Bill Schaninger

Original Air Date: November 5, 2023

Bill Schaninger, former senior partner at the global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, has written a book called “Power To The Middle: Why Managers Hold The Keys To The Future Of Work”.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Welcome to Sunstein Sessions on iHeartRadio,Conversations about issues that matter. Here's your
host, three time Grasie Award winner, Shelley Sunstein. I want to introduce
you to Bill Schanninger. Yes,that is my married name, and I
was trying to think, so isBill my stepnephew. I think he is

(00:22):
right because you are John's nephew,so that makes you my stepnephew. But
he was also a senior partner forthe longest time with one of the biggest
consulting companies in the world, theglobal management consulting company McKenzie and Company.
So that makes him a very bigdeal in the community when you're talking about

(00:48):
consulting some of the biggest companies inthe world. And I didn't realize he
also consulted government officials during this verylong career. But the reason Bill is
joining me this morning is he hasco written a book called Power to the
Middle Why Managers Hold the Keys tothe Future of Work. So all this

(01:11):
work you've done all these years consultingsome of the biggest companies and government officials,
why did you pick this issue towrite the book? Well, it's
it's a good first question right,Why now? Why bother? You know,
it's been about twenty five years sinceWarfare Talent came out, which was

(01:32):
a sort of a pretty significant mckenseybook on talent, also published by Harvard,
and I knew initially, I knewI wanted to do a follow up
to it in some way, sortof a what have we learned over the
course of the twenty five years.And when I first started thinking about it,
then we really started seeing the impactof COVID on you know what we

(01:53):
were bundling in nice work, workforcework. Basically, COVID was changing the
work that was being done. Itwas also changing what people needed to know
how to do, and some ofthe stuff they used to know how to
do wasn't so useful anymore. Andwe had a big issue around the workplace
where people going to come to workor they're going to come to the office.
They were working at home while tryingto be a mom and a teacher
and a partner. So all thatstuff was coming together at the same time,

(02:16):
and when we were teasing through it, we kept on coming up the
same answer was like, well,the manager will know how the work is
changing and what's permanent what's not andsurely the person that they work for will
know what skills they've acquired and whatkind of flexibility we have. And well,
yeah, I mean people want togo see the people they work with
in their boss and that kind ofmakes it a cool opportunity. And so
we had all these answers that saidthe manager, the person you directly worked

(02:38):
for. The challenge, of course, was when we were looking at the
same time we had all of ourgreat attrition, great attraction stuff going on,
saying why are people leaving work indroves? Why aren't they coming back?
And the answer and why they wereleaving work and not coming back was
the manager. So you had thisconfluence of we desperately need them, but
boy are they not up to it. And so then the impetus was,
well, that's why aren't they It'snot like people get out of bed the

(02:58):
morning and say I'm going to bea jour today, right, And so
was that really was the impetus,right, like how you'll roll the clock
back and say, how the heckdid we get here? And what can
we do about it? And basicallymiddle managers are the Rodney dangerfields of the
workplace, right because that'll be thefirst jobs that are cut. And then

(03:21):
of course that means that their rolesmultiply because they have to make up the
work that is missing with other middlemanagers being cut. And yet why why
are we And I'm thinking of myown boss when you know, I'm passing
this book onto him, because he'sa middle manager. We work for a

(03:42):
very, very large company, thebiggest communications company in the world. I
believe, iHeartMedia. He's a middlemanager and I see him taking on more
and more roles. And you're right, I mean, he is the link.
He is my go to if Iam sick or if I have a

(04:03):
problem. So how did we endup here? And how do we correct
it? Well, because there isa disconnect from the very to rye up
and the people like me. Yep, oh for sure, you know,
I mean a couple of things.Most of the people who are currently running
companies sort of came up in anera when we were at the tail end

(04:25):
of cradle to grave employment. Solike, I mean, I'm fifty three,
I turned fifty four tomorrow. Righthere in the Lee High Valley,
you know, Bay, thank you, you know, here in the Lee
High Valley, we saw Bethel andSteel go cold, lose the vast majority
of their value. MAC trucks moveaway. Right, we saw these iconic
institutions in my lifetime. We've seenGM take federal bailout money, Chrysler go

(04:47):
into bankruptcy, let you know,at and t up and down. So
iconic institutions right now. And agood reason for that was through the sixties
and seventies, even a tad intothe eighties, they we were all just
kind of set up to be likeduplicate bus. You had a company,
it was set up. You know, they had many CEOs and a massive
amount of middle management infrastructure, likepeople who were there to literally push paper.

