The shift from managing individual contributors to overseeing other managers is one of the toughest transitions in leadership. Chris Williams, former Microsoft HR VP, explores why this change is so challenging and how organizations can better support these key leaders.
Chris dives into the unique struggles faced by second-level managers, including finding mentorship and translating vague strategic objectives into actionable plans. He emphasizes the importance of building influence across organizational boundaries through genuine connections with colleagues, which proves invaluable during tough decisions. This episode offers practical advice for those navigating this difficult leadership transition.
Interview Highlights
- Evaluating Leadership Coaches [01:25]
- Chris values leadership coaches with real, hands-on leadership experience.
- Coaches lacking real-world experience often give unrealistic or superficial advice.
- True leadership involves tough decisions, like laying off good employees.
- Supporting Second Level Managers [02:53]
- Transitioning to a second-level manager is difficult and often unintuitive.
- Domain expertise becomes less relevant; soft skills like communication and coordination become crucial.
- Managers must lead through others and avoid directly advising lower-level employees.
- Companies often lack resources and training tailored to second-level managers.
- There's limited literature and experience available for managing managers.
- Mentorship becomes harder to access as one moves up the hierarchy.
- Support from coaches or advisors can fill this gap and help leaders grow effectively.
Companies should be open and willing to support second-level and above managers with coaches, advisors, consultants, or whatever resources are needed. This provides them with the ability to ask questions, get honest feedback, and make mistakes without judgment.
Chris Williams
- Effective Training for Mid-Level Managers [07:18]
- Chris has tried various methods like courses, books, and seminars to support second and third-level managers.
- These managers face highly situational, context-specific challenges that generic training can't address.
- Real impact comes from personalized, one-on-one conversations tailored to the unique problem.
- Experience-based guidance is more valuable than theoretical advice or quick tips.
- While broad content is less effective, one-on-one coaching yields the greatest results and satisfaction.
- The Challenge of Middle Management [09:09]
- Middle managers often struggle to translate strategic goals into actionable tasks.
- They face pressure from above while managing tactical issues below.
- Effective translation of high-level objectives into specific actions is critical.
- Managers must filter information, deciding what’s relevant for their teams.
- Strong communication skills are essential but often undervalued in this role.
A large part of middle management is translating requirements from vague to specific, deciding what is noise and what isn’t, and determining what to communicate to your employees. The difficulty of this job is often greatly underestimated.
Chris Williams
- Navigating the Shift to Senior Management [11:35]
- As managers move up, their role becomes less visible and harder for others to understand.
- Employees often question what higher-level managers actually do.
- Senior managers should communicate openly with broader teams about strategic goals and challenges.
- Explaining how different teams contribute to larger initiatives builds understanding and respect.
- Vulnerability and honesty in communication are key to maintaining credibility and trust.
- Moving Beyond Generational Stereotypes [14:00]
- Treat employees as individuals, not based on generational stereotypes.
- People have different communication preferences (email, phone, text, etc.) and feedback needs.
- Age does not determine technological ability; people from all generations can struggle or excel with tech.
- Work preferences vary; some prefer working from home, others thrive in an office setting.
- The key is to understand each person's unique needs and adjust management accordingly.
- Generational stereotypes are limiting and undermine effective management and relationships.
- Importance of Cross-Functional Relationships [17:53]
- Cross-functional relationships are critical for building influence and credibility.
- People often get labeled as underperformers because they aren't well-known within the organization.
- Managers should proactively build connections across departments, even if the culture doesn’t fully support cross-functional work.
- Asking genuine, curious questions about others' roles can help build meaningful relationships.
- These relationships can provide support during tough times, like layoffs or performance reviews.
- Personal connections make it harder for negative perceptions to form about colleagues or teams.
- Navigating Return to Office Orders [22:31]
- The push for return-to-office orders is often a reaction to deeper issues, not the solution.
- Problems like long meetings and poor communication existed both remotely and in-office.
- Businesses facing struggles may revert to old habits, like in-office work, but this doesn’t address underlying issues.
- Leaders should focus on results and work quality, not where or how the work is done.
