Manage Work, Not People

Unlocking flow by casting vision, visualizing work, and creating a Pull Culture.

We don’t see ideas on a production line these days…

“Great organizations lead people, and manage work.”

That line came from Brendan Wovchko, one of my earliest Kanban mentors.

It has lived rent free in my brain ever since.

The idea is deceptively simple: we lead people—and we manage work. That means giving people a clear goal or outcome, casting a compelling vision, and then…getting out of their way.

Steve Jobs put it this way:

“It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

Yes, most of us report to managers. But we know micromanaging doesn’t produce real value. It doesn’t foster autonomy, mastery, or purpose—those three core motivators Daniel Pink highlights in Drive. And I’ve seen and lived what happens when someone has those things. They don’t need to be managed. They need clarity. And space.

So what does it mean to manage the work?

Let me show you.

Scenario 1: A manager says,
“Hey Tristan, what are you working on?”
The focus? Me. My effort. My time. I become the thing being managed.

Scenario 2: A leader asks,
“Hey team, how’s that marketing campaign going?”
Now the focus is the work. The outcome. The progress. Not me.

That’s the shift.

Here’s another:
A former boss once told me, “Tristan, I want you to handle this support request and build a Gantt chart for it.”
What’s being managed? Me. Not just what I’m working on, but how I should do it.

That’s the opposite of what I coach teams to do.
I coach leaders to visualize the work, so the team can pull from it when they have capacity. Once the team pulls it, they decide how to tackle it.

When leaders assign the what and the how, they create delays.
They build a culture of waiting—waiting for direction, waiting for permission, waiting to be told what to do. Like gerbils waiting on the water bottle to be refilled.

And that’s not Nimble.

That doesn’t build adaptive teams. It builds order-takers. Drones. And worse, it attracts them.

You want to know if a team is being managed or led? Walk into their daily standup.

If everyone’s reporting status to one person, they’re being managed. The work isn’t flowing—it’s being policed.

But if they’re asking each other smart questions, pushing through blockers, taking turns leading the conversation—then you’ve got something different. You’ve got a team that’s managing the work, and a leader who’s focused on leading the people.

The trap of resource utilization

Another common sign of managing people instead of work?

Resource utilization.

My disdain for calling people “resources” is rooted in how dehumanizing it is. People are humans, and teams that focus on managing people often get hung up on keeping everyone “fully utilized”—as if people are machines on a factory floor. It’s an attempt to squeeze every drop of energy out of the team. But here’s the other problem: when you optimize for utilization, you lose sight of value. Jon Terry says this:

If you optimize for efficiency, you get gridlock. But if you optimize for flow, you get efficiency.

High utilization creates busy people.
Managing work creates valuable outcomes.

Teams that manage the work think differently. They focus on delivering value to the customer—not just once, but reliably and predictably, in a way that customers can trust. That’s the kind of consistency that builds confidence, momentum, and real flow.

Efficiency Isn’t Always Effective

Let me tell you what happened on multiple teams I worked with.

They had a “smartest person in the room” culture. Anytime a new ticket came in, the manager would decide, “Who’s the best person for this?” Nine times out of ten, it was the same senior dev, senior writer, or channel lead. They were sharp, no doubt. But also—completely slammed. (Think Brent, the overburdened bottleneck in The Phoenix Project.)

So that work would sit.
And sit.
And sit.

All the while, there were other capable teammates who could’ve knocked it out that day—but they didn’t, because it hadn’t been “assigned” to them. If you keep assigning that work to the “expert,” they stay the expert. No one else learns, grows, or adapts. Efficient, but also not expedient.

That’s the cost of managing people.
That’s the cost of optimizing for efficiency.

We think we’re streamlining the work, but we’re really just creating bottlenecks.

Managing people slows things down.
Managing work keeps things moving.

When you make the work visible—and trust the team to pull what they’re ready for—you create real agility. Not theoretical agility. Not “we-had-a-standup” agility.

I’m talking about decisions getting made, problems getting solved, and customers getting served. That’s what leadership looks like. That’s what managing the work really means.

Why do we default to managing people?

We’re not trying to be controlling. It’s just that knowledge work is invisible. You can’t walk into a factory and see a half-built idea. You can’t measure progress on a concept the way you can on a physical product.

So, we manage what we can see—people.

And now, with remote work, we don’t even see them anymore. That creates anxiety. So we ask for more check-ins. More status updates. More control. It’s no wonder people feel more managed than ever.

But here’s the truth:

The more visible the work, the less you need to manage the people.

Now is the time for this shift.

✅ Make the work visible.
✅ Let the team pull from it based on their capacity.
✅ Track the flow—not the faces.

🎯 Lead the people.
🎯 Give them a goal worth chasing.
🎯 Say things like, “We need to boost customer clicks. I need your best thinking.”

That’s what it means to manage work and lead people. And when you get that right, everything flows. It won’t be perfect. But that’s where leadership comes in. Here’s the reality:

When you stop micromanaging your team, they learn to make decisions.
They stop waiting for your instructions.
You stop being the bottleneck.

But that doesn’t mean you stop leading.

You still need to set direction.
You coach them when their decisions don’t pan out and you set vision for where they are going.

There’s a verse I love in the Bible that reminds us:

Where there is no vision, the people perish. Proverbs 29:18

When leaders fail to cast a clear direction, people drift. They lose focus. The work becomes foggy, and so does their purpose. On the flip side, when vision is present, people find their footing. They know what matters. They learn how to move. You, the leader, help them build better frameworks for decision-making.

And maybe, most importantly, you finally have time to grow them as people. You get to focus on their craft. Their potential. Their trajectory. The prophet Habakkuk said,

“Write the vision and make it plain, that he may run who reads it.”

Clear vision doesn't slow people down—it sets them free to run.

And that’s where you shine.

Managing work is about clarity.
Leading people is about vision.
And vision—when written plainly—unleashes movement.

Stop being the bottleneck. Start being a leader.
Manage work, and lead people.