independent coaching and consulting to join a consulting firm, Gapingvoid. So what drew you to do that?
Matt Ley (00:02:47):
Great question and one that I've kind of been answering a lot in the last, I'm five weeks in, so it's really new into the space and the thing is I am doing what I was doing before, but I'm doing the meta version of it. So what that means is a lot of what my consulting and coaching was is I wanted to help people build community and then I realized at some point along the way that hey, I kind of want to also be in community and I found that Gapingvoid. I was looking for someone that was doing what I was doing in a way that allowed me to not only help build community and culture but also be invested in one at the same time. And so that was my hope and it's been just validated every single day that I'm there. So I'm in a community helping build community and that's my happy place.
Dan Freehling (00:03:51):
That's great to hear and I know you were looking for being able to rejoin something like that, so I'm really glad that you've been able to find that with Gapingvoid.
Matt Ley (00:03:59):
Thanks.
Dan Freehling (00:04:00):
Yeah. So you mentioned community, it's something I know in our talks before that community is a big thing for you in organizational culture. Could you talk a little bit more about what you see as the difference between organizations and communities and where that overlap is? I think it's a really interesting conversation topic.
Matt Ley (00:04:20):
Yeah, so I think when we've talked before, one of the mental models is it's a pretty clear Venn diagram space community can exist separate from an organization and an organization can definitely exist without being a community. And ideally what you're looking for in this new way we're thinking about work, I would say what is going on is people are trying to close that Venn diagram to have as much overlap as possible because I think the big distinction is organizations come together for a purpose. There's a thing that they're trying to get done. So nobody founds a business without trying to accomplish something. This business provides some service or some product that basically solves a problem. So all organizations are trying to solve a particular problem and so that gives them a vision and so they coalesce around this vision and that's the thing that they follow.
(00:05:17):
Community is more about the interconnectedness with all of the people in the group. And so a community doesn't necessarily have to be going after a purpose to have its impact. So a family can be a community and while I think there's value in a family saying, Hey, what's our purpose and where are we trying to get to? It's something I do when I do some sort of couple partner coaching spaces is help identify their purpose, but it's not a requirement for the community. You can get together and have family dinners and meals and reunions and still feel that sense of community without having a directive purpose. So as organizations are trying to figure out how do we build that stickiness, how do we build that future of work, what they're trying to do in my view is lay that Venn diagram to pull not only a strong vision that pulls people in and says, yeah, we want to go where you're going, but as we're getting there, we're building community and the community becomes the stickiness. And so for me it's the interconnection is the community and the vision and where you're going is the organizational aspect of it.
Dan Freehling (00:06:33):
It's so interesting to think at the meta level on that community versus organizations and the organizations driving toward purpose in the chicken egg. Kind of a question here, do you think or have you seen, do communities come before organizations? Do they come after them? Are they concurrent and mutually beneficial? What have you seen?
Matt Ley (00:06:55):
I mean it's a great chicken and egg question. It can go both ways. Most of the time when you have a business it's like I have a vision and I have a value proposition. And then we start and you find other people are like, yeah, that sounds awesome and they you grow from there. That's where you go from that independent individualized startup to a small team is people getting excited about the vision. But if you don't build the community along the way, that's where you start to struggle. And honestly, the larger you get and the longer you exist, the more community becomes the sustaining force and less I think the vision and purpose. So you get that a lot in the nonprofit space. They think that the vision and purpose is going to be enough to sustain the organization and the individuals within it. And frankly, some of the most toxic and caustic communities I've found in nonprofit in that they're not driven by the dollar.
(00:07:55):
That's clearly not why you take that job or working in the public sector anywhere. And so if you don't build that community, you don't have a driving force, that's an intrinsic motivation for at least your own financial wellbeing and you start to struggle. And the other side of it, just to kind of close that loop is you could have people that come together that we are a community, we have a affinity for a particular topic and we talk about it and we're like, Hey, you know what? There's a gap here. So now we have a vision, we have a thing that we could do, we have an impact we could make. And all of a sudden you organize around that and that's where social movements I think come from is you start with community and then you move into impact and now you're an organization. And so you can kind of go the other way starting with community and become an organization as well. That danger there is twofold. One, does the vision start to so solid that the community was a bit more multi-directional and having it solidified into one direction chips away at the community sense? Or does the vision become so vague because you want to try and
(00:09:12):
Sort of I guess save the community and have the community be present, that you lose some of the values that I think organizational design naturally has, which is decision making, the difference between responsibility and accountability. So buck stops here, who gets to make the call? Communities that move into being an organization sometimes struggle to incorporate that piece. So I'd say you could start with either it's just being consciously aware of what issues might come up as you step into the other realm.
Dan Freehling (00:09:48):
I think it's something that leaders really have to think a lot about of what is your focus on purpose vision versus your focus on identity and community. And it reminds me a lot of conflict resolution models where there'll be that difference between the agenda focus and the relational focus. And I think that's something that I've definitely seen clients experiencing too is how much do we have to be focused on getting things done and getting outputs out and all of that versus the people. And I've seen it be very off on either direction either, so people focused that people are afraid to make tough decisions and let go of poor performers and that kind of a thing help drive people toward achieving goals and really producing results. And then I've seen it the other way too of people so focused on that that they forget that it's made up of people who want to be in community with each other and each other and respect each other and grow with each other. And just being off kilter on that I think is really dangerous for works.