- Effective managers track performance and outcomes, not the physical presence or actions of employees.
- Return-to-office policies may mask poor management practices and won’t necessarily improve performance.
- Chris helped redesign Microsoft's compensation system for 33,000 employees.
- The challenge in compensation systems is ensuring the right outcomes are monitored, not just the expected ones.
- In sales, commission-based systems can lead to undesirable behavior, like selling unwanted products or rushing orders to meet targets.
- Compensation systems often encourage employees to game the system, so objectives must be clear and aligned with business goals.
- It's important to avoid superficial metrics like "mouse movers" or "key twiddles" that only make employees appear busy without driving real results.
Meet Our Guest
Chris Williams is a seasoned leadership advisor, content creator, and former Vice President of Human Resources at Microsoft. With over 45 years of experience in the tech industry, he has held diverse roles, including leading the development of Microsoft Visual Studio and managing HR operations for over 30,000 employees during the dot-com boom. Currently, Chris advises senior leaders across various organizations, sharing practical solutions to everyday leadership challenges. He is also a prolific content creator, sharing insights on leadership and workplace dynamics through articles, podcasts, and social media platforms. His work has been featured in publications like Business Insider and Entrepreneur, where he offers candid advice on navigating the complexities of modern work environments.
You have to treat everyone as an individual. The sooner you start doing this, the more effective your relationship will be. The more respect you'll earn, the more open and honest your conversations will be, and the stronger your relationship as a manager and leader will become.
Chris Williams
Related Links:
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Related Articles and Podcasts:
- About the People Managing People podcast
- 11 Leadership Models To Help You Become A Better Leader
- 7 Things To Work On To Be A Great Leader
- Job Leveling: Key Benefits And How To Do It
- Return To Office: Pros, Cons, And Tips For Success
- Return To Office Mandates: Mistake Or Good for Business?
- The Truth About Return-to-Office Headlines: Why the Data Tells a Different Story
Read The Transcript:
We’re trying out transcribing our podcasts using a software program. Please forgive any typos as the bot isn’t correct 100% of the time.
Chris Williams: When you move from individual contributor to manager, there’s a major change. You’ve gotta remember that you’re helping people do work and not doing it all yourself. Your skills at doing the job can be very helpful in advising people and coaching them and helping them to get ahead, judging the quality of their work, all that kind of stuff.
When you move to be that person’s manager, not only are you one level removed from it, but it becomes to the point where you cannot advise, right? You can’t skip your, the person who reports to you and tell the person two levels down how to do their job or judge the quality of the work. You have to work with the person who works for you to judge the quality of their work.
That’s very frustrating for a lot of managers who move up and all of a sudden all the skills they have, their domain expertise, all of a sudden their domain expertise is nowhere near as valuable as many of the other skills.
David Rice: Welcome to the People Managing People podcast. We’re on a mission to build a better world of work and to help you build happy, healthy, and productive workplaces. I’m your host, David Rice.
My guest today is Chris Williams. He is a leadership advisor, content creator, and a former VP of HR at Microsoft. We’re gonna be talking about the transition to being a second line manager, the challenges that come with that, and how organizations can better support them.
Chris, welcome!
Chris Williams: Hey, David. Good to see you.
David Rice: Good to have you back.
So you’ve been in the leadership coaching business for a minute. So I’m curious what type of leadership coach is your favorite? Because there’s more flavors of them on LinkedIn these days than there are flavors of ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. So which one’s your favorite?
Chris Williams: My sort of bottom line evaluation of a leadership coach is, have you ever done this before? One of the problems I see is people have picked up, a couple of books that their latest Barnes and Noble and decided that they wanna be a coach or an advisor to people whose job they’ve never done.
And so I see a lot of times that what that tends to have people do is lead by quip, lead by little short nuggets of stuff, and none of it reflects reality. None of it reflects the hard problems you face when you’re trying to, if you have to lay people off, if you’ve never had to sit in a room and lay people off who are great people, who have done nothing, but be the wrong guy on the list.
