problem hacker #31
The Sacking Reflex
There’s a particular pleasure, as an Everton fan, in watching Tottenham flirt with relegation. Not just because some of my best mates are Spurs fans. But also because us Toffees have been there so many times ourselves.
Spurs haven’t been relegated since 1977. Forty-nine years of looking down. As it stands, they’re two points off the drop, with one game to go. It goes to the wire on Sunday, against none other than…Everton.
West Ham sit anxiously behind them in the bottom three. The Hammers haven’t seen the Championship since 2012. Anything but a win at Newcastle this weekend and they’re toast.
Two clubs with enormous budgets. Two stadiums most Championship sides would never even consider. Two boards that, between them, have churned through four managers this season. Both still staring at the drop.
This isn’t an accident. It’s a pattern. And it’s the same one you see in every business that mistakes activity for strategy.
Sack the manager. Skip the problem.
When a Premier League team starts losing, the board fires the manager. It’s the cleanest, most visible decision available. It signals to fans, owners and the press that something is being done. The new face arrives. The new system arrives. The losses, more often than not, don’t stop.
That’s because the manager was rarely the problem.
Look at the names involved this season. Graham Potter, gone at West Ham in September. Nuno Espírito Santo, sacked at Forest, recycled to West Ham within the week. Thomas Frank, gone at Spurs in February; two wins in seventeen, said the press release. Enzo Maresca, gone at Chelsea on New Year’s Day (note: and soon to replace one of the most successful managers in the history of the game in Pep Guardiola at Man City this summer). Ruben Amorim, gone at Manchester United five days later.
A merry-go-round of competent operators inheriting broken systems and being asked to fix them in eight games. They don’t. They can’t. They get sacked. The next one starts.
The board, meanwhile, is performing strategy without doing strategy.
Where this shows up at work
The new CRO. The “global transformation programme.” The agency review. The reorg. The pivot. The fresh hire who’s going to “rebuild the culture.”
These are all sacking-the-manager moves. Visible. Decisive. Bold. They feel like progress.
They almost never fix the problem.
Because the problem is usually that nobody at the top has decided, clearly and out loud, what the business is for, who it’s serving, and what it’s prepared to stop doing. Without that, every new hire walks into the same fog the last one walked out of.
A new manager can’t build a team without a recruitment philosophy. A new CRO can’t build a pipeline without a customer thesis. A new agency can’t fix your brand without a positioning. None of them are the missing piece. They’re being asked to manufacture the missing piece from the dugout.
The Brighton question
While Spurs were sacking Frank, Brighton just kept being Brighton. Identifiable style. Coherent recruitment. A manager who fits the model rather than imposing his own. They’ve changed coaches plenty over the years, but the club survives the change because the plan survives the change.
Brighton don’t have Tottenham’s budget. They don’t have their stadium either. They have something more useful: they know what they are.
That’s the question worth borrowing.
When something goes wrong in your business, the first instinct is to ask: who is responsible for this? The better instinct, the harder one, is to ask: what would survive if we changed the person?
If the answer is “everything we actually do,” you don’t have a people problem. You have someone good at executing a coherent plan.
If the answer is “nothing, the plan walks out with them”, you don’t have a strategy. You have a manager.
The hack
Before you make the visible move, sit with the invisible one.
Write down what your business actually believes about its customer, its product, and its market. Not the deck version. The pub version. The one that would survive the next hire, the next reorg, the next quarter.
If that version doesn’t exist yet, no manager you bring in will produce it. They’ll be playing for the drop too. They just won’t know it for a few months.
Spurs might survive on Sunday. Probably will, knowing Everton’s recent form. But have they fixed the underlying problems? Probably not; more likely they’ve just postponed it.
The question for your business is whether you’re doing the same.
The Problem Hacker. Smart takes on strategy, growth, and uncomfortable truth.
From Mark Jefford // jefford