"The relationship between managing and productivity is very, very simple. The more you manage, the less productive you are as an organization. And that's kind of scary. That's a scary thought. Cause we never stopped to think about that extra manager that we had, that we're actually taking productivity away from the organization."

Intro:
Welcome to the Agile Digital Transformation Podcast, where we explore different aspects of digital transformation and digital experience with your host, Tim Butara, Content and Community Manager at Agiledrop. 

Tim Butara: Hello everyone, thanks for tuning in. I'm joined today by Jack Skeels, award winning executive, frequent keynote speaker and published thought leader, as well as the CEO and founder of AgencyAgile.

In his recently published book, Unmanaged, he writes about the concept of unmanaging and how it can help deliver better outcomes for all kinds of companies. So today we'll be breaking down unmanaging together with some of the key lessons from Jack's book. Jack, welcome to the show. We're very happy to have you here. Anything to add before we dive in? 

Jack Skeels: No, that's a great intro. Thank you, Tim. And a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Tim Butara: Well, definitely, as I said, definitely, we're in for a great conversation. I'm excited about diving into all this with you, Jack. And the first thing that I want to start with is you mentioned, one of the first things you mention in the book, in the intro, actually, that the book Unmanaged is primarily intended for project driven organizations. So what is a project driven organization? 

Jack Skeels: Yeah, so it's a great question. A project driven organization, I believe is the, it's the organization of the future and it's actually been the organization of the future for a while and i'll explain that. There are two other types of organization, a process driven organization and a product driven organization which roughly correspond to like a policy organization. 

Like, your accountant is a process driven organization. They have to follow rules and they just follow a process essentially. And a product driven organization is of course, a factory, something, an organization that makes things over and over. 

Project driven organizations are increasingly the heart of our economy and the heart of business. Project driven organizations do something new every time they do it. Hence the name. 

The only reason people don't think of it this way, because we use the word project very casually, right? I have a project to clean up my room or something like that. But technically a project is when we're doing something we haven't done before. Right? Okay. 

That's really that sort of, the only reason a project exists is because it hasn't been done before. And this is, for example, in engineering or software or advertising and marketing agencies and many fields. If you look at aerospace, like, we're doing a project to build a new missile, but the project is to do a missile that hasn't been created before. Right. 

So, increasingly. In our world, as we say, innovation speeds up, what we're really saying is we're becoming more project centric, okay, is innovation really is doing things.

We haven't done before. Being more creative is doing things in a way we haven't done it before. Being more efficient means how do we improve what we're doing? So all of these things are essentially projects and increasingly businesses becoming project oriented. And I made a note, you gave me a great list of questions before this.

So this is great that. Okay. I said, when did this start? When did this start happening? And I did a little research and I'm a former RAND researcher and the like, and it turns out in the 1950s, the military industrial complex started with this idea of matrix organizations where you didn't just have one manager, but you had another manager. You know, you had a vertical manager and a horizontal manager. 

And this matrix organization was actually somewhat effective in what they were doing it. And then in 1970s and 80s, Ken Olsen, the CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, DEC, if you're old enough to remember DEC VAX and PDP computers and the like, he popularized this idea of the matrix organization. He's a huge advocate of it. And I actually worked at DEC at the time. 

And then they backed away from it. And what he said was this idea of having multiple managers. And by the way, multiple managers is a primary characteristic of the project driven organization. 

Multiple manager, he said, it saps the energy and efficiency from our efforts. Okay, so he was already seeing in 1970 and 1980 that we can overmanage that we can do too much managing and that's the characteristic of the project driven organization. It's an overmanaged organization. 

Tim Butara: So this is something that you call in your book, manager tax, basically, right? So what are some of the other consequences of manager attacks of over managing and of ignoring the consequences of manager attacks?

