When 'Phones Are All That Matter' Becomes a Policy, People Obey—Literally

A manager promoted for being the boss’s BFF declared, with the confidence of someone who has never read an operations manual, that “phones are all that matter.” Employees obeyed. The result was exactly what incentive theory (and experience) predicts: you get what you reward.

Toy model: suppose your performance metric M is “number of phone interactions answered.” The boss wants M high because it’s easy to measure and makes the spreadsheet look pretty. The supervisor (who wants to keep her promotion and the boss’s affection) tells the team M is the only thing that matters. Workers maximize M. Goodhart’s Law does the rest: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” (credit to the Reddit commenter who supplied the jurisprudential footnote). What you intended to reward—responsiveness and problem resolution—becomes a counting exercise.

The real-life execution was deliciously literal. Ticketing, provisioning, and other invisible-but-necessary work got starved because none of those things move the sacred M. As one commenter put it, the attempted performance tracking refused to meet the ticketing system halfway; another observed, with sharp economy, that “the kind of person who wants to be a supervisor is always the wrong person to supervise.” (There is a special joy in seeing managerial ambition collide with a simplistic metric; it behaves like a soufflé that falls but keeps the crumbs beautiful.)

Call this doctrine “phonocentrism”: a policy memo might read, in mock-legalese, “All duties are hereby subordinated to telephonic throughput until further notice.” It reads as a bold management experiment—and it is, in a certain technical sense, efficient: maximizes the measured thing, destroys the unmeasured things. The takeaway, modest and bleakly practical, is that incentives don’t just nudge behavior; they rewrite job descriptions. If you want different outcomes, measure different things (or promote people for competence, not companionship).