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.
Now Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage startups with content and traction called End Game.
Guest Author: Ken LeaverSo the idea for this post came when I was chatting with a friend on Whatsapp recently. He’s a smart guy, a hard worker, and has run a lot of hard tech-related projects over the years.
But he’s been stuck in middle management for about a decade.
Why? Because he’s a simple, hard worker.
But not very good at developing strong, senior-level relationships, and not good at “politics”.
His problem is that the current ‘system’ generally works against him. He’ll have a glass ceiling that will be tough to ever break through.
Instead folks that are very good at the whole relationship/politics thing will rise beyond. In part because they are also perceived to be better ‘managers.’
But my vision is to change all of this. And break that glass ceiling that sits above my friend and everyone like him.
But first let’s back up and give some context.
Companies are traditionally run at the senior level by ‘relationship’ people
All throughout my career I saw a consistent pattern. At the upper ranks of larger organizations were ‘relationship’ people… who across most other skillsets were relatively average.
A good example was when I worked at Visa Inc. back in 2009 and met then CEO, Joe Saunders in Moscow. He hit me as kind of an old western cowboy with the deep voice and grandpa demeanor.
He was disarming yet strong. And there was a small group of us that were part of the ‘Russia strategy’ exercise so I got to see him up close for awhile and see a bit of how he thinks.
He was a smart guy (but by far not a genius) and he liked to keep things simple. It was clear that he saw himself as more of the ‘communicator’ and high-level decisionmaker.
But I remember thinking…. “there isn’t anything I see that particularly impresses me about this guy… other than his deep voice and relationship-building skills.”
Note that at that time Visa Inc. had failed in almost all of its internal tech endeavors. And in my view he’d completely failed to build an organization that could effectively compete against the fast-moving tech companies on new payment technologies.
Instead it needed to acquire companies because its internal innovation has essentially been non-existent for the last 20+ years. But i’ll hand it to their M&A team.. they’ve done an excellent job investing in companies.
Anyway, reality is that it is people like Joe that have traditionally run the Fortune 500. Because they are excellent relationship builders and communicators. And thus good ‘managers’ in the current system.
But what if the system changes?
Under my system you eliminate the ‘relationship’ element
I’ve described my system in numerous past posts so I won’t go in detail on it here again. You can check out the “Contrarian Manager” and “Imagine not wasting time updating others” for the gist of it.
Basically I see a future where you try to avoid relationships and rather everything is based on executing tasks in an asynchronous way. I’ve honed this system over the last few years on a number of client and my own projects… and see how it performs better than the traditional way of working in almost every dimension (at least for me).
In my system…. a guy like Joe Saunders never makes it to the top. Because all of his core skills of relationship building and communicating the traditional way are rendered nearly useless.
Rather he instead needs to layout his decisions and projects as tasks and then track and manage folks to do it.
Execution doesn’t depend on developing relationships because you barely ever even talk to the others in the system. Instead it depends on working in a very structured and systematic way.
In my system i am pretty sure I would beat a guy like Joe nearly every time. I’m confident enough to put money on it.
Give us any project… it could be starting a new venture or perhaps an internal project within Visa. Or perhaps something that reflects his scope at Visa Inc…. lots of projects.
He’d go about it by putting his top lieutenants in the key positions and relying on them to execute well. Meanwhile they’d put their own people into the key positions and you’d have an intricate set of politics and relationships very quickly.
I’d go about it by putting every single project into Clickup and tracking all the important ones directly, myself, through to execution via hundreds of daily notifications that I would sift through.
And as I’d mainly use contractors, I would swap folks in and out fast till I had a solid team that were reliable.
I’d also create an entire organization under me that executes this way. One that is not based on politics or relationships, but rather how well they execute themselves.
And so the ‘Beasts’ rule!
By ‘Beast’ I mean the folks that are good at actually getting work done themselves. Ones that structure complex problems quickly, break them down into a set of tasks, and then execute those tasks one-by-one in priority order till they’re done.
In this type of system managing others is simply a matter of aligning on what tasks to create and then staying updated with the updates to ensure they’re on track. Not the soft skill BS.
In my system you don’t need ‘managers’ like Joe. There is no benefit to these types of people because the system is almost completely independent of relationships.
People like my friend who have a glass ceiling above them are set free.
Their upward mobility is no longer limited the way it would be in a traditional relationship-based system.
Rather the better they get at doing work efficiently themselves and staying on top of others, the more they move up. Straightforward and fair.
One day I see most companies working like this… I wanna see a revolution happen!
All a company is in my view is a big mountain of tasks. And the success of that company is defined by finding good people, prioritising the right tasks to do first, and managing the excution of them.
That’s it. That is all a company is when you break it down into its raw essence.
And therefore the people that do this better will rise up in this system. And the ingredients to career success will evolve to reflect this.
Why do I think the world will slowly evolve to this type of system? Because more and more folks will simply see that it works better.
For example, after I wrote “The Contrarian Manager” a couple of weeks ago I’ve already had a few different folks that either run startups or large teams reach out to me… and say that they wanted to give it a try.
And those people will use this to beat the companies that are run the traditional way.
And given enough time… natural selection triggers evolution.
A revolution will happen in the coming decades… and I believe what you’ve read above will go from sounding almost ‘crazy’ to sounding like the norm.
Let’s see 😉
Interested in getting some feedback on how your team operates and whether some of these principles can potentially be applied successfully in your team? Just grab a slot and let’s chat! Calendly