Jack Skeels: Yeah, I think it's a, you're hitting on a key idea here, which is that originally we were going to call the book, the Manager Tax, and it is a cool, provocative title. The challenge really comes down to: if managers are taxing, in other words, if there's a cost to management and I'll talk about that in just a second. But if there's a cost to management, is it an intentional tax? In other words, do managers really mean to tax the organization? Right? 

And, like, if you said to me, you said. Tim, if you said, Jack, you're really taxing me, I would feel like I'd done something wrong. And I think that in a way we want to make sure that managers got the idea that they're, they aren't necessarily doing anything wrong, is that this is a, this is a thing that happens as a result of having managers, but it's not a result of a manager intending to be taxing, right.

And so there, there are actually, I think, five different manager taxes that we identify in the book. They all start with one very, very cool idea from a Nobel Prize winner named Ronald Coase. Coase won the Nobel Prize for this one idea that is: as an organization grows, the number of managers grows. And in fact, the number of managers grows faster than the organization does.

If you think about what this is saying, it's saying at some point, if you do a little graph, I put a little graph in the book, actually, if you do a little graph, at some point, the cost of managers becomes the greatest cost in the organization and actually slows the organization down, right? Just like I said, with Ken Olsen of Digital.

So the, there's an inadvertent and just unavoidable fact that ultimately the greatest tax on the organization is the tax of managing and managers. Now, if I multiply that by the fact that I have a multi managed organization, then it accelerates. Okay. 

If I start saying, fine, we're going to have a bunch of managers for different things and everyone can be a manager, then we get a level of chaotic managerial activity that happens where managers manage against managers. And I go into a lot of detail in the, in the many sections of the book about how this sort of plays out. 

Ultimately, at the end of the day, the ultimate cost, and you ask, what is the cost of manager text? The cost is productivity. An organization is designed, all organizations are designed to be productive. The goal of the organization is to produce its output, right? And, and in general, then this has been shown in the research. It's how he won the Nobel Prize. The relationship between managing and productivity is very, very simple.

The more you manage, the less productive you are as an organization. And that's kind of scary. That's a scary thought because we never stopped to think about that extra manager that we had, that we're actually taking productivity away from the organization. 

Tim Butara: This all reminds me of a recent comic that I stumbled upon. You've probably seen it. It's like a coach with one driver and one course gets stuck in the mud. And then what do you do? The obvious solution is more horses. But then the corporate solution is more people on the coach, all whipping the one horse. 

Jack Skeels: Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, if there's a problem, it must need a manager to solve it. Exactly. 

Tim Butara: Yeah. I think that this is also... maybe, you know, even though we've been kind of living in this industry and living in tech and in the digital for quite a while now, it's still kind of new. And I think that, you know, avenues for like job promotions haven't really been that developed. And then when somebody is like, oh yeah, you're like a developer or designer, and then you're doing good. And then you get promoted. And then you just, you just transitioned to being like a product manager or a design manager or something like that. 

So I think that, you know, one part of it is also not just this urge for having everything under control, even, you know, ignoring the productivity costs and all that, but also just kind of not knowing how to properly reward hardworking people.

And then also, you know, we add on top of this, that people who, you know, if you perform well in a particular field, and then you get promoted to a manager, that doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be effective as the manager of that particular field. 

Jack Skeels: Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's a very interesting field. It's the, we call it, so we actually have a coaching practice in my company, AgencyAgile. And one of the big things we coach on is what we call the specialist to leadership transition. In other words, I become, in the research, they called the deep specialists, the strongest specialists, like, your best technologists, and you want to keep this technologist, right? You can't afford to lose them.

And they want to be rewarded and often reward the reward looks like, as you stated, it looks like getting promoted. And so all of a sudden someone becomes a manager. Now, the interesting thing is that all the skills that it took to get to that moment, the aggressive style and the I'll do it, get out of my way. You know, all these sort of very strong personality traits. 

And some of the kind of subtle quiet ones like, oh, well that works okay but mine's better. You know, all these sort of nuancing and, and behavioral things that got the person to the top are not good skills in a manager, right? Okay. What you really want, whereas they had worked so hard to be the one who got that job. At the end of the day, their job turns into: how do I get everyone else to be as good as I am? And they have no skill at that. 

