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- [00:01]
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If you've completed leadership beyond the theory, then listen up, because this message is for you. You know the LBT strategies work. You know how to deliver value, work at the right level, drive accountability and hold superior standards. But here's the part that nobody really prepares you for. Once you start seeing leadership differently, you just can't unsee it. You notice the standards that are slipping. The underperformer that everyone keeps making excuses for. The boss who says they want accountability but doesn't empower their people. The meeting where a consensus is the only way to reach a decision. And that team member that needs to hear some tough feedback. And the moment where you're sitting in your car or you're lying awake at 2am thinking, I know what needs to happen here, but I need help thinking this through and coming up with a plan. Because you can't always take these challenges to your team or to your boss. And your partner can listen, but they can't really help you lead through it. And that's why Marty and I built the no Bullshit Leaders Club. It's the next step after Leadership beyond the Theory for alumni who don't just need more content, they need the right community. Marty, me and a group of other no Bullshit leaders in that conversation with you, straight answers, no filter, and 90 leaders working through the same level of complexity that you are. We're opening 30 spots for the May intake and 20 places are already taken. If you've completed leadership beyond the Theory and you know you need to be in the room again with our support, go leadershipbeyondthetheory.com NBLC for no bullshit Leaders Club. Or you can find the link at the very bottom of the show notes. Submit your application now. I'm really looking forward to seeing you in the club.
- [01:38]
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When you start something new, whether it's a business, a project or a podcast, there's always that moment of doubt. Is this the right move? Is it actually going to work? Look, I've been there. And while the uncertainty never fully goes away, having the right systems in place makes a big difference. That's where Shopify comes in. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and it powers 10% of all E commerce in the US from established brands to people just getting started. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com leadership. Go to shopify.com leadership that's shopify.com leadership. When CEOs cut management layers, they often kid themselves that they're building leaner, faster companies, but what they're actually doing is destroying accountability and weakening performance. And hiding behind fads like Player Coach Leadership cannot change that fact.
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Welcome to the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. In a world where knowledge become a commodity, this podcast is designed to give you something more access to the experience of a successful CEO who has already walked the path. So join your host, Martin Moore, who will unlock and bring to life your own leadership experiences and accelerate your journey to leadership excellence.
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Hey there and welcome to episode 403 of the no Bullshit Leadership Podcast. This week's episode Don't Be Sucked in by Player Coach Leadership the tech sector loves a management fad, and over the years they've tried them all. But the unquestioning adoption and eventual discarding of these wondrous new management techniques doesn't seem to discourage them from trying the next one that comes along. The latest trend is the Player Coach model, the idea that managers should roll up their sleeves, write code alongside their teams, and justify their existence through individual contribution rather than through leadership. It's now official policy in Coinbase that there would be no such thing as a pure manager, despite the fact that the business is 5,000 people strong and has five layers of hierarchy below the CEO. Unsurprisingly, this comes with the news that 700 managers are being laid off. The thing that fascinates me is that the argument isn't entirely wrong. Bloated bureaucratic layers are a genuine problem, and leaders who add no value deserve to be cut. But there's a world of difference between pruning dead wood and setting the forest on fire. One is surgical, the other reeks of panic. Today, I'm going to pull this apart from a few different angles. I'll start by looking at the fundamental misconceptions that drive fads like Player Coach leadership. I'll give you a view from an industry insider. And I'll give you a practical list of the five things that you should be thinking about in your own business before you get sucked into the next manager free fad. So let's get into it. When I read the US business media every day I look for trends in reporting. And when it comes to the tech sector, the hits just keep on coming. Business Insider got my attention with two articles. The Most Layoff Prone Jobs and My Favourite Managers are Going Extinct. Both of them referenced a recent move to the Player Coach model. Coinbase Chief Executive Brian Armstrong announced that the crypto firm would cut 14% of its staff. That's roughly 700 employees. And of course it he singled out managers for special attention. Armstrong's all staff missive was taken directly from the standard tech layoff playbook. It cites the advances in productivity from AI, the need to adapt to unpredictable and volatile markets, and the quest for greater agility. Armstrong was unambiguous in his views on the value of management roles. There would be no such thing as a pure manager in Coinbase going forward, he said. Every leader of Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. And he described the new breed of managers as player coaches, delivering more value by getting their hands dirty alongside their teams. This is the classic misunderstanding about what it means to lead from the front, but more on this shortly. This is just one example of many in the last 12 months, major layoffs have been imposed at Meta, Microsoft, Intel, Google, Spotify. The list goes on. And there's plenty of data around now, not just on the number of manager layoffs, but also the reduction in job ads for management positions. I must admit I was somewhat heartened to see the defensive managers in Fortune magazine with its valiant rear guard action in defensive leaders. It was titled Silicon Valley's Player Coach Fantasy Misses the Point