As a result, if Tim doesn’t meet with each one of his employees in the next 24 hours, I will have no choice but to fire him and to fire you. Are we clear?
You get exactly one chance to threaten me. That was it. I quit.
(Honestly, all this management style does is ensure that the only people you'll be able to keep are the ones who will put up with your shit. Not a very good recipe for building a great company, huh?)
Yes, agreed -- this is unbelievably awful executive management. Ben should be asking some questions here instead of threatening to fire Steve because Tim hasn't been filling in his TPS reports. What's especially unconscionable here is that Ben is threatening to terminate both Tim _and_ Steve. Can you imagine Steve's ensuing conversation with Tim? Or worse, the resulting 1:1 marathon held by Tim with his team at the tip of Steve's bayonet? This is just wrong in every conceivable direction -- Ben has in a stroke created an organization ruled by fiat, bureaucracy and fear. If Tim is a problem -- if his team loathes him because he refuses to communicate -- they should solve that problem, instead of creating yet more problems by not only threatening Steve but encouraging him to use fear to lead his own organization. I think Ben's blog entry would be much more aptly titled "an awesome place to leave"...
This isn't just filling in your TPS reports. This is a manager completely failing at his job, making him fail his employees, and showing the failing of his manager.
I agree with the rest of what you're saying, but I think you're greatly understating the problem.
When one (of many) underlings falls far short on one (of many) company edicts and you don't know about it, that's not "completely failing" as a manager.
He's completely failing at his job if and only if his entire job is to ensure that the 1:1s occur, which would be just as bad as being "Steve" in the meeting described in the article.
He is completely failing because he did not meet one on one within 6 month? I must have worked with completely failing managers for my whole career over the last 16 years.
Well, there are a lot of completely failing managers out there, so that's plausible.
When I started managing people I read and thought a lot about what management was about, and who my good and bad managers were. I came to the same conclusion as Ben Horowitz did here: my main job was to make sure that my people were happy and had what they needed to get their jobs done. And that it was impossible to do that that without directly talking with them, one on one, on a regular basis.
Of course, that had absolutely no relation to the skills that got me to the point of managing people, so it's no surprise to me that many managers never figure that out.
Please contrast with the executive management where you work because it would be nice to have some insight into what led up to recent decisions at Joyent.
It's even worse than that, the people that work for you will make their number one priority not getting fired.
I've worked at a company like that before. Management worked hard on whatever problem the CEO noticed last, while doing their best to hide any other problems from him.
As a manager you do much better at aligning everyone's interests so that your staff does what they want to do, which just happens to work towards the outcome you want. It's more about gentle course corrections ahead of time than grabbing the wheel from them.
This isn't a reactive problem resolution as you describe, it is a proactive endeavor. The tactic used could have been improved significantly, but the priority is very high for the CEO. There is a big difference in response from ignoring a lazy CEO/manager that jumps from fire to fire shouting, "This is the priority! This is the priority!" and one that wants to ensure his management team is focusing on employee contentment.
That's a false dilemma, and the CEO is the person who let it get to the point where the only option was to threaten to fire someone by surprise. I'm not sure how we can say that this was a high priority before Ben noticed it. Aren't the management team employees too?
A CEO can only act on information they have. Primarily directives are carried out by being followed down the chain. By not following something the CEO felt was important, the employee (manager is this case) is creating a problem. First they are ignoring desired direction. As a person in a management role, this basically means that they are not doing their job. Second, they are demonstrating that following direction doesn't matter. This was a serious issue for the CEO and it had to be dealt with.
The executive should have been made aware that this was an issue or fired, not threatened. That was a stupid move. If you have to threaten your employees, you have already failed as a leader.
Interesting response. I didn't see it as a threat but clearly it was a negative consequence. People who work for you should know what is expected (their 'job' as it were) and they should know if they are or aren't meeting the expectations of that job. Clearly in Ben's case he required that his managers meet with their people, and said as much, and one of his managers wasn't. Now this was complicated by the fact that it was a couple levels down from him, but he did communicate how he wanted his managers to manage, and then described the consequences of not managing that way.
