You're Doing it Wrong Part 9: All Captains, no Sailors

Who actually does the work, managers or employees?

Introduction

We are taking a step back from healthcare and health insurance to bring you a new series: You’re Doing it Wrong.  In this 15-part series we will discuss all the things that business people, et al. do that are counterproductive, risky and raise the cost of their own products and services and consequently the cost to you, dear reader, the consumer.  This ninth installment is an indictment of the entire business decision and leadership structure.  You can’t have more “leaders” and “decision makers” than you do people actually carrying out the work.

We are taking a break from healthcare because there is no new real news.  The AI hype is just getting worse and will never pan out; the EMR vendors haven't realized that you can't document encounters with text or language; insurance companies rip off everyone, so we are stepping back and looking at the bigger picture.  If you need your weekly dose of healthcare, read our article Saving Healthcare: How to Make Rural Healthcare Viable.

The Situation

Business is shooting itself in the foot over management.  The last time I saw an acceptable management to worker ratio was in the late eighties when I worked in a machine shop as a recent high school grad.  Today, everyone wants to have a cushy office job, in the air conditioning, with the mandate to “ideate” (not a word regardless of what M-W.com says) and make important decisions.

There aren’t that many important decisions to make that aren't directly supported by the people actually doing the work.  To extend the metaphor of the title, the captain says where and the engineer room figures out how to get there.  I think we are far, far down the path of “leaders” being blow hard know-nothing cheerleaders who can’t really do anything.  Musk didn’t design that rocket engine, and one wonders if he needed a new design at all.  He also didn’t invent the battery car, those have been around since the turn of the last century (1900, not 2000) and aren’t any more viable then than they are now.  Bezos didn’t invent AWS, and in fact it was done incredibly badly under his watch; he made the mistake of buying too much hardware for their little site and had to figure out a way to sell the processor cycles or eat that mistake.  

WE posit that unless you can actually provide the goods or services that your company makes, you have no business in managing the people that do.

The Logical Conclusion

Layers and layers of management can’t point a clear direction.  Layers and layers of management are incredibly expensive.  Layers and layers of management have to come up with stupid excuses for their own continued existence like “Return to Office” (RTO, and that is the subject of next week’s article) so they can be seen doing something, even if what they do is fairly useless.  The upshot of this is that efficiency goes down and prices go up to the point where an over-managed company will struggle to even continue its own existence.

Literally, these layers of management are resource sucking leeches that produce no salable goods or services and only muddy the water and consume resources.  

The Short Answer

Anyone who doesn’t either point direction or actually spin the wrenches of industry needs to go.  By “point direction” I mean figure out what and how we are going to provide the product or service, and by “spin the wrenches” I mean actually do the work.  

When a takeover happens in the corporate world, either the bankruptcy, acquisition or a hired consulting firm, the very first thing that always happens is the elimination of middle management.  You don’t need them and shouldn’t have them.

The Slightly Longer Answer

So what do all those middle managers do?  I assume they write reports mostly.  Status reports, progress reports, HR stuff like employee reviews.  The funny thing is that we don’t need people to write reports. What you do need is a worker bee, a wrench spinner, to have access to the underlying report data and produce a canned report that a C-Suite denizen can run with a single click.

That one-click report is actually a small part of what we do here at Sentia.  This is not a marketing piece and really more of a hatchet piece against the powers that be, but we know how business both does, and should work and those two things are not anywhere close to each other.

Clearly then to automate these reports we need all the data in the company, all in one place, at one time and accessible by the people who need it.  In past articles we have advocated for the need for custom built software to run a company, and this is one reason why.  With a zillion disparate point solutions and siloed applications, business still needs developers to finish them, maintain them and integrate them with each other.  Why not skip the original purchase price and write your own software that doesn’t need integration and make the one click report possible?  This also obviates the need for layers upon layers of middle management.

So the solution becomes to simply automate everything that the layers of management does.  In a large company, we have the various CxOs, probably department heads and the aforementioned worker bees.  That is really all you need.  Let the employees themselves solve the problems, they have better insights into what needs to be done in most cases, anyway.  

Get rid of HR.  If you need to automate your payroll and employee education, farm that out to an HR outsourcing company.  HR is just a way to avoid lawsuits in any case.  Quite literally “we provided this training that said ‘this behavior is appropriate and that isn’t.’”

Conclusions

Of course, not all middle managers are worthless, and some can provide valuable insights into what work gets done and how.  The trick is to cut as much as possible but not more.  

We have shown that middle managers are largely a waste of resources.

We have shown a viable solutions framework to replace them largely with automation

Remember, this is part nine of a fifteen-part series about how businesses are being run incorrectly by business people who probably haven’t been trained in the intricacies of doing whatever it is that their company does.  That however is no excuse for basic incompetence.  We are demonstrating not only the problems of modern business, but real, viable solutions.

I will be putting out one or maybe two articles per week.  If you liked what you read or want to relate your personal experiences, contact us here, on our site, SentiaHealth.com, our parent company SentiaSystems.com, or send us an email to info@sentiasystems.com or info@sentiahealth.com.  By here I mean comment and tell me that I am a cotton-headed ninny-muggins or whatever else you need to say.