(05:14):
And you know, we hadn't yetgotten to the point where you could
communicate with everyone all at once byhitting the send button. So you know,
it's a straight take out of thegovernment in the military. Right,
It's like you formed the pyramid,but that was super expensive. So in
the eighties when we started having thefirst real round of cutting, it didn't
take very long to look in themiddle and go, what the hell do
these people do? You know,they give good meeting and they pushed forms.

(05:38):
I mean, you know, thingslike the TPS reports and who moved
my Stapler and Gilbert didn't come outof nowhere, and so you know,
we'd had a run where a lotof bloat and it was easy to go
after the middle. Unfortunately, andthis is where I think it starts going
south. In the early nineties,we started having things like re engineering right,
sizing, offshoring, speeding our wayinto the you know, dot com

(06:00):
era. Remember when we thought likethe you know, the planes weren't going
to fly and the you know,our money would go away. That run
up there, fascinating early fascination wouldtech the early knots up to the financial
crisis, which was throw money atit, throw options at it, you
know, all in almost a completeremoval of the idea that the organization didn't
need people in the middle to leadpeople to help them make sense of what

(06:23):
was going on. So we've hadalmost thirty years then coming up to COVID,
almost thirty years of kind of beingderisive of this group of leaders,
right, and part of it wellearned. Part of it that people are
not very good. Sometimes they're justreally good individual contributors who got pushed into
these roles. But other times theyare good and they're just do when everything
they can to get the hick outof it really fast because they think it's

(06:44):
it's it's a way station, nota meaningful role. And I'm thinking of
the office right now for sure.Okay, So I am speaking right now
to Bill Shanninger. He is theco author of Powered to the Middle,
Why Managers Hold the Keys to theFuture of Work. Now talking about the
future of work, and we're sortof caught in a really weird place with

(07:06):
the return to office after COVID,because cities desperately want us back filling up
office buildings, but people aren't goingback, and they're pushing back, and
at best most are saying, okay, I want a hybrid workplace. And

(07:30):
we're noticing in the city. InNew York City, Friday is dead.
I mean it is a ghost town. There are restaurants that won't even open
for breakfast because there's nobody there.And Monday is also not such a popular
day to go to office, sopeople are going it seems in the middle

(07:56):
of the week. And I getit. The collaboration face to face is
different than when you're working remotely.So I'm asking you, as somebody who
long consulted companies through various changes.Is the solution. Okay, we want

(08:18):
you in office. All of youcome in office Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.
How do companies deal with this?Well, some have tried that.
Some have gone the mandate route andwith notably bad results, you know,
where you put the mandate out andsay everybody has to be in and you
get less than thirty percent showing up. Well, what if there is if
it was a hybrid, but therewere only specific days of hybrid. Right,

(08:41):
Well, that's one It's one waythat people are trying to do it.
I've been encouraged and you know,boy, I've gotten to speak about
this a lot last two years.I've been encouraging my clients and just people
who listen, you know, tothe speeches and stuff, and say,
why don't we look at the workand say where collaboration is required and match
it with coordination, Like what groupof people? I mean, we've boxed

(09:03):
ourselves almost into a power to theindividual or power to the company, and
I don't think either of those arethe right answer, right, I mean,
most you know, a lot ofwork is done with teams, a
lot of work is done collaborative withother people. But you probably have some
of your own work. And soI've been saying, what if we just
said to every employee, a daya month is for the company, and
you're going to come in one daya month just so we can take stock
of what's going on, have anice meal, right, figure out see

(09:26):
how we're doing, celebrate some folks, et cetera. Two days a month
will be for the unit you workfor, and that's probably a little bit
more like coordinating. And then therest of it is the people you work
with and the manager you work forwill identify give you the all months six
weeks out. Notice, Hey,we're getting together here, here, and
here. The rest is up toyou. That seems like it would be
fair and based on the work.Anything not based on the work starts feeling

(09:50):
a little bit spurious, right,and you're back in the day of Oh,
I'm gonna eat I'm gonna eat trafficbecause I have to. And that's
basically where people are at. It'swhat a time suck traffic is? Why
why do I have to deal withthat? If I can do my job
and do it well, and weall prove that during the pandemic that we

