When I was new in white-collar work, I realized the bosses didn’t want to see you standing around talking much. They put up with it, but they didn’t like it. The bosses once moved a colleague across the office from me because he and I were talking too much.
Now, bosses want employees to commute an hour each way to the office, so employees can talk with each other.
The other reason bosses want employees in the office, of course, is that they suspect employees aren’t doing as much at home as they would be, under the watchful eye of the bosses—and, perhaps, the watchful side-eye of tattletale corporate colleagues.
The problem with all of this, of course, is not employees, but bosses: bosses who don’t have any solid understanding of how much output each employee ought to be able to achieve in a given role. Clearly. How else could an organization lay off 10,000 human beings and keep humming along?
And this is why I never want to be in charge of any organization so large that I can’t at least guess whether or not an employee is taking advantage of me, or I’m taking advantage of them. In my organization, I want all of us all to be taking maximum advantage of one another—to get what each of us needs in our livelihoods and our lives. I never wonder whether I’m being taken advantage of; I hope I am!
In my little remote company, I’m sure each of us has days when we don’t feel we’ve fully pulled our weight. But very rare weeks like that—and no months or years, at all. And I’m sure we each have days or even weeks when we feel we’re shouldering a little too much of the load. During month-end and year-end, our financial guy is swimming harder than we know. During conference season, our events director feels she’s running circles around us. We have a third colleague who achieves much so quietly that I have to check under the radar to find her. And as the owner of the company, I’m probably always doing a few extra things that only an owner can do—or would.
Sometimes we explicitly talk about the thankless tasks we each do, and thank each other for doing them. Always, when something terrible or great or funny is happening in our lives, we tell each other that, too. The more we talk to one another, the better.
I’m not any kind of “amazing boss.” If I’m any better than average, my only secret is that I have a pretty keen sense of how much everybody can sustainably do, how much everybody should do—and I think frequently about would take to replace any of these players. And even more profoundly, what it would take to replace this tiny team. Every Tuesday on our staff call we review everything we are doing; and every Tuesday I cannot believe that we do this much. My real question is at the exhausted end of those calls is, How am I going to keep up?
I realize I’m lucky to be running a company where know-nothing, greedy investors aren’t asking me if I could squeeze another 10% from the bottom line next quarter. Lucky to be running a company small enough that even a space cadet like me can keep most of the important things in mind. And lucky to have met these people and gathered them on this thin raft. “There is nothing,” my old man used to say when he ran his own circus, “like a good man or woman.”
But mostly, lucky to have assembled a crew that has the same basic idea of what all this is for: To take the best care of one another—and everyone in our orbit—that we know how to do. That’s it.
It’s plenty of work.
I hope it’s also plenty rewarding. Not every single day, of course. But on all the days—the good days, and the bad days—that count.
I’ve had the unique privilege of working with you all for a bit. And I was even more impressed when I saw how you work and how much you all get done. Other small businesses could learn a lot from you and your team. Thanks to all of you for your leadership and for all you do. We are the beneficiaries!