"Do I have too many managers and not enough doers?" Find out in this episode of Appfire Presents: The Best Project Portfolio Management Show by Appfire.
Andrea Fryrear of AgileSherpas joins Appfire's own Kerry O'Shea Gorgone to talk about how to tell if you have too many managers (SPOILER ALERT: you probably do). Andrea offers advice on rebalancing things so you can better support your "doers," the people executing on the work.
About the guest
Andrea Fryrear is co-founder of AgileSherpas and a leading global authority on agile marketing. She is co-author of the ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Marketing curriculum, and the author of two books on marketing agility, including
Mastering Marketing Agility: Transform Your Marketing Teams and Evolve Your Organization.
About the show
The BEST Project Portfolio Management Show by Appfire covers everything you ever wanted to know about PPM by talking with project management experts who’ve seen it all. And every episode is 10 minutes or less, so you can get back to changing the world, one project at a time.
For your convenience, here is the transcript of this episode:
Do I have too many managers and not enough doers?
Kerry: Today we’re going to address the question do I have too many managers and not enough doers. Joining us is Andrea Fryrear, co-founder of Agile Sherpas and a leading global authority on agile marketing. If you’ve ever had this problem, stick around because we’re going to talk about it.
Andrea, thanks for joining. Why is it so important that you don’t have all managers and not enough doers if you’re going to be agile?
Andrea: We’ve seen this problem cropping up more and more. The issue is that you have this layer of people who are interfacing with the business or having great ideas or otherwise trying to navigate the work, but then this much smaller nucleus of people that are actually able to execute work that have skills and capabilities to get stuff done.
When you have too many people at that middle layer pushing a bunch of stuff down to that nucleus of people, they can’t possibly manage it all so they end up spending way too much time trying to navigate those incoming requests, “Is this the most on fire thing, is this the most urgent thing? How many status meetings do I have to go to this week?”
They burn a ton of time on managing those different relationships and then they’re also dealing with context switching, which is this nasty knowledge work problem where your brain is trying to jump back and forth to all kinds of different things, and every time you do it, you waste time and energy in jumping back and forth.
Kerry: I’ve heard about that. It effectively lowers your IQ.
Andrea: It does.
Kerry: Like smoking a joint.
Andrea: It’s not great. When you have all those things together, none of the work is getting done, nothing is actually being produced.
Kerry: How can you tell then that that’s the situation your organization is in? If you’re the person who just wants to get work done, how can you figure out that this is the problem?
Andrea: The obvious symptoms are that people are working all the time and yet everything is still late, nothing seems to hit deadlines, people are sleeping under their desks kinds of situations. If you find yourself saying, “We just need another project manager to handle the process. Let’s just hire another PM or something like that, because clearly the process is the problem,” it might not be the process. It might be this imbalance between the people who execute the work and the people who manage and decide what work needs to be done.
Kerry: If you have a team of people who are working like crazy and maybe they’re hesitant to complain about it for whatever reason, like company culture just doesn’t like that, how can you actively look, what are some things you should be looking for? Is it just that things are late and yet everybody seems busy, or are there other ways to tell that you need to slow down the filtering down and maybe get more people on board?
Andrea: I think that’s part of it. I think people’s calendars can be really revealing as well, if you can take a look. We do this with teams that we coach a lot. Do a calendar audit with your team. Don’t make it a judgmental thing, but make it a how can we help one another be more effective kind of conversation.
Look at how much time they’re spending in meetings that are not working meetings, it’s not a brainstorming meeting, it’s not an ideation or collecting feedback, like we’re not really in this meeting to drive the work forward, we’re just in this meeting to understand what’s the work, who is it for, those kinds of informational meetings. If people are spending 80% of their time in those, then you definitely have an issue.
Kerry: It might be the best possible to identify this issue when a company is about to go agile. I imagine you’ve walked in on that when they’re like, “Hey, we want to go agile. Take a look at our team and let’s make some teams.”
Andrea: Yes. That happens a ton. We look at the org chart and we say, “Great, let’s build some cross-functional agile teams,” and they’re like, “Awesome. We think we need five because we have five business units that we support.” Cool, so you have five copywriters, and you have five designers, and you have five mar-tech folks that can put that all where it needs to be. They’re like, “No, we have one of all of those people.” Okay. We’re going to have a challenge here. Let’s figure it out.
Sometimes it has to be we’re going to hit pause and we’re going to let you go hire lots of people before we can go, because one agile team serving this huge universe of stakeholders, agile is not magic, it’s not going to solve everything. You have to have the right butts in seats.
Kerry: A little prestidigitation there to make your team scale. In that situation then, I’m thinking about this from a supporting your workers standpoint. We’re seeing people leave jobs in incredible numbers, and I have to think part of it is stuff like this where they’re working like crazy but they’re still getting static, if you want to call it that, from above for things not being on time and it’s just mathematically not possible.
Andrea: Yes.
Kerry: How can you support people properly if you want to keep your best talent?
Andrea: Psychological safety is a big deal in terms of making it okay for people to say things. You need to be able to say, “I don’t have enough time in the day. I’m working after hours. I feel overwhelmed.” That conversation needs to be acceptable, which is very much a cultural thing.
Again, there are some proactive things that managers can do as well and leaders can do to look at people’s calendars, to ask these questions in one-on-ones, and drive the conversation. Go to that managerial layer and talk about how they’re engaging with your people and whether you can create some space in people’s days.
It's really surprising to me, once you notice something you see it everywhere kind of thing. Like if you say, “Find blue cars,” and then you see blue cars everywhere. I now see this everywhere, in every org chart and client that I look at it seems to be pretty pervasive. Chances are you have this problem whether you know it or not. Go out and figure out ways to solve it, because otherwise people will leave because they don’t have to stick around for these things anymore.
Kerry: What about reshuffling people? I think possibly part of the reason nobody wants to admit there is a problem is because managers don’t want to be fired or let go or something. Are there ways to incorporate them in a more active role, or do you think people are resistant to that? Do they think management is some kind of promotion that has prestige and they don’t want to give it up? How do we handle this?
Andrea: That’s super fair. I do think trying to create maybe an alternative advancement path that’s about being an awesome individual contributor. Some people shouldn’t be managers, it’s not in their aptitude, and it’s honestly not what they like, but they feel like, like you said, it’s a step up and that’s the only way that I climb the ladder, get higher salary, and all of those things.
If we say you don’t have to do that, you can still be paid really well and you can still really enjoy your job as a great designer, as a great writer, as a great whatever, so that not everybody ends up stuck at that manager layer. Just as a way to show them that they’re valued, we promote them, but then there’s a bunch of people up there who aren’t doing anything, and there might be people up there who don’t like it and would rather be spending more of their time actually getting their hands dirty in one way or another.
Bringing it up and talking to people about it, because you’re going to have to either bring them back or even say down, back down into the doer level, or find another way to even things out.
Kerry: That must be ugly, trying to reshuffle that. I was just thinking that can’t be fun. For the doers, when you’re first recruiting them, I imagine this would be a helpful thing to let them know at the beginning that there’s these multiple paths for your career that you can take. As a recruiter brand or hiring brand, I would think that would be helpful, too.
Andrea: Yes. It shows that you’re progressive and forward-thinking and that there are multiple ways to succeed in the organization.
Kerry: So, there are ways to fix it, we don’t need to despair. Andrea Fryrear, thanks for coming by. I really appreciate the information. Everyone, there is some fantastic material over on AgileSherpas.com, so follow Andrea and find out more information there. Of course, you can find more episodes of The Best Project Portfolio Management Show at appfire.com/resources/resource-library/videos-webinars. See you next time.