Matt Ley (00:10:52):
I totally agree. And actually a tool that's kind of in the HR space but I think has much broader applications is a what/how matrix of organizations, that's basically like they'll lay out your job and say, okay, what do you do? And that'll be the list of your accountabilities or responsibilities for the role. And then across the top will be how do you do it? And that will be sort of either the cultural pillars or the way we do what we do here. And so it's like, okay, my job is to be an analyst and so I'm supposed to provide great analytics. That might be one of my, what I do and one of our hows is we go for the assist, not just the goal. And you could be rated on, well you give great analysis but you never lift anyone else up. It's always like the you show and it's like, so you don't do your what in the way that we do things. How you do it isn't in line with who we are. And I think that's the community versus the organization, sort of two pieces of that Venn diagram meshed together. And you could take that to the high level of we as an organization, what do we do and then how do we do it? And then sort of map that out. And I think it's a great conversation tool or facilitation tool to have a great conversation.
Dan Freehling (00:12:17):
Love that. And I love adding facilitation tools to people's arsenals too, either as a leader, as a professional facilitator. So that's a great one. So let's turn to the book. So I'm super excited for this to be coming out so it's managing gaps, reclaiming the awesomeness of management. I know you've been working very hard on this for quite a while now and it's finally here, so really excited for people to be able to check that out. My first question on it is you focus on management in the book, which seems a bit countercultural in this space where there's so much focus on leadership, everything, why management?
Matt Ley (00:12:56):
I mean your question to me answered itself because we have so much focus on leadership and everyone can be a leader and all of these pieces where I saw, I think most of it came from seeing online post where it's like be a leader, don't be a manager. And I was like, well, why? What's so bad about being a manager? And the other half of it is I've been a leader in the past, I've been an individual contributor and I've done really well at both of those. And then I got into management and I got my butt kicked. And so it was a personal discovery journey of why was that, why was it so hard to do what felt like the middle as I've described it as having a really solid bridge where you've got foundations on both sides of the river and then all of a sudden you get to the middle and it's paved in paper.
(00:13:48):
So how to, can I be an individual contributor and a leader rocking both of those and then get to the middle of the bridge and tiptoeing terrified I'm going to follow through. So figuring out why that was for me and then recognizing that telling people you can be a great manager, you don't have to be a leader or managers aren't leaders and saying things like that and realizing there's a lot of emotional energy that people put into statements like, well no, no, I'm a leader and they want to jump away from being a manager from my coaching background. I am always curious to follow the energy. And there was a lot of energy in what I was seeing with people wanting to step away from management and immediately into leadership. So the book is in part an exploration of why is that and what are we missing because management is awesome and our managers can be awesome if we allow them the opportunity to see that the thing that they're doing for the business brings value. It's not just a bureaucratic bloat. So it's really just exploring into why that is and giving people some context and then some ways to apply it once they understand it.
Dan Freehling (00:15:06):
I think I said in your praise quote, the management bashing fad that's taken over and you're so right about all this stuff on LinkedIn or on other social media where it's like, yeah, leaders are great and editors are terrible and here's the straw man argument of why managers are bad. And it's basically saying bad management and leadership is bad, which is a little bit self-proving there. There are real benefits to effective management and it's necessary to the organization versus community's point to really turn into an organization you need to be able to have effective managers and effective management going on there to be able to monitor and meet and drive toward all of the different goals and outputs and all of that that the organization's looking for. So I think this is really helpful. And another thing that I find really helpful about your focus here is I think a lot of leadership books are focused on leading the organization and are at a level for a CEO or a founder who can control the entire direction of the organization and they're valuable to think about for people at lower levels or at sort of day-to-day levels within the organization, but they're not necessarily setting grand strategy and culture and vision and that kind of overall topics.
(00:16:43):
And they're much more focused on how do I move projects forward? How do I supervise people, how do I make sure that we're meeting our targets and our objectives and all of that. And it's much less of that sort of grand strategy and vision.
Matt Ley (00:16:59):
Yeah, part of it's just they're all important and I think that where we sometimes conflate and get confused is the difference between a role and an activity and the sense of accountability and responsibility for me is accountability is decision making, responsibility is action taking. And so how do we divide all of that up? And so the basic framework that I walk into in the book is you've got three ways of impacting your business. You've got your leaders and your managers and contributors and the way that they do that, you can think of it as leaders work on the future. They're looking for where's the value. Tomorrow managers work on the business. They're looking at how do we the value today and contributors work in the business. They actually create the value. And the biggest point or one of the big points I like for people to get from the book is to recognize that your contributors are the only value creators in your organization.
(00:18:05):
That management and leadership are both contingent roles to impact the ability of the contributor to make value. Managers and leaders themselves do not create value for the organization. They create the opportunity for future value or they maximize the ability to create current value, but the value creation is all on the contributors. And so if you got rid of your contributors, your managers and leaders would not really have any purpose for existing except to now become contributors because that is the most important role in every organization. Now the distinction that I make between that roles and actions or activities is just because you're a leader by title doesn't mean you aren't also involved in contribution, which is the act of creating value or in management, which is the act of optimizing the value creation. You can still in your role have some leadership activities, management activities and contribution activities.