And that's a huge, it's a huge shift. And there's a lot of interesting research on this. We call it the firefighter syndrome, right? You become... you're the person who puts out the fires all the time and you get the promotion. And now how do you stop being a firefighter because it's not your job anymore, right?

And the research is interesting. The research says, for example, teams with firefighters on as a manager underperform teams that don't have a firefighter as a manager. In fact, these teams perform no better than a team without a manager, right? So, sort of an indictment on managing in the first place. 

But the other thing is that if you think of the behaviors that if I don't know how to manage and all I know how to do is be a firefighter and I need to be managerial what i will do is i will micromanage people i will tell them what to do i will do all these things that are horrible ways to be a manager and in fact i will decrease their by trying to act managerial it will decrease their productivity. Those people would probably be better off if that person just went home for the day. Right. Let people get some work done, right? 

Tim Butara: That's exactly an example that you actually use in the book, right? That's, you know, was it you or was it just a client of yours or someone that you knew that actually tried an experiment of sending a manager home and seeing how productive the team would be.... And... oh, you actually have a lot of examples like that, right?

Jack Skeels: So yeah, we have this, one of the things we do in AgencyAgile is when we start working with a new agency or development shop, we will do a leadership workshop and in the leadership workshop, it's usually a day or two long and we get all, because remember the problem we're trying to solve is the managers, right?

And get them to manage better and get the organization to run better. And we will... so we'll have them in a room for the day. We'll actually take all the managers out of the business, right? 

And one of the things we do at the end of the first day is we do this exercise where we say, we have people think about if, I sent your teams home for the day, how much productivity would there be? And then, well, if we sent all of you home for the day, how much productivity would there be? And the answer is there would be more productivity. It isn't necessarily sustainable. But it is that there would be more productivity.

And the little vignette that the story that I told in the book was a, it was a funny one because the, we done, we did that with a client in Brooklyn, New York, and the agency had arranged a happy hour for, you know, an all hands happy hour that evening at the end of that day, they didn't know we were going to do this exercise. Right. 

And so they all met, we weren't invited because it was a company only kind of thing. But all the, all the leaders and managers got to the restaurant bar, and said, how was your day? Cause they were curious that you've been productive. And everyone uniformly said, we were so productive today, you won't believe how much we got done. So we see, that we've seen that happen multiple times, but it's pretty amazing. 

Tim Butara: So what exactly is unmanaging? What does it look like in practice? And how does it take care of some of the issues and challenges that we've talked about so far? 

Jack Skeels: The naming of this was a tricky thing, and I know you're not asking about that, but I want to just go in through that, go through that door to get there.

Technically, it's de-managing, right? It's like a decrease in managing or dis-managing or something like that. But unmanaged sounds nicely provocative, right? Like, out of control or something like that, when in fact it's, it is out of control, but that's a good thing. So, the idea behind un managing is releasing of control.

And this is the control reaction that comes from two things, typically. One of which is that firefighter manager that we're speaking of and others, I no longer do the work, I have to manage. So I need to be in control. And a lot of those control behaviors are very negative behaviors. The other thing is that we get over managing from the matrix style, multiple manager organization as well. 

So unmanaging is really decreasing the impact of managerial activity, which usually means decreasing managerial activity upon the production function. And it's not easy to do. In a sense, I go into a couple examples in the book where some of the choices are insanely impossible to figure out. Like, should I introduce this information now or should I introduce it later? 

And in our research, you know, we've seen like a 4% productivity change. 4% is a lot. If you got 25 people, that's a whole person kind of thing. So, it's crazy, the nuance in it. And so we've identified some very key ways that managers can unmanage key moments, if you will, the four key moments that managers unmanage in, and we've proven this, that if they do those well, then it works well.