Have you really lived as a leader? Have you really lived as a manager? So that’s one of my first things. My biggest problem with LinkedIn is that you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting somebody who calls themself a CEO coach. Everybody wants to coach the CEO, right? As if that’s the hardest job in the world, so.
David Rice: I know, I could agree more. They’re everywhere and I get probably 10 podcast pitches a day from them so that they want to come on and chat,
We were talking before this and we were talking about the difficulty of becoming a second level manager, right? The manager of managers, so to speak, and how that transition takes place.
Now, the great thing about being a line manager is that, you essentially advise employees on something that you have skills at, that you are a proven performer in that arena. You’re in a good position to advise a lot of times, but when it comes to being that second level manager, that transitions a lot harder because it’s not quite intuitive.
It’s not the lessons that you need to learn or the lessons that you lead, you need to learn aren’t exactly a part of your sort of standard manager onboarding process in most cases. So I’m curious, what do you feel like needs to change most for companies to help these professionals thrive essentially?
Chris Williams: You’re right. I think one of the core issues that people have when they move, there’s a major change. You’ve gotta remember that you’re helping people do work on not doing it all yourself, but as you said, your skills at doing the job can be very helpful in advising people and coaching them and helping them to get ahead, judging the quality of their work, all that kind of stuff.
When you move to be that person’s manager, not only are you one level removed from it, but it becomes to the point where you cannot. Advise, right? You can’t skip your, the person who reports to you and tell the person two levels down how to do their job or judge the quality of the work. You have to work with the person who works for you to judge the quality of their work.
That’s very frustrating for a lot of managers who move up and all of a sudden all the skills they have, their domain expertise, whether it be, in programming or finance or whatever it is, all of a sudden their domain expertise is nowhere near as valuable as many of the other skills like getting to people to work together.
Communicating objectives across things being clear and concise in your communication. There’s a whole bunch of things that are more important as a second level manager than you were as a first level manager. But to answer your question, one of the problems I see, and one of the reasons why this is the core group of people who I really like to focus on, is that companies don’t know how to help those people.
It’s particularly easy to teach someone how to be a manager 101. There’s a bunch of, there’s a lot of literature out there. There’s a lot of courses you could take. There’s a lot of training you can do about how to delegate better, how to do a bunch of those things better, but the kinds of things that you need to be good at as a second and above level manager are things for which there’s not a lot of literature out there and there’s also not a lot of experience out there.
So you’ll find, for example, the people in HR frequently can be helpful, or the leadership training can be helpful because they too are managers of people and they can help you manage people, but manage managers, there’s just not as many of them and there’s not as much experience around them.
I think companies, one of the things that I, and this almost sounds self-serving, but one of the things I think companies should be really open and willing to do is to support these second and above level managers with people, with coaches, advisors, consultants, whatever it is, with some resources to provide them the ability to ask questions and get honest feedback and be stupid or what.
One of the problems you get as you move up in an organization is mentorship is hard to find. If you’re a second level manager going to your VP and saying, geez, I don’t know how to deal with this guy who works for me, makes you look like an idiot, right? It makes you look helpless. So you don’t wanna go to your boss’s boss or whatever and be vulnerable and be the kind of person who can’t get stuff done.
And you can’t go to your peers because they’re often in competition with you. You can’t go to your employees and ask them an opinion ’cause they’re the problem, right? So having somebody to talk to, somebody to work with, a coach, an advisor, or somebody is frequently incredibly helpful. Again, that sounds like I’m advertising for my own business, but it’s the kind of thing that I think companies can do more of and should do more of.
David Rice: Absolutely. Like you said, not a lot of books written about being this type of manager.
I’m curious, as you’ve been working with these groups, what have you found works? What’s the messaging that sort of gets through to them, and what sort of training do you feel resonates with them?
Chris Williams: I have explored all kinds of different ways to help these people. Looked at doing courses. I’ve looked at writing a book. I’ve looked at any range of things to be able to help them, and what I’ve discovered, I’ve done seminars, I’ve done, I’ve spoken to groups. The problem is the kinds of situations that these second and third level managers deal with tend to be very tactical and situationally dependent situations.