(00:19:02):
So it's not just to say because you're a leader, all you do is leadership or if you're a manager, all you do is management. It's being able to connect the dots on what brings the most value to the organization over time on how you put your role together. And why I particularly focus on management is that's the brackish water in between. So you're no longer, most people step into management straight out of contribution. So you've been creating value, creating value, your job is no longer to create value, it's to maximize it for other people. It's to help create better efficiency and opportunity for the current value creation individuals, your contributors. But your value as a member of the organization has been tied to doing that yourself. So sometimes you freak out and you want to keep doing contribution work to show that you're still providing value.
(00:19:52):
Also, you think, oh, I'm now stepping into leadership and you think your job is to set vision for the future. And so you start looking up and out into where's the future? Where can I create opportunities? That's why I've been moved up, I've got vision and you've missed that middle part. You start to, if your organization hasn't defined how that brings value into the organization, what is the impact that becomes a struggle space for managers. And so I wanted to really clear the air on that piece of as much clarity as possible as to this is how this all works together. This is why each of these pieces brings value and how they bring that value. And honestly, some people in management might read the book and get it to the end be like, wow, I do not want to be a manager. This is not where I bring my value and fantastic go be a contributor or say my value is to be a leader, so help me figure out the best way to get there so that I continue to create opportunities to impact the business at the highest level based on the skill sets I bring to the table.
(00:20:57):
And do that without the shame and guilt of well, we got you to your Peter principle, we've moved you to the position that is your level of incompetence and that's why we don't promote you anymore. It's like, no, you're just in a space where the skill sets you bring to the table aren't aligned to the value opportunities that the business needs. We just need to shift you over. There's no such thing as a corporate ladder. That's a fallacy. When you step from contributor to manager and manager to leader, the rules of the road change, you're shifting into a different lane. You've got to figure out how to do things differently because the way you impact the business is different in each of those environments. And if we don't let people know that you start to act in the way that you were doing before and it no longer works where you are now. And so helping them understand that is basically the overall arching goal of the book.
Dan Freehling (00:21:44):
I think this recognition and realization that individual contributors are the value creators is so powerful and so just jarring I think for people to hear and wrap their head around. But it's obviously true when you give it some thought, and I think it's an excellent reframing of this from the leaders are the value creators, the managers are the value creators. They get these bigger titles and more pay and all of that kind of stuff because they're the value creators when they're really their job is to in some ways multiply that value from the individual contributors and set the individual contributors up for success in their value creation rather than trying to do it themselves all the time.
Matt Ley (00:22:39):
One of my pithy statements about it, it's like managers don't own their people's time, people own their manager's time. The purpose of the manager is to serve the contributors and not in a I have power over you type thing, but just to recognize the nature of why their role exists. So something as simple as a one-on-one, a report out from the contributor to the manager to be like, here's all the things I'm doing so that you can then report out to your manager of all the things that you're doing or have oversight for. It's for the contributor to grow and learn and the manager to hold that space for them because that helps them maximize the value for themselves and ideally the fulfillment they get from the work that they're doing, they can see what they do day to day impacts the larger piece. Another part is I really don't believe people mind being a cog in the wheel if they understand how the cog impacts the wheel and agree with where the wheel is going.
(00:23:38):
Which is another way of saying people just want to be part of something larger than themselves and feel that they're contributing to that. And then I think the other piece with that is just that managers are your culture champions, that they are that middle ground in between the two, that the role that they play is as leaders are setting the culture, which is in a sense the guardrails of how are we going to be who we are in this space that people's interaction day to day isn't with leaders, it's with their direct supervisor, their manager. And so if your managers haven't in a sense gotten an understanding of who you are and why you're doing what you do, that's going to be a real struggle. And what you're going to end up with is a bunch of subcultures or call 'em sub communities that are carrying out their own hows that aren't in aligned with the larger organizational how.
(00:24:32):
And that's why you get things that people don't leave good companies or great companies, they leave bad managers. If you're not feeling the feels because the person that you report to is not in alignment with the direction you're going, you'll leave and other way around, you could have a caustic terrible environment community set up from your organization, but if your manager protects you from that because they're confident and good at what they're doing and they create a culture that's safe in the midst of that, you'll stay and work with them. So managers have a huge power opportunity to be the stickiness to be that culture champion and leaders should be doing everything in their power to make sure that their managers are aligned to and on board with the cultural direction, the vision, the potential impact and future value creation of the organization because they're the ones who are going to make or break it.
Dan Freehling (00:25:35):
What an important point there. What are some ways that managers can be culture champions? What can they tangibly do day to day that serves that role?
Matt Ley (00:25:50):
I think first and foremost, if there's a cornerstone to what managers do, that's it. So for me, when I was a manager having one-on-ones, I'd say that was the most important thing on my calendar and I would never cancel it on my side. I would allow people on my team if they're like, I'm really busy, I need to get to the work. You can cancel one but you can't cancel two and you had to have it at least every other week. So my parameters were they had to be somewhere between 30 minutes to 60 minutes long and you meet every week or every other week. So the most often could be an hour every week if that's what the person needed in that time. And then you could flex into that to then be down to half an hour every other week if that's what you needed.
