In September of 2016 I was hired by Walgreens after an embarrassing drought of not working. It was a whirlwind that seemed too good to be true; the district manager who was going to phone interview me completely flaked on our scheduled time, then called out of the blue on the next day. Didn’t even interview me, instead he had two offers: I could either float in and around one city or I could take a staff position in one of the nearby cities with a $30k sign on bonus. Seemed like an easy choice.
It was too good to be true, but not in the this-was-some-sort-of-scam-not-real-job sense I was nervous about, the store in question was a perpetual problem store. It turns out they’d hired me and another pharmacist, both completely brand new to retail. They didn’t even bother to train me, just handed me over to the pharmacy manager and said good luck (she was, fortunately, an adequate teacher).
Somewhere around 6ish months and one more pharmacy manager later, one of the regional managers came around to the store for a visit and I somehow ended up in a one-on-two meeting with him and one of the assistant store managers. I was and mostly still am grateful for the random opportunity since it gave me the first tastes of insight into how upper management views their stores from down on high with clever metrics and platitudes.
He had a few stories, things I didn’t know how to react to then but have much more experience now to question. One was something to the effect of, “Every store thinks their problems are unique, but as a regional leader traveling from place to place you get to see that they really are not.” I believe there’s some sense in which this is true; I would anticipate that the kinds of problems pharmacies have could be broadly wrangled into only a handful of categories, especially from the far view of upper management.
But also this is a metis vs episteme problem. The implication here was that since every store has the same set of problems, those problems can be solved with the same solutions, which, if true, was not borne out by any direct help from him. My unfounded suspicions are that regardless of how similar problems are across stores, solutions still need to be tailored by store; my store having “the same” problem as every other store did not save me from the fact that he didn’t know how to solve the problems of my specific store.
So I pointed to the metrics he was showing me and I asked point blank, “So what are we doing wrong? How do we get our numbers to be the good numbers?”
He replied with something like, “The problem here is teamwork.”
To which I replied, “Okay, but what specifically do we do to fix that?”
“I really think you need better teamwork.”
And that was all I would ever get. The impression I was left with was “oh, they don’t know, they couldn’t even solve this problem if they wanted to, they’re hoping a pharmacist with basically no experience will ‘figure it out’”.
Unfortunately for me “I really think you need better teamwork” turned out to be right.1
Around a year after I started we got a third pharmacy manager. She deserves a pseudonym here so I’ll call her Stephanie. Stephanie was a rockstar pharmacist, I’ve seen one or two more since but she’s the prime archetype. Both an outstanding pharmacist in the operational sense and a peculiarly effective leader. Everywhere she went would go from garbage to glory and everywhere she left would inevitably slide back into the trash heap. The store she left when she was given the pharmacy manager position got to be so bad that our district manager was sending people from our store to theirs to help keep them caught up. When she managed to get herself promoted out of our store I had to do everything I could to keep things from following the same course and was mostly failing.
I would love to say something like “and I got a front row seat to see how she turned things around” except I’m not very confident I do know how she did it. She had some unbelievably incredible charisma and was legitimately pretty damn cool.2 I guess I would describe her as being the kind of person that intrinsically motivates others to avoid disappointing her. She wasn’t especially strict but she wouldn’t tolerate passive failure or poor performance either3. Less tiger mom, more cool older sister. I had morale-crushed coworkers who blossomed into extremely competent pharmacy technicians under her leadership. I had about a year period where I didn’t hate coming in to work at a chain pharmacy.
We were finally able to get caught up pretty early on and then from then on the operating expectation was that we would stay caught up. And we just sort of did it. Somehow? Some of it was Stephanie herself being monstrously efficient in ways that were frankly kind of baffling; at least once we tried to figure out how she was able to move so much faster than me despite having basically the same physical process and it still was kind of not very clear what was going on. But the most astute way to describe it was that the teamwork was pretty good.