That is why I didn't see it as a threat, I read it as Ben saying "Managers who work for me have 1:1s with their reports, if you have a manager who doesn't want to manage that way that is fine, they should work somewhere else."
So if you worked for Ben and thought 1:1s were "bullshit" then you ideally would already have had a discussion about that and either understood what he wanted or have already quit.
The bottom line is that Ben needed to be clear when his direction was 'optional' and when it was not. Clearly this was a time when it was not.
Relative to the title of the piece, do you think "Steve" left the meeting thinking that Opsware is "a good place to work?" How about during the meeting? I think there's a failure somewhere within the technique Ben employed to impart the values that he thinks are important, not to mention blindness to the possibility that he himself might be an obstacle in creating "a good place to work."
Its an excellent question. I know if I were "Steve" in this scenario I'd feel bad that I had so misread something that was very important to my boss. As with most things I would also be evaluating how I felt about it.
At Sun I worked briefly for a guy who was an incredible micro-manager. He would ask me to report on what my folks were doing, and then tell me what they should be doing so that I could meet the goals he had set out for me. I pushed back on that. My push back was that I felt I had a better handle on how to meet the goals than he did, I also recognized that if that wasn't something he could live with it was well within his rights to remove me (as I recall I even offered to proactively move at that point).
I completely agree with Ben's original assessment that part of making a place fun to work at is that you and your reports have a clear idea of what you're being asked to do, and your management supports your effort to get that done.
The part of this story that seems to trigger the most emotion is the notion that Ben brings this guy in, then drops this requirement on him with the consequence that if he doesn't do it in 24hrs he'll be out of a job. That level of clarity in direction is rare in my experience. It also read a bit like Ben was taking no responsibility for not communicating clearly the importance of this requirement. If I were Steve I would want to understand that better. But we don't know what sort of 1:1s that Ben and Steve had prior to this one. Perhaps it came up often and Steve made vague affirmative noises about how he would get around to it soon or something. And only after repeated nudges did Ben come out and make this clear delineation of behavior and consequence.
> The part of this story that seems to trigger the most emotion is the notion that Ben brings this guy in, then drops this requirement on him with the consequence that if he doesn't do it in 24hrs he'll be out of a job. That level of clarity in direction is rare in my experience. It also read a bit like Ben was taking no responsibility for not communicating clearly the importance of this requirement. If I were Steve I would want to understand that better. But we don't know what sort of 1:1s that Ben and Steve had prior to this one. Perhaps it came up often and Steve made vague affirmative noises about how he would get around to it soon or something. And only after repeated nudges did Ben come out and make this clear delineation of behavior and consequence.
That's technically possible, but that's pretty much opposite to how Ben himself told it. Here's the condensed version of the backstory:
> one day while I happily went about my job, it came to my attention that one of my managers hadn’t had a 1:1 with any of his employees in over six months... I did not expect this.
> I thought that leading by example would be the sure way to get the company to do what I wanted... why didn’t they pick up my good habits?
> Given the large number of things that we were trying to accomplish, managers couldn’t get to everything and came up with their own priorities. Apparently, this manager didn’t think that meeting with his people was all that important and I hadn’t explained to him why it was so important.
There is no hint at all of the situation you envision. That isn't to say you're definitely wrong, but you're certainly on shakier ground than Ed.
The base problem is that if you've resorted to threatening my job, there are two possibilities:
- You've genuinely exhausted all your other ideas and avenues for improving the situation. Obviously this means we aren't going to be seeing eye to eye. That means this job probably isn't worth either of our time anymore, unless one of us can come up with something that will drastically change our relationship for the better.
- This is what you resort to instead of thinking hard about how to fix problems. I don't want to work with you.
It's not about fairness, it's about fear. Fear isn't a good way to run a good company. In my opinion, of course.
I actually saw this happen once. A system admin (we'll call him Rick) I worked with had failed to get something installed, and it was going to cost the company thousands of dollars. (Not 10s of thousands, though.) The CEO/Owner told Rick that if he didn't get it installed within 24 hours (the actual deadline, not made up) then he was fired.