They are deeply dependent upon what their business is and how it works, and who the personalities involved are, and often the technology that’s involved. And so it’s a really very custom problem. I have this problem, I don’t know how to deal with it. What should I do with it? There’s no book that’s gonna fix that.
There’s no quip on LinkedIn that’s gonna help you. What you need is someone to be able to say, Hey, here’s my problem. What do you think? And explore options and figure out ideas. Figure out how to make this work and have it really helps to have somebody say, been there, done that. Got the T-shirt, right?
Be careful, don’t say this ’cause that’ll upset a bunch of people, that kind of thing. I’ve found that what really works, and it’s very frustrating for me as somebody who creates content and wants to impact a whole lot of people, it’s very frustrating. But for me, one-on-one is what works. Working one-on-one, that’s where I find I have the most impact, the most effect, and frankly, it’s what I enjoy doing the most because I get the most impact and the most change and the most effect.
David Rice: You mentioned something interesting there. You’re talking about sort of the situations that they’re in are very tactical, and one of the things I think I’ve seen quite a bit is there’s a struggle to, they might have good tactical ideas, but then they have to translate them into the strategy that the leadership has and communicating it both ways, right? It can be a little bit of a challenge.
Chris Williams: I think it’s called middle management for a lot of reasons. One of the problems you’ve got is that while you are busy trying to deal with this horribly tactical problem of an employee who can’t get some project done because of somewhat ever problem, you have your boss’s boss screaming at you about, why can’t we get this strategic project done that is crucial to the future of the business?
It’s very difficult. You have to translate that, that high level objective into the pieces that actually matter to get done. And that level of translation is really complicated. And it also isn’t helped by the fact that you can’t go to that frontline person and scream the strategic objective at them ’cause it doesn’t help. They don’t, I, how do I, how do I motivate our customer base to do it? That doesn’t help me. I need to know, should I get this project done like this or like that. So a huge portion of what middle management is translating requirements. From the vague to the specific, right?
And deciding what is noise and what is not, and what to bother your employees with and whatnot. So there’s this huge filtration process that you’ve gotta be just incredibly facile at. And also communicative, right? You gotta be really good at communicating these kinds of things in a way that people can hear them.
It’s very underestimated how incredibly hard that job can be.
David Rice: Yeah, I think so too. I think it doesn’t get enough respect when you hear all this talk about flattening or getting rid of middle managers and I think that’s not quite fair ’cause a lot of them have not been set up for success, so.
Chris Williams: You look at a company like Amazon that has something like five people working for every middle manager and they now want to go to 10. Okay, cool. So that means instead of getting 20% of my manager’s time, I’m getting 10% of their time. It just makes things complicated really early on, and I think it’s in many ways just cutting, ’cause cutting feels good to cut.
David Rice: One of the big challenges we often hear about is the changing perception that middle managers face, right? It’s one thing when you’re at the line manager level, you have your direct reports and your, like I, we were talking about before, your expertise and everything, it all like translates.
It’s limited to a certain area, but when you become a manager of managers, that perception of you starts to change among everyone below you. What advice do you have for helping folks navigate that shift?
Chris Williams: One of the problems is they will look up at you and wonder, what do you do all day? That’s one of the things that happens.
You can look up at your boss and figure out what they do, but looking up and figuring out what your boss’s boss does, that’s really hard. And so one of the things I like advise senior managers to do is to occasionally have opportunities to speak to broader organizations, broader groups.
And lay out some of the strategic challenges that their group, their organization, their company is facing, and talk about the difficulties that they as a manager have in executing against those strategic priorities. And people can understand that sort of the very large scale. Hey, we’ve been asked by the corporation to implement this.
Build this product or whatever, right? And you can explain to people, then that means we need to do this and this and this, and here’s this team over here doing this, and this team over there doing that. And if you lay that out in a particular way, people suddenly get a respect for, oh, I see you are managing this whole project.