I’m writing this post partly to tell the above story and partly to think through whether or not “teamwork” is a black box solution that I could replicate if I wanted to. Is Stephanie’s management something I could replicate, at least in part?
I don’t have formal management experience but I don’t exactly have no management experience. I ended up running a guild in the early stages of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn in the last half of 2013. I didn’t have to work to put it together, basically I’d joined a cadre of dudes I played Star Wars: The Old Republic with back in the day and by the time we were all set to start raiding in FFXIV the guild leadership decided they weren’t feelin’ it and quite en masse, so I stepped up.
It went pretty well for a while, it had a solid core first with enough people to make two full groups of 8 players each and that slowly expanded over time up to 6 full groups. It wasn’t perfectly smooth but it was pretty good, I didn’t over-delegate, didn’t make extra officers to appease egos, did my best not to play favorites, pretty fairly arbitrated a couple intense disputes.
The last boss of original raid in the ARR release was unfinishable, supposedly because there was some hidden mechanic that nobody could figure out4. This caused some awkward friction because several people were satisfied to clear up to it and stop and some of us were not and were willing to smash our heads into that brick wall even though it was profoundly frustrating for everyone involved. The subsequent 2.1 patch that added Crystal Tower et al. ended up being a bit of a breaking point that caused people to stop playing the game faster than I could adapt to, and over the course of about two weeks I suddenly had not enough people for a competent full group for the main raid5.
The elements of my leadership that worked seem apparent to me, stability and fair, competent authority seemed important. Morale management was also important and fragile and very vulnerable to forces beyond one’s control. Some of this was improved by having mechanical working relationships with a lot of my members; one of my gimmicks at the time was that I powerleveled everything, had every class at max level very early on (very possibly among the first in ARR) and so could carry on talk about the game with anyone on any level—I was never too far above anyone in any kind of managerial sense. People seem to prefer that their leadership be more proximal versus more remote, probably this is some kind of metis thing.
The things that didn’t work are murkier. Some of it was which advice I chose to ignore, but it’s the kind of thing where you can’t be sure it wasn’t hindsight coincidence. One of the early controversial decisions I made was to have people assigned to static groups (as opposed to rotating membership between groups); I was warned by a few people that this would cause a fractious cliquishness that did indeed literally end up happening6. I still sort of think static groups were the right call in terms of how quickly it allowed people to progress but again, it’s difficult to call in retrospect.
Teamwork seemed greatest when morale was aligned, and conceptually this makes sense, but I’m worried “morale” is too reductionist and obfuscates the actual components of what makes this work. We can sort of break some of this out by identifying what seems to be patterns when morale is high versus low. It seems that morale being high correlates with how much fun everyone is having and by how much or how frequently each individual’s goals are being achieved. Perhaps goal alignment is an important component; it maybe doesn’t have to be if you can induce an extrinsic common goal but I would guess there’s always going to be some legwork in adapting intrinsic/extrinsic motivation disparities.
My experience tells me that morale seems to be most harshly impacted by feeling ignored by leadership, and while this is still sort of in the realm of fuzzy-intuitive sense-having-ness—gah, look if it seems like I’m constantly harping on ideas being too reductionist versus not having identifiable components this is what I mean by calling these ideas black boxes. I have to believe on some level that you need to eventually figure out why things are working the way they do if you want to understand how to cause them to happen by anything other than chance. It’s important to be able to break down the jargon, to be able to taboo your words!
When you find yourself in philosophical difficulties, the first line of defense is not to define your problematic terms, but to see whether you can think without using those terms at all. Or any of their short synonyms. And be careful not to let yourself invent a new word to use instead. Describe outward observables and interior mechanisms; don’t use a single handle, whatever that handle may be.
Let’s back up a little bit. One approach we can take is to reasonably guess that “teamwork” and/or “morale” as solutions are for problems related to management, so it’s probably useful to think of them with that framing in mind. Like we briefly tried to do with morale, we can maybe break down “management” as a fuzzy concept into more digestible components: let’s call one set macromanagement and another micromanagement. I’m going to go one more step and translate this Art of War style by referring to macromanagement as strategy and micromanagement as tactics. This also gives us a good contextual springboard for exploring these ideas.
