Podcast EP 107 | Software is Not Management

There’s a trap that lead­ers can fall into, think­ing that soft­ware can replace the impor­tant role of man­ag­ing people.

Some soft­ware com­pa­nies advo­cate that their prod­uct will remove or reduce the need to man­age and lead peo­ple. But this comes with a set of sec­ond-order con­se­quences that affect employ­ee engage­ment and reten­tion. In the end, there is no sub­sti­tute for lead­ers help­ing peo­ple to be great at their job.

In this episode of The Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast, Brad Giles and Kevin Lawrence talk about how soft­ware is high­ly effec­tive at automat­ing process­es that are inef­fi­cient, but can­not replace human to human inter­ac­tions. They also dis­cuss the line between automat­ing tasks and man­ag­ing peo­ple to be more effective.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Kevin Lawrence 00:12

Wel­come to the growth whis­per­ers pod­cast where every­thing that Brad and I talk about is relat­ed to build­ing endur­ing, great com­pa­nies. Because that’s what we care about. I’m Kevin Lawrence, here today, as always, for the 107 time, with the won­der­ful Brad Giles from down in Aus­tralia, Brad, how you doing today?

Brad Giles 00:33

Won­der­ful, had a super intense week last week with clients. And hav­ing a cou­ple of days off this week, which is great.

Kevin Lawrence 00:47

It was great today to have two thirds of my team face to face for our quar­ter­ly. And that was awe­some to have every­one back togeth­er again. And it’s just noth­ing like being in per­son for the con­nec­tion and the rela­tion­al part. Some­times it’s not as pro­duc­tive because you get chat­ting, which is also I think, a won­der­ful thing for your bonds and your rela­tion­ships in the cul­ture. So what, what are we dig­ging into today?

Brad Giles 01:20

It’s the trap of think­ing that soft­ware is man­age­ment. But some­thing that we’ve come to kind of come across. And we spent a very long time talk­ing about this sub­ject today.

Kevin Lawrence 01:42

Yes, we had a great debate about it. We’ll get into that. What’s your word of the day today?

Brad Giles 01:48

Oh, look, it’s real­ly recu­per­a­tion. Last week, I was start­ing between six and 7am every day, and some of my last meet­ings were at eight at eight at night. And so yeah, for me, it’s I’m just switched off, and real­ly had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to recu­per­ate. And what about you, Kev?

Kevin Lawrence 02:09

Mine today is who. And not like the owl, I should talk with the owl mine, I’m gonna go with who for two rea­sons, because we just use this amaz­ing and it’s not a new thing, then called the meet­ing owl Pro. If you’ve got a bunch of peo­ple in a room, and most of those video con­fer­enc­ing sys­tems are chal­leng­ing to be able to see peo­ple and hear peo­ple, we have to hack around them all the time. And we used it for a meet­ing today. And it was out­stand­ing, because it just sits in the mid­dle of the table. So that’s one part of who the oth­er part of who is when you’re stuck on some­thing, as Jim Collins has said many times in ses­sions with him is that your first ques­tion should be a who ques­tion. So that’s one thing also who from the owl per­spec­tive, because it’s an amaz­ing tool for run­ning vir­tu­al meet­ings, or when there’s peo­ple in per­son in a board­room or a room? Or medi­um? And then who just always think about who is the best per­son that you can call to get some­thing done? All right, well, let’s dig into about that and sewing those togeth­er, you know, like, who is going to make sure that you get the reju­ve­na­tion? Maybe that would be the ques­tion who, in my world, I need some account­abil­i­ty some­times because I don’t do enough. That’s not a great, so togeth­er of those two, but we’ll take it. Awe­some. So let’s dig into this trap of think­ing soft­ware’s man­age­ment. I got­ta say, when Brad and I were talk­ing about this, as we’re prepar­ing for the show, he’s explain­ing some of the stuff that he’s seen in some com­pa­nies. And I’ve seen some sim­i­lar exam­ples from a dif­fer­ent lens of peo­ple think­ing that soft­ware is actu­al­ly man­age­ment. Some bad words start­ed com­ing out of my mouth, I’m like, You talk­ing about? Like, of course, you know, soft­ware can’t man­age peo­ple. And he’s gonna Oh, that’s not the things that some peo­ple are think­ing that is a great idea these days. And he had some exam­ples. So Bri­an, all I’ll just say is that we had some very great debates about this part of it, because I think it’s absolute­ly Looney Tunes. And he goes, Yeah, but Kevin, you know, you’re not a 23 year old tech entre­pre­neur. That’s, that’s true. I’m past that. So Brad, tell us more about what we’re think­ing here and set up our con­ver­sa­tion before we get into our con­crete ideas.