I didn’t understand what that part of it was. So there’s an opportunity for you to be more open and honest about what goes on. But what’s absolutely crucial in those sessions is that you also be really vulnerable. This is hard, right? Or, I’m getting a bunch of pressure from the CEO to do this, which I know is really hard.
Or to be open and honest with those people because most people are smart. They can smell you when you’re making stuff up. So you have to be honest about, hey, I know this is hard and I know this may be an unbeatable goal, but we’re gonna work our best to see if we can get there, or those kinds of things.
Be open, honest, and vulnerable with them, ’cause if you’re not, they’ll know it. They’ll smell it.
David Rice: Yeah. One thing that gets talked a lot about management circles and of course in the media, ’cause I love this topic, is generations. You’ve got people navigating up to five generations in the workforce now, and this comes with some obvious challenges.
I’m curious though, I, ’cause I saw you posted something about this recently. How do we help managers and really the workforce as a whole move beyond sort of generational tropes and stereotypes? How can we help these people look at these challenges in a different way?
Chris Williams: One of the things I work with, everybody I work with on is trying to treat the people who work for them as individuals and even the people they work for.
But remember that each one of these people is an individual with a completely different backstory and life experience and any number of other things. The way I relate it to people is through some things they will see at work. For example, some people like emails, some people like phone calls. Some people like a text.
Some people prefer Slack. Some people like feedback to be very careful and thoughtful and gentle. And they need a little bit of stroking before they get some negative feedback. Other people, if you give them that kind of feedback, they will not hear you and you practically have to scream the feedback, stop doing that, or but if you do that to some people, they will cry, right?
So you can’t do that. You can’t forgive everybody the same kind of feedback all the time. You can’t assume that some people are good writers. Some people learn through watching videos. So every single person, regardless of age, regardless of generation, I know people who are terrible at picking up new technology who are 25 years old, and I know people like myself who are approaching 70 who pick up new technology all the time.
So you can’t make generational stereotypes. What you have to do is look at that person and decide, oh, I see you are one of those people who likes harsh feedback. Doesn’t hear me unless I’m talking quite directly at you. Will never open my email. Only hears it when I send you a text, right? If you treat each one of your employees that way with the, whatever the world they live in is, you suddenly realize that generational stereotypes don’t mean anything.
And that’s the whole work from home thing, right? There are some people who would. Absolutely love to work from home. There are other people for whom the office is a sanctuary. Their home is a nightmare. They wanna get to the office because it’s quieter and they can focus and whatever because they got kids running all whatever it is, right?
There are other people for whom the office is a scary place that’s 45 minutes away, and the commute drives me nuts, right? So those people could be 25 or they could be 65, who knows, right? You have to treat everybody as an individual. And the cool part is the sooner you start to do that, the more effective your relationship with them will be.
The more respect they’ll give you, the more open and honest your conversation can be, and the better your relationship as a manager and a leader will be. The generational stereotypes thing just chaps me. Partly as an older person being stereotyped, as you don’t understand new technology.
I’m working with an AI startup right now. Okay. A friend of mine and I have developed a really cool leadership AI startup, which we could talk about at some other time. We’re using AI agents in ways that people haven’t seen before. But I’m not, I’m a boomer. Boomers can’t even open their phone.
Yeah. No, I’m pretty good at opening my phone. Ask my wife.
David Rice: Yeah, ask TikTok.
Chris Williams: Exactly. Exactly.
David Rice: That’s great. And I think a big part of the reason I ask that question is because a lot of middle managers, second line managers, they’re expected to grow their influence, right? As you, the more time you spend on the role, influence plays a big part in your success, and one of the reasons is it helps you work cross-functionally.
This is such a big thing that we always talk about now, but when you work in a culture that doesn’t necessarily support cross-functional work because a lot of companies like to talk about it, but the actual logistics of supporting that and not keeping things siloed, it’s more complicated than just saying, we’re gonna work cross-functionally.
It doesn’t come naturally, but you’re still expected to grow your influence within other departments. What advice do you have for a middle manager who’s in a situation where they need to build influence and create more credibility for themselves, essentially?