(00:26:41):
But having that touchstone and then having it be about what are you proud of? What are you telling people that you did in the last one or two weeks and what are you excited to get into in the next one or two weeks that type of look back, look forward and look for something that piques their interest or gets them excited. If you have multiple meetings, two, three in a row where you can't get them to share one thing that they're excited about doing or that they're proud of having done, that's a point where we need to have a conversation's missing. Is there something going on and the work that's going you're doing here have things shifted in your priorities. That's the check-in that you're looking for when people talk about stay interviews, that in a sense is part of the one-on-one is to what's going on here and then help them align to where they can go if it's not working out for them. Again, it's not that someone can't be successful if they're not working out in the particular position they're in, it's just this might not be the fit for them. Maybe something shifted in their priorities in life or maybe something has shifted in the role for one reason or another that having that one-on-One is, I would say probably the biggest way to help continue being that culture champion.
Dan Freehling (00:28:04):
I couldn't agree more with one-on-ones being the main sort of practical modality for managers. I've always found that just personally and as a manager and being managed and I'm so glad you can really bring that to light. I think a lot of people neglect those and they'll just go months and months at a time without meeting with their team and with people they're managing. And that's really where management happens in my view as well. So I'm just so glad that you, you're bringing this to light and it's something that's really, it's not cool and fresh and new and all of that to have set aside time for one-on-ones and really make that time, which I think makes it even more important, not some sort of trendy management or leadership fad to just take the time to really be with people and see what's driving them and see what's motivating them to stay and then look for ways to make that happen if it's not,
Matt Ley (00:29:06):
I couldn't agree more. I mean that is in a sense that's kind of besides being the touch point for the manager of the work that they do. It's also the touchpoint for the Venn diagram between community and organization. Are you aligned with where we're going and are you connecting with who we are? And if you're not finding that in that space, then something's missing either with your organizational alignment or your community engagement for the individual. And so helping them understand that that's where you can deepen those bonds and maybe uncover something that's like, ah, it's a little annoying right now, but we don't address it for six months. And all of a sudden that annoying piece is what leads to all of the things we talk about today. Like quiet, quitting, disengagement, burnout, it just all comes from, well, I'll take a step back and we've talked about this before, but what I put it through the lens is a thing I call Fulfillment ROI, which is really a driver for me in working with myself and anyone else is I want people to feel fulfilled.
(00:30:13):
I want them to feel like excited and energetic, but what the heck does that mean? Because we're all unique individuals, so fulfillment for us is going to look very different, but I do believe it can be boiled down to a simple formula of what's going on in the background, which is to say the energy we invest in something and the value it produces for us, if that's a positive return on investment, that's a fulfilling experience. And so when people are starting to feel burned out or quiet quitting or all of these things, what I would say is happening is that return has become negative. Either the energy that it takes to get the job done is increased or the value we see has decreased. And so we've kind of flipped those two. And so we just need to look at are there ways we can reduce the energy drag on what we're doing or are there ways we can increase the value proposition of what we're accomplishing?
(00:31:06):
And some small tweaks in that space can move someone from being apathetic and disengaged to, oh, I get it. And it becomes a positive feedback loop of, alright, I've seen a little bit more of that impact. It's becoming a little easier to come in on Monday mornings and you can see those flips happen. And that's where you get those situations where people are like, what happened to Jane? She was sitting in the background, now she's firing on all cylinders and rocking it. So you made some small tweaks and you made this a fulfilling experience for her again by either making it less energy investment or a bigger value proposition. So helping people solve for that is sort of what management can tap into and be like, oh, I'm seeing this sort of disengagement, burnout, all these things happening. Let's flip that fulfillment ROI formula in their favor again.
Dan Freehling (00:32:00):
I love that one. And it's so many mental models that managers can add to their toolkit and really use on a day-to-day basis and it's just so valuable. Matt. So you've also talked about managing rock stars differently than rising stars. I'd love for you to explain that distinction for folks.
Matt Ley (00:32:22):
Just to put the attribution on that, I first came across the concept in Radical Candor by Kim Scott where she talked about it as a concept she learned from someone else at Google. And basically in her book she calls it rock stars and superstars and I just kind of changed it to rising because I think it's a better visual image of what you're looking at, but really the concept is they're both stars. So what that means is everyone wants to shine, everyone wants to be good at their job and know that they're being successful. The way that people define success shifts a little bit between these two poles and on one side you've got rock stars, which are people who want to rock where they're at, they're steady, they want to stay, they just want to deepen their ability to create impact in the role that they're currently in.
(00:33:10):
They're not looking to go somewhere else. And so for them success is expanding their ability to create impact where they are. A rising star is someone who's looking to learn in the current position as a way to leverage the knowledge for the next position. How do I learn what I need to know here? And not like an immediate, I've got to be hopping to a position every six months, but they've got a trajectory, they've got a place that they're trying to get to and they're looking to use this time to find the value so that they can be ready for what's next. And a lot of times, or a dangerous space for managers is treating these two types of stars as the other and particularly around treating everyone like a rising star because if you are a manager, it's more likely than not that you yourself are a rising star.
(00:34:00):
You've moved from a previous position into this one and probably are on a trajectory. So you think everyone else is on a trajectory. And so you want to provide value for your people and show them that you are supporting them and taking care of them. And fortunately you might treat a rock star, like a rising star and you want to keep saying, Hey, you're doing really great. Here's an opportunity for another role that you could get into. I think you'd be really great at this. I want to support your career. They don't want to go anywhere. They like what they're doing, they want to stay in this role, they just want to deepen their knowledge, maybe take some training or build some relationships and network across the industry, but they start to potentially feel guilty or ashamed, maybe I need to have a career, maybe I need to think about this differently because they're being told that they should be doing something different to measure their success.
