Unmanageable

Last quarter, someone on my team delivered a project three weeks late. When we connected for our quarterly check-in, I was ready with talking points: timeline management, communication gaps, the importance of raising flags early.

I didn't need them.

Before I could launch into my prepared feedback, he opened with: "I completely blew the timeline on this project. I got stuck in the weeds on edge cases that didn't matter and didn't communicate the delay until it was too late. Next quarter, I'm going to scope smaller chunks and do weekly progress updates."

Companies today have a fetish for feedback. We've built entire religions around it.

My cofounder used to work at Bridgewater, a Connecticut-based hedge fund, where founder Ray Dalio turned feedback into a contact sport. Employees carried iPads and rated each other in real time across metrics like "structured thinking" and "intellectual horsepower." Every meeting, every interaction, every thought became a data point in colleagues’ assessment of your worth.

Dalio called it "radical transparency" but from what I can tell, it sounds more like systemized bullying. A Black Mirror episode, but with free lunch.

Still, Bridgewater is often referenced as the gold standard for a “feedback culture.” They're the logical endpoint of where every startup thinks it's headed. More feedback loops. More real-time ratings. More processes to tell people what they should already know about themselves.

We've accepted as gospel that great feedback creates high performance. That if we just build the right process, establish the right cadence, create the right framework, we can feedback our way to excellence.

But what if that's backwards?

What if the best performers don't need our feedback because they're already having harder conversations with themselves than we could ever have with them?

Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich spent years studying self-awareness. Her research found something brutal: while 95% of people think they're self-aware, only 10-15% actually are.

I see this play out constantly. The engineer who thinks they're "detail-oriented" but actually just gets lost in rabbit holes; the manager who prides themselves on being "approachable" while their team actively avoids them.

The gap between who we think we are and who we actually are is where growth goes to die.

In an office, there are a thousand small corrections throughout the day.

But on a remote team, that gap becomes a canyon.

You don't have the luxury of physical presence. There aren’t ambient signals from a meeting, casual lunch conversations, or quick syncs in an empty conference room. People have to be able to see themselves clearly because you can't always see them.

The 85-90% who lack self-awareness don't just struggle in remote work, they disappear into their own blind spots.

When SparkPlug hit about 20 people, the requests started rolling in:

"Can I get more feedback?" … "How am I doing?" … "Where do I stand?"

It felt like a normal evolution for a startup. Grown-up companies have performance systems. Rubrics, levels, review cycles… all the real HR shit.

So my cofounder and I did what we usually do when facing a new problem: thought about it for a while, looked at what other companies were doing, then made something up.

We called our new feedback framework QGR: Quarterly Growth & Reflection.

Each quarter, team members rate themselves 1-5 across five dimensions:

Then they write a short narrative. Where they've grown, where they're stuck, and what they're working on next.

Only after that do managers weigh in.

When we first launched QGRs I thought our feedback would be the valuable part, but I was wrong.

The self-reflections told us everything.

Almost immediately, you can spot who's coasting and who's pushing; who sees their gaps and who's living in them; who’s hungry and who's comfortable.

The highest performers share self-criticisms far harsher than anything I would write. They spot problems I missed and hold themselves to standards I didn’t even impose.

The struggling ones typically rate themselves as "exceeds expectations" across all metrics and ask for a promotion.

Everyone loves the idea of self-management…right up until they have to manage themselves. Most people can’t.

And that's fine!

Plenty of people thrive with clear direction, regular check-ins, and structured support. They're not broken or inferior, they just need a different environment than what we provide.

We've made a deliberate choice: we’re trying to optimize for people who manage up, not down. Team members who bring solutions, not problems and self-diagnose before we diagnose them.

I don’t think this is necessarily kind or cruel. It's just clear.

When someone needs constant feedback to know where they stand, they're telling us something important: this isn't their environment. They'll be happier and more successful somewhere with more structure, more oversight, more traditional management.

Frankly, we’ve chosen not to build for the 85% who lack self-awareness. I just want to find the 15% who already have it.

Autonomous talent is driving structural change in tech.

Meta cut 11,000 jobs in 2022, then another 10,000 in 2023. Google axed 12,000. Amazon dropped 27,000. Look deeper and you will find these cuts disproportionately hit middle management: directors, VPs, and senior managers. The feedback layer.

Zuckerberg called it the "year of efficiency" and discovered what many of us already knew: when you have genuinely self-directed people, management layers don't add speed, they add friction.

The traditional manager, the one who assigns tasks, tracks progress, gives feedback, is becoming organizational scar tissue. Necessary perhaps in the industrial age when work was predictable and measurable. Obsolete when work is creative, complex, and constantly changing.

The future belongs to leaders who create clarity, not control.

Every time things feel chaotic, I fight the same impulse: to manage harder. More check-ins. More process. More oversight.

Those efforts rarely work.

The solution won’t lie in more management, but in better mirrors.

QGR is one mirror. But we've built others:

This is our self-awareness infrastructure, built to help people see themselves clearly, without waiting for someone else to spell it out.

The word "unmanageable" usually describes problem employees. The ones who won't follow process, can't take direction, refuse to play nice.

I'm reclaiming it.

Unmanageable should be the goal. It means you've transcended the need for external motivation, constant validation, or micromanagement. You've installed an internal compass that's more demanding than any boss could be.

Most organizations are still building for the 85%: the ones who need structure, feedback, and constant calibration, but they're fighting the last war.

The next generation of companies will be built by and for the 15%. Small teams of self-aware operators who manage themselves.

This isn't about being harsh or exclusive. It's about being honest about what remote, asynchronous, high-ownership work actually requires.

Not everyone can be unmanageable… but the ones who can will build the future.

The rest will need to be managed.

Up and to the right.