We live in a world of noise. I don’t just mean the machinery and traffic
we endure every day, but the incessant demand for our attention from pretty
much everyone. Our family needs our
attention, our work demands it, advertisers try every trick to grab it, and
even when we want to relax, once again from commercials to features, someone’s
right there grabbing at our attention.
OK, fine. To a degree we learn how to cope with a noisy
world. But there is also a point beyond
which someone ceases to offer value, and becomes just an annoyance. One of these is what I call the fake
expert. I like to read ‘The Pulse” on
LinkedIn, and the site loads up that section with articles from what they call
‘Influencers’ - celebrities, business leaders, and some folks with no obvious
reason to be highlighted. Full disclosure – I have never been invited to post
as an ‘Influencer’, and my lack of political correctness means I should never
expect such an honor, which may play a small part in my opinion of LI’s ‘Influencers’,
but my real complaint is the trend of articles on subjects where the author can
claim no expertise.
A sad example would from Frank Wu,
the Chancellor & Dean of AC Hastings College of the Law, who wrote a little
ditty he called “Your Boss Is No Better Than You”
My first problem starts with the
subject. When I read the article, Mister Wu was plainly addressing the business
environment, and the matter of competency among different ranks. The problem is Mister Wu’s credentials to
speak as an expert. His profile is pure
academia: Law Clerk after college,
associate of a law firm, then teaching at law school, then writing, law work,
and teaching law up to today. What’s
missing? Unless you are naïve enough to
imagine that a law firm can reasonably be compared to a corporation, start-up,
retail or other genuine business that actually sells to the public, Mister Wu
has less experience in business roles than a middle school student. I have no complaint if Mister Wu wants to
discuss some case in the news, or discuss liability for a business. Unfortunately, however, Mister Wu posted his
article on his opinion of business roles and ranks, on absolutely nothing more
than what he has read in magazines and online.
To make matters worse, Mister Wu never even mentions the authors or
studies he found so compelling.
Why should that be rebuked? Three reasons, I think. First, Mister Wu’s article took the place of
a different article, and if a real manager or executive or long-time employee had
written their account, the article would have been far more authentic. Second, there are so many articles cluttering
the web about business that it makes no sense to post where you have no
applicable knowledge. I do not, after
all, post articles in law reviews about my opinion of the latest SCOTUS ruling,
so there is no reason why some law professor bored with his profession should
troll into a place where his opinion has no more weight than that of his
readers. If he wants to blog it on his
own blog, fine, but a business site should seek out business people, not
lawyers, on the subject of work roles.
And third – time wasted on Wu’s
opinion devalues the site. I am just a
little less interested in LinkedIn’s “Pulse” articles, having learned that
authors may troll in print for no better purpose than the editors at LinkedIn
forgot their own core competency.
There is more, of course. Some of
Mister Wu’s claims are not merely not completely true, but also can be
dangerously false. For example, in his
first paragraph, Mister Wu wrote the following:
“any good supervisor should realize her direct reports are by and
large more capable in their jobs than she herself could be if she replaced
them.”
So what’s wrong with that
statement? The problem is that a
supervisor exists to direct and guide his or her employees, not to do their
work. A coach of a football team is not
the coach because he throws the ball better than the Quarterback or tackles
better than their starting Linebacker, but because he is the best coach. Mister Wu’s inability to understand this distinction
undercuts everything he says in the article.
A good manager has to have specific skills, and that's
where Mister Wu makes his second mistake - he assumes that degrees are
irrelevant, and that is usually just not true. Someone can get a degree and
never learn the skills they need, sure, but that's not usually case; the
majority of people who earn management degrees do so to gain depth and learn
how to be effective in leading their team. Mister Wu is correct to the point
that managers must respect the work of their people, but he is completely wrong
to insult and disrespect the talent and experience of managers and bosses. He
does not begin to understand what a good manager does, or why it matters to the
team.
Mister Wu doubles down on that ignorance, saying “An executive who is in charge of a project is not necessarily
capable of fulfilling the specialized responsibilities of the people whom she
oversees” . There
are several reasons why this is so wrong.
First, as I noted, a manager is not made a manager to do the same work
as his employees. A manager has his job
to accomplish three missions:
- A manager is given
specific projects and assignments by the executives/directors. He is paid to make sure these assignments
are completed and well done;
- A manager exists to
protect the company’s stability, financial health and prospects for
growth, and
- A manager exists to take
care of his team, to direct them, provide resources and discipline or
reward according to the worth of their work.
These
are all important, and to the point, very distinct from the job description for
regular staff. Never forget that managers
are paid more because they are responsible for results in a way that regular
employees never have to worry about.
Mister
Wu is not done insulting professionals in roles he does not understand, saying “people who are quick studies suppose that a cursory review of a
subject enables them to substitute their spontaneous judgment for reasoned
recommendations made by others”. Note that Mister Wu
assumes that people with advanced degrees and professional certifications only
make ‘a cursory review of a subject’. He
does not stop to consider that his logic suggests his own credentials would
disqualify him to teach his own classes.
After all, by his argument Mister Wu does not really know the law better
than his clerks, assistants, or students – an advanced degree equals a ‘cursory
review’. Mister Wu clearly does not examine
his own claims in anything like an objective manner.
Mister
Wu has a law degree, and a lot of experience in academia. He does not have a
single day of work in any real business enterprise. Mister Wu has never worked retail,
manufacturing, or in any environment where he can speak with experience about
how corporations evaluate and promote talent.
He has never had to work with a business plan, had to evaluate a staff
for bonuses and promotions, never evaluated an employee to determine if they
need additional training or resources. Mister
Wu, in other words, has absolutely no credentials to speak on any business
operations topic.
None.
The
damage done by Mister Wu may not be apparent, but his arrogance and contempt
for the value of managers and bosses undermines the effectiveness of companies
and teams. Managers can be good or bad,
more the former than the latter, and assuming that because someone is the boss
that they are actually less competent
than their staff is both undeserved and malicious in character.
Every
business that runs with a focus on customer service depends on good
managers. Every business that builds on
a solid business plan depends on good managers.
Every business that plans to be around a decade from now will depend on
good managers. In my three decades as a
manager, I have worked for rotten bosses and great bosses and learned from all
of them. I learned how to evaluate performance,
how to determine necessary training for employees, how to choose candidates for
promotion, how to protect good employees from layoffs and from being passed
over for promotion, how to discipline employees and to create genuine
improvement processes. I am far from the
only boss to learn all these things, but a good boss must be respected in order
to be able to do his job, and that means employees cannot trash bosses with
false claims and insults, just because they do not understand their boss’
duties and responsibilities. Business structures
change over time, and all kinds of ideas get tossed around to create innovation
and growth. The boss, however, is a necessary
role in any business and it is vital to understand the role, not attack the
boss out of ignorance.