Brad Giles 04:36

Thank you. Well, it’s a trap. Okay. It’s a trap that we can think that soft­ware is man­age­ment, and specif­i­cal­ly, man­age­ment is man­age­ment. And soft­ware is soft­ware. That’s kind of obvi­ous, right? But more and more as the soft­ware as a ser­vice, you know, indus­try con­tin­ues to flour­ish. You know, there’s a great say­ing from there, that soft­ware will eat the world. But, but there’s no sub­sti­tute for hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions with one’s man­ag­er. And that’s what employ­ees need. And that’s what employ­ees often crave, is engage­ment with their man­ag­er to help them to under­stand how to suc­ceed, you know, and then there’s also account­abil­i­ty. So there’s, there’s, there’s a num­ber of dif­fer­ent areas that man­age­ment applies, that dri­ves employ­ee engage­ment, that soft­ware, it just like in the fore­see­able future, it won’t be able to counter. And so we’ve got to be care­ful because it is a trap, we’ve got to be care­ful that we don’t begin to think that soft­ware can actu­al­ly take over the role of man­ag­ing peo­ple and dri­ving employ­ee engagement.

Kevin Lawrence 06:02

Yeah, it total­ly, insane­ly log­i­cal to me, but there’s so tell us about some of the peo­ple that are going down a dif­fer­ent road. Can you give some exam­ples, Brad, you know, you shared some with me ear­li­er? And what some of that think­ing is that I just can’t relate to.

Brad Giles 06:19

So I’m writ­ing a book about onboard­ing as an exam­ple. And I have seen in the onboard­ing world where peo­ple are sell­ing soft­ware, and what they’re try­ing to do is say that he, this is every­thing, onboard­ing, okay. So as a man­ag­er, you will have the new hire come into the firm, and the onboard­ing, every­thing will be done by an auto­mat­ed process, or soft­ware, or what have you. And this employ­ee will, after they’ve been through the onboard­ing, that is auto­mat­ed, they will front up to the man­ag­er, and they will be pris­tine, they will have a lit­tle bow tied around them because it’s all per­fect. But the prob­lem is that that may be a utopia for the man­ag­er, right? But imag­ine if you’re the new hire that’s com­ing into this firm, and you come in and you meet with the HR on your first day, and then they say, All right, so here’s what we want here to do. We want you to watch these 100 videos, and we want you to read these 27 doc­u­ments. And then once you’ve done that, then maybe in two or three days, you can go and you’ll meet with your man­ag­er, and he’ll get you on the job. Or don’t do that, too. They well, do they do it? Or is it some­thing that peo­ple are a trap that peo­ple are unwit­ting­ly begin­ning to observe? It’s the same, it’s the same as the hir­ing trap, right? So the hir­ing trap is that peo­ple think that there’s a vacan­cy, peo­ple are going to turn up on the day, after you place the vacan­cy, they will be in a play­er, and they’ll be able to start the day off. Right? It’s a trap, in the same way that this can be a trap.