(00:34:50):
And then on the other side, you've got people who are rising stars that are potentially really, really good at the job they're currently doing and the manager doesn't want to lose them, so they really want them to be a rockstar. They want them to stay on the team and be part of it. And so you can potentially end up in that same guilt shame space saying things like, oh man, we would be so lost without you bring so much value to this team. I don't even know what we would do if you weren't here anymore.
(00:35:17):
You are such a star. You're just amazing at what you do. And potentially that person also feels that shame and guilt. And as we talked earlier about fulfillment, ROI, that sort of increases the energy investment to feel that shame and guilt to do the job. And if you do that enough or it gets heightened enough, it starts to an impact on the fulfillment that they get out of the role even if you haven't changed anything on the purpose side of it at all. And that over time wears on them and they potentially could just leave your team or the company because you've just treated them like the wrong kind of star and you've helped them define success in a way that's not in alignment with who they want to be. And then the last thing I'll say about that is that this isn't a one and done.
(00:36:02):
You could be a rising star for the first 15 years of your career and all of a sudden you start a family or something else happens and you're like, you know what? I really like this role. I'm good. I don't want to be a rising star anymore and I want to be a rockstar. Giving people the language to say that I think is really valuable to help them tweak. And so a recommendation I give to teams and managers, particularly when I work with them is define what that looks like for rockstar rising star in your environment and once a quarter or so, check in and just have people self-identify which category are you in right now and how could I help best support you? And I think one more thing that kind of kicked off for me, sorry I'm stealing the mic.
(00:36:49):
It's one of the things that we do, frankly, I call it lazy organizational design. We cap out our individual contributors pretty low in their ability to impact the business and there's so many ways that you can increase the impact of an individual contributor that doesn't involve people management or moving into management or leadership. A term that I keep coming back to because I think it resonates and sort of tells people what we're really looking for is concept of guru. It's like how can you take someone that's a contributor and turn them into a guru? And a lot of times when I work with organizations, the places I help them focus on is where are the edges, where are the handoffs? Where are those spaces that people tend to have less knowledge about what's going on because you're stepping out of your center of your team's expertise and you're moving towards another teams or another role's expertise.
(00:37:43):
Those areas in between like a process handoff or a interaction between two systems or two teams and the work that they do, those are the most fragile aspects of any business's ability to get things done. If you allow your individual contributors that are rock stars that want to just expand their ability to create value for the business into owning those handoffs, owning those edges, they're going to bring so much value to your organization. But we tend to just put them in a hierarchy of well, you're an associate, then you're the role, then you're the senior of the role and then I guess you got to be a manager or else you're capped. We don't allow them the ability to create impact and we also have this thing, well, we can't pay a individual contributor more than a manager because that's the next band on the hierarchy and you couldn't manage someone that made more money than you. We need to break out of that. I think that's false. We need to be better at understanding what the impact on the business is and how these roles interact with each other. And so if we could create more pathways for individual contributors, AKA usually rock stars to impact your business, you're going to see a lot more engagement, a lot more fulfillment, a lot more impact on your bottom line and your community sense within the organization.
Dan Freehling (00:39:11):
A lot of this is reminding me of my Career Design Map concept from my book too, where I have the contributor, the go-getter, the expert and the executive, and knowing for yourself which of those you are in, which of those you're looking to move toward depending on season and overarching goals and your drive and all of that kind of stuff. Flipping that to the manager lens I think is great with this kind of a concept. And it's just knowing what's driving someone and if they're the rising star, if they're the go-getter, that's going to be something very different than someone who's an expert or an executive who's in that rockstar lens. And then there's also the people who are the individual contributors who are really happy to be doing their job and doing it well, but they're focused elsewhere and they have more important things in their lives going on and they're looking for work really as a place to do a good job and contribute to the team. But it's not their be all end all. It's not their first and foremost priority.
Matt Ley (00:40:20):
Yeah, I totally agree. Your framework is awesome. One, it's a great length to get through and consume. It's a fantastic read and one the visual I think is awesome. I love the way it's laid out. And then really that concept is you kind of step out of the manager could be in either of those categories themselves, but then as they support their people, it's hugely beneficial to have that framework to help the manager understand where are their people going. And I love that you have that contributor piece a little bit outside of that expert and that go-getter because that is another part of it is there are seasons in our lives where it's like, you know what? I'm good to go. And actually another story from Radical Candor of this same space of she tells a story of a person when we have a child, I want to be in a role where I know what I'm doing and I'm kind of in that contributor space so that I can put my energy into being a dad and that when their child was born at the same time, their managers like, Hey, you've been offered a promotion.
(00:41:31):
And the person's like, no, I don't want it. And they're like, oh, you don't have a choice, you have to take it. And so the person just left the company and went and took a different job and it's like, what a waste of potential for the person to have impact on the business because the business is like, oh, you have to be a go-getter right now. You have to be a potential maybe a leader and you just want to be a contributor. You're on the wrong part of the island. It's like, well, that's not for the organization to choose for you, that's for the organization to understand how to leverage. And we tend to think that we should put people into buckets versus allow them to be where they're at and then have that conversation. So yeah, that was, I imagine that happens many, many times unfortunately in organizations that we just have people plotted on the wrong part of the island and we never ask them and then we engage them in the wrong ways because they're in different parts of the island.