Strategy is your big picture component, what is your mission statement and how do you accomplish that. Tactics are the most granular, ground-level component. Strategy is choosing the right battle, tactics is choosing the correct actions once the battle has started. Strategy and tactics feed into each other, and you should always be trying to use one to build advantage for the other. Starcraft makes for a great illustration of this, and also conveniently meshes with the terminology we’re choosing to use since strategy & tactics in this context are usually referred to as macro & micro.
In Starcraft, macro is how you choose to build your base; when and how you time rates of resource extraction, deciding what unit producing structures to build and what your army composition will be, when to research upgrades, when to expand to claim additional resources, and reacting to your opponent’s strategic decisions. Micro is how you control individual units, whether alone or in a group; it’s how you execute effective scouting, effective precision strikes, choosing specifically when and where to engage an enemy and getting the most out of your army in the engagement by controlling them precisely. Macro is more about planning and execution, micro is more about practiced, precise control.7
Macro and micro feed into each other; you use one to build the other. Starcraft matches begin with two players in similar bases at random points on a map, with a default base structure and several workers near a starting resource patch. At the earliest stages, both macro and micro play important, mixed roles; you need to have a plan going in for what your initial buildings will be and how your workers will behave, and you also need to be thinking about scouting for your opponent for information on where they are and what they are planning. Your earliest decisions in base planning inform your earliest decisions on early game army construction and composition, and then immediately you should be seeking to use that army to establish advantages.
Often this operates by turning one of strategic or tactical advantages into another—using one to screen off and allow you to build the other. At the start of a match the Red player has sent one of their workers as a scout to look for the Blue player, who happens to be in one of the first places Red looks, meanwhile Blue’s scout has not yet found Red. Red now has a strategic advantage—not only does he know where Blue is, now (for as long as his scout is able to remain alive) he has continual information on what the other player is doing and building (for example, if Blue expands early Red knows he is vulnerable to early attacks since those resources are not being used to build his army).
Let’s say Red spots an early expansion, so he immediately shifts to building an early army, which he then sends at the lightly defended Blue base. Red has used his strategic advantage to build a tactical advantage (in the form of a more robust early army) that he now seeks to exploit, which he does by sending his army to the Blue base where he is successfully able to destroy the lightly defended expansion and several workers. Because he has damaged Blue’s resource acquisition (while still building his own in the background) Red has once again turned the tactical advantage into a further strategic advantage.
There’s a concept here referred to as marginal advantage. Day9 has an old legendary article on marginal advantage in Starcraft.
Despite the fact that these games function in drastically different ways and demand completely different skill sets, the expert players, the players who consistently win, always share a single commonality: they play comfortably with a marginal advantage. The marginal advantage embodies the notion that one cannot, and should not, try to “win big.” In a competitive setting, the strong player knows that his best opponents are unlikely to make many exploitable mistakes. As a result, the strong player knows that he must be content to play with just the slightest edge, an edge which is the equivalent to the marginal advantage. More importantly, a one-sided match ultimately carries as much weight as an epic struggle. After all, the match results only in a win or a loss; there are no “degrees” of winning. Therefore, at any given point in a game, the player must focus on making decisions that minimize his probability of losing the advantage, rather than on decisions that maximize his probability of gaining a greater advantage. In short, it is much more important to the expert player to not lose than it is to win big. Consequently, a regular winner plays to extend his lead in a very gradual, but very consistent manner.
