Matt Casey ranks the management tasks that are the most stressful and emotionally draining – but arguably are the least necessary
A lot of people think that stress is an unavoidable consequence of being a manager. While there are of course elements to the role that are inherently stressful, it’s also true that often the tasks that are the most stressful and that make the role the most emotionally draining are actually the tasks that are the least necessary.
With that in mind, here are five pointless management tasks that often create a huge amount of stress.
1One-on-one meetings
I am starting with probably the most sacred of the sacred management cows.
Just a few years ago, if someone had told me that one-on-one meetings were pointless, I would have rolled my eyes and geared myself up to give them a patronising lecture to disabuse them of this idiotic notion. Traditional management theory would have us believe that these meetings are one of our most crucial tools, and any suggestion to the contrary is usually met with derision. However, there has been a huge change in the world since the one-on-one was written into management gospel: the internet. Before the internet, if someone wanted to share information with someone else, they needed to make a point about it. They would need to schedule a meeting or make a call. Those things could feel quite “big”, so without a recurring one-on-one, what would happen is that a manager would only hear about things once they were already a problem. Staff would wait until something was significant enough to warrant a meeting or a call, and by that time the damage had often been done. The regular one-on-one allowed managers to find things out before they were significant enough to have a specific conversation about, and they were therefore irreplaceably valuable. But today, there is Slack, Teams, Whatsapp, or anything else you choose to use to stay in touch. Your staff can and should feel comfortable giving you small pieces of information whenever they need to. The one-on-one was a great solution for it’s time, but we have better solutions now.
2Performance reviews
I’m going to keep this straightforward – performance reviews are garbage, and deep down all of us know it. They don’t mean anything, they barely connect to the real world at all, and most of the time all they do is allow a smart employee to game a process so they are rewarded well regardless of how they actually perform. I am yet to meet a single person who thinks their performance reviews consistently drive them to perform their role even remotely better. But they take up time, managers stress over them, and when they’re delivered badly they can damage the relationship between manager and employee. The performance review offers absolutely no value, and comes at a huge price. Stopping them – even if they are replaced with absolutely nothing – will almost always benefit the employees, the managers, and the company as a whole.
3Objective setting
Overly complicated, unhelpfully specific, rarely beneficial. Individual objectives, whether you use SMART, OKR, or any other framework, are a waste of energy. The company has objectives. The employees should know what those objectives are. The employees should try to help the company achieve those objectives. That’s it. There’s no reason or benefit to giving everyone divided responsibility for the composite outcomes that are potentially necessary to achieve the company objectives. If we just make sure that everyone understands what the company is trying to achieve, and give them the framework and support necessary to use the skills they have to help achieve those objectives, everyone will be better off.
4Emails (all of them)
I was recently forwarded an email that a friend of mine had received from her boss. At a conservative guess, it was roughly 3500 words. I suspect it probably took several hours for her boss to write this email. I suspect she agonised over it, reread it, rewrote it, and reformatted it several times. Even after she sent it I bet she reread it again countless times. The reason I know this is that I used to be guilty of sending long emails myself. Right up until the day I finally realised that they are completely pointless.
There is nothing of value a manager can do via email. You should stop sending them, and you should stop reading them. Emails should be used exclusively for factual, one-way communication – if you are sharing a fact, and you do not need a reply, then email potentially makes sense. For anything else, you shouldn’t be using email. On top of that, if you need paragraphs, you should probably be talking, not writing. I know so many managers who spend the majority of their working time reading and writing emails, and it’s preposterous and incredibly easy to fix. Just stop engaging with it.
5Pay reviews
I used to expend a huge amount of emotional energy on pay reviews. I was always painfully aware of how something minor to me could actually be very significant to an employee. When you’re working out how to distribute a limited budget, you can easily lose sight of the fact that giving someone a 2.5% pay rise instead of a 3% one can actually be significantly different both emotionally and financially. In my experience no matter how much effort you put into this process, you’re unlikely to ever get it completely right. And as it happens, there’s a much easier way to handle it.
Let people tell you what they should be paid.
The pay review when led by the manager becomes a way of showing recognition, and it places the responsibility of determining value entirely on the manager. If you have eight direct reports, you have to evaluate eight different people. To each of those individuals, their pay review is incredibly significant – it’s likely the only review they will have all year – but to you it’s just one of many you have to get through. It’s a lot of responsibility, it’s a lot of effort, and the consequences of mistakes are often significant. But if you tell people to simply make their own case for what their salary increases should be, then you put the responsibility squarely in their hands. What you’ll see when you do this is that the majority of your staff will come back with something reasonable, and that will free you up to focus all your energy on dealing with the one or two people who may not have a completely accurate view of the value of their contribution. Moving to this way of working empowers people, reduces the stress and responsibility you feel as a manager, and makes life fairer and easier for everyone.
Matt Casey is a management expert, the co-founder of DoThings.io and author of The Management Delusion: What If We’re Doing it All Wrong.
