Results, not roll call

I once went to visit a CEO friend and longtime client. It was Monday morning, and she wanted to show off her new offices. So she took me on a quick tour. The place is indeed lovely: vibrant African designs in an open-plan vibe.

As she took me around, she pointed to where her various leading lights sat: the CFO, CHRO, CMO etc. But here’s the thing: she was mostly showing me empty chairs, not people. So I asked her, with tongue in cheek, why she wasn’t worried that most of her A-team weren’t in the office at the start of the week. The tour was actually an exhibition of absence.

I’ve never forgotten her answer: “I employ grown-ups.”

By which she meant this: that senior people know what they need to do, and don’t need to be watched or tracked while doing it. If they are slacking off, then their boss has failed in selecting them—and that will soon show up in their results.

When I was a young management consultant, one boss made it a point to stand at the door every day from 7:55 to 8:15 am. To check what time we juniors walked in. It totally, totally mattered to him that everyone was at their desks at the designated time, doing their designated work.

See the contrast between the two worlds, just a couple of decades apart? One treats employees like children who must be watched and monitored every hour of the day, to prevent them from shirking or idling. The other says: show me your results, not your attendance.

Monitoring is dying, and deserves to. In a world where work can be done from anywhere, old-fashioned supervision becomes performance art. The more you do it, the more it becomes busyness cosplay: “Look at me, working so hard for you…”

You can’t run today’s workplace like my old boss ran his doorway. You can try, of course. You can demand cameras on, green dots glowing, hourly check-ins, software that tracks keystrokes and screenshots. But all you will get is a new genre of employee: the professional performer. Present, responsive, busy, visible. And quietly disengaged, side-hustling away.

There’s also a deeper point about leadership: surveillance is a confession. It says, “I don’t trust you, and I don’t know how to manage outcomes.”

Old-school managers wanted bodies because bodies were the proxy for work. How will that work in a world where bodies are optional? AI is changing the workplace. Soon, most routine tasks will be done by the bot. The work of the human then shifts towards orchestrating: prompting, judging, combining, editing. The key skills centre on owning decisions, and taking responsibility for consequences.

Most people will not be coming to the office to be seen by their bosses. They will be coming to do the things that remote is bad at: trust-building, conflict resolution, creative energy, mentoring, laughter. The cultural glue, in other words.

We may start thinking of offices not like factories, but studios. Work is more session than attendance. Folks come in for the moments that matter.

Workplaces in this part of the world are, in truth, still mostly old-school. Many leaders grew up in a world where “I can see you” was the operating system. And some roles genuinely require strict attendance: you can’t run a branch, a warehouse, a clinic, a plant, or a security desk by vibes and Zoom. Presence matters when safety, equipment, and real-time service are part of the job. But that’s exactly why we should be precise. Where presence is essential, say so and organize it well, with fairness and respect. Where it isn’t, don’t turn attendance into a proxy for performance. 

The distributed workplace isn’t a fad or a perk, it’s the plain physics of modern work: talent scattered, time sliced, tools in the cloud, value created in bursts rather than eight obedient hours.

And for the work that can travel, we should stop trying to drag it back into the old cage. Monitoring will become ever more absurd in an age when a colleague can produce in thirty minutes what once took a day, with an AI co-pilot humming beside them. The manager’s job shifts from watching to enabling: setting clear outcomes, removing blockers, judging quality, and building a team of adults who can be trusted with autonomy and held to standards. 

Empty chairs, in that world, are not a failure of discipline. They are a sign that the organization has finally learned the difference between presence and performance.

THE SIGNAL IN THE NOISE

Outcomes matter more than optics

 

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