Dan Freehling (00:42:28):
I think that's so spot on and the laziness framing is really apt, and it's this idea of how do we make it. I think a lot of times organizations can misuse the idea of efficiency and streamlining to just be lazy, and it's like we don't want to have to think about things. So we're going to, in the name of efficiency, even in the misused name of equity now of we're going to have these different levels and we're just going to promote people up to them based on these different categories. And the only way to get more money, to your point, the only way to get more money is to be increasing levels of management and then increasing levels of leadership.
Matt Ley (00:43:15):
I totally agree, and one of the things is, I mean we keep driving towards this flat organization and I'm not a proponent of like, Hey, let's add a bunch of layers of hierarchy because no one goes out into sales call and says, Hey, you should hire us. We have six more layers of management than the competitor. We're way better. It's not a selling point, but it's part of that efficiency is figuring out that middle ground. And one of the things that I work with clients and recognizing is I truly believe that once you get it set up, because the goal of management is optimization efficiency, that when it's rolling it itself really only takes about a quarter or a third of your time to do the management portion of your job, which means you've got 75 to 65% of your job time energy available to do either contribution, to help build the value of the business up or leadership to help direct where the business is going to find value in the future.
(00:44:12):
You have to get through the J curve of change, which is to say it starts out being a little bit more difficult all new, you got to learn it put in the time, and you can't skip that step. It's kind of like baking. You can't be like, oh, I want to have the cake faster so I'm going to double the temperature. And half the time, you're just going to have burnt cake. You got to spend the time at the right temperature. They're doing the right things to get the right outcome. And for management, I think it's a three to six month learning curve for most people to understand how to leverage the attributes of the role. And so when you have organizations that are in a sense really flat, I play by a rule of what I call a rule of eight. If you look at the number of people directly reporting to you and the lines of business you oversee for, if you oversee three types of work that are very distinct lines of business, you should only have roughly five people in that space that report directly to you.
(00:45:07):
Once you get past that, your ability to engage in other things becomes just impossible and difficult to do When you have people like I've got 15 one-on-ones to go through all that, that's part of why people don't like one-on-ones is you come into positions where we're trying to be flat and you have a ton of people reporting directly to you. If you just average that out, you're only stealing 25% of someone's time once they're up to speed, you could still be getting a ton of contribution work if that's what you really need while still leveraging that management capability. You just got to take the time to get people there and invest in it, and instead we just burn people out and then our managers leave and then we have way more contributors reporting to one person and then they don't understand what they're doing. So they're inefficient in the work.
(00:45:54):
I mean, the amount of effort we lose because we don't want to add one layer of organizational bloat is to me is I just don't know why people can't see that matrix that's going on behind the scenes. And part of the book is try and be like, this is what's going on. And at the end of the day, it's just an energy exchange of where do you want to invest it? And I just want people to have that ability to make the conscious choice and hopefully see, oh, management is awesome. It brings a particular value set to the table. Let's look at how we're organized right now and how can we leverage that awesomeness to maximize our energy exchange for investment of energy to value production.
Dan Freehling (00:46:37):
I just think this is, again, so helpful for measures to get some ballpark of the time commitment that it takes to effectively manage. And I would agree with that. I think a quarter to a third of your time on management is something that I would be actually interested if people think that's much more than they thought or much less than they're currently doing. And I think you might get people on all sides of that, of people who spend their whole time, to your point in, they supervise way too many people or people who really are focused on being an individual contributor still and who, oh wow, a quarter to a third of my time should be in management is a lot for them. But I do tend to agree that it's about the right amount and I just wonder how people would respond to that.
Matt Ley (00:47:37):
Yeah, I'd be curious to get some feedback. And in my work training managers, that is tended to be the case. We go through the course, I have a six week course that I've done pretty consistently, and they're like, for a lot of them it's like it can't be just that much. I have to put so much more time into all the things you're talking about. There's no way it could just be 10 to 12 hours of my week. That's crazy. And we get to the other side and they're like, oh, that's what efficiency means. You set it up and it works and it's a little bit easier to do the next time around and people start to, you have another concept that I use with clients a lot that feeds into this space of optimizing the energy investment. It's called the four Cs, is really what people are looking for to reduce the amount of energy drag like a potentially anxiety that they're feeling or high levels of stress.
(00:48:38):
If you can show people that you care that they truly feel cared for, that reduces it. If you can give people clarity, they understand where they're going and the path to get there and what to do if they maybe step off the path, that helps if you can give them consistency so they don't have to look around every corner and wonder, is today going to be the same as yesterday? Is this project going to have a totally different set of parameters? And okay, we were supposed to get weekly updates, but last week it came on Tuesday and it's Thursday. Is it coming this week? Are we skipping? If you give them consistency, then they don't put their energy into wondering. And then you want to also communicate because a lot of times ideas repeated or ideas remembered, it's not the first time you say it, it's not the second time you say it, it's usually around the sixth or seventh time you say it, which is probably about the point where you're tired of saying it that people start to actually hear it.