Tim Butara: So it's like if your company was the body and your muscles were the managers, if they were two tense. They could get less things done than if they just relaxed, you know, in that kind of sense. 

Jack Skeels: I love the metaphor a lot. I think the... I was, one of the titles we were going to use is the lazy manager. Okay. And I think that you, and we, I was like, lazy is not the right word. And in a sense, it's the relaxed manager. In other words, one of the biggest things is managers feel the need to act managerial. 

And if, you know, it's a greater than 50% chance that when you feel the need to act managerial, that you're going to decrease productivity, right? So it's this ability to step back and let go of the idea that I have to always be managing. 

I'll give you a really simple example. It's one that, I was speaking to some, at an audience the other day at an event, and it just came out of my mouth is if you think about the factory setting, the old factory model where I I'm a manager and I have 10 workers in my little department, right. And we were producing widgets or whatever. Right. 

And the way that I get measured as a manager is how many widgets my department produces every week or something like that. Right. Say it's 200. Right. And so Im very well aligned to the idea of productivity because if that number goes down a bit that I get asked, why are you not producing 200 widgets? Right. So the management function, the production function have a balance there, right? 

Now let's go to our modern knowledge worker organization. Oh, no, that's right. I missed a part. So, If I, as that manager, that factory manager, if I say, I think I'll call a two hour meeting and have everyone come into the meeting, I'm going to tell them a bunch of stuff and ask a bunch of questions and all that kind of thing. And that way I can feel like I've done something as a manager. 

And so I do that. And then at the end of the week, we've only produced 180 widgets. And my boss calls me and say, hey, where are those other 20 widgets you're supposed to produce? And I go, well, I wanted to have a meeting. And I guess we did.... and my managers will say, don't have meetings, get work done. Right. Okay. 

So it's very, very well aligned at that point. Now, if I fast forward into the multi manager organization. Anyone can call a meeting and there's no cost. You can't measure whether my meeting caused productivity to go down. 

In fact, the over meeting situation, the fact that there's so many meetings all the time in these chaotic multi manager organizations means that basically the loss and productivity is often assigned to the worker. Like, why aren't you working harder? Why didn't you get that done? And the answer is because I was in your stupid meeting. Okay. I was in, I was in 17 stupid meetings this week. Okay. How can I get work done when I'm in those meetings? 

Tim Butara: And the thing about meetings is that they don't just take away the productivity for the duration of the meeting, but also, you know, at least, you know, depending on how long it takes sometimes, you know, up to an hour before the meeting, you can't really get into a flow state if you are like a software engineer or like another more creative role.

And then after the meeting, you need some time to get back into the state of flow. And that can be disruptive, even if you just have one meeting a day. But if you have 17 per week, that's like at least three per day. And that's just not feasible. 

Like, you know, if you have three meetings per day and even if each of them just last one hour, that's more than half of your day just spent preparing for meetings, kind of mentally breaking down the key stuff from meetings. And if you get 180 widgets with that, then that's a huge success. 

Jack Skeels: Oh, no, it is, yeah. Yeah, we actually, I spend a lot of time talking about productive flow in the book, as you know. And a couple of the key ideas, one of which you mentioned is what we call the, the interruption or the meeting shadow. The shadow of the interruption.

In other words, yeah, maybe, how long does it take... I say, do you have a minute to answer a question? Well, the reality is, is that even if you could answer, even if I could ask in one minute and you could answer in that same minute, the shadow from that is probably 15 to 20 minutes long, right? 

So I'm really asking, can I decrease your productivity by 20 minutes, right? And to which your answer should be, no, you can't, but we don't do that. We lie to ourselves about these things, and meetings have a shadow. And you did a great job of describing that. The meeting shadow that proceeds and follows. 

And so a lot of times you'll have, I don't know if you notice this, but you'll have these meetings that have a half hour gap between the meetings. That's just wasted time. In fact, all you can do during that time generally is go interrupt other people. Right. You go, you go write some emails or go text someone or something like that. So the meeting shadows actually create more productivity loss as well because productivity loss comes both from meetings, but also from just interruptions, you know, of any sort.