of Good Managers Hooray. This article posited that you shouldn't criticise what you don't understand. There's a huge difference between building great leadership capability that enables teams to deliver turbocharged performance and just having layers of bureaucracy. Leaders who know how to deliver performance and are driven by a relentless passion for improvement create a multiplier effect that's impossible to achieve organically. But bureaucratic leaders, which many organizations promote and nurture, just slow things down and create unnecessary barriers for their teams. If your organization is full of bureaucratic layers, then I would absolutely support radical change, but not simply by getting rid of the layers completely. Instead, I'd probably try to work out how to build my leadership capability so that I could uplift company performance without good leadership. Objectives are unclear, accountabilities are vague, and outcomes are much more dependent on luck than I would ever be comfortable with. Once you get into the detail, you'll find the headline to be a little bit sensational for a 5,000 person company, Armstrong said there would be no more than five layers below him. Well, fair enough. Five layers isn't ridiculous, but it does make me wonder how much coding Armstrong is doing himself. At some point, leaders at higher levels have to focus on different things. For a CEO, of course, focusing on the future is really important. The perpetuation of the business and the maximization of resources fundamental to a CEO role. And there's no way you can run a 5,000 person company without leaders at some level focusing on capital, efficiency and financial performance. But it does strike me that a lot of tech CEOs seem to have common characteristics. They're incredibly entrepreneurial and risk tolerant. Founders who've succeeded due to their own individual brilliance also seem to have a blind spot because they've never seen the evidence of what great leadership can do. They're very hands on themselves and as their success has come from their business acumen and smarts, they never focused on becoming great leaders. They don't value leadership perhaps as much as they should, because they've never experienced the night and day difference that great leadership can make to a company. And the tech sector can be a little different in this regard. Let's start with the massive overvaluation of tech stocks. Tech companies haven't had to be efficient because investors are betting on a hockey stick of unicorn proportions. There is so much capital washing through these businesses that short term revenues and profits are viewed differently than they are in more mature, less volatile industries. Then there's the fact that the very first industry targeted for disruption by AI was the tech industry itself. The obvious use case for AI developers to work on was coding. They know how coding works, so they had both the technical expertise and the domain knowledge to create an AI agent that could code. But this isn't necessarily the case for other industries and other use cases. For example, the same AI developers have no clue about what a lawyer does in her day job, so they'd need expertise from that field to be able to code and train the AI on legal work. You could say the same thing about marketing and asset management and risk and operations, basically anything that's not coding. So we can expect the tech industry to disrupt itself first and foremost. And given Coinbase's six layer business, at some point in the hierarchy you're going to be creating pure managers. Not at the front line, of course, and maybe not even into the middle, but at the top few levels. Anyone who's undertaking technical work would be, in my book, downright dangerous. If you have a thousand people under you, it's almost impossible to be a great leader you and a great technician. But at the front line, there's always a need to dip down into individual contributor work from time to time. The question is at what point and at what level does this become counterproductive? Things have changed a lot since my early career in it. I was working as a software developer in the finance sector in Sydney, the huge mainframe computers of the 1980s would struggle to keep up with an iPhone 17 in both processing speed and storage capacity. So being a little out of touch these days, I turned to one of our no bullshit leaders with up to date insights in the tech sector. Alec Lipski has over 20 years experience in tech. He's VP of engineering for US based company, but he's based in Poland. So not only was Alec able to give me the tech sector overlay from a no bullshit leaders perspective, but also some of the nuances between the US and Europe. He made five insightful observations on the player coach model which I've adapted slightly for this episode. The first was the generalist is showing the way after a recent downsizing in his business. It wasn't the deep specialists who thrived, it was the generalists who could code and use AI and talk to a client and switch between contexts without falling apart. That combination of skills is still quite rare and should be highly valued. Alec's second observation is that the player coach idea sounds great until someone has to make a hard call. Nobody writes about what happens when an individual's performance slips. A player coach whose heads down building is often the last person to notice underperformance, the last person to hold their teammates to a higher standard, and the last person to make a hard decision. This accountability gap is real. Alec's third observation Good managers are worth it. If you have a manager who can make everyone on a team of five, say 10% better, this delivers serious uplift in output. But if a manager has, say 50 people, it's almost impossible to identify an address under performance until it's already taken root. No matter what you call them, player coaches, org leads, etc. The effect is the same diffused accountability where the work is being done. Point number four, AI enables leaders, it doesn't replace them. With AI, you can have almost instant visibility of performance data and you can easily differentiate between individuals. This shifts the manager's role from collecting evidence to acting on that evidence. Understanding the value behind the data, being able to communicate with the team, keep people on track, maintain the standard, and motivate each individual is a set of skills that AI won't replace anytime soon. The managers who are going to thrive are the ones who were always good at the human side but were buried in status updates. Now they're going to be freed up to multiply value. And finally, the fifth point from Alec is you can't just copy a trend and hope it's going to work. When Spotify introduced the tribe model. It was widely mimicked in the tech industry and beyond. Since then, the companies who adopted it have quietly dropped. Wasn't the structure itself that failed, but the assumption that you can copy a structure without replicating the culture that it was built on. We tend to follow trends without fully understanding how to adapt them to our own specific context. And Alec's final word. The jury is out on whether this so called revolutionary Org model is going to be adopted or whether it hits the graveyard. And after the first reality check, I suspect that reality check is not too far away. If you don't believe in the intrinsic value of leadership, the player coach model sounds okay. But if you know how powerful leadership can be for unlocking individual talent and driving team performance, you'll probably want to avoid the fads that the tech industry is so famous for. Does your company value the leaders at each level as a critical link between business strategy and execution, or does it see its managers as little more than administrative paper shufflers? Here are five questions you can ask yourself before you decide on any major changes to who does what in your business? The first question is does every layer in your structure have a unique purpose? In defence of delayering, really good leaders understand how important it is to maintain efficiency and performance in their org structure. Every level must have a unique purpose, it must have a unique set of deliverables, and it must focus on a unique time horizon. If those three things aren't clearly different between layers, then you probably have too many layers. The second question how big is the span of control at each layer? If you're confident you have the right number of layers, the bigger consideration is span of control. Now this is just a fancy name for how many direct reports you have. I took this issue on a few weeks ago in episode 396. How many direct reports is too many? As the theory goes, a leader should ideally have between 6 and 12 direct reports, and in my book I think there should be fewer direct reports at higher levels. As the work becomes more complex, you need to allocate more time to each direct report to ensure the best outcomes. Your leadership becomes less directive and more thoughtful. Leaders who drive performance spend a lot of time with their directs, so it's important that you have the bandwidth to do this for each individual. The third question to ask do you have clear percentages set for technical work? It might be entirely reasonable to expect a frontline supervisor to do some hands on work, but you wouldn't expect the same of a CEO, would you? So what happens to the leaders in the layers in between. If you decide that it's appropriate for a manager to still do some hands on work, be clear about how much. For example, frontline leaders should allocate 40% of their time to technical tasks and 60% to leadership work. Otherwise, when they're faced with the choice of doing either technical work or leadership work, they're going to opt to be individual contributors. Why? Because that's the easiest path. Many professions still require people at relatively senior levels to keep their technical skills current, so law and consulting and education come to mind. If you're in a situation where you think your senior people are more valuable for their technical skills, then you likely have a huge capability problem and all you'll ever be able to expect is billable hours. The fourth question is do you understand what it means to lead from the front? In the player coach model, leading from the front means rolling your sleeves up and getting your hands dirty, doing what everyone else in your team does, but only better. Now in my book, this is just dipping down. For me, leading from the front is about behaviors, values and energy. Having a single minded focus on value creation, eliminating activity for its own sake. Maintaining an uncompromisingly high standard of performance, not shirking responsibility or making excuses, putting company first, team second and self third. Leading from the front is not about doing someone else's job for them, it's about building their capability so that you don't have to. And finally, question number five. Is it clear to your leaders what you expect of them? If you expect managers to be paper pushers with no value add or no performance imperative, then you don't need a lot of them. In fact, if that's the case, maybe you should just hire an EA with a broad mandate to handle the administrative burden. But if you want leaders who have both the skill and the will to lead, well, that takes time and energy. That kind of leadership starts at the top and filters down through the business. If you signal to your team that technical skills matter above all else and rob from their leadership bandwidth to do it, you'll get what you focus on. Once your leaders understand the lay of the land, they'll do what they think you want them to do. And if that's producing more widgets, well you know they'll produce more widgets. But this comes at the expense of their leadership work. And if you ever question their leadership performance, they'll have an awesome excuse to offer the dog ate my homework boss, but you're the one who told me to feed it to him. In summary, a lot of people look to the tech sector to see emerging trends because those companies appear to perform so well. The industry is fairly unique though, and it's prone to overvaluation and bubbles. There are also a massive number of failures that don't get publicised. The fierce competition for talent and capital means that trends sweep through the industry like a tsunami. With such a focus on technical skills, it's little wonder that they embrace the fads that emerge from the industry's top tier performers. But the only way I can see the player coach model increasing value or improving performance is if the leadership is is already weak and the people at the top probably can't even see the irony. If leadership is weak, it's weak because it started in the corner office. Alright, so that brings us to the end of episode 403. I really hope you enjoyed it, but as I'm sure you know, listening is easy. Leading is hard. If you found this episode useful, please follow or subscribe to the no Bullshit Leadership podcast on your favourite player. I'm really looking forward to next week's episode. It pays to listen. Until then, I know you'll take every opportunity you can to be a no Bullshit.