Beware the Maverick Mindset

The Trap of the Maverick Mindset

The Trap of the Maverick Mindset is when innovators point their maverick instincts that they used towards the product into the human factors of the business, towards certain management practices. And we know that being disruptive in the management space often leads to dysfunction than it does lead to, you know, building kind of this romantic idea of a brand new workplace.

To be clear, we are not apologists for old school management. But there are reasons why these practices have sustained through the centuries. In many ways, technology evolves very quickly, but human evolution, unfortunately, goes a lot, you know, slower.

3 Management Myths to Rethink

There are three myths that are useful for us to consider here. One of the biggest myths in these circles is The Myth of No Hierarchy. There is an instinct in all of us, an egalitarian instinct where we reject the idea that we need hierarchy. As a leader, the reality is that you are in a position of power. We also know from the research that a healthy layer of management actually helps reduce a lot of the operational ambiguities that the team needs to do their work really well.

There’s a really fascinating study out of Wharton that studied gaming studios, and they tried to understand when they introduced a layer of management, how would that affect things like the level of creativity? What the study found was that it did hurt the level of creativity, but by a rate of one percent. While you lose one percent in, you know, the quality and the creativity of the game, you actually see a fourteen percent upside in terms of commercial achievement. By establishing this layer of management, you’re actually able to achieve your commercial goals a lot more effectively.

The second is The Myth of Sustained Heroics. There’s a belief with Mavericks that because it takes this superhuman effort to create these amazing products, that as I scale the company, I need to see the same level of heroics from every single person on the team. What that creates for the team is a dynamic that some psychologists have called overperforming and underperforming dynamic. The overperformer will push really hard, save the day each and every time, and really create a single point dependency around them. And then what happens with the underperformers is they then ever-so-slightly lean back, feel less committed to the outcomes, know that they can rely on the hero to come in, and you create an environment where you have this imbalance between people’s contributions. And over time, that really spoils the culture. Instead, what you want are clear roles, and you want systems in place so that you don’t create these single points of failure in the team.

The last is The Myth of Structural Harmony. You might think about conflict in your organization in two ways. There’s personal conflict and then there’s structural conflict. Personal conflict usually looks like, you know, egos that clash, perhaps, you know, working styles that don’t quite match.

But then there’s structural conflict. And this is conflict that is built into the way the organization is built. For example, it’s very common for a CEO and a CTO to have structural conflict. CEOs are oftentimes out with investors, with the board, oftentimes think about the future of the company where CTOs need to, yes, think about the future, but also need to reduce technical debt and make sure that, you know, they’re able to meet these product timelines.

There’s very oftentimes a conflict between engineering and product management teams, between sales and marketing. These are all — between finance and HR. Now, an untrained leader, a new leader who comes into this space and sees these tensions will often misdiagnose these as personality conflicts. When in reality, these conflicts are meant to be checks and balances within the organization. As a leader, when you see this, it’s important for you not to rush in and try to resolve the tension. You might want to make sure you spot some of the personality issues within that structural conflict. But by no means is it your job to actually resolve all that conflict.

So we encourage leaders to not fall for a lot of these fad management ideas of holacracy or these self, you know, self-managed teams. There simply is no data to show that any of this actually works.