Kevin Lawrence 08:15

If you lis­ten to the mar­ket­ing from some of the, you know, the the the the dig­i­tal recruit­ment com­pa­nies, they talk about match­ing can­di­dates and stuff like that. And we know that’s not one day, maybe that’ll hap­pen. I you know, I and I’ve got a com­pa­ny that’s try­ing to work on mak­ing that hap­pen. They’re work­ing on it. But yeah, it was the one thing that we know is that the soft­ware can be very pow­er­ful for enabling things in busi­ness. And it can also be a big pit of ener­gy, mon­ey time, for things that it claims to do. And it does. So real­ly what you’re say­ing here is that what we’re say­ing here is, you know, be care­ful of, of soft­ware that auto­mates things that real­ly should, in the short, medi­um and long term be done by a man­ag­er with peo­ple because it adds to the engage­ment and the expe­ri­ence of the employ­ee. So basi­cal­ly, don’t let the soft­ware remove the valu­able part of the humane­ness of work.

Brad Giles 09:14

So imag­ine that you have a foot­ball team and you’re watch­ing the foot­ball game, what do you see in the break, so all teams will have a break, maybe a quar­ter at the quar­ter time, the team play­ers will all run off to the coach or the series of coach­es, and they will pro­vide them with coach­ing and feed­back and account­abil­i­ty and a whole range of things. Okay, well, well, that is akin to man­age­ment. Okay, we are deal­ing with those employ­ees. The play­ers are run­ning off and they’re hav­ing a human to human expe­ri­ence. Well imag­ine instead of that if they came off the field. And then they went and looked at a series of iPad screens. So then you’ve got like the 12 or 20 play­ers, and they’re always look­ing at the screen. Fun­ny. It’d be hilar­i­ous. It would be fun­ny, but we can’t imag­ine that in the fore­see­able future. And like that engage­ment from a human is miss­ing that pas­sion. Yeah. Right. And so we’ve got to be care­ful that we don’t fall into the trap of not dri­ving employ­ee engagement.

Kevin Lawrence 10:29

Yes. And basi­cal­ly, those man­age­ment touch points that are incred­i­bly high val­ue and crit­i­cal. Yeah, that is awe­some. Great. So our first kind of point on this is soft­ware mat­ters. It is crit­i­cal to grow­ing and scal­ing most com­pa­nies these days, it auto­mates process­es that are inef­fi­cient. And it can make peo­ple more effec­tive, no two ways about it. And even with onboard­ing, there is soft­ware things that can assist in that, and mak­ing an awe­some onboard­ing process. I know, for our team we use, we’re still using an Excel spread­sheet for it, to help us to map it out. I mean, even the fact that we have 13 week onboard­ing plan. Inter­est­ing. As a side note, one of our newest peo­ple that we on board­ed, just gave feed­back on our meet­ing, that was the most incred­i­ble onboard­ing they’ve ever had. They nev­er felt so sup­port­ed, includ­ed, edu­cat­ed, and there’s a guy on Dean on my team who dri­ves up Ark did a mag­i­cal job of it. And if we were at scale, we prob­a­bly would have soft­ware to assist with it. But the key is, you know, it’s about the involve­ment and get­ting to know the peo­ple, the cul­ture and things and build­ing rela­tion­ships, and not let­ting the soft­ware do jobs that it should­n’t be doing. In many ways, it’s almost and here’s anoth­er great exam­ple, I’m think­ing about this. It’s like you go out to a spec­tac­u­lar restau­rant. I don’t want to be typ­ing in my order to an iPad on the table. Right at a five star restau­rant. That’s just not what I’m look­ing for. I’m look­ing for an expe­ri­ence, and to feel impor­tant and tak­en care of and enjoy the evening. I don’t want to be order­ing off that that’s know, if I’m going to order take­out. I’m hap­py to do it online. Those are two very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences. And with our most impor­tant peo­ple we hire, we just don’t want to take them like a take­out treat them like a take­out order.

Brad Giles 12:24

Oh, because that you’re talk­ing about only going out for din­ner, which is one or two hours. But this is like 8, 10 12 hours a day like this, you know, work con­sumes so much of peo­ple’s time and lives. So yeah, yeah. And, and that is from their per­spec­tive. But let’s not come back, right. Reten­tion mat­ters. Employ­ee engage­ment mat­ters, like these things have real tan­gi­ble out­puts. So mov­ing on to the next point, soft­ware does­n’t replace the human to human expe­ri­ence. And that’s what you’re kind of say­ing, right? It does­n’t replace the cul­ture, it does­n’t replace the moti­va­tion or the account­abil­i­ty, but man­agers must still man­age peo­ple man­agers job is to help peo­ple to per­form to achieve the results that they need.

