Thought experiment time. I’m going to give you some excerpts from a Harvard Business Review article about how a company sold its workforce on management, and you’re going to work through the implications of what this firm learned for Law Land—where, yes, lawyers are at least as averse to “Management” as were the engineers at this software company.

Since the early days of [the company], people throughout have questioned the value of managers…. As one software engineer, Eric Flatt, puts it, “We are a company built by engineers for engineers.” And most engineers, not just those at [the company], want to spend their time designing and debugging, not communicating with bosses or supervising other workers’ progress. In their hearts they’ve long believed that management is more destructive than beneficial, a distraction from “real work” and tangible, goal-directed tasks.

Since the company has an “overall indifference to pecking order,” top-down directives are not accepted without question. People respect expertise and good ideas over titles and lines of authority. The selection of people who thrive in this kind of meritocratic environment begins with recruiting.

[The company] emphasizes the power of the individual in its recruitment efforts, as well, to achieve the right cultural fit. Using a rigorous, data-driven hiring process, the company goes to great lengths to attract young, ambitious selfstarters and original thinkers. It screens candidates’ résumés for markers that indicate potential to excel there—especially general cognitive ability. People who make that first cut are then carefully assessed for initiative, flexibility, collaborative spirit, evidence of being well-rounded, and other factors.

[The challenge is] if your highly skilled, handpicked hires don’t value management, how can you run the place effectively?

If we can stipulate that this company diverges wildly from Law Land in its use of “rigorous, data-driven hiring,” may we agree that otherwise this sounds like an awfully familiar recruiting model? I would further ask you to consider—just entertain the wild and almost unhinged notion—that there might actually be something to a rigorous, data-driven hiring process, given this company’s stratospheric success?

This company isn’t alone in experimenting with and learning from data analytics in the context of recruitment and hiring:

Until recently, organizations used data-driven decision making mainly in product development, marketing, and pricing. But these days, Google, Procter & Gamble, Harrah’s, and others take that same approach in addressing human resources needs.

The reasoning, dare I add, could not be simpler: If data has improved everything from the speed, efficiency, and quality of decision making for products, marketing, and pricing, why wouldn’t we want to try it on one of the gnarliest organizational challenges out there, hiring and recruitment?

Seizing on this reasoning, our guinea pig company decided to go all-in on this data analytics challenge, hiring “several PhD’s with serious research chops.” The leader of this initiative recalled, “I didn’t want our group to be simply a reporting house…I wanted us to be hypothesis-driven and help solve company problems and questions with data.”

Initial results were scarcely emphatic. Even though they began by comparing managers in the top and bottom quartiles of satisfaction and performance, even the low-scorers were doing pretty well. All the managers, in other words, looked pretty similar. So they rolled out the big statistical guns and applied multivariate regression techniques, which revealed that “even the smallest incremental increases in manager quality were quite powerful.”

The high-scoring managers saw less turnover on their teams than the others did—and retention was related more strongly to manager quality than to seniority, performance, tenure, or promotions. The data also showed a tight connection between managers’ quality and workers’ happiness: Employees with high-scoring bosses consistently reported greater satisfaction in multiple areas, including innovation, work-life balance, and career development.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

But the question remained: Even if we can begin to identify the best managers, what exactly is it that they’re doing differently to distinguish themselves?

Back to the data.

After months of review and processing (this company is much larger than the largest law firms, so don’t panic), they identified eight actual behaviors the best managers engaged in. All center around motivation, communication, and support:

• Coaches
• Empowers their reports and don’t micromanage
• Shows personal interest and concern
• Oriented towards productivity and results
• Listens and shares information
• Helps with career development
• Articulates a clear vision for the team, and
• Possesses technical skills that earn respect.

The company coupled these identifiable behaviors with classes, panels, one-on-one’s, and other tools to help managers scoring low on any one to improve.

You’re wondering whether all this effort didn’t lead to a dead end, since we’ve already stipulated that the high-performing engineers at this firm are instinctively allergic to management and crave autonomy. Well, yes and no. As it turns out, their autonomy-seeking behavior is focused on doing engineering, not on their own career paths and roles at this company. As one nicely put it:

“Engineershate being micromanaged on the technical side,” he observes, “but they love being closely managed on
the career side.”

I agree with this fellow’s remark, and also have an explanation for it: Engineers are surpassingly confident they can come up with the most fitting technical solution, so “back off!,” but are deeply insecure in their heart of hearts that they know how to manage their careers, careers being, you know, kind of squishy and random-seeming things—they might use the word “stochastic,” at least to themselves.

Another dimension to this: Given that all your peers are Type A’s, how painful is it to score poorly as a manager? Consider this fellow’s experience:

In an environment of top achievers, people takelow scores seriously. Consider [a] vice president, who came to [the firm] in 2011 from a senior sales role at Oracle. During his first six months, he focused on meeting his sales numbers (and did so successfully) while managing
a global team of 150 people. Then he received his first UFS scores, which came as a shock. “I asked myself, ‘Am I right for this company? Should I go back to Oracle?’ There seemed to be a disconnect; my UFS [upward feedback] scoreswere terrible.” Then, with help from a people ops colleague, he took a step back and thought about what changes he could make. He recalls, “We went through all the comments and came up with a plan. I fixed how I communicated with my team and provided more visibility on our long-term strategy. Within two survey cycles, I raised my favorability ratings from 46% to 86%.

How important is it to raise a manager’s score? Suffice to say that very few people quit firms; they usually quit managers.

In Law Land, you can translate this as follows: (a) those who leave BigLaw because it’s not to their taste are going to leave regardless of the firm or the manager; this is the first set of people; (b) the second set of people consists of those who sincerely want to make a go of BigLaw and love their firm but can’t stand their boss. These are the people that cost you the most to lose, not just because they’re the most promising prospects in your pipeline but because they hope to be in this game for the long haul and they’ll do it at a competitor if their boss drives them out of your firm.

The third, residual, and we submit tiny set is (c) those who leave no matter how delightful and inspiring their boss is because they are at odds with your firm. There’s nothing you can do about them, and the sooner they and you are separated the better all around.

So now, many of you who are with me this far may have guessed our anonymized high tech company is, indeed, Google. The HBR article is here.

But recall the message going in:  This was a high-stakes, real-world demonstration that you can persuade autonomy-seeking professionals that management matters.

How much of a difference might that make to your firm?

This article has been all about data.

You are free to think of Google and data in two ways:

• “Google and data” are joined at the hip! How would you expect them to address their internal management challenges other than by using data?! This means nothing to me. I’m home free to do what I’ve always done. In short, “Nothing to see here folks; you can all just move along.”  Or:
• Well, now, Google seems to be a rather impressively successful organization. (From a $50-billion market cap upon its IPO ten years ago to $600-billion today; has your firm done the equivalent?)  Perhaps there’s something to be learned here.

Those of you in Camp A are excused. Everyone is entitled to their comfort zones. But your right to your comfort zone ends where the strength of your firm’s long-term talent pool ends.

Those of you in Camp B? Hire a few graduate student quants and start a few experiments. It will cost you virtually nothing and God forbid you learn something. And if you’re afraid people might actually be expected to change, remember that you have Type A’s fear and loathing of low scores on your side as your secret weapon.