The joy of having no direct reports

For some gig-economy types, the only thing better than not having a boss is not being one

Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

Last weekend, the Nine papers ran a story centred around a corporate high-flyer who gave it all up to become a cleaner. Not the CEO of a giant cleaning company, or even a small businessman employing a team of cleaners, you understand. No, Tony Beaumont purchased a Jim’s Cleaning franchise and now spends his working days in blissful solitude wiping windowsills, mopping kitchen floors and scrubbing toilets.

Unsurprisingly, Beaumont, previously a marketing manager for BP, has taken a financial hit. (He used to earn “over $200,000” and presumably now struggles to approach six figures.) But he has no regrets and would “do the same thing again without a shadow of doubt”. There were many things Beaumont was over when he quit his job – long hours, interstate travel, responding to 150 emails a day, corporate culture in general – but it appears the thing he was most over was overseeing members of his team. “I didn’t want to manage others anymore. I had had 10 direct and 35 indirect people reporting to me. I didn’t want any staff that I had to worry about,” he explained.

Take this cup of (people-management) suffering away from me

In the same way individuals who don’t aspire to power tend to wield it wisely if it is thrust upon them, those with no desire to oversee others often make the best managers.

The best boss I ever had was ambitious and no doubt enjoyed the salary that came along with heading up a department of 30-40 people. But, as far as I could tell, he would have been perfectly happy to have ascended to a well-paid, prestigious position that didn’t involve overseeing any staff. He certainly evidenced no hesitation or regret about chucking in his senior management role after a few years and returning to being a jobbing, one-man-band freelance writer and editor.      

Back in my employee days, I was never in charge of more than a handful of people at any one time. 

Fortunately, most of the people on my team were, most of the time, competent, professional and pleasant to be around. Unfortunately, that wasn’t always the case and I soon discovered that an obstreperous employee can drain the life out of you almost as quickly as a deranged manager.

In fact, despite theoretically being on the right side of the power differential, attempting to manage a diva subordinate can be more challenging than propitiating a difficult boss. In the former case, you can at least choose to change the way you behave or communicate in the hopes of resolving, or at least dialling down, the conflict. In the latter case, there’s little you can do if the other person is, consciously or unconsciously, determined to maintain or even intensify the conflict. 

It's the system, man!

Workplaces are structured in a way that makes supervisor-subordinate (and colleague-colleague) conflicts likely and, in many cases, inevitable. That’s because, despite all the HR puffery to the contrary, zero-sum games are the norm.

*If Gary gets promoted to Head of Department, Melanie, Tim and Alan miss out

*If John works long hours to complete a project, he may get recognised and rewarded for it. Then again, his boss could take all the credit meaning John has exerted himself in the service of furthering someone else’s career  

If Supervisor X or Subordinate Y doesn’t pull their weight, the other party has to take up the slack

In short, whenever someone wins, someone else loses – or at least fails to win.

To a minor extent, this is also true of the gig economy. But the extent to which it is true is so minor that few gig-economy types worry about it.

If Tony Beaumont is hired to clean a house, that’s one less house available for other cleaners to service. However, given the number of houses that need to be cleaned, it’s not like Beaumont’s gain amounts to a significant loss for other cleaners, even ones operating in the same geographical area.

Likewise, if Beaumont decides he wants to ‘scale up’ and go from cleaning 20 houses a week to cleaning 40, the pool of cleaning jobs is so vast that a single cleaner doubling their output has no meaningful impact on other cleaners. This means there’s little reason for cleaners to have a scarcity mentality or believe they are in direct competition with their peers.

Zero-sum employment vs win-win micropreneurship

I can’t comment on the level of collegiality among self-employed, one-man-band cleaners. But I can discuss my experience labouring in the content-creation industry as both a staffer and freelancer. 

I witnessed some truly vicious office politics while working in magazine offices. Many ink-stained Machiavellis took a gleeful delight in trashing the reputations and, not infrequently, derailing the careers of their enemies. Some of this nastiness was a result of those involved working in a dying industry and fearing for their livelihoods in the face of endless rounds of redundancies. However, from what I’ve read and been told by older journalists, pit-of-vipers office politics were the norm rather than the exception at magazine and newspaper offices even back when print media businesses were making money hand over fist. (For reasons I don’t have space to explore here, a disproportionately large number of psychopaths work for media organisations. While most journalists aren’t psychopaths, they are more likely than not to have substantial yet fragile egos and sharpish elbows.)

Like many of my erstwhile colleagues, I morphed from being a print journalist wage slave to a self-employed content creator a long time ago. This wasn’t without its challenges, but it has turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me. There were a variety of reasons for that, but two of the most important ones were (1) being able to permanently escape the subordinate-supervisor dynamic and (2) enjoying uncomplicatedly warm relationships with my peers.

To paraphrase The Simpsons, in a way, your clients are your bosses when you’re self-employed but in another more accurate way they aren’t. You’re not obliged to continue working with clients for any length of time if you don’t want to and firing a client is less of a big deal than quitting a job. (In the same way that not giving any more work to a freelancer is less of a big deal than dismissing an employee.) Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve found, compared to supervisor-subordinate ones, client-contractor relationships are less fraught and less likely to involve the more powerful party abusing their authority or the less powerful party projecting their daddy/mummy issues.

Likewise, a lot of the emotional messiness is removed from relationships with peers once the success or failure of those peers doesn’t impact your ability to advance your career and increase your income. I don’t kid myself that the hearts of freelance content creators are entirely devoid of competitiveness, envy and schadenfreude. But many of the self-employed writers I’ve interacted with over the last decade have offered generous support to newbies, happily handballed on work to putative competitors and even taken genuine delight in the wins (e.g. landing a lucrative client, publishing a book, launching a podcast) of others. When resources aren’t scarce and the competition for those resources isn’t zero sum, there’s simply no need to be an arsehole. And it turns out that when the external environment doesn’t encourage paranoid, scheming, double-dealing arseholery, most people don’t engage in it.            

You can get out (and avoid being pulled back in)

I’ve always believed Godfather Part III is unfairly traduced. I think it’s far more compelling than Godfather Part II, which, for all its Oscar-winning brilliance, is kind of pointless. Before getting too outraged, try to think of a scene from Godfather Part II that’s anywhere near as memorable or endlessly quoted as Michael Corleone’s pre-heart attack “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” turn in the final instalment of the trilogy.  

The tragedy of The Godfather is that Michael doesn’t want to assume control of the family business, but must do to protect his family. The tragedy of Godfather Part III is that Michael wants to exit the family business while protecting his family, but can’t.*

Fortunately, the stakes are much lower for others in management positions who want to free themselves of the supervisory burdens of high office. Swapping a senior corporate role for self-employment will almost always involve a substantial pay cut, at least in the short term. But even if you never again earn as much as you used to, you’ll probably be much happier.

That’s an offer that’s hard to refuse.   

*An argument could be made – and probably has been made by HR types – that Michael’s fate is sealed by his failure to effectively performance manage the work experience kid.