Kevin Lawrence 13:19

That’s almost a great def­i­n­i­tion of man­age­ment, you just said they’re bred man­agers help peo­ple to per­form, or to achieve what is expect­ed of them. Awe­some. Love that.

Brad Giles 13:29

So that is to under­stand what is to be expect­ed of them. Right. So they help them to under­stand, and then they help to pro­vide feed­back and course cor­rec­tion and all of those things. I mean, you know, Google actu­al­ly tried an expe­ri­ence where they had no man­agers, Google tried the exper­i­ment. I think it was in the mid 2000s, or ear­ly 2000s.

Kevin Lawrence 13:57

And at least more than at least a decade ago, from my recollection.

Brad Giles 14:01

So a lot of engi­neers said, we’re a mod­ern com­pa­ny. We don’t need to have man­agers, you know, we can man­age it our­selves. We use the OKR sys­tem. It’s high­ly effec­tive. And we can do that right. And then they began to see some ter­ri­ble out­comes as a result. So I think it last­ed for about nine months to 12 months. And then they began to see the real ram­i­fi­ca­tions of not hav­ing man­agers. And so then they said, Look, we’re going to do it the Google way. It’s not going to be the tra­di­tion­al way. But we still need man­agers to help peo­ple to under­stand what’s expect­ed of them how to course cor­rect to coach and to hold them account­able, all of those types of things.

Kevin Lawrence 14:46

Yep, makes sense. Any­way, you even said, there’s, you know, some AI soft­ware try­ing to run meet­ings and things and, you know, the thing that soft­ware does­n’t do the great man­agers do is also to empathize with peo­ple. Hear them Feel it, and then be there to help them find their own ways and fig­ure out their own answers. But there’s sup­port. And in many ways, we all good man­age­ment some­times is like good par­ent­ing of young chil­dren, you’re help­ing to grow and devel­op and make them inde­pen­dent and teach them skills. And, again, we’re mas­sive believ­ers in tech­nol­o­gy is just let­ting it do the job let­ting tech­nol­o­gy do the jobs. It should­n’t. It’s awesome.

Brad Giles 15:28

Yeah. So yeah, we are mas­sive fans of tech­nol­o­gy. But if you’re if you are look­ing at tech­nol­o­gy, just think, is this going a lit­tle tiny bit too far? Is this, is this going to affect my employ­ee engage­ment? Is this is in that way? I mean, can you imag­ine, for exam­ple, being man­aged by Siri? You know, I mean, Siri would have to be one of the best arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence or human to human expe­ri­ences that that that we get with soft­ware, right, in a ver­bal kind of way. And so there’s Siri for Apple, or there’s I think it’s Bix­by for Google,

Kevin Lawrence 16:18

or Alexa for Ama­zon. I yell I yell at Alexa all the time.

Brad Giles 16:23

I like this is the best job. on a b2c type envi­ron­ment. This is the best job that the biggest tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies in the world can pro­vide us. Yep. And like, it’s, it’s awful. Half the time. Maybe it’s just that, that, you know, I’m from Aus­tralia, and we have a dif­fer­ent accent. But I think gen­er­al­ly that’s for sim­ple things. Like, can you tell me how to get to the local shop? This is like, can you imag­ine if Siri was your man­ag­er, it’s far­ci­cal to even think about. But, and maybe one day. And it would lead to dis­en­gage­ment and reten­tion issues.

Kevin Lawrence 17:13

Yes, and good man­agers help with engage­ment and help­ing, you know, find ways for peo­ple to be sup­port­ed and believed in and giv­ing the tid­bits they need or the acknowl­edge­ment they need, or what­ev­er it hap­pens to be. And, again, there’s parts of that you don’t you would­n’t want soft­ware to be able to do that. And maybe it will one day, but it sure is there today.