Rick installed the software (which took most of the 24 hours apparently: remote machine, hard to work with the hosting company, etc) and then quit, effective immediately. He was jobless for a while, but he eventually got a better job.
He really should have had it installed before that, but it wasn't his only job responsibility, and the system was really, really unstable at that point. Emergencies were a daily occurrence.
I stuck it out with the company. I wanted to have a few years experience on my resume before looking for another job, and they hadn't yet done anything like that to me.
The company's HR policies were pretty much exactly what you'd expect, after that occurrence. I managed to avoid most of it, but even simple things like vacation time were really painful.
Really? As a VP, this is your reaction? The CEO, your boss, just told you that it was his number one priority to make sure that the employees felt like it was a great place to work, and that your direct report employee was failing miserably to follow this policy, and you didn't seem to notice, even though it was covered by the basic management training provided by the company?
Meta: I hate that a silly comment like this gets so much attention only because it's the first comment.
Are you managing monkeys or are you managing highly competent human beings? Are your employees actually any good?
The whole exchange stank of condescension and patronization. This is a high-level exec at a company, his basic intelligence doesn't need to be questioned - he did not need the principle of 1:1's to be explained to him as if he were a child.
One of his direct reports is violating a very clear, established policy. "Steve" needs to fix it, pronto, and that's all that needed to be communicated. The whole pointlessly patronizing "lesson" in business and the direct threat to Steve's job was entirely unnecessary. It's unproductive and just plain power-posturing.
It's only necessary if your workforce is consisted entirely of slack-jawed yokels that need to be hand-held through the very job you hired them to do. If that's the case, you should fire yourself for having created an organization full of slack-jawed yokels.
Side note, from the article:
> "it’s personally very important to me that Opsware be a good company. It’s important to me that the people who spend 12 to 16 hours/day here, which is most of their waking life, have a good life"
Protip: if you want to have a good place to work, and your employees to have a good life, don't have 12-16 hour days.
I am willing to assume that the whole aggressive attitude stems not only from this encounter. I am willing to assume that it wasn't first time that Steve failed (for whatever reason) to make Ben happy.
Thus I agree that the whole rant was needless. If Steve was a repeat offender, then he and his underboss should just be fired on the spot and the reason for the termination should be explained to the rest of the company to reinforce the importance of the core values.
If this was one of Steve's within margin of error blunders, he should be explained the rules again and probably made charge of inspecting the status of adherence to this particular rule by the people within company.
> his number one priority to make sure that the employees felt like it was a great place to work
So what you are saying is that the CEO was failing to achieve is number 1 priority for 6 months, and the best he can do is expect that his managers resolve the problem in 24 hours or they get fired? This isn't just any old directive, this is his number 1 priority. If he's failed to do the most important thing for 6 months, then he has only himself to blame.
He said: "I thought that leading by example would be the sure way to get the company to do what I wanted."
If it was really that important, it wouldn't have taken 6 months to discover. What's more likely is that the CEO changes his mind, constantly refocusing on new important things.
The CEO of this story is filled with lies, deceit, incompetence, and ignorance. Emulate that? No, I have respect, at the very least, for myself.
I've worked in the valley for 16 years for half a dozen companies, (Starting at Netscape in 1996) - I've also worked in Ben's organization (at Loudcloud/Opsware). Ben is the epitome of no bullshit management. He clearly establishes what he expects of his employees, and, if they fail to live up to his expectations because they decide his expectations are not a priority, he terminates them.
Working for Ben then becomes a pretty straight forward process - if Ben's priorities aren't yours, then it's time for another job. In the case of edw519 - if he is unhappy with being terminated because he's unwilling to make Ben's priorities his priorities, then he'll be soon working for a new company. The action/response equations couldn't be more simple.
Ben is also viewed by the vast majority of his employees, particularly the engineers, as one of the best CEOs they've ever worked for.