(00:49:28):
And so communication, consistency, clarity and care. If you can hit those four C's, then you're going to help people maximize their energy into the work that you're doing and not into wandering around the edges. And the last piece on that is if you can say you've clearly done that and people are still not finding fulfillment in the work they're doing, they're not doing the right work. There's something that needs to be shifted in the nature, either a job change or the role they play on the team. But if you're hitting those four and they're still not feeling it, then it's time to have a different conversation, but at least it's time to have a different conversation.
Dan Freehling (00:50:05):
It's such a helpful self-scorecard on that. I think a lot of times I've dealt with this with coaching clients too. Am I doing enough as a manager? Am I doing my role as a manager and figuring out what that balance looks like because then you get the other side of things where it's exactly to your point where you're doing too much a manager and you're really putting way too much time into one person where it's not the right fit for them. And that's exactly, it's a different way to look at it, but it is a great way to just sort of self-assess of, look at these four Cs and what am I doing everything I need to be doing? And then at that point you can give yourself the permission to have those other conversations.
Matt Ley (00:50:50):
And I'd say one thing to, you touched on it, and I just want to highlight and double click on our plus one or whatever we're saying these days to say I agree, is that it is not a manager or a leader's job to make people happy. That is not their purpose. Their job is to set up an environment to set a vision for the manager and the leader for people to find happiness in what they do, if it's the type of thing that they like doing. So if people are not finding happiness in what they're doing and you use something like the four Cs or some other tool to say, I've given you the parameters of what we're doing here, and you're just not feeling it, that's not on the manager or on the leader to be like, well, okay, what can we shift to make you happy? That is not their role. And so I think part of that is to say an organization again exists for a purpose and the purpose isn't to find happiness for its employees, it's to carry out a vision and find people who are aligned with that so that their happiness comes from carrying out that vision and that mission. And if that's not happening, maybe they're just aligned with the wrong vision and mission and what they're doing
Dan Freehling (00:52:06):
Hear hear. It's so important, and especially where I think there was a correct pendulum swing in a lot of ways with the pandemic and everything in the past few years of this. We got to make sure that we're really bringing humanity back into the workplace and taking care of people. But that doesn't mean just trying to make everyone happy all the time. There's still that organizational purpose and vision and mission to do, and that is your role as the manager is to do that in a way that is also focused on people and on giving them the opportunity. And I think you expressed that so beautifully.
Matt Ley (00:52:51):
Yeah, I mean, I'll just say it. It's not your role from the organizational perspective, but you're a human being. And so I would hope at the end of the day you care about their happiness and sometimes the best thing you can do is just say, this isn't where you're going to find it. We've done everything to align and be clear about who we are and what we're trying to do, and you're just still, this is not your happy place and I would rather you go somewhere else and do something different. If that makes you happy, then have you be here even though I may enjoy spending time with you, and I love having you in the mix and you're a great person and I wish we could spend more together. I want you to find happiness. And if that's not happening here within the parameters that we set of what we're trying to do, how can I help you find that space?
(00:53:35):
And so one of the best things you could do as a manager is be open and say, look, this isn't working, so I'm not going to just fire you today because you're not finding happiness here and this isn't your space. But opening the conversation to say, where can we go from here? Because that's so much less disruptive to you and to their lives to say, you're not in the right place. Let's figure that out. Can you let me know that you're doing that so that I can work on backfilling someone who can find happiness here? That's how you take care of them in a way that supports the person, their pursuit of happiness while still honoring the business. And the operational reason that you exist is to do both of those, is to tell them, I don't think you're going to work in this position.
(00:54:20):
Are you in agreement? Okay, what do we do from here? And too often I think we say, well, this person just isn't a fit. This person just isn't here. And so fire fast, right? Get 'em off the table. Let's move on and get the next person in that I'm not a proponent of. I think we need to work with helping people move on to what's next. Because if we could increase happiness across the board, even if it's outside our company, that's awesome. And then another hidden piece in that that we don't often think about is regardless of a person stays with your company or not, they're always going to be an ambassador for your company. Is that an ambassador, a positive ambassador, or is it a negative ambassador? The way you treat them is going to impact the way they talk about you after the fact.
Dan Freehling (00:55:05):
I think especially now with the way that the workforce is going in terms of a lot more people doing shorter stints at companies doing project-based work, doing consulting, boomerang employees, all of that where that ambassador quality is just amplified now more than it has been previously, even though it always existed to some extent. And it's much more about reputation as an organization than it is about just keeping people at all costs. And that I think retention is something that is always brought up and I think it's an important metric, but I'm personally less concerned with retention than I am with reputation, and I think that's a shift that's hard for some organizations to make.
Matt Ley (00:55:55):
Yeah, I think that's a really great point to pull up. I think it's one of those, there's three types of falsehoods, right? Lies, damn lies and statistics. The cost of replacing an employee. We beat that particularly from the consulting space of like, we're going to help you increase your retention rate because it costs so much to replace an employee. Well, it costs so much to replace an employee if you fire that employee immediately with no backup plan for how someone else is going to come in, so you have the gap of space and time where people are covering work, then you have to train someone in without someone who knows how to do that job directly. That's where a lot of that cost comes from. If you were like, you're not finding your happiness here, this isn't your space. Can we talk about what's next?
(00:56:40):
Can we help figure that out? I'm going to keep you on for two months while you look for another job or somewhere else within the company. I'm going to post for the role we're going to pull that person in. I were request, could you help train them into your pieces of their job? Then all of a sudden that cost of the shift is much less than the statistics we report out of the cost of lack and retention of letting people go because we're doing it differently. We're doing it in a way that's, I think, honoring the person in the process without creating as much ripple effect to the organization overall.