(10:11):
could do it remotely I mean thatwas just one thing that changed. Well,
it's massive and an interesting thing that'scome up though, because it has,
like you know, connections to otherthings. Particularly people who've been in
the workforce a long time or workwith people a long time have build up
social capital. I mean, thinkyou're you're on air, partner, you've

(10:31):
been with forever, you have aspeak, you have a code, you
can even look and know what you'resaying. Okay, that's social capital.
You can draw down on that whenyou're not in the room the same time
because you can broadly predict how theother person's going to react. So in
the early days of COVID, whenwe were getting way more done than we
thought and it was crazy and wewere taking zooms at all hours and just
trying to figure out what the heckis going on, we were drawing down

(10:52):
on the good will account because weknew each other. We're going into our
third year of hiring new employees whodo not have that. They've not been
onboarded in person, they've not hadthe ceremonies in person, they had the
rights, the rituals, you know, all that stuff that would normally make
you part of we They're still verymuch me And so if we're not careful,

(11:13):
we've backed our way into a gigeconomy. But we're just sending them
a regular check, which I don'tthink is helpful. You know, for
instance, I think that's why yousee people saying it's fraying at our culture,
it's breaking who we are. Butthen the response is an over the
top mandate like you all will comein, which I also think misses the
point. Okay, let's bring upsomething else, because you see and with

(11:35):
the young people, people who arejust starting their careers, not only are
they missing the collaboration if they're notthere in person, a different sort of
collaboration, but you're missing meeting people, socializing with people. But that said,
look I met my husband at work. In today's world, I'm wondering

(11:58):
if we would have gotten together becauseof you know, these lines that are
drawn when people are in What dowe do about relationships? This is where
you meet people, this is whereyou fall in love, and now we're
sea blocking people again. What dowe do about that? Bill Shanninger,

(12:20):
Yeah, you only have three minutesleft, and this, this is a
big one. I got to tellyou. This is probably an era where
the Me Too movement, which isvery real and very significant, did trigger
again probably an over reaction towards nonezero. You know how we don't have
to worry about power dynamics is ifthere's none, And when they're junior people,

(12:43):
it's like, you know you,well, you have to report to
us. I got to tell you, I think the walk of shame after
a weekend training event is probably notgoing to get reported, which is that's
just I mean, it's it's notI think. I think because of an
appropriate concern of risk, we've overdoneit. But I get it. I
get where it comes from because therewere some cultures that were so enabling of

(13:05):
just sickening behavior. You can seewhy they come back that way, right,
So what do we do about that? Because that's the way we seem
to do things in society. Thependulum is either one way or the other,
and the common senses, I thinkwe've vacated. We've definitely vacated the
social and I think the social partof the group has to return if we're

(13:26):
going to have a tie that binds. I mean, I didn't see my
colleagues for over a year, andand my buddy Aaron de Smett, who
lives in Montclair. We went therefor his birthday party, and I remember
looking in at the city on hisdeck and thinking, this is wonderful going.
I forgot how much I like thesepeople right, And I think we're
on borrowed time as institutions that haveresilience and people who are willing to go
above and beyond for us. Ifwe don't make it matter that you wear

(13:48):
the badge, you know, Okay, we only have a minute and a
half left. This really isn't yourarea. But I'm curious how you feel
about it. What do we doabout all the empty off the space in
Manhattan. You're correct, it isnot my area. I have a former
colleague named Phil Kirschner who's excellent.He and I have done a couple of
podcasts and articles about it. Ido think the ability to reconfigure is a

(14:13):
real upside. I was on Oh, I was on the Forbes Forbes are
a fortune. It was a fortunething with an architect and somebody who did
this kind of stuff, and they'resaying, all the footprints. It's not
even just figuring what the perfect layoutis, it's the how can we reconfigure?
Almost by the day you know,based on what usage is. And
maybe the single biggest thing is,I'm not sure we've done a good job

(14:35):
of telling people why it matters tobe together. We keep leading with the
rule, and we keep leading withthe mandate and the power, and we're
just it's it's like trying. It'slike the day the kids figure out that
mom and dad really can't force youto eat your food, you know,
right, and then you're like,now what right, Oh, now you're
making me at it? Okay,still banned, Okay, we are out

(14:58):
of time. The book is Powerto the Middle, Why managers hold the
keys to the future of work.Thank you so much, Bill Shanninger.
You've been listening to Sunstein Sessions oniHeartRadio, a production of New York's classic
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