Yaniv Preiss

Theaters in a professional setting manifest themselves in many ways. They can usually be attributed to misunderstandings or ignorance, not malice.

A famous example is the the agile theater, where “Scrum teams” use Jira, run sprints, refinements with estimations and plannings, but deploy once per quarter. This is only pretending to be agile because there is no early and continuous delivery or feedback from the customers.

Another one is what Marty Cagan called the product management theater:

The reason I describe this as “product management theater” is because a person that is essentially a project manager, with no real training or skills to cover the true product management responsibilities, simply declaring they are a product manager, is just pretending.  

There is a clear analogy for management in general:

The reason I describe this as “management theater” is because a person that is essentially an engineer, with no real training or skills to cover the true management responsibilities, simply declaring they are a manager, is just pretending.  

This declaration almost always comes from the organization, and with time, the person is led to believe they are, without knowing what skills and practices they are missing.

As Roy Osherove wrote:

Management – done right, is a tough job. That’s why you get paid more. But some managers prefer to go through life taking the money and not doing the hard work.

It’s no wonder. Many managers don’t receive any training, guidance or feedback.
The common belief is that management is transparent, something that happens by the way, not a first-class citizen among the other duties of making technical decisions, prioritizing, planning, designing, hiring, coordinating and overseeing projects.

ICs (individual contributors) transition into management, receive people management responsibility and do what they think has to be done: a lot of IC work and mimicking their manager, who likely walked the same path.

While they spend years studying software engineering and honing their technical skills, they don’t spend even a few hours of learning management. They don’t know what they don’t know.

The old joke “software would be so much easier without users” could be paraphrased: “managing would be so much easier without people”.
This is the reason so many companies have dual track career path – IC and people management. But in too many places, even the management track disregards the people part.

Unfortunately, this is not limited to new managers because they are surrounded by others who manage and are managed in similar ways throughout their entire careers, which becomes the norm.

What management theater looks like

I am not talking about managerial mistakes that everyone is doing.
While most could have been easily avoided with very little learning in advance, most of the time, the managers learn from their mistakes and do better.

For example, surprising team members by redoing their work over the weekend, or dictating the solution to any given scenario, which results in becoming a bottleneck and blocking members’ growth.

When do mistakes become a theater?

Everything we do for the first time is not likely to be great. Recall learning to ride a bicycle, play the piano, drive a car or learn a new language. It takes time, practice and feedback to become better and eventually excel.

It turns into a theater when we commonly believe and act as if we’re doing the right thing, ignoring consequences. Imagine all of us were driving only in the first 2 gears, playing only the “white keys” of the piano or using only the present tense of a language. All of us would be doing that, so it would seem right and serve as social proof, but a lot of joy, benefit, opportunity and achievement would be missed.

The theater has been performing daily for many years, and the two prominent representatives of the management theater are 1:1s and feedback.

1:1

The average IC encountered 1:1 throughout their career, in which they probably met their manager every two weeks for half an hour. Now as managers, they have 1:1s with their direct reports, and there are several ways this goes wrong:

• Suffering from ineffective 1:1s with their manager, they decide to not bring this pain upon their direct reports, so they cancel them, thinking “we anyway see each other every day”
• To avoid wasting “real work time”, reducing the 1:1 to once per month
• Often canceling the 1:1 due to important matters
• Thinking it’s “chatty chatty”, they are holding 1:1s, but not bringing agenda items, taking notes or following up on action items, letting the direct report come up with their topics only to fade away
• Turning the 1:1 into a status update meeting and giving directions on how to proceed

What’s the problem with these?

As I extensively explained, the 1:1 is a meeting for the direct report, and its purpose is building trust and rapport, which serves as the basis for the rest of the managerial tools.
A scheduled weekly meeting is the most effective in achieving results and retention.
Getting to know the person, bringing agenda items topics, taking notes and following up are crucial for having a trustful relationship.

Feedback

Many employees receive feedback only in their annual performance review, though some employers removed even these and didn’t replace them with anything else.
It’s no surprise that many do not give feedback to their direct reports once they become managers – that’s what they experienced for many years. Often, they wait for the annual performance review, and then, relying only on their memory, mention only one big thing that happened during the year and a few things from the past two weeks, usually surprising with new information. That’s why performance reviews cause so much anxiety for employees and renaming them to “feed forward” will not change it.

Effective feedback on the other hand, is given constantly, to improve future behavior. It is both positive to encourage more of a specific behavior, and negative to discourage other specific behaviors.

Beyond people management

To not give the false impression that the theater only has to do with people topics, let’s look at very common practices that cause less-than-ideal outcomes. Again, it belongs in our theater because it’s the whole organization that is behaving this way and perhaps even the majority of the industry.

Being late

Meetings that start late “due to important matters that took longer” or waiting for late people. That may seem harmless, but consider being 3 minutes late for a 15-minute meeting – that’s 20%. On top of punishing the ones who showed up on time, this signals that time doesn’t matter. How can we expect bigger efforts to be on time when we fail to plan and execute something as small as a single meeting? How can such a manager hold others accountable?

Ineffective meetings

In addition to starting late, some meetings lack agenda and preparation, suffer from agenda hijack and run over time, messing up the next planned activities. These teach people that meetings are a waste or a necessary evil at best.

OKRs masquerade

Objective and Key Results are goals that are set in the beginning of the quarter, intended to achieve business outcomes, that is, change customers’ behavior. Way too often, these are decided late into the quarter (2 weeks delay is already wasting 15%). Another common mistake is to have our internal actions or initiatives (which are output, not outcome) instead of goals that reflect a change in the customer behavior, like “switch from AWS RDS to DynamoDB” or “add analytics screen”.

OKRs are ideally incrementally trackable, to allow for many opportunities to change the course of action if things don’t go well. What often happens instead, is looking at the OKRs achievements only at the end of the quarter, or not looking at them at all, even when achieving an alarming low of 10% or a negative result. This is what “The five dysfunctions of a team” refers to as “inattention to results”.
That’s why so many employees think that OKRs don’t work.

Busywork

Feeling productive doing emails, reading slack messages, joining calls, reading industry news – all at the cost of not moving the most important things forward.

Call To Action

Learn about management. It’s a profession. There is ample information and resources: books, articles, podcasts, consultants, coaches, meetups, conferences and mentors.

Lead by example.

As an individual contributor, you don’t have much power to change things. Shouting that the emperor is not wearing any clothes might end up in some punishment, but you may bring one idea at a time to your manager in an attempt to influence things in your team.

As a middle manager, you can start applying your learnings in your own team or group, focusing on one area at a time and measuring improvements.

As an executive, you do have some power to change things more profoundly.

Instead of performing in the management theater, seek effective and impactful management that drives higher performance, resulting in a more successful organization.