On the other hand, if you expect your employees to produce every week only what they can do in an afternoon and no more, many of the most talented ones will also jump ship, because they are motivated by accomplishing high-quality work.
It may have less to do with talent than motivation. Motivations people can have at work (and many can and do have a combination in different proportions) can include: making as much money as possible; doing as little work as possible; producing as high-quality work (in their own opinion) as possible; recognition from others for contribution; social relationships and/or being liked; learning new things and developing new skills; being challenged; not being challenged; being part of a collaborative team working well together or being left alone to work independently; etc.
But I think few "most talented" people would last very long at workplace GP described, where doing more than a half-day's worth of work in a week was restrained.
Intrinsic motivation can be better than extrinsic motivation. Google won a lot of fans and dedicated employees with its original version of 20% time that encouraged people to find stuff they were highly motivated to want to work on and could do so relatively safely in the company's sandbox. It is possible this sort "everything the company needs you to do can be done in one afternoon each week" could be an incredible "80% time" company. There are lots of people that would find "80% of my time at the company is my own" to be quite motivating.
Of course, certainly not in the example scenario above where one layer of management is effectively lying to another layer. That's not a healthy "80% time" when it involves duplicity and covert play acting.
But if you were feeling crazy enough to try to build an overt "80% time" company you likely wouldn't have a hard time finding some of the "most talented" people.
That's certainly how Xerox PARC is described in some of the tales of their classic discoveries/inventions/Demos.
Certain decades of Bell Labs, too, have that glimmer of a bunch of the smartest people allowed to explore stuff they cared about with only the oversight from fellow technical people.
I've even heard Microsoft Research can still sometimes feel a bit like that, though with all the pressures of academia like grant finding and patent applications and other such hustles.
This. Motivation is the key to getting employees to produce over a period of time. Give the good ones the maximum amount of ownership they can handle and they will set an example for everyone else. Grow the talent over time.
Fire the whinny shit-talkers as soon as possible. They drag everyone down.
> if you expect your employees to produce every week only what they can do in an afternoon and no more
... then they will have time to fix problems that arrive randomly, rework the parts of their work they got wrong on the first try, and study and train to stay sharp to do the next piece of work. Ironically, all of those will make them produce their next piece of work faster, making this one "problem" worse and worse.
But I left the real benefit to the end... those people will have enough time to think about how they can work into improving something on their workplace. You know, the people that actually do the work, how they can apply the work they know about, because they do it, instead of people that know nothing about it being specialized in thinking how to apply other people's work.
The GP saw a good manager trying to keep his people safe from a dysfunctional organization. The dysfunctional organization is a read flag, for sure, but it doesn't automatically mean the environment is a bad one.
Good software shops leave a good amount of "slack" time for their engineers. It's how you handle shit hitting the fan without burnout.
I currently work on a team that has been basically solving multiple crises per year for years now. In the blips where we've returned to normalcy, we didn't push hard. Because we knew that was time to recover because another crisis was definitely coming.
The crises were external / due to leadership being aggressive without our input..so at that point, all you can do is execute. And part of executing is resting.
It may have less to do with talent than motivation. Motivations people can have at work (and many can and do have a combination in different proportions) can include: making as much money as possible; doing as little work as possible; producing as high-quality work (in their own opinion) as possible; recognition from others for contribution; social relationships and/or being liked; learning new things and developing new skills; being challenged; not being challenged; being part of a collaborative team working well together or being left alone to work independently; etc.
But I think few "most talented" people would last very long at workplace GP described, where doing more than a half-day's worth of work in a week was restrained.