Why Jamie Dimon is wrong about managers
Try as I might, I can’t seem to shake my annoyance at Jamie Dimon’s scolding of managers who work from home:
“I don’t know how you can be a leader and not be completely accessible to your people.”
The JPMorgan CEO is unapologetically anti-remote. He believes (without evidence) that it inhibits ideation. But this isn’t a post about remote work or even about Return to Office policies, actually.
This is a post about the ingrained and widespread misunderstanding of what makes managers good, successful, and yes, accessible.
Because the context of Dimon’s statement is within a discussion of why he isn’t a remote work proponent, he is in essence saying that he doesn’t see how a leader who works from home could even be a leader since they are not in physical proximity to their team.
No, he doesn’t actually SAY those words, but that’s clearly the implication. To him, the argument is:
Physical proximity = accessibility to team members
Remote leaders are not in physical proximity to team members.
Therefore they are not leaders.
That argument is both flawed and misleading. Let’s assume that for the majority of our working lives until the pandemic, we all mostly reported to a manager in the same physical location as us. So in Mr. Dimon’s universe, because of the fact that they were near us and nearness constitutes accessibility, then they were leading well.
But we all know that is definitely not true. Think of all of the managers you’ve had over the course of your career and how close to your desk their own offices were. Were they automatically accessible to you because they were there? Did you think Oh I’m so glad my boss is right there where I can touch them because they’re really giving off those leadership vibes with their mere presence?
Maybe a few were like that, but mostly not. Leadership isn’t about sitting nearby. You can be an incredible leader 5 feet from your team or from another country. Accessibility is not taking up physical space yourself - it’s creating emotional space for your employees. You can be right next to your employee and be completely emotionally unavailable to them.
As you might imagine, I have other issues with Mr. Dimon’s flawed take on remote work, but they pale in regard to my issues with this ridiculous belief about what is required to lead. I talk about him a bit, and about RTO quite a bit more in my podcast episode, Hell No, RTO, which you can listen to right here:
