Transcript: How to get ahead without managing people, with Martin Wolf

This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘How to get ahead without managing people, with Martin Wolf’

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Martin Wolf
The way I think of it is you can be a brilliant violinist in an orchestra or a soloist, then you get to a conductor or an orchestra manager. Well, an orchestra manager is a very, very important job, but I don’t think it’s as much fun as actually being a soloist. And I am a soloist.

Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times. I’m Isabel Berwick. In many companies, a management position is a sign of status. As you gain experience and get promoted, you manage more people and win more influence. That’s the received wisdom on how career progression works. But some people don’t want to manage others or just aren’t suited to it. Can those people have fulfilling careers without having to deal with the faff and the politics of management?

A little later, I’m going to speak to Karl Edge, chief people officer for KPMG in the UK, to find out what the options are for people who are ambitious about their careers but don’t want to oversee people.

But first, I’m going to speak to someone who’s lived it. Martin Wolf is chief economics commentator here at the FT, where he’s worked for more than 35 years, all without processing a single request for annual leave. Martin is my neighbour at the FT, and he’s often said to me how glad he is that he hasn’t had to manage anyone here. Our producer, Mischa, popped into Martin’s office to find out more.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
Martin, thank you for joining me. Am I right in saying you’ve never wanted to be a manager?

Martin Wolf
Almost right. I think when I started my professional life, I was 25 and I ended up in the World Bank. I didn’t really know where I would go and what I wanted to do. And about three years in, when I was running the largest team I’ve ever run, which consisted of five people, I realised that I would rather focus on what I did than manage other people doing that sort of work, and that would get even worse if I went further up the hierarchy. So I decided after that I wasn’t going to spend my time managing people; I was going to spend time managing myself. It’s one of the reasons, in the end, that I left the World Bank because it became obvious that my next step in the hierarchy — I was already a senior economist — would be to become a manager, and then I would end up managing a department and perhaps a vice-presidency. And that really didn’t excite me at all.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
So it sounds like progress was tied up with managing people.

Martin Wolf
I think that’s true in many organisations which have an output. The natural progress is to manage more of those outputs. And when you do that, what you’re doing is managing people. So you become a manager.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
And what was it about managing people that wasn’t for you?

Martin Wolf
I realised that what really mattered to me was to work out what I thought about something and express that and get that into the public domain with the feeling that this is mine — this is my contribution, my voice. I wanted that to be me.

The second part, which was less important but not insignificant — I realised pretty soon managing people is difficult if you want to do it well. In this particular case, I think I had 4 or 5 subordinates, but one of my subordinates was a woman who had a lot of difficulties, and I took that very seriously. I wanted to help her, support her, work out where she would fit in. And I found that emotionally stressful. I wanted to do the best for her, but I also wanted still to ensure the team worked. She didn’t fit in very well in the team. And, I thought, do I really want to do that part of the job for the rest of my life, managing people and then managing hundreds of people, even worse, until you become completely indifferent to their fates, which would be really terrible. So I just decided that’s not what I wanted to do. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t something I wanted to devote my life to.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
So management is a skill. It’s something you might have a flair for, but it is a skill and developing that would have taken time and distracted from other things.

Martin Wolf
I think it is a skill and I didn’t want to acquire it particularly. I’d rather develop my skill as an analyst, as an economist, as a writer. But I don’t think I was bad at it. I am fairly clear-minded and get on with people reasonably well. I think I could have done it. But I wanted to do my work. So you have to be clear about this. The way I think of it is you can be a brilliant violinist in an orchestra or a soloist, then you get to a conductor or an orchestra manager. Well, an orchestra manager is a very, very important job, but I don’t think it’s as much fun as actually being a soloist.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
And what is it about being a soloist that you most enjoy now?

Martin Wolf
You’re judged on what you do. People know what you’ve done. They can praise or blame you for it, and when it goes well, you feel the satisfaction that you’ve actually cracked a problem. And it’s this sense of a personal relationship with the work which is to me immensely satisfying. In the end, what comes out — in my case, it’s words — is a product of your efforts. I think that gives really extraordinary satisfaction in one’s work, and I don’t think I would feel the same if it were part of a collective operation. And as a manager, well, even worse, you start getting credit or in worst cases, taking credit for things other people do. I’m not prepared to do that.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
So you have a high profile. You’re very influential in your job. Is it fair to say you don’t regret managing more?

Martin Wolf
I have rather few regrets, which I’m very pleased to say, but certainly at the very bottom of my list of regrets is that I haven’t managed.

Mischa Frankl-Duval
Martin, thank you very much.

Martin Wolf
Pleasure.

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Isabel Berwick
Martin has made his name as an individual contributor — someone who does his own thing, does it well, and doesn’t oversee anyone. But his situation is a bit unusual. For most people, seniority will mean management. My next guest is pretty senior. I’ll let him introduce himself.

Karl Edge
It’s Karl Edge here, I’m the chief people officer at KPMG in the UK. There’s 18,000 people across KPMG in the UK, and my role is to help them come into our organisation, developing into our organisation.

Isabel Berwick
At any one time, KPMG will have thousands of managers. That umbrella term includes performance managers who manage in the traditional sense, overseeing groups of people and helping them develop, but it also covers other less formal management roles — people who might manage a project, for example. I asked Karl if people had to become managers at KPMG to get ahead. He explained that many people, unlike Martin, actually want to manage others.

Karl Edge
Many people who join us join us because they want to be leading teams, managing teams, helping other people improve. And so many people will put their hand up, but also for some will say, look, there’s development opportunities here. We always have the debate about whether the manager, is it nature versus nurture. Actually, I genuinely believe it’s about nurture. It’s about giving people the opportunity and the support and the development as managers, which make them actually more empathetic in then managing others.

