This week’s pieces followed decisions about who does what work, who holds the top job, how hard next year’s number looks and who gets promoted, and kept finding their effects later, or somewhere other than where anyone was measuring.
On October 2, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that payroll employment “changed little” in September, a gain of 29,000, and that the unemployment rate, at 4.2 percent, has stayed between 4.1 and 4.3 percent since March. The same release revised July down by 31,000 and August down by 29,000, which leaves those two months 60,000 below the earlier count. The other half of the picture came from the job openings survey last week’s issue rested on, where the quits rate held at 1.9 percent in August.
When headcount barely grows and few people quit, the people already inside an organization live with earlier decisions for longer. Two of this week’s pieces show what that looks like from the inside. Boards facing poor returns were far less likely to remove a chief executive who had followed an interim, and the narrower pay gap a transferred manager left behind held for the workers who had reported to him after he moved on.
My read, which goes beyond anything the release or the studies claim, is that slow hiring raises the price of a bad default. A company adding headcount can dilute a poor promotion pattern or a badly set target with new people. A company at roughly flat headcount cannot, so the same cohort carries the result for years. Leaders in that position tend to reach for tools and policies, and this week’s evidence kept pointing at the discretionary calls underneath them.
The jobs report does not prove any of that. It is the backdrop against which a week of research about lingering decisions reads with more weight than it would in a market turning over fast.
If you have not heard Episode 7 of High Road Conversations, Hanna Bauer ran an educational publishing company through the collapse of print while keeping quiet, for roughly twenty years, about the heart disease that had her declared clinically dead at ten. We talked about burnout, about reading an organization’s vital signs, and about hope as a catalyst for change.
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I don't just talk about Agile and leadership, I put it into practice in my Skool, building and shipping real products with Claude every Thursday at 12:30pm ET.
Join us →This week’s piece on transferred managers found the effect spreading to the local managers who worked alongside them or reported to them, which is close to a line in Agile Sucks! (When You Do It Wrong). In the chapter on ten ways companies sabotage Agile, Mistake 7 is no executive buy-in, and James Wright and I put it plainly: “Employees model the behavior they see from above.”
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