Brad Giles 17:36

The oth­er thing is, is a soft­ware help­ing employ­ees become more effi­cient by replac­ing menial data dri­ven tasks? Or is it replac­ing man­age­ment of peo­ple? So if you’re replac­ing inef­fi­cient data entry, or repeat­ed data entry or any­thing, that’s just a grind? Now you have to do the ROI on end, you got to test it and see, does it actu­al­ly make it bet­ter? Because there’s a lot of times when peo­ple think it makes it bet­ter, and it does­n’t, but you know, there’s doing that kind of stuff can be real­ly, real­ly good. Like, even just in our, our team meet­ing today, it’s a basic thing. But we’re just talk­ing about the use of dig­i­tal sig­na­tures for client sig­na­tures on projects, right? We nev­er we’ve been doing it the old way. Here it is, sign it, send it back. And you know, peo­ple can dig­i­tal­ly sign a PDF. But if you send like DocuSign, they open it up, they click, they put the sig­na­ture and they just sign in a few spots, it takes 17 sec­onds. And it’s easy. There’s things like that. Automat­ing stuff like that is a no brain­er. For some com­pa­nies that have a lot of peo­ple sign­ing things. But that’s fine. ver­sus, you know, hold­ing peo­ple account­able, coach­ing, moti­vat­ing, you know, and even the idea of try­ing to replace meet­ings just makes me cringe, with stuff like that, because you’re los­ing that rela­tion­al, the teach­ing moments, the coach­ing moments, all those oth­er things.

Brad Giles 19:05

Yeah. So ask your­self, Is this soft­ware help­ing employ­ees become more effi­cient by replac­ing menial data dri­ven tasks? Or is it replac­ing the man­age­ment of peo­ple, so coach­ing, moti­vat­ing, hold­ing peo­ple account­able? Like that’s the kind of line in the sand that we might be advo­cat­ing? That you think about, like, there’s got to be an area where if we go too far, it’s going to neg­a­tive­ly impact these areas? Yep.

Kevin Lawrence 19:35

Awe­some. So the main point is to kind of review this, the whole point is, is be care­ful not to let your automa­tion and soft­ware pieces take away the man­age­ment, which is the one on one, help­ing peo­ple to be great at their job. So soft­ware does mat­ter. You just got to make sure that it’s help­ing things to be more effi­cient. It does­n’t replace the human expe­ri­ence the human inter­face, the build­ing of cul­ture and moti­va­tion and account­abil­i­ty and help­ing them see their poten­tial and growth etc.

Brad Giles 20:09

So as an exam­ple, an extreme exam­ple, think about some of the soft­ware that you inter­act with at a human lev­el, like Siri or Bix­by from Apple or Google, or even Ama­zon Alexa, can you imag­ine this per­son being your man­ag­er, and that’s extreme, but we know it would lead to dis­en­gage­ment and reten­tion issues. So we’ve got to, as lead­ers in the busi­ness, we’ve got to know that we can push this stuff too far. And some of the soft­ware com­pa­nies will keep sell­ing us the stuff, but we need to hold the line some­times know­ing that it could impact our reten­tion. And then final­ly, we got to ask our­selves, is this help­ing employ­ees become more effi­cient? In oth­er words, is it replac­ing menial data dri­ven tasks? Or is it replac­ing actu­al­ly man­ag­ing peo­ple? Coach­ing, moti­vat­ing and hold­ing peo­ple account­able? Well, that was a good check. Give a nice and quick. We prob­a­bly spent about one quar­ter of the time doing the episode as we did actu­al­ly debat­ing it and get­ting clear on it.

So let’s move to close. You can find myself Brad Giles at evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com that are you and I’ve got an inter­est­ing newslet­ter that I put out every week, you may be able to sub­scribe to that. Of course, Kevin, you can find at lawrence​old​bu​.wpengine​.com. And he equal­ly has an inter­est­ing newslet­ter, you can sub­scribe to there. You can find the two of us on youtube if that takes your fan­cy. And of course, we’re all good pod­casts are found wher­ev­er you get your fix. Thanks for lis­ten­ing to the growth whis­per­ers we hope that you have a great week. Have a good one.