The Work Around the Work Is Called Management

Andthe hardest thing about the work around the work isn’t the mechanics. It’s the character you bring to them.

I’ve met a lot of managers who can recite every metric about their team. Productivity is up, tickets are closing, the dashboard is a wall of green. Ask them how the quarter is going, and they’ll show you the charts.

Then ask a different set of questions:

• Is anyone on your team overworked?

• Is the work they’re pouring their energy into actually the priority, the kind of work that’s meaningful to them and moves the organization?

• Is anyone quietly burning out behind all those green status indicators?

Usually you get a long pause. The dashboard doesn’t answer those questions.

I’ve come to believe a lot of managers use tracking and measuring as a crutch. It becomes a way to feel in control rather than a way to understand what’s actually happening. In my experience, the problem is rarely that these managers track too little. They track plenty. They just track the wrong things.

Erkang Zheng’s recent piece, The Hardest Thing About Work Isn’t the Work, gave me a useful frame for why this happens. (Disclosure: I advise Ariso, and I’d be writing this anyway.) His argument is that at every stage of his career, from engineer to CEO, what drove his growth was never the output itself. It was the tracking, reporting, aligning, and measuring that surrounded it. He calls the system TRAM, and he makes a persuasive case that this invisible layer is where careers are made, and where AI can genuinely carry some of the load.

I agree with him. I’d also point out something sitting in plain sight: the work around the work already has a name, and that name is management. Track, report, align, measure. That isn’t a productivity system that happens to help managers. It’s a reasonably complete job description for one. Which is exactly why the crutch pattern worries me. If TRAM is the job, then doing it mechanically, defensively, or pointed at the wrong things is a failure of management itself, not a small productivity gap. The system tells you what to do. It can’t tell you who to be while you’re doing it. After twenty-five years in technology and several more researching leader behavior, I’m convinced this is where the best managers separate from the rest.

Every element of the loop can be run two ways

You can track your team’s work as surveillance, or as a security blanket made of green dashboards. Or you can track it with empathy, meaning you pay attention because you genuinely want to know where people are stuck, what’s weighing on them, and what they need before they have to ask for it. The best managers I’ve studied and worked for tracked relentlessly, yet their people experienced it as being seen rather than being watched. Tracking the right things (workload, energy, whether the work is worth doing) is what empathy looks like in practice. A manager who knows every metric but can’t answer the questions I opened with isn’t really tracking anything. They’re hiding behind the numbers.

You can report as spin, or you can report with transparency and integrity, telling people what’s actually happening, including the parts that make you look bad. Erkang’s original mentor lesson (tell people what you’ll do, do it, then tell them you did it) only builds trust if the middle step is honest. A status update that leaves out the blocked workstream is closer to marketing than reporting. Integrity is what allows the reporting loop to compound into trust over time instead of eroding it.

You can align through positional authority, the old “because I said it’s the priority.” Or you can align through purpose, and this is the element I would add to TRAM outright. Alignment that survives contact with reality doesn’t come from getting everyone to agree on a task list. It comes from connecting that task list to something people believe matters. The best managers I know are translators. They take the organization’s purpose and make it legible at the level of this team, this quarter, this Tuesday. When purpose is doing the aligning, the manager doesn’t have to relitigate priorities every week, because the team can navigate ambiguity on its own. That’s the difference between a team that needs constant steering and a team that self-corrects.

And you can measure to justify yourself, or you can measure with humility, which starts from the uncomfortable premise that you might be the problem. Erkang describes this as a loop of continuous improvement, and he’s right, but the loop only turns if the manager is willing to be wrong in front of their team. A manager who can’t say “I misjudged that” out loud has quietly disabled the M in TRAM, no matter how many retrospectives are on the calendar.

Your success is your team’s success

There’s one more idea I drill into every new manager I work with. The moment you become a manager, your output is no longer your output. Your success is your team’s success, and I don’t mean that as a motivational poster. I mean it as the actual definition of the job. The question that should follow you into every one of those TRAM behaviors is not “am I on top of things?” It’s “are my people thriving, and is their work worth thriving for?” The notes, the updates, the dashboards all matter only to the degree that they serve that question.

This is also where the AI angle gets genuinely interesting for me, and it’s part of why I advise Ariso. If a tool like Ari carries the mechanical load (capturing what happened, drafting the report, flagging where alignment has drifted, and yes, reminding you that your success depends on your team’s success when you’re tempted to grab the interesting work for yourself), then a manager’s attention is finally free for the questions no dashboard can answer.

• Who on my team is stretched too thin?

• Is the work we’re prioritizing meaningful, or merely measurable?

• What conversation have I been avoiding?

AI carrying the work around the work doesn’t make managers less necessary. What it removes is the excuse for skipping the human parts of the job.

So here’s my summary of Erkang’s piece, along with my addendum. The hardest thing about work isn’t the work; it’s the work around the work. And the hardest thing about the work around the work isn’t the mechanics. It’s the character you bring to them.

Track with empathy, and track the right things. Report with integrity and transparency. Align through purpose. Measure with humility. Do that consistently and you’re not just running a good system. You’re being a good manager, and your team will be the proof.

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*Cindy Goodwin-Sak, DBA, teaches at UMSL’s College of Business and researches leader behavior as a leading indicator of organizational performance. She is an advisor to Ariso.*