Tim Butara: Yep. Definitely. Yeah. Okay. So now we kind of covered and talked about what unmanaging is. But on the other hand, what does unmanaging not mean?

Jack Skeels: Yeah, you're the first interviewer podcast host to ask that. Unmanaging doesn't mean no managers, okay? We have had a few of our clients who've gone to the extreme of having few, if any, managers.

If you look in the research on organization... and this is one of my geek areas where I love to just dig into this stuff. And I, in writing the book, I, I'd read some things before, but I dug more deeply into it, and there are flat organizations out there. So here's the question, is that organization is a human construct, in other words, it has to work for the people in the organization or otherwise it doesn't work. Right. 

And so the question is, is there any form of business in which a truly flat organization forms, especially if it's an organization that has to work together? Right. And there are some examples, but, but in general, there's always someone in charge. Okay, there's always someone that... there's a way that we need at least a minimal leader inside. And when I say an organization doesn't have to be a big, big company, but an organization is... a department is an organization, a project team is an organization. In a way, a little bit of hierarchy seems to be a natural thing for us, and that's okay. 

And the problem is we build, we build multiple, multiple hierarchies. I've got departments filled with managers and I've got departments that have managers and, and on and on. So unmanaging doesn't mean no managers and it doesn't mean that those managers cease to exist, but unmanaging means managers do their best to stay out of the way of the production function. 

And I think that that goes to a thing in the book and I can't quote it from memory here, but the, you know, the first of all of unmanagement is essentially this idea of the manager shall do no harm is that no matter what you do, no matter what you say, if you say I'm holding this meeting to make people more productive, then it, that sounds sort of suspect, if you will, right. 

You really need to be thinking, I would need to ask you, Tim, for example, before I invited you to the meeting, I need to say, Tim, do you think it would help you if we had this meeting, or do you want to just go on working, right, producing things? 

And that would be a better way to judge whether I'm being productive as a manager by doing something. It's actually asking it... and this is what we do, is in our survey work, we ask team members how productive they are. And why, right. 

And to come, I'm coming full circle to a point and you get to see how my brain works here... is when we start talking about productive flow, we measure that we have our clients measure that. And in the sort of multi project environments that our clients work in, if a worker gets four hours of productive time in a day, that's a win. That's a huge win. Okay. Four hours of unbridled productivity is just a tremendous success. 

And the average for most multi project organizations, that's when you, as a project person, team member, have multiple projects that you're on, which means you have multiple projects with managers on them, right, and you have multiple interruptions, the average is about two and a half productive hours a day out of an eight hour day. That's crazy. It's a crazy number. 

And all you have to do is get rid of a little bit of that managerial activity and you see a huge boost, going from two and a half to four hours. Feels like you've just, you know, invented another eight days in the week or something like that.

Tim Butara: Yeah, I figured that I should definitely ask this question because I didn't want anyone to assume that, oh yeah, because we talked about, you know, the downsides were the pitfalls of overmanaging, then the obvious solution is something that goes in the other extreme. 

And if we go back to our analogy with the body and the muscles, you know, just because your muscles, if your muscles are too tense, that doesn't mean that, oh yeah, the alternative is not using them at all. It's just, just relax them, you know, just don't, don't make them be super tense and don't overwork - just don't overmanage. 

Jack Skeels: I like this muscle tension metaphor. I'm going to, I'm going to steal it. I hope you don't mind.

Tim Butara: No, I'd be honored if you stole it. I love that you're going to steal it. Nice. 

So Jack, this has been an amazing conversation. Really great stuff, great insights. Just the last thing that I really want to talk about is how does the concept of unmanaging and everything that we've discussed so far today compare to the now very popularized agile approach to project and project management? 