A good manager would have recognized your reaction against threat and have taken a different approach with you. Truth is, without knowing Steve or Ben and Steve's relationship with each other, it's hard to extract too much out of this line.
The executive ranks are full of people who prefer direct "do this or here's the consequence" talk. I personally prefer that. If it's really that important, then let me know with words that can't be misconstrued.
I like my leadership transparent and decisive. Sometimes that may come across as blunt and rude.
The whole dialog between him and the manager gave me that vibe. He has the manager giving two- or three-word responses and non-responses like "Umm, well...." and then the CEO launches into a monologue. I don't see anywhere in the dialogue that he gave the manager a chance to explain his point of view. The dialogue is very unidirectional. Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I'd say the CEO could probably try listening to his managers more and giving them orders less.
I had thought about that possibility, or the possibility that the conversation that he wrote isn't exactly as it went. But I think that the conversation that he decided to write in the article is a reflection of his own mental processes. That is actually more telling about how he sees his manager than an actual conversation would be.
If, in the actual conversation, the manager tried to explain his point of view and the author instead made the manager out to be a buffoon in his story, I think it's indicative that he either (1) doesn't listen well (and therefor didn't recall what the manager said) or (2) doesn't respect his managers.
One is the issue of micromanagement versus giving people the initiative to achieve the desired result. Ironically, even the military leans heavily on the side of initiative, if only because that's the only way you can effectively lead a large number of people. You only address the details that are important at your level in the chain of command. This takes dialogue and even a degree of pushback. You don't just say "I want to fly this many sorties per day" and punish people for not living up to that if it's unreasonable. They're expected to tell you it's impossible to maintain the aircraft on that kind of schedule.
There's also the separate issue of whether there's such a thing as non-negotiable orders. It seems clear to me that there has to be such a concept for any organization to work. It's even necessary for that to be the case in order for initiative and delegation to work. There will always be decisions made far above your pay grade, and the people who made those decisions can't delegate the details down the chain unless there's some assurance that the people down the chain won't deliberately sabotage the high-level decisions. That way lies politics and other bullshit.
In the OP's situation, both sides failed. The CEO made the high-level decision that 1:1's were mandatory. The VP's mistake was his failure to enforce the decision down the chain, and the manager's mistake was to silently ignore or disobey the decision. (If the manager disagreed and pushed back in the first place, it wouldn't have become a problem). When the CEO became aware that the manager was not holding the 1:1's, he was immediately forced to attend to details below his level. This wouldn't have happened had it been clear from the outset that the decision was not, at the present time, negotiable. By making that point, the CEO resets expectations and from then forward has regained the ability to delegate.
It mystifies me that a fairly unambiguous, direct decision made by the CEO (managers have regular 1:1s with their reports) can be interpreted as somehow optional or negotiable. If you're going to have a diva moment and quit because someone threatened to fire you for not doing your damn job (for the manager, holding the 1:1's--for the VP supervising that manager, holding the manager to the expectation of holding 1:1's), the company can go without you.
Viewed in isolation, your point makes sense. But in most start-ups (at least the ones I've worked for) there are multiple unambiguous decisions from the CEO along with a good number of ambiguous ones that are all deemed to be "top priority". You can't do them all and you don't know the weights that are assigned to each of the "top priorities" so you duck out on things that seem like lower priorities. In a typical chaotic startup company it wouldn't surprise me at all that something like regular 1:1 meetings with your manager could fall by the wayside.
I think that's the OP's point, though. Sometimes you have to clarify which decisions are unambiguous, not presently open to negotiation, and absolutely mandatory. If a decision has been perceived as something less than that, you need to clarify it. "This is your job, this is why it's important, and like everyone else in the world who doesn't have a damn good union, a sinecure, or serious blackmail on their boss, if you don't do your job you get fired."
There are many, many ways to clarify that this is important without threatening the man. If you jump straight to "blah blah blah in 24 hours or you're fired", that's just awful management. It is possible that Ben did not jump straight there, but that's certainly the way he tells it.