Marginal advantage comes into play here; can Red’s army successfully assault Blue’s main base and win the game or will Blue’s fortified main position along with the defenses he’s managed to accumulate make this too risky of a play? If Blue is able to more cleverly control their units in a way that destroys Red’s army, Blue will have gained a marginal tactical advantage that he could then exploit by sending his army at the now-undefended Red base. As Day9 indicates, a more consistent player may choose to accept the strategic advantage already gained to leverage into a better long-term tactical advantage shortly down the road instead of risking giving Blue the relative tactical advantage of destroying Red’s attacking army. With Blue’s income damaged, Red can now expand in relative safety and leverage their marginal advantage to snowball into a safer win.8
Ahem, alright, but wasn’t the question, “How do I make my pharmacy not suck?” No, snarky interlocutor, recall that we’re talking about management.
So what are the kinds of things we can split or define into macro vs micro in a workplace sense? I’ve heard management best described as ensuring one’s employees has the resources necessary to do their jobs, which sounds very macro to me. Perhaps there’s some sense in which tasks that are more managerial in nature fit macro vs execution of actual “work” being micro. Assigning duties seems like it could be either, I guess I’d characterize it as the grouping a set of duties to assign is a macro constraint and execution and in-world prioritization of the assignments is micro.
I think morale management is probably micro; there’s going to be a higher degree of complexity required in maneuvering the motivations of a number of individuals—I don’t believe you can just set a mission statement and then suddenly everyone will be happy. You’re always going to have to be juggling preferences and while I can see the temptation to set a macro rule and be done with it but in my experience you’re always better served by embracing the nuance of treating it as a micro problem. There’s a great passage from Robyn Dawes’ Rational Choice in an Uncertain World quoted in Hold Off On Proposing Solutions that’s extremely relevant here and I’ll quote in part and add emphasis to highlight here:
Maier devised the following “role playing” experiment to demonstrate his point. Three employees of differing ability work on an assembly line. They rotate among three jobs that require different levels of ability, because the most able—who is also the most dominant—is strongly motivated to avoid boredom. In contrast, the least able worker, aware that he does not perform the more difficult jobs as well as the other two, has agreed to rotation because of the dominance of his able co-worker. An “efficiency expert” notes that if the most able employee were given the most difficult task and the least able the least difficult, productivity could be improved by 20%, and the expert recommends that the employees stop rotating. The three employees and… a fourth person designated to play the role of foreman are asked to discuss the expert’s recommendation. Some role-playing groups are given Maier’s edict not to discuss solutions until having discussed the problem thoroughly, while others are not. Those who are not given the edict immediately begin to argue about the importance of productivity versus worker autonomy and the avoidance of boredom. Groups presented with the edict have a much higher probability of arriving at the solution that the two more able workers rotate, while the least able one sticks to the least demanding job—a solution that yields a 19% increase in productivity.
I’ve seen a lot of friction caused by discussions of rotating versus static assigned tasks, in fact you may recall I’ve already brought it up in the context of raiding in FFXIV in the previous section. These days I frequently come back to this story to illustrate the kinds of third options that people easily forget can exist.
There’s variations on this we can dream of even, for example I’ve proposed what I’ll call “split intermittent rotations”: have an 8 week period of 3 weeks on regular assignments, 1 week with half the staff rotating to new assignments, 3 weeks regular, then 1 week with the other half rotating. Goal here is to allow for consistent task accountability while enabling people to get some teaching and familiarity with tasks outside their regular role, taught and overseen by the remaining half that do not rotate. A single individual only rotates 1 out of every 8 weeks, making it more palatable for people who prefer their usual stability.
Having control over hiring is clearly a strategic option. Training a new hire is probably a tactical problem except inasmuch as there’s strategy to choosing the right trainer.
Should a manager be able to do everything their employees are required to? It seems obvious that on net the answer should be no, simply because there’s probably more situations where this isn’t even reasonably possible, and yet it seems most of (corporate) society is able to function. However, everywhere I’ve seen leadership that has worked well has been in a context where the leader fully understands what their workers are doing on the micro level. I think this works so well because it reinforces reciprocal trust and respect with regards to executive decision making—if my boss has no clue how to do my job and no appreciation for the level of challenge he’s assigning me, why would I have faith in their ability to make any decision that involves me. Likewise, I’m almost certainly making better decisions as the supervisor with a clearer understanding of what my employees are going through minute to minute, and I have a better understanding of what their needs are and how to meet those needs.