Isabel Berwick
So you wouldn’t say that some people are naturally better at managing people. Do you think it’s all learned or do you think there are some personality traits that can help?

Karl Edge
Yeah, definitely, some people are better, but there are also skills that people can learn. One of the things when we do recruitment into our business is we’re looking for a mindset of people who want to continuously learn, as opposed to think to themselves, hey, I’ve got to a certain level and I don’t need to learn anymore.

Isabel Berwick
Can you progress at KPMG if you don’t take on a management role? I mean, are there some people who stick to their amazing, you know, corporate or audit skills?

Karl Edge
They’ll still have to have the people skills because they’ll be working in teams. Actually, as they get more senior, they’ll still be running, say, bigger audit teams out of all these entities, or they’ll be running bigger project teams. So they’ll be managing the project even if they’re not doing the more formal performance management role against individuals.

Isabel Berwick
And if you’re a performance manager, is that your whole job? You’re not doing anything else?

Karl Edge
Yeah. So we have some parts of our business where absolutely that performance management role might be 20 or 30 per cent of somebody’s job, but the other 70 per cent is absolutely working on clients and audit entities and out in the market. We do have some parts of the business where actually, by the nature of the business, we can have full-time performance managers because we recognise that that fits with the sort of client demand. So we’re flexible enough for both.

Isabel Berwick
One of the things we talk about a lot on the podcast, and I hear from people, is that a lot of people dread management because they don’t like dealing with people’s problems — you know, their time off, conflict in the team, that kind of thing. Do the non-performance managers get to dodge that, the people who are just working on projects?

Karl Edge
Well, interestingly, because you spend your life working with people across all sorts of projects that will impact everybody, yes, you’ve got the performance manager who’s dealing with that, if you like, in a more formal way. But if you think about it in the normal flow of work on any project with a client or an audit entity, actually those things come up on a daily basis. And so if you’re the manager of that project, you’ll be dealing with that anyway. So I don’t think you can let other people, if you like, have responsibility for it. I think the other thing in our organisation is many of the people who join us want to have the opportunity to help other people develop.

Isabel Berwick
There’s a growing feeling that older people in the workplace have a sort of duty to give back by helping other people develop their careers. Is that something you’re seeing? Has that increased since the pandemic or do you think that’s something that’s always been part of the culture?

Karl Edge
That’s always been part of our culture. I’ve been very fortunate in my career to have more senior people who have coached and supported and challenged me, you know, in different ways as we’ve worked our way through. And I think we see that as all of our responsibilities as directors and partners in our business, that we should be doing that.

I think it’s really interesting since the pandemic, I think people are far more thoughtful about what they want their careers to look like. So actually, that performance management is even more important. I don’t think people just say my ambition is to be one thing anymore. You know, my ambition is just to be a partner in the firm. And so I don’t think the career progression’s linear. Maybe in a pre-pandemic world it was a more linear; now, you know, it’s much more squiggly, if I use that word, you know, people can come in and go out. People can actually take different roles at different times. So I think that’s something that we have to be much more flexible with as an organisation.

Isabel Berwick
If you want to be someone who drives change or be influential in your workplace, is it possible to do that without carrying a management role of some sort?

Karl Edge
I think you can do without carrying a management role, but I think you do need to be a leader. And I don’t mean a leader as in I’ve got a title that I’m a leader; I mean a leader, as in, I can take a group of people and help shape them and drive an outcome for a client or an impact in society or a change in our business. So that’s where it’s subtly different, I think.

Isabel Berwick
During your long career at KPMG, have you ever just wanted to focus on the task in hand and spend less time on managing employee issues, or is it something that you’ve always enjoyed?

Karl Edge
I get my energy from people.

Isabel Berwick
Right.

Karl Edge
And so I love being around people, and I’ve always wanted to learn from more senior people. And as I’ve got more senior, I’ve always wanted to pass on that learning to others. I think there’s a massive satisfaction I get and I see in our organisation lots of people get when the people you manage sort of flourish themselves or do something they didn’t think they could do.

Isabel Berwick
There’s gonna be a lot of people listening to this who are sceptical about the joys of management. Can you sell it to them in a sentence?

Karl Edge
(Laughs) Where else do you get the chance to touch the lives of people that enables them to be better for themselves, better for their friends, better for their family, better for their communities and better for their clients? That’s the opportunity that people management gives you.

Isabel Berwick
Karl, thanks so much for coming on to Working It.

Karl Edge
It’s been brilliant, really enjoyed it. Thank you for the opportunity.

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Isabel Berwick
Lots of people dread becoming managers and having to do less of the work they love to focus more on staff issues and the big-picture stuff that relates less and less to their work. But some people, like Karl, thrive off helping others and steering them in their careers. It sounds like if you want to make headway at KPMG, you basically have to be willing to manage others in some sense, even if you’re not formally recognised as a performance manager. I’m sure that’s true at other companies, too.

For what it’s worth, I loved being a manager. During the pandemic, I ran a small team of journalists here at the FT and I got to know a lot about their lives during those long hours on video calls. But it can be draining. Being a good manager takes time, effort and emotional investment. I think there are times in our lives when management is a great path to success and fulfilment, but it’s fine to balance that out with times when we focus on ourselves and doing our core work. More than ever, we have the freedom to go back and forth between the two career paths.

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Thanks to Martin Wolf and Karl Edge. This episode of Working It was produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval and mixed by Simon Panayi. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Thanks for listening. 

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