Dan Freehling (00:57:19):
And it's still being able to make those tough calls. Just doing it in a smarter way that honors everyone involved much more than just doing that fire fast stuff. But still, it doesn't mean don't, don't let people go when they're clearly not a good fit and not performing. It's the exact opposite of that.
Matt Ley (00:57:42):
Yeah, and I mean, you can set boundaries within that too. You're not finding your happiness here, but you're also okay, you're causally impacting the community and the culture, the air quality of the work that we do. And if the person's not willing to live within those boundaries as they make that shift, then it's like, yeah, because making a choice, you've set a boundary. They've made a choice. I'm not finding happiness here. Okay, that's alignment. How can we find different alignment for you? But if you're dragging down the rest of the team, so you're having a ripple effect on other people and you're not willing to shift in that space, then you've made a choice. And I'm just carrying out the action on the other side of that choice.
Dan Freehling (00:58:26):
It's a really, really great way to put that and very nuanced and kind of challenging and how to implement that effectively. And I think you've laid it out so nicely for people to be able to wrap their head around of how they could do this in their environment. So besides your own, which again would highly recommend for folks and I'm very excited to get an official copy of soon. What books or other resources do you find yourself coming back to the most often in terms of management, leadership, that kind of thing?
Matt Ley (00:59:02):
Well, I've mentioned Radical Candor a couple of times. Definitely that was my touchstone book for shifting into we can do management differently. So I love that one. I mean, I'll lift it up again. We talked about it a bit, but The Career Design Map I think is a great, that should be on shelf for understanding, just a really good visual of how to understand where people are at in their journey and helping how to support them in that space. See a couple ones asking me for a book list is a dangerous question, but I think a great one that I haven't heard a lot of people talk about, but The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety. It's by an author, a guy named Timothy R. Clark, and it's defining the path for inclusion and innovation. And it takes, Amy Edmondson has some the great books like The Fearless Organization around Psychological Safety.
(00:59:56):
But what Dr. Clark does is really builds it into a model so that you can talk about psychological safety and where you're at within it. He's also got a tool for measuring your organization's current level of psychological safety. And so I think it's one of those terms that's bandied around a bunch, but our ability to action on it is difficult. And so I really appreciate that. And then I think one of the ones I've read recently that I really love is Patrick Lencioni came out with another one on Working Genius and that's actually got an assessment on the backend. I'm a bit of an assessment nerd and the Working Genius assessment is probably the most useful. I would say for me it is the most useful one I've come across for helping organizations understand how to leverage that fulfillment ROI in the work that they do. And within two hours you could be making huge shifts in your business. So reading that book gives you a great understanding of it. And he doesn't in his typical Fable style to start. So it's a good easy to read story and the concepts come through and then at the end of it, you can have your team go take the assessment and it's really, really impactful. So I'll stop there. Otherwise we'll have another hour.
Dan Freehling (01:01:22):
Well, those were all good. Thanks for the kind words on The Career Design Map
Matt Ley
That's a great book.
Dan Freehling (01:01:27):
Thank you. Thank you. And lots of folks are really moved by Radical Candor. It's just a kind of mental reset in terms of how you can approach your work in a more direct way that's not direct in the sense of being just mean or vindictive or anything like that. That sometimes can be what comes out of the directness. It's very much a warm way to be frank with people and work. And then actually a organizational development practitioner that I respect a lot and work closely with is really big on Dr. Clark's book. And I think that's a really exactly right on that. It's a way to put that psychological safety into more practical terms of, so what do you do with this? And what does this really look like on the ground? So I definitely recommend people check that out. And then I respect your judgment on all these assessments and for you to say that this working genius one by Lencioni is the most impactful one you've come across is saying a lot too. So I'll definitely personally check that out and I'd recommend others do as well. So Matt, wrapping up, how can listeners learn more about your book, learn more about Gapingvoid and get in touch if they'd like?
Matt Ley (01:02:51):
Yeah, I'd say to kind of in that middle and wrap around Gapingvoid, check out Gapingvoid.com again, along with assessments. I'm a big fan of models and what they do and the way they approach culture design is the best I've ever seen. Obviously I chose to join them and the community inside is what I would be looking for. And so it's just Gapingvoid.com is easiest way just to learn more about what they do and check out culture walls, particularly we do semiotic work that's unparalleled. It's fantastic way of visually representing your culture in a way that resonates and helps you relentlessly socialize it so that people can really buy into it myself. I think LinkedIn is probably the easiest way to come across me. So linkedin.com/in/mattley would be the easiest. And then for the book, flipthescript.io/myg for Manager Your Gaps is where you're going to find the information about that. Or I guess it's going to be available so you can go purchase it on Amazon or any other book seller that you are more comfortable or familiar with.
Dan Freehling (01:04:11):
That's an exciting, exciting time. So we'll throw those links into the show notes at conceptusleadership.com. And Matt, thank you again for taking the time to join us. It's been a pleasure having this conversation. Very excited about the book launch and would really encourage folks to check out Manage Your Gaps, Reclaiming the Awesomeness of Management. So thanks again and thanks for joining us everyone.
Matt Ley (01:04:33):
Yeah, it's been a great conversation. Always appreciate it.