Is this a reasonable expectation or goal? I think there needs to be a choice by the individual manager; empirically there seems to be a tradeoff between being an of-the-people in-the-trenches ground-level commander that is able to foster direct connections with their team and…just about everything else about being the boss. A lot of elements of managerial positions seem to be unpreventably opaque to lower level workers, and so one has to decide whether this is fine or whether this is something that ought to be mitigated.
Part of what I’m dancing around here is that there seems to be a natural dichotomy between the kind of manager who is pursuing metrics and is focused on pleasing upper management and the kind of manager who is prioritizing the quality of life of employees under them. I don’t think you can’t do both, but I think the far majority of most people are not effectively capable of doing both. My impression is that in most cases the simplest path is to do one at the expense of the other—that doing this is easier macro—whereas navigating the intricacies of both requires a very high level of business finesse—is a tougher micro.
So where’s a good spot to end here? Originally I was going to have a big section where I try to explain how my present situation is running on severe teamwork deficits and explore potential solutions but ran into a problem where I realized I’m neither guaranteed permanent continued employment9 nor like the other pharmacists enough to invest deeply into putting much time into it10.
Looking at the Substack dashboard reminds me not to stress too much over appearances for the 13 people who might get this far, so let’s wrap by noting that I guess if nothing else this has been a helpful set of thought exercises that can be built on more later.
To be clear though, I think this was purely coincidence and not likely to have been a wise insight. Having the right platitude for my situation didn’t change the fact that he had no actionable plan for “improving teamwork” and the problem solved itself basically by accident, as I’ll go on to describe. Inasmuch as he was aware that “teamwork” was the magic solution I’m also fairly sure this was either gleaned by accident or coincidence or a line in some management training powerpoint. Again, I’m not convinced “teamwork” isn’t a black box solution that they even understand beyond the symbols that make up the word, that it’s something Walgreens management could actively replicate if they wanted to.
She was into video games at a pretty high level, way higher than me! The story I like to tell here is that when she found out I was into video games she said something like, “Oh yeah! I’m really into hardcore Diablo 3 and Starcraft!” But I heard “I’m hardcore into Diablo 3” and was like okay yeah cool she’s probably a regular casual Blizzard fan. And then she pulls out her phone and shows me where she’s been on the top 10 hardcore leaderboards for Witch Doctor in several of the previous seasons. These days she’s always on Lost Ark on my Steam friends list, has something ridiculous like 3000+ hours in it. Gotta ping her for an opinion on Diablo 4 maybe.
We had an almost-comically-inept pharmacy technician for whom we were able to discover ways of overcoming the conventional difficulty of firing someone who’s not causing active harm but is underperforming. I recall being presciently nervous about being involved in this because the methods seemed extremely abuseable, and indeed were, as I discovered much more personally quite later.
Or (more likely) it was badly bugged and they didn’t know how to fix it in a timely manner.
Basically, we were expecting the new 24-man content to replace the previous raid—which is why we’d recruited up to 6 groups—but it ended up being gimmicky side content, and the previous raid was both kind of an annoying/boring grind by now and had still not been fixed.
When things were falling apart, one entire group decided to peace out together to make their own separate free company.
If you want to skip this entire section where I get kind of into the weeds in describing Starcraft, click through to the next footnote and back. I think it’s worth reading but it ends up being way longer than I intended.
Back to the main point here.
I’m contract and, having interviewed for around a half dozen (relatively) permanent positions that are identical to what I’m doing now, am not really convinced this is something my present employer considers an obvious advantage, so I’m not exactly invested in long term solutions to this local problem. (The weird double-standard between permanent and contract state employment isn’t something I’m prepared to rant about here but I am and have elsewhere.)
The techs are pretty rad though, and I’m pretty impressed with and proud of how dutiful they are despite them all being kind of generally, constantly miserable.
My favorite post from you thus far I’ve read