The Last Job That Requires You to Give a Shit

Stop writing “quietly!”

I yelled at Claude again this week.

Stop telling me “it’s not this, it’s that.” Stop with the tics. I’ve typed some version of this so many times.

And then I realized, I was doing what a crappy manager does. Give vague instructions, provide no context, and then, when the work comes back wrong, exasperation!

I interviewed Boris Berenberg, CEO of Zero AI, this week. He told me, “We are just making everyone into a manager. There is no such thing anymore as a non-managerial role.”

He was talking about our relationship with AI.

“The rate at which you have to manage them is like speed-running management training. You get frustrated, and you start being a problem. You start exhibiting the bad management tendencies. And then you start being like, oh wow, now I’m behaving like that manager I don’t like.”

On March 31, Jack Dorsey co-wrote an essay called “From Hierarchy to Intelligence.” In it, he wrote that managers exist to “route information, precompute decisions, and maintain alignment across a complex organization.” And then concluded that “Hierarchy and middle management impede information flow.”

The same day, Block cut about 4,000 jobs from a company of more than 10,000. Two weeks later, Dorsey went on a podcast and said eventually he wants “everyone in the company [to] report to me, and that would be all 6,000 of the company.”

And fine, if a manager is a router, of course a computer can do their job. Routing was the piece of the job that sucked anyway. Status meetings. Forwarding decks. Translating one team’s update into another team’s format. Take it. Please.

But 6,000 direct reports plus bots does not a management strategy make.

Two stats:

1. Gallup has held since 2015 that managers account for at least 70 percent of the variance in engagement scores between business units.

   70%.

2. In 2008, Google ran a study called Project Oxygen and ranked the eight behaviors of its best managers in order of importance. At the top, the winner was being a good coach. Dead last was having the technical skills to advise the team. Even when Google expanded the list to ten in 2018, coaching stayed on top and technical skills stuck at number eight.

I think that gap explains every bad boss you have ever had. It’s not that they lacked a skill. It’s that they skipped over the human piece.

Here’s Boris again.

“Management is a combination of a science and an art. There’s been a huge body of research on it. We ignore almost all of it, and then we’re like, why doesn’t it work?”

We promote people to their weakness and then act surprised.

Three to eight people. That’s about the size of the most effective teams. At least according to organizational psychologist Richard Hackman. He spent his career at Harvard studying teams and put the limit like this: “No work team should have membership in the double digits, and my preferred size is six.”

Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, who studies how many people we can stay genuinely close to, lands on about five.

1:8. Not very scalable, that ratio.

Managing well is slow. It can be sloppy. And it is definitely inefficient. If your goal is to improve how your business operates, cutting managers won’t get you there.

A manager who sees you, cares about your work, and helps you grow—that’s how we’ve always gotten better at what we do as individuals and as a team.

Middle management is the last job that requires you to give a shit. And for my money, that’s one thing AI won’t change.