Intro II - Professional Status: “It’s Complicated”
On the complexity of the modern workplace, and what that means for managers and leaders
This is Part II of the intro series. If you haven’t read part I, you can find here.
We like things simple. We like sleek tutorials that simplify heavy interactions, and micro texts that summarise whole articles into directly-actionable takeaways. Since before I was born in the mid eighties, humanity has been on a never-ending quest to perfect and simplify interfaces so that they can be picked up and used in almost an instant.
Despite all of this, our working environments have never been more complex than they are today.
For employees, the aspirations for security and permanent positions have diminished in importance. Our workplaces have become places of identity fulfilment, as put by Esther Perel, markets in an identity economy. They dictate our place of living, the structure of our lives, and our learning efforts. Work is a much bigger part of who we are and what community we belong to than ever before.
Many employers have internalised that organisational success is rooted in employee engagement - engaged employees have been shown to have higher retention, fewer safety incidents, higher performance, and produce better quality output.
Managers and leaders (Two distinct terms I will be using interchangeably in this publication, because it is relevant for both, despite the differences between them.) are subject to this paradigm shift like any other. We are (most of the time) both employees looking for identity fulfilment, and drivers of engagement in the employees reporting to us. In fact, to truly succeed as a people manager in the market of identity economy, you must become a leader. Setting goals and monitoring results just doesn’t cut it anymore.
Less traditional organisations see management less as a vertical trajectory one takes from rank and file and moving upwards, and more as a horizontal step - a profession of its own, with its own skill set. While it would be false to state this is the new norm, more and more workplaces extend their vocabulary beyond performance indicators. Managers today can just as easily find themselves discussing authenticity, vulnerability, mental safety, and many other relational words that used to be left beside the door as we left for work in the morning.
This new vocabulary means that the manager’s role needs to be redesigned in a lot of ways. The identity market is endocentric. Yet humans naturally crave belonging. Our desires have become more difficult to fathom and express, while most workplaces haven’t fully developed the tools and mentality to successfully engage in this sort of conversation. Managers often simplify their interfaces with their reports. Sometimes because they lack an understanding of the power play between the identity economy and the need to belong, sometimes because they haven’t been able to apply this new logic into archaic work cultures they operate under.
In my professional life, I have found myself in leadership positions in the military, the restaurant business, and the tech industry. That, to me, is an ever-surprising reality. I am not particularly charismatic, and am introverted to the edge of misanthropy. I am the brooding guy at the corner of the party room, making an effort not to show how prone to stubbornness and arrogance I am and failing because of anxiety. In a way, this blog is a reflective attempt to make sense of this dichotomy.
Today I manage three diverse teams in a tech company in Berlin. My reports came together from four different continents, all hand-picked for their initiative, skill, and passion. To succeed and be happy, they need room to express themselves, to float ideas bottom up, to feel fulfilled, to feel that they are growing, challenged but not frustrated. They are in constant pursuit of their professional identity.
My peers and I constantly feel the need to diversify our skill roster, so that we are capable of catering to the needs of our reports, as both teams and individuals, to be able to effectively serve as coaches, enablers, and hopefully, inspiring leaders. We gobble up articles, podcasts, books by the boatload, and we spray them at each other. It’s a messy race of paper and bytes, this path of becoming worthy managers to our colleagues.
Managers are contradictory creatures. We foster uniqueness and innovation, yet we define protocols, build processes, and create templates to normalise approaches. We must create meaningful, personal connections to succeed in our roles, yet we need to operate at a distance to maintain a measure of objectivity through difficult conversations. When we do things right, we make ourselves redundant, building teams that miss us greatly when we are not there, while being completely capable of functioning without us.
It’s often a cold space, this in-between.
With very little room for simplicity.
Any practitioner of a craft, managers included, need playgrounds, room for experiments, to improve and excel. The trouble is, playgrounds require raw material. The woodcarver will deface many woodblocks before they make something beautiful, the software engineer will stare frustratingly at red compilation errors until they understand what is behind them, and the chef will botch many meals before they reach a state they can get it right every time. The raw material for managers - you guessed it - is people. We rarely get to safely experiment. When you try something, you try it with someone else, or with an entire team.
It’s rarely life and death, but getting it wrong could harm a report’s engagement, performance, and worst of all, wellbeing and sense of safety.
So this blog is an exploration of my playground, found completely outside the workspace, but ever-connected to it as far as I’m concerned. It’s about how playing games, board games in particular, is the way I train as a manager in a safe space for experimentation.
Next time we’ll explore what exactly is a game, and why they can be useful tools for growth and learning.