Jack Skeels: Whoa, how much time do we have? So yeah, it's a great question. I do explain a bit of this in the book and also on the resource page on our book website and the like. I come from an agile background, even pre agile and the like, I was doing the equivalent of, sprints back in 1983 and the like, when I was a lazy project manager and the like. 

I think that the... a lot of what I'm teaching in the book is consistent with the ideas behind Agile. I also think that there's been a lot of, there are a lot of problems with the way Agile is implemented inside of businesses, and largely what we see is that manager... you know, one of the things I always ask, if you're really... like, we had a client, a potential client that contacted us, large Fortune 100 company financial services, and they were going to make their whole 200 person marketing organization more agile. Right. 

And I said, well, tell me about it. And they explained, well, McKinsey was the consultancy that designed it for them. Which is always a warning sign in my book. And I said, so how's it going to be organized? And they said, well, we're going to have 25 pods or something like that or whatever. And we need to hire 20 more project managers.

And I thought, oh, that's the exact opposite of agile, right? Okay. If you're hiring more managers, then you don't get it. Okay. The idea behind agile and it's a very simple idea. And, I mean, I stole a lot of the great thinking behind agile in building this method. 

If we think about the agile sprint, right? The agile sprint is, you know, day one is planning, days two through nine or execution and day ten is actually, we review what we did, right? Very simple. It's got a little bit more to it, but that's the basic idea. 

But from a manager's perspective, that's what it looks like. I can talk to the team on the first day. I can talk to the team on the tenth day, all the other days, stay the fuck away from the team.

Think of that's where all that productivity comes from an agile teams, is that we actually remove managers. And so that's, you know, it's one of the original ideas behind unmanaging, right. And the methods that preceded it, IEPM, iterative enhanced project management called for that same thing.

And that's what I used in the 80s, was let's talk about what we're going to do for the next couple of weeks. And then let's let the team go do it. And then we'll show you what we did. Right. And managers could live with that. They'd be like. Okay, I get to look at it a couple of weeks. 

But what it really was, it's unmanaging. It's saying we don't need to overmanage the team. We can lessen the amount of managing, put it in narrow brackets, all that kind of thing. And so in that way, I think if you read the book and you're an agile practitioner, you'll get a lot better at being an agile practitioner. Absolutely.

I don't think you need to do agile though, to do unmanaging. And I think that, in fact, you can use what, what we put in the book as a way to actually just manage better without, regardless of what sort of environment you're in and the like. 

Tim Butara: Yeah, they definitely both sound similar in this sense. And just, you know, it makes sense, just semantically having too many, too much of anything. In this case, too many managers weighing you down is just semantically antithetical to agility, right? Because if you're agile, you're efficient, you're fast, you're nimble. And then if you're just, if I imagine you're somebody with too many things in their pockets because they think they need all of them, then they just won't be that agile. 

Jack Skeels: No, I'm going to use your... yes, I'm going to use your muscle, your muscles thing, which is we've got the bodybuilder out there trying to play tennis. Okay. And the bodybuilders, the muscles are all pumped up and everything, but he has no flexibility. He or she has no flexibility or anything like that. So maybe that's the, to carry it onwards . 

Tim Butara: Perfect, perfect, Jack. And a great note to finish on. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope that anyone else who's listening right now also enjoyed it so much that they'll actually go ahead and go check out your book and buy your book. So before we wrap things up, if listeners would like to do that, or if they would like to connect with you, where would you send them to?

Jack Skeels: Oh, yeah. Hey, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm Jack Skeels on LinkedIn. I think I'm probably the only Jack Skeels out there. And you can find our book at unmanagedbook.com. And our company, AgencyAgile at agencyagile.com. We'd love to hear from you. 

Tim Butara: Well, awesome. Thanks again, Jack. Very happy to have you here today.

Jack Skeels: Well, thanks, Tim. Great interview and great questions. Thank you. A real pleasure to spend some time with you today. 

Tim Butara: Thank you. Likewise. And to our listeners, that's all for this episode. Have a great day, everyone, and stay safe. 

Outro:
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