Teaching undergraduates gives you a different perspective on things. For many, they see their life already laid out: An analyst position at a prestigious bank or consulting firm after graduation, then graduate school and a string of impressive jobs at important institutions. Then family, travel, and maybe a board seat or two.
We all know that life is messier than that, but that’s the type of thing you really have to learn for yourself. The management professor Henry Mintzberg once observed that we expect management to be like a conductor with an orchestra, with the leader on a pedestal directing each movement with expert precision.
“But,” he argues, “management is more like orchestra conducting during rehearsals, when everything is going wrong.” The truth is that you don’t want things to go exactly as planned. It’s the off-key notes that you learn from most and what often leads to your biggest opportunities. Here are four things I’ve learned from a very messy career that produced wonderful surprises.
1. Incentives rarely work
There is an old saying that “when you change incentives you change behavior,” and there is some evidence to support that it can work. For example, the Mexican government program Prospera has been proven to be extremely effective, using cash payments to boost school attendance and preventative health care.
Yet research shows that incentives often fail and can even backfire horrendously. Human behavior can’t be boiled down to simple triggers. There are norms that underlie behaviors that are rarely obvious as well as unintended consequences that can warp behavior. The truth is that if you want to motivate people, incentives are rarely the right place to start.
As Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole explained in a landmark paper, there are forms of motivation beyond extrinsic benefits including, most notably, intrinsic motivation and reputational factors. For example, artists often toil for years with little material benefit, but enjoy significant intrinsic satisfaction and reputational rewards.
There is also significant evidence that extrinsic incentives crowd out intrinsic and reputational motivations. In an experiment in which subjects were asked to solve a puzzle, those who were paid a flat fee were much more likely to continue to work during free time than those who were paid for each puzzle solved.
Sound leadership is not about prodding people to do what you want, but attracting those who want what you want and leading them with shared values in pursuit of a shared purpose.
2. You don’t need the best people, you need the best teams
In 1997, McKinsey published a landmark article declaring a “war for talent.” The firm argued that due to demographic shifts, recruiting the “best and the brightest” was even more important than “capital, strategy, or R&D.” The report was enormously influential and continues to affect how leaders manage their teams even today.
I once worked at a company where senior leadership meetings on Friday mornings were meant to discuss critical issues. But no matter the agenda, the conversation always seemed to turn back to talent and the need for “better people.” They would look at our current staff and wish that they could find others who were smarter, more skilled and more ambitious.
Each time I remember thinking, “You recruited these people. You trained these people. And you manage these people. If there’s a talent problem, it doesn’t lie with them. It lies with you.” As workplace expert David Burkus puts it, “talent doesn’t make the team. The team makes the talent.” Their people weren’t failing them, they were failing their people, which is why our employee turnover rate was roughly twice the industry average.
The truth is that we don’t need the best people, we need the best teams. Researchers at MIT and Carnegie Mellon found that group performance is driven more by factors such as group dynamics and social sensitivity than anything else. It’s how your team builds trust, psychological safety, and collaboration that will determine what they can achieve.
If you feel you need “better people,“ you should probably focus your efforts on becoming a more capable leader and creating a better, more supportive culture that empowers people to achieve their potential.
3. Empower your people to ‘never go down alone’
One of my first managers gave me great advice: “Never go down alone,” he said. “If I know what you’re doing and everybody else knows too, then you’re covered. If something goes wrong, we’re in it with you. But if you go off by yourself and nobody knows what’s going on, you will end up going down alone and taking the blame for everything.”
It’s a great context shift. We tend to value our privacy and see oversight as an intrusion. We are acutely aware that our lives are messy and don’t want others to see our missteps. We wake up in the morning, clean and dress ourselves in an effort to put on our best face. Exposing our peccadilloes threatens to shatter the mask we show to the world.
But when you see communication and transparency as a shield, protecting you from your own mistakes, it changes your outlook. I completely bought in and later, when I took on a senior role, had my people prepare “never go down alone” reports to tell me what I needed to know to protect themselves. They were reluctant at first, but then asked their people to do the same.
The somewhat unintended result was that every Friday hundreds of reports were flying around our company like an anthill, filtering information up to me. I would review each report (they were very short) over the weekend and address any issues on Monday. It was tremendously helpful in identifying potential issues and nipping problems in the bud.
4. Everybody brings something to you and needs something from you
Years ago, we had a manager named Ania running one of our publishing operations. She was well-liked, diligent, and responsible. Still, we felt the business needed a more creative spark, so we brought in a rising executive to take her place. Ania transitioned out gracefully and left the company on good terms.
Things turned out well for Ania. She became a sought-after interior decorator, renowned for her creativity. As it turned out, the problem wasn’t that she lacked any creative ability. The problem was that we weren’t giving her the type of challenges that excited her. While she languished in our organization, she excelled in a different environment.
That simple concept is key to being an effective manager. Everybody brings something to you and needs something from you. If you can figure that equation out, you can run your team effectively. If you can’t, you get situations like we had with Ania, in which everybody would be made better off by parting ways.
For all of the simplistic talk about “carrots and sticks,” hiring only the “best people” and demanding accountability, understanding how to set your people up for success is the most important thing a manager does. That’s often not what you learn in business school, but over the past 30 years it’s what I’ve learned to be true.
In the end, great management isn’t about control—or even authority—it’s about creating the conditions for people to do their best work.
