290. Managing People Is Hard - Just Ask Dharmesh
Managing people isn't easy. But it's a required activity on the path to leadership. Maybe we should rethink leadership. Just ask Dharmesh.
This is The Best Leadership Newsletter Ever, a weekly way to reframe your daily behavior and catapult your career, like understanding the truth about trust.
Dharmesh Shah is amazing.
He’s the cofounder and CTO of Hubspot. Along with his co-cofounder, Brian Halligan, they built the company from an idea to a multi-billion dollar business.
But that’s not the only reason why I think he’s amazing.
Dharmesh was in charge of creating the company’s culture. The Hubspot culture code is a model of health and happiness. It is the reason why they are continually voted as one of the happiest places to work.
But that’s also not the only reason why I think he’s amazing.
Here’s the real reason Dharmesh is my hero:
When he decided to start Hubspot, Dharmesh had one important caveat:
He never wanted to manage a single person. Ever.
Throughout every stage of growth for this technology behemoth, from inception through IPO, Dharmesh stuck to his desire and stayed true to his word. In the process, he became one of the most successful CTOs in history without ever having a single direct report.
That’s amazing.
Managing People is Hard
Managing people isn’t easy.
It’s a constant juggling act. Just as it feels like you’re hitting your groove, the floor shifts from under your feet and you're knocked off balance.
This juggling act involves four different elements to keep in the air when managing employees. They are:
Business Operations
You need to make sure the employees get their work done. That’s kinda Management 101.
Emotional Health
Happy people are productive people. It’s your job to keep your team motivated, inspired and happy.
Interpersonal Balance
Your team members must be able to communicate effectively with each other. That doesn’t always happen as effortlessly as we’d like. It’s your job to help manage those flailing interpersonal relationships.
Personality Maintenance
Everybody has different needs and different triggers and different ways of weighing on you. Your role as a manager is to balance those personalities to maintain harmony and progress.
Putting those four pieces together in the most optimum way is like rubbing your stomach and patting your head while spinning ceramic plates on top of bamboo sticks that are clenched between your cramping toes.
You’re basically one sneeze away from complete chaos.
The Curse Of The Good Worker
Managing people is a learned skill.
But they don’t teach you how to do it in high school.
They don’t teach you how to do it in college.
And they certainly don’t teach you how to do it at most companies.
Still, when you excel at doing your job, your reward is that you get to manage people.
Yes, it’s a learned skill. But you mostly have to learn it on your own.
Godspeed.
The better you do at your job, the more people you get to manage until you’re no longer doing any of the job that you excelled at in the first place.
We are expected to accept that career trajectory. We are expected to embrace the idea that all roads to success involve managing people.
After all, if you don’t embrace it, you are penalized.
If you don’t want to manage people, you don’t get the promotion. You don’t get the bigger title. And you’re definitely not going to get the increased compensation.
Then along came Dharmesh.
The People Management Bias
There’s a bias around managing people.
The common belief is that, in order to be a successful leader, you must be good at managing people. Heck, if you can’t manage people, how good of a leader can you really be, amirite?
Honestly, I think that attitude stinks like a scared skunk at a coyote convention.
Some of the best workers - in fact, some of the best leaders - are not great people managers.
In my executive coaching business I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and the leaders they hire. The entrepreneurial mindset is not always compatible with managing people. However, the transition from founder to leader is one of the most difficult transformations to accomplish. Only .01% of entrepreneurs can do it successfully.
Does that mean the entrepreneurial founder needs to leave the company if they can’t manage people?
Why don’t you just ask Dharmesh that question.
It’s OK To Not Manage People
Throughout my career, I’ve worked with some truly brilliant entrepreneurial minds who weren’t good managers of people.
Most of them ended up leaving the company or being fired.
I know more than a few salespeople who can generate millions of dollars in new business every year, but they couldn’t manage a sales team if they came with an instruction manual.
What happened? They never rose to senior management.
Call me crazy, but I think this is a whole rung of wrong.
Let’s face it, not everybody is good at managing people. Not everybody even wants to manage people.
It’s just not fair to penalize people who are great at their jobs, simply because they don’t excel in an unrelated area of leadership.
Leadership is about behavior. People can exemplify leadership behavior without having to manage direct reports.
That’s a fact.
Just ask Dharmesh.
It’s Time To Rethink Leadership
Maybe it’s time to rethink the way you think about leadership.
Should all the leaders in your company be managing people?
Will your company be more productive by removing direct report responsibilities from certain individuals?
The fact remains that expertise, influence and innovation can happen without requiring people management. So maybe it’s time we repave the path to success with an option that allows some people to excel in their passion, without the frustrations involved in managing others.
In the end, not being a “manager” doesn’t mean you aren’t a leader. In fact, your contribution to a company can be just as valuable — and maybe even more so — when you’re not mired in people management.
Just ask Dharmesh.
Subscribe to The Best Leadership Podcast Ever
YouTube
Apple
Spotify
or your favorite podcast player.
Leading Starts With Following
🎥 Subscribe on YouTube
⏰ Follow me on TikTok
📖 Follow me on Facebook
⛓️ Follow me on LinkedIn
📷 Follow me on Instagram
🅧 Follow me on X (Twitter)
This is incredible to ponder. I've posited it for a while in my own coaching practice to my clients but Dharmesh is such a great example of this. Is there more info on the mechanics of how his non-people management works? I vaguely remember hearing about it, maybe on the My First Million podcast...?