Monday, March 16, 2009
Some people are managers almost from birth, some followers. Which is not to assume either subservience or inferiority on the part of the followers. Many people, over the last couple of decades, got shoved into leadership roles because companies developed an ‘up or out’ theory.
The word "manager" went out of fashion during the boom years. Team Leaders replaced Managers, and Employees became Associates. Whereas Managers could tell Employees what to do, Team Leaders couldn’t tell Associates what to do. Perish the thought. Them days was gone.
Now that we were into the 21st century, it was all about "buy-in." Instead of telling someone to move a flex from where it was likely to trip three other people, as a Manager would, a Team Leader typically gathered members of the team around to achieve "buy-in" to the notion of flex-shifting. A really good Team Leader would work out a way to convince members of the team that they’d come up with the idea to move the flex all by their little selves, to raise their self-esteem.
All this buy-in guff runs counter to nature. Some people are managers almost from birth, some followers. Which is not to assume either subservience or inferiority on the part of the followers. Many people, over the last couple of decades, got shoved into leadership roles because companies developed an "up or out" theory, which said that if you weren’t promotable, you were no good at all, ergo should be warmly encouraged to take yourself somewhere else, together with your skills and experience and proven capacity to work at some level below the top.
The companies which majored on this soft-and-fuzzy leadership stuff produced warm, unchallenging, consensus-driven men and women with the skills to facilitate groups into chronic inaction. They developed a whole new language around this chronic inaction. They never described an obstructive self-serving, pain-in-the-butt as an obstructive, self-serving etc. Perish the thought. Instead, they described that person as "having difficulty with" or "struggling with" the issue. Problems were always described as "issues." The old honesty of calling a spade a spade, if not a bloody shovel, ceased to apply.
Bad-tempered, nasty people were described as having "anger management issues." The words "bad temper" were replaced by the word "anger." Bad temper is inexcusable in business. So some twit decided to re-calibrate having a rotten temper as being angry, which at best carries an aura of magnificent validity about it — remember the phrase "righteous anger" — and at worst carries a trailing implication of inculpation: they’re angry from birth or because their father was a drunk or their mother wrote about them under a pseudonym or favoured their sister.
Once "bad temper" mutated into "angry" there was no dealing with the belligerent. So people made excuses to facilitate progress.
Those excuses allowed the career progress of people who should never have progressed within organisations. I remember, in the course of a communications audit in one company, encountering a man with the build and charm of a bruiser at a brothel.
I got rid of him quickly, on the life-is-too-short principle, and his team leader arrived within minutes to explain that Ben the Bouncer was a little fragile today. Fragile? Fragile? "He’s fragile like a double-deck bus is fragile," I said, and the Team Leader’s PA stifled a snigger.
No, no, the Team Leader explained. Ben the Bouncer was having a tough week. His wife had left him. (Good girl, I thought.) He’d had a bit of an incident on the road. This threw me, the way I always get thrown by news reports attributing deaths to "an incident" on the Long Mile Road or the Kinsale Roundabout.
I think it stems from a moralistic desire to remove the blamelessness from car crashes on the theory that there’s really no such thing as an accident. But it makes news reports weird. Describing a car crash as a "road incident" makes it sound like covert vehicular pushing and shoving done with malice aforethought for a fell purpose.
However, let us not lose sight of Ben the Brothel Bouncer. His wife had left him and he’d had a road incident. Quite a vigorous road incident. The other driver was still, at that point, in hospital.
Having had the incident, Ben had then become assertive when the garda who arrived on the scene wanted to breathalyse him. The garda, female and half his size, nevertheless overcame his anger management issues and lashed tickets at him like they were going out of style. Hence, the Team Leader finished, BBB’s fragility today.
"Is he usually a little ray of sunshine?" I asked.
Phrases like "normally more amenable to…" were uttered.
"He’s been here five years," the Team Leader’s PA said crisply. "During which time he’s never been known to say a civil word to anybody. He’s a complete b****** and an absolute b*******."
Why didn’t they get rid of him? Several reasons. First of all, he was highly skilled, and getting anybody to replace him in the boom years would have been difficult.
Secondly, by the time everybody realised what a complete tool he was, he’d stopped being a novice and was fully professed, in corporate terms. Thirdly, by the nature of his job, he spent between three and six months in one area of the plant before moving to another, and so the area currently favoured with his bad temper (sorry, anger) just counted the days until he could be decanted onto someone else.
Fourthly, by the time every area within the plant knew him for what he was (a bad-tempered social dyslexic with the human skills of a brothel bouncer) they had — as the Team Leader ruefully described it — "bought in" to his brothel bouncer behaviour and couldn’t suddenly decide they wanted him to become sweet-natured and gambolling through the plant sniffing the flowers on desks. Well, they could and did decide that (although the flower-sniffing would have been a gambol too far) but, HR rules being the way they are, they couldn’t implement their decision. And finally, they didn’t get rid of him because they suffered from irrationally positive expectations. They believed that sooner or later, he would get the message.
"We invest in our people, especially if they manifest challenging behaviour," the Team Leader told me over the phone.
Ben the Brothel Bouncer had been sent to a prestigious overseas third-level institution to do an MBA. Which was good for the plant, which got 12 months peace, bad for the third-level institution and neutral for Ben, who ended up obnoxious at a much better informed level.
During the boom years, people convinced themselves that avoidance of managers and approaching everything through teams was a fairer way of doing business. In some companies it was and is. In most, it wasn’t. Good managers listen, learn, are respectful, responsible and energetic. They don’t spend forever hoping for buy-in through group therapy.
Those are the managers who will steer their companies through these bad times.
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