Chris Williams: It’s one of the interesting things I have discovered. If I were to go back of the last, say, 25 clients I’ve had in the last several years, I would bet you that the ability to work cross-functionally. Is the most single biggest asset that they have gained at my encouragement over the last few years. And the reason is that you will never imagine the depth of having connections across your organization.
How effective that will be on so many levels, not the least of witches. I just wrote an article for Business Insider about this recently, which is that all these people who were being labeled as under performers, their biggest problem, their largest problem, is that they weren’t known in the organization.
That when the meeting got together and they tried to pick out who we’re gonna get rid of on this list of people, the people who got rejected first were the ones who obviously had blown something up or had some terrible performance problem. But the next people on the list were the people who, when you brought up their name, people went who?
So what you need to do as an individual is make connections across the organization. And the thing I keep telling people is whether or not your organization wants you to work cross-functionally, there’s nothing preventing you from having an association cross-functionally. There’s nothing preventing you from giving a, if you work in the product development side of the business, there’s nothing preventing you from having lunch with an HR person or a finance person or a marketing person or whatever. And I love to tell people the way you do that conversation is you sit down with ’em and you say to the finance guy, I don’t even understand how you guys do what you do.
How do you guys come up with these complex reports? How does that work? When are you guys supposed to do them? How does that, how do the upper management react when you do those things? Don’t you get some pushback when you try and push down on people with it? How does this ask them a million questions about their job?
And I have never met someone who, when you start asking good, genuine questions about what they do for a living, doesn’t just light up and want to tell you it really gets to me like this and I, eventually you’ve gained a relationship with someone over in finance and then you’ve gained a relationship with someone in marketing and sales and whatever, and they will introduce you to somebody else.
And so when the time comes for some thing that blows up, you are required to cut 10% of your organization. You got somebody in finance to go to and say, wait a minute, how does this really work? And what does that look like and how do I make this work? And. Or when that round table discussion is happening and they’re trying to lay off the under performers, everybody will go no.
Wait, not Chris. I know him. He is a good guy. Just because the organization doesn’t want you to be, working together between each other doesn’t mean you can’t have a relationship with that person. Doesn’t mean you can’t know who they are. By the way, the other thing is it’s really hard to hate people one-on-one.
The finance people are always going, ah, you can never trust the product people ’cause of whatever. And if you have a relationship with one of those guys, one of the finance guys is going and go, no, wait a minute. I know some of those people, they’re not doing that stuff or whatever.
So it’s really hard to have a negative relationship when you’ve got a one-on-one connection with somebody.
David Rice: Yeah, absolutely. More often than not you find that they’ll ask these questions, they start to understand what you are doing better, and then when that conversation’s being had, they say no, I know Chris has been working on and they’ve got a long list of things.
And it’s, there’s more advocates at your back. It’s never a bad thing to have.
Chris Williams: Never a bad thing.
David Rice: I wanna finish by talking about one of the things that has been toughest for managers, I’d say in recent years and has led to a lot of discussion, and that’s return to office orders. There’s this shift, to new working models where whether it’s hybrid or remote, and it’s something that a lot of people in HR have been navigating, but now there’s this kind of move to push people back in.
And I’m curious how you’re advising clients to adapt to the new working environment because many seem to really struggle. I don’t know if return to office orders are helping anything really.
Chris Williams: It’s interesting, I a lot of noise recently from Jamie Diamond doing a rant at an employee session where he ranted about, I couldn’t get people on the phone.
And we have these meetings that are way too long or whatever, and for somehow he feels that returning to the office is gonna fix those problems. Those problems were not return to office problems. They were problems that happen in the office too. They were problems that happen remotely. I think one of the problems is that business is tough and things are hard to do.
And if your business is in any way struggling, you rush back to the things you’ve always done, and one of the things people have always done is be together in an office. So that feels like the thing to do. I also think, as a complete subtext to all of this, it’s important to note that Jamie Diamond’s Company, JP Morgan is one of the largest investors in downtowns and office spaces and shopping malls and whatnot.