The 24 hours bit is a little harsh, but let's be honest here--saying "do this or be fired" is brutally honest, nothing worse. Any other way of putting it would just be a euphemism for "do this or be fired", and euphemisms are bullshit.
Just because a way of expressing is not the absolute rudest thing you could think of doesn't make it a euphemism. If anything, under normal circumstances, "Do this or be fired" is a dysphemism for just telling somebody to do something.
I mean, we're talking about a situation where clearly people hadn't been doing something they'd already been told to do, and somehow expected not to be fired over it.
It's actually not clear that they'd been told to do it (at least, not clearly) based on Ben's description of the situation. Nowhere does he say anything like "I'd talked to this guy about this before" — instead, he talks about how he leads by example and throws out lots of suggestions that he doesn't really expect to be followed.
So the job of a manager is just ensure that CEO's orders, no matter how stupid they may be are executed without any shadow of doubt, and no questions asked? By highly intelligent employees?
That's some lame management and some lame company to be in.
It's also every employee's job to honestly and openly argue with anything that he finds stupid or unnecessary. If he doesn't speak up, or if he loses that argument, then yes, he is supposed to commit to the decision that's been made and execute it to the best of his ability.
Conversely, it's every senior employee's job to listen to these arguments in good faith and countermand his own bad decisions once they've been pointed out as such.
What isn't anyone's job, ever, is to receive instructions from above and silently ignore them. Especially in this particular example, a manager who hasn't had a 1:1 with any of his reports in half a year probably isn't some brave conscientious objector trying to hide from the oppression of the CEO, he's more likely a shitty manager and the people working for him would probably be glad to see him summarily fired in the first place.
Yeah, I would have quit on the spot, too. Even though I agree with his overall message, and e "or you will be fired" is implicit. All he needed to do was say "making this a great place to work is my one goal" and any reasonable person would have jumped on it.
I wonder if their corporate culture at the time was so dysfunctional that threats were necessary for any response, in which case quitting is a great move anyway. Or maybe he is just trying to appear more badass for dramatic effect in a story.
(It's kind of like every time I had a rifle on a sling in a war zone, I never had to threaten anyone. You only threaten people when you have no power.)
How would you have handled it differently? We can all get handwavey and say, "I wouldn't let it happen on my watch!"
But, let's say it did happen. Something that you feel is fundamentally important to the companies core and culture hasn't occurred in six months, how do you handle it?
In general you talk about it. So if over the course of 6 months you have been raising the 'temperature' of the requirement with your report and not getting the results you want, then at some point you have to 'call the vote' as it were. You say "OK, we've talked about this for 6 months, you and I disagree clearly. Rather than waste any more time on this you have a choice to make, you either implement the policy as I've asked you to do or you go work somewhere else, which do you want to do?"
It would be a challenge if out of the blue you had to take this position, and generally as a report to the CEO you won't, although I could imagine that to Steve's manager its going to come as a huge surprise when Steve gives him the requirement that he meet with his employees or be fired, because clearly Steve hasn't been passing along this requirement. For that guy, the unnamed manager for Steve, its going to feel very arbitrary and I feel bad for him.
"Some reason" being that they were failing to do the job he had hired and trained them to do. Don't be a prima donna--many working people would get fired just for showing up 30 minutes late, what makes you think you're any more special than they are?
There is a massive difference between knowledge workers and hourly workers at Walmart. I have never met anyone in my life in the tech industry who would 'be fired for showing up 30 minutes late'. This isn't a minimum wage job where you can simply be replaced by the next idiot that walks in the door, so the norms are slightly different. If people want to manage highly skilled workers as if they were replaceable cogs they certainly can, I just suspect it will lead to them having a staff full of replaceable cogs and not much success.
