The Trap of Thinking That Software is Management

Soft­ware can be very pow­er­ful for enabling what you need to do in your business.

But we have to be care­ful how and where it’s used. This is espe­cial­ly true when it comes to things that should be done by a man­ag­er, like the expe­ri­ence and engage­ment of employees.

These man­age­ment touch points that are incred­i­bly crit­i­cal and high value.

Soft­ware matters

For grow­ing and scal­ing most com­pa­nies these days, it’s crit­i­cal to auto­mate menial, data-dri­ven tasks or inef­fi­cient processes.

Of course, even for these process­es, you have to do the ROI and test to see if it actu­al­ly does the job bet­ter, faster or cheap­er, first.

We’re mas­sive believ­ers in tech­nol­o­gy but soft­ware can’t man­age peo­ple, and we can’t let it remove the humane­ness of work.

Peo­ple matter

We’ve seen soft­ware designed to auto­mate meet­ings, recruit­ment and onboard­ing process­es. While they may make the manager’s job eas­i­er, they sim­ply can’t replace build­ing rela­tion­ships, coach­ing, account­abil­i­ty and teach­ing peo­ple about your culture.

As a new hire, the expe­ri­ence of sit­ting alone in a room, watch­ing videos and read­ing doc­u­ments, for the first day or two on the job, is less than ide­al. And it can lead to dis­en­gage­ment and reten­tion issues.

Soft­ware should nev­er do jobs that peo­ple should do. It’s like going to a spec­tac­u­lar, five-star restau­rant and typ­ing your order on an iPad. Peo­ple in that sit­u­a­tion are look­ing for an experience.

And soft­ware sim­ply can’t replace the human-to-human experience.

We still use an Excel spread­sheet to guide our 13-week onboard­ing process, and one of our newest peo­ple gave us feed­back that it was the most incred­i­ble onboard­ing they had ever expe­ri­enced — that they had nev­er felt so sup­port­ed, includ­ed and educated.

The key, when look­ing at soft­ware solu­tions, out­side of ROI and effi­cien­cy, is to look where it might have neg­a­tive impact on teams and cus­tomers, and poten­tial­ly cre­ate bad habits.

The Chal­lenge

• Where might you have a sys­tem or soft­ware try­ing to do the job of a man­ag­er who should build con­nec­tion, con­fi­dence or capa­bil­i­ty, with their cus­tomers or team mem­bers instead?
• The eas­i­er ques­tion: Where could soft­ware cost-effec­tive­ly man­age some­thing in your busi­ness in which a man­ag­er does not need to be involved?

Want to hear more? Lis­ten to Episode 107 of The Growth Whisperers.

Lawrence & Co’s work focus­es on sus­tain­able and enhanced growth for you and your busi­ness. Our diverse and expe­ri­enced group of advi­sors can help your lead­ers and exec­u­tive teams stay com­pet­i­tive through the use of var­i­ous learn­ing tools includ­ing work­shops, webi­na­rs, exec­u­tive retreats, or one-to-one coaching.

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