The Management Pretzel 🥨

The cost of trying too hard to make someone successful or happy

I was talking to a leader recently who was doing everything in her power to keep someone on her team. She was considering a re-org, creating a vertical for this person to own, changing titles, and more.

At some point, I had to ask her, “Would you do any of this if this person wasn’t here?”

The answer was no.

“Do you want to do this stuff regardless? Is it the right thing for the business?”

The answer was unclear.

“Do you sort of feel yourself contorting—turning yourself into a pretzel—for this person?”

Yes. That’s exactly what it feels like.

Welcome to the management pretzel 🥨.

There are these moments in management when you are trying really hard to make something work. Trying to boost up a low performer. Trying to make the right space for a high performer. And somewhere along the way, you stop asking, “What’s the right thing for the business?” or “What would I do if this person quit tomorrow or wasn’t here?” Instead, you’re asking and answering a very person-specific question: How do I make this person successful here?

If you’re asking that question, you’re a good manager. So, pats on the back. But sometimes, good managers can do too much.

The cause of the management pretzel is usually genuine care as a manager curdling into over-responsibility for someone’s performance or happiness. You love working with the person and don’t want them to leave. You care about the person, and they’re struggling, so you think that if you just help them a little more or spend a little more time with them, it might get fixed. Good intentions can lead to contortion.

To be clear, changing things for people isn’t inherently bad management. Great managers do it all the time. You redesign roles around exceptional strengths. You give someone extra support when they’re struggling. You fight to keep great people.

The warning sign is when you stop being able to separate what you want for the person from what you believe is right for the business. You’re creating a role because you’re scared they’ll leave. You’re avoiding a performance conversation because you really want them to succeed. You’re reorganizing everyone else around one person’s needs. At that point, you’re probably in a pretzel.

It’s basically a symptom of the article I wrote about management as a potluck. You risk the pretzel when you believe your job is to make the people on your team successful. Your job is to create the conditions for success; it’s their job to meet those conditions.

Pretzeling is expensive. It consumes a disproportionate amount of management time and, more importantly, distorts your judgment. Instead of asking what the team or business needs, you start solving around one person.

And it can be surprisingly hard to notice while you’re doing it. There’s a fine line between supporting and coaching someone and pretzeling for them. Often the clearest signal comes when the situation resolves itself—someone quits, you finally make a change, or someone else points out what’s happening—and you feel an enormous sense of relief.

So how do you catch yourself before you’re all the way bent?

There are three questions I ask myself, or ask the leaders I work with.

Would I do this if this person weren’t here?

Not “would I miss them?” Would I actually build this thing, create this title, or add this new reporting line regardless of who was sitting in the seat?

This is a particularly useful question when you’re trying to retain someone. Sometimes the answer is yes! Maybe their potential departure has forced you to confront an organizational change you should have made anyway. Great. But if the answer is no, pay attention to that.

Taking the people out of it, what’s the right thing for the business?

As an exercise, write the job description for the role as if you were hiring for it tomorrow. Design the org chart without the names in the boxes. What does the business actually need?

Obviously you shouldn’t design organizations without considering the strengths of the humans inside them. But temporarily taking the existing people out of the equation can make it much easier to see when you’ve started designing around one particular person.

If a friend came and explained the situation to you, what would you tell them?

We are so much better at solving other people’s problems than we are at solving our own. As a friend of mine put it: “Your problems are fun! Mine suck.”

So pretend it’s your friend. Explain the situation to yourself as if it were happening to someone else. Sometimes the answer gets obvious.

Anything you can do to take a step back and see what’s happening more clearly can help you figure out whether you’re genuinely supporting someone or whether you’ve started pretzeling for them.

In the case of the leader I mentioned at the beginning, the person she was trying so hard to retain ended up leaving. She expected to be devastated. Instead, she immediately felt relieved.

That feeling told her that she had been carrying responsibility for making a situation work that probably didn’t work anymore.

You don’t have to wait for someone to quit to find that out. If you find yourself redesigning roles, lowering expectations, making exceptions, or spending a wildly disproportionate amount of time trying to make one person successful, ask yourself: What would I do if this person weren’t here?

Sometimes the answer will confirm that you should keep fighting for them. And often you’ll realize just how far you’ve bent.

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