I wasn't speaking of a difference in basic humanity, I was speaking of a difference in skill level and options. I also wasn't trying to justify treating anyone poorly, but when your job takes a minimum of skills and you are easily replaceable then, realistically, you have less bargaining power than someone with a much higher skill level or cost of replacement. It would be nice if everyone treated everyone with basic respect and dignity, but on lower wage jobs (trust me, I have held a number of those prior to my going to college, which I did later in life than most peers) you are more easily replaceable because the skills necessary for the job are easily acquirable by most anyone. That translates into less understanding/leeway from a management perspective. This shouldn't be license for management to be a dick, but it does mean that things like getting written-up/disciplined for being 20 minutes late is the norm, whereas in my experience in the tech field being 'late' doesn't even make sense since there aren't really set hours (the presumption is you will get your work done by some deadline, regardless of what hours you choose to work in order to accomplish that). The idea that someone who expects to be treated like a competent adult is being a 'prima donna' is just a strawman insult used by management, likely due to insecurity which drives the need to try and pull power trips to 'show who's in charge'.
> There is a massive difference between knowledge workers and hourly workers at Walmart. I have never met anyone in my life in the tech industry who would 'be fired for showing up 30 minutes late'.
There's a massive difference in that specific example, sure. Though not necessarily--lots of knowledge workers are on-call and expected to respond quickly to pages, and repeatedly missing the expected response time would be a firing offense.
But in any business, there are certain non-negotiable requirements that an employee has to meet to keep his job. Showing up on time may or may not be one of them, but the requirements exist. And while it's shitty for any manager to treat his workers as replaceable cogs (even at Wal-Mart--they don't exactly have the best retail employees), it's equally shitty for an individual worker to act like he's irreplaceable and that the rules don't apply to him. As I said, don't be a prima donna.
That sounds more like one gets exactly no chances to threaten you, but never mind your imprecise language.
These are managers we're talking about here, not workers. Middle managers have indirect, damped control over the quality of a company's output, but direct and leveraged influence over a company's culture. A bad middle manager can wreak havoc on morale, can pollute the talent well by hiring Bs and Cs and can drive the As away. Ben has stated clearly that his top priority is that culture; that kind of thing isn't said just once. These managers are both failing at implementing the CEO's wishes and he is right to hold them accountable.
Ben approached this well. He confronted Tim's boss - presumably higher paid, with all the extra trust and responsibility that implies - with a short, sharp shock and a restatement of his expectations. He phrased it in a way that makes his vision absolutely clear, then showed the consequences of failure. That boss should, if he's half decent, then have a very different meeting with Tim in which he asks why he couldn't have his one-on-ones, re-states the importance of them and provides either extra training or some resolution into the root cause of Tim's inability to hold the meetings. Tim's boss shouldn't be just passing Ben's threat of termination on like a hot potato; he should be resolving the situation.
I largely agree with your underlying message that a culture of fear is a bad thing for a company, but in this case Ben is right to wield a dirty great stick in front of his senior manager. He's doing it to protect the workers and the culture he's worked hard to build by holding his most privileged, trusted and influential staff accountable for their failure.
If the situation was that way fore 6mos before he noticed it, I think it's reasonable to speculate that "the culture he's worked hard to build" is at least partially imaginary in Ben's head.
Agreed. They made a mistake and they should fix it, but firing people just for doing a single mistake isn't the right the way to go. Ben has treaten Steve and Tim bad with this response. Ben should have talked first to Steve and told him that he should have a 1:1 talk with Tim about the problemm, so they could figure out why Tim hadn't done any 1:1 talks with the team. Maybe he has a good reason and you could figure out a good solution to avoid this in the future.
I think that is an oversimplification. Winning overcomes a lot of things. Why did people put up with Steve jobs? Why do a lt of winning sports tems have angry shouting head coaches?
Although the CEO definitely did not need to act and word the encounter the way he did, I don't see this as a self respect issue. The employee failed to do something that the CEO trained him and required him to do for his job. The employee did not hold up his end of the deal, which means he was in the wrong, and at risk of getting fired. As you say, amongst professionals, one should do the things their boss asks.
You get exactly one chance to threaten me. That was it. I quit.
(Honestly, all this management style does is ensure that the only people you'll be able to keep are the ones who will put up with your shit. Not a very good recipe for building a great company, huh?)