This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background. He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion.
Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage companies execute faster and cheaper. Check out his linkedin at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenleaver/
Guest Author: Ken Leaver
So my whole career I feel like I was taught to ‘invest in relationships.’ As was probably everybody else.
But has anybody questioned…. why?
What if we didn’t?
And so I worked the first ~20 years of my career believing that was true. Till ~3 years ago when I began operating differently.
I was working remote mainly managing teams of contractors who I found via Upwork and managed using my ‘everything is a task’ method.
And I realized “wait a minute… this works really well even if I never develop any relationship with these folks. In fact it even works better because we avoid politics and decisions are made more purely based on logic.”
Now it’s almost like a no brainer for me… companies are run much better when you have very tight processes and try to almost avoid relationships.
Welcome to my topic for this week 😉
I view work relationships like weapons of mass destruction
Think about it.. why do you invest in a relationship in the office?
Like.. why develop a strong relationship with your boss?
Basically you invest in a relationship to make your life easier down the road and get buy-in more easily. Because it develops trust and trust is very necessary.
And the more trust you have the less you will be challenged. So if you invest in personal relationships, this will help grow trust faster.
The thing is sometimes it is a bad initiative that should normally be veto’d if the decision were made purely on logic.
But instead you will often see these sail through and get approved because of the person’s relationships (ie. not solely on trust they developed through executing well, but rather also because they now know each other personally quite well).
And because it was a bad decision it ends up destroying value in the company.
I’ve seen this happen tons of times in the past. And it’s why I like to nickname deep work relationships as “weapons of mass destruction” because they are more typically destructive than constructive.
And yet this way of thinking that you should develop strong relationships has been taken as being almost ‘obvious’ for decades and decades.
But what if everyone continued to basically not know anyone? Would things suffer or get better?
And here is where my experience for the past several years already led me to conclude…. decisionmaking and output in general will only improve!
Why do things work better without relationships?
Well think about it… when you are doing a project you no longer need to think about the political consequences.
It is like what you see when two countries that both have weapons of mass destruction (WMD) are negotiating. Both know that if either uses their weapons, both countries lose because the other country reacts in kind.
And it is this single thing that has prevented nuclear war for decades now.
Whereas if one side had it and the other didn’t… there is a much higher likelihood that they will be used (eg. World War II in Japan).
And the reality is that in a traditional work situation, the political influences/relationships (my metaphorical WMD) often matter far more than the logic of a decision.
You need to constantly think about… ok how is John gonna think about this? And how strong is my relationship with him? Because he is really tight with the CEO and if he doesn’t like it he can shoot it down quickly.
Or I really need to get the entire marketing team behind me otherwise they will pocket veto it. So let me spend some time hanging out with them this week.
A workplace without relationships (WMDs)
What if there were sound processes that were designed to avoid all of this relationships stuff?
Rather nobody really knows anyone else very deeply and rather everyone just executes tasks and jumps on the occasional call.
And decisions are made based on a process where everyone is encouraged to challenge things only from a logical perspective. And politics are kept to a minimum because nobody really knows each other.
There are no ‘cliques’, etc.
Having experienced it for awhile now, I can tell you that in my view it works far far better. And it takes less effort and less time.
You allow decisions to be made almost purely based on logic, which ends up being a much better way of doing it.
You challenge and blow holes in the logic of people more senior to you without worrying about any political ramifications on yourself… because that is the process.
Relationships are like an arms race
The interesting thing about relationships is that it is a lot like an arms race.
If nobody invests in relationships than you have a very logical and political-free decision-making foundation as long as there is sound process.
But the minute one person tries to invest in relationships they are putting themselves at an advantage and putting everyone else at a relative disadvantage.
They are essentially trying to curry favor among a certain group of folks in the company, thus making it easier for them to operate.
And if you are at the receiving end of this you realize… “hey wait a minute. I better invest in relationships too otherwise i will be at a disadvantage.”
And so lots of other folks begin investing in their relationships.
Soon you have almost everybody working very hard at investing in relationships in order to be more successful.
The average corporate office is an arms race of relationships
Is this starting to sound like your average corporate office?
Well it should because this basically sums up the underlying dynamic of how most corporate offices work.
But my question is… was this time and effort worth it?
Or would it have been better for the company if everybody just focused on their goals and projects without being distracted by any of this relationship business?
Take the leap of faith
You need to take the leap of faith like I did.
Once you do.. to me it’s like emerging through the storm clouds to a bright sunny day.
You just work and do the right thing. Without worrying about any of the relationship ramifications.
It makes what you do simpler and more pleasant.
Join me and take the leap!