Jamie has a slightly vested interest in making sure that downtowns and office complexes thrive. So there’s a reason why Jamie’s not just talking about office culture. He’s talking about needing to prop up the office class, a office space market. But in any case, the underlying problem is that if you are a manager who is focusing on how the work gets done and not what the work is getting done, you’re focusing on the wrong thing.
It’s not about where somebody does it or whether they do it in the nude, or whether they do it standing on their head or none of that matters. What matters is the work getting done and is the work quality of the work getting done? And again, this is one of those things that mattered before Covid and it matters just as much now, which is if you were a kind of manager who wasn’t focusing on results, who was monitoring people’s keystrokes, or whether they were taking too long of a smoke break or one of those kind, you were not actually managing to the business results you were managing to, the symptoms of business results.
And if somebody is remote, and you should certainly be able to tell whether they’re getting the work done or not. And if you don’t, then that’s your problem. You as a manager need to figure out what are the requirements for this job, what things need to get done, what is the appropriate time to get them done in?
And if they don’t meet those requirements, that’s the discussion you should have. Not about where you’re doing it, it’s about you’re not getting it done. So I think one of the things that has. Return to office is an easy whipping post upon which to hang your poor management hat on. Gosh, I mixed as many metaphors as I could there, but it’s an easy thing to say, oh, I know what’ll solve it.
Let’s all get back in the office and so we’ll all get back in the office. Everybody will be miserable again and the performance still won’t improve. What are you gonna do then? I’m gonna blame something else. Middle managers I know. I’ll fire all the middle managers. That’ll do it.
David Rice: It’s funny you mentioned managing the symptoms are like the appearance of work getting done, right?
I find every time you do that, what happens? People find a way to game the system. So they did
Chris Williams: the little mouse movers.
David Rice: The mouse movers. People just pretending to type and not really doing much of anything, you know?
Chris Williams: Yeah. It’s one of those things that long ago I reinvented the compensation system for all of Microsoft.
We changed every single one of, at the time, there were 33,000 employees or something. We changed every single person’s compensation. In the process of doing that compensation analysis and revamp, we talked with some of the world’s leading compensation experts and time and time again they said, the most difficult thing to do in a compensation system is to make sure that you monitor the result that you want, not the results you think you want. Because as you see, for example, it’s very common in sales circles. For example, if you give people a payment, a commission based on the sale, right?
People will sell stuff that people don’t want just to get the sale, even though the return will come back later. So then you have to, oh wait, no, we got a credit for the return. Or you’ll get these stupid behaviors where people rush orders through at the end of the quarter and then have no orders for the beginning of the next quarter, and then rushing through the end of the quarter.
So compensation systems are exactly the model for that. The minute you set out some objective, people will figure out a way to gain that objective. You have to make sure your objectives are clear and related to the business at hand. Really relatable to the business, as you said, mouse movers and key twiddles to make it look like I’m busy, right?
David Rice: Yeah. As long as people have been getting paid to work, they’ve been figuring out how to look busy,
Chris Williams: but the point is, people who are pretending to work, you should be able to see that in their work, right?
David Rice: In their productivity.
Chris Williams: They’re not getting stuff done. And then the other thing I so I make that comment and I say, yeah, but what about the person who gets all their work done in 30 hours?
And I’m like, give that person a raise. Have them teach other people how to do it in 30 hours. You shouldn’t be promoting that person if they can do it in 30 hours. You shouldn’t be mad at them.
David Rice: You should reward them.
Chris Williams: Exactly. Have that person use the other 10 hours a week teaching people how to do it in 30 hours rather than 40.
David Rice: And then you could come up with new things.
Chris Williams: The last thing you should do is be mad at somebody ’cause they get stuff done sooner than you thought. Come on.
David Rice: No. And then you can find new things for people to do with those 10 hours, which might generate revenue and make the business better.
Chris Williams: Exactly. Geez, Louise. There are people in this world who find a way to complain about everything and it’s.
David Rice: As always, it’s been a pleasure chatting. Before we go, couple things I like to do. First thing I wanna do is give you a chance to tell people more about where they can connect with you and how they can find about what you have going on.
Chris Williams: As you ended to earlier, I do create a bunch of content. I got a quarter of a million followers on TikTok, which is just always a my amazing to me. I’m also on YouTube and LinkedIn and Bluesky and Threads and everywhere. If you search for CLWill, you will find me. I’m clwill.com. I’m CLWill on all those platforms.
If you just look around for CLWill, you’ll find me. And I’d love to meet at, particularly if you’ve got middle managers who are struggling, go to my website, clwill.com and let’s talk.
David Rice: The last thing we always do before we sign off the podcast is a little tradition here. I turn it over to you, you get to ask me a question. Anything you want. Doesn’t have to be about the topic, but it can be.
Chris Williams: You talk to an awful lot of HR people. Tell me how worried are HR people about AI, particularly like the HR generalist community. It feels to me like AI is gonna be a real opportunity to answer an awful lot of those questions that HR generalists spend their days answering.
Is that something people being worried about?
David Rice: A little bit, yeah. There’s a sort of a sense, a growing sense amongst that crowd that it’s time to specialize in something. Push in a direction where it’s am I doing recruiting and I’m like a talent acquisition manager or trying to figure out that, or am I, am I compliance?
Am I payroll? Am I gonna focus on one specific area? Other folks, I think they’re kinda looking at it like, this is a tool, it’s not gonna fully replace the need for like human input. And also somebody’s gotta monitor it, right? So I think there’s a level of mixture in it. Some folks are getting a little nervous.
And I think wanting to figure out, like they wanna open another door if nothing else, just to see like what a, what’s on the other side. And also, a lot of these folks are overwhelmed right now, right? State of the world kind of thing. People are asking a lot of questions and they’ve got a lot of people in their face asking ’em the same questions about ai and they don’t know.
It’s interesting timing because I think a lot of people are thinking like, I gotta figure out what that next thing is. But there’s a level of we’re not there yet, though. We’ve got time. It’s gonna be a while before this thing just completely, it’s like I, I was saying to somebody on a podcast just last week about, I saw this study from MIT and this guy was like, his management expert was like, there’s no meaningful work that a human being does that AI is ready to replace it this time, or will be probably for the next year or two.
I think for that generalist crowd, that’s a good thing to keep in mind. Like you’re still going to have to be there to manage the thing and monitor it. What is it saying, is it actually put, are the outputs good? They’ve got a little time, but they should. It’s on everybody’s mind.
Chris Williams: I think one of the things that I take solace in is that if you look at the output of any of these things, if you look at output of, ChatGPT writing or writing code, or the answers to quite the answers are mid, right? They’re fine. That’ll do. So I think what it does is it puts pressure on people who are mid, that’ll do in whatever you’re doing, that you’re gonna get pressure from that.
So you need to up your game. You need to be better and smarter and a better communicator and a better. Whatever you do in order to differentiate yourself from the mid that is being automated behind you, right?
David Rice: Yeah, absolutely. I think, if you look at it like if you’re that generalist and you’re being asked these questions, think about the next steps.
Yes, it can answer this, but like that’s another layer of value that I can add to the person. As a content creator, you’ve probably used it probably to write a script or something like that, but what happens? Even though it’s getting more sophisticated and it still writes pretty good now.
The one thing I would say is it’s not a particularly talented storyteller and it can’t add human value to it. That’s where you can thrive,
Chris Williams: it tends to be verbose. It also tends to try and play down the middle. One of the things that you can do as an individual is emphasize the corners, emphasize the edges, emphasize the extremes in one way or another, because being down the middle is interesting, but it’s not really what provides human value.
David Rice: And it’s not what people consume, right? People don’t remember down the middle when you have a point of view or a stance sort of that you’re taking. People do remember that.
Chris Williams: Yep.
David Rice: Chris, as always, it’s been a pleasure talking with you.
Chris Williams: I loved it. Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure talking to you too.
David Rice: All right. Listeners, until next time. If you haven’t done so already, head on over, sign up for the People Managing People newsletter, peoplemanagingpeople.com/subscribe.
And until then, color in the corners. Avoid the middle. Let ChatGPT do the middle.
