Management: The Unnecessary Evil

Jason-

Thanks for the post on “Life without Management,” and glad to hear that you took a little family time. We have been squeezing in some weekend trips as summer winds down and those have kept us pretty busy as well. I have been thinking a lot about your post and I agree that accountability is a big part of the equation here, but I have decided that I am going to hold fast to my original argument. Management is an unnecessary evil.

In thinking about this issue, I keep going back to something Clay Shirky said (disclaimer: I have a huge professional crush on Clay Shirky).
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
Management does not want accountability because then it loses the power advantage, and the hard truth of this whole thing is that we still have a philosophy of management based on power.

There is a great deal of talk about the new leadership and leadership 2.0 and yadda, yadda, yadda…you and I both know there are some of those folks out there and some of those organizations out there, but I think they are the exception to the rule. You do not have the recent financial debacle with real leadership and individual accountability…you also do not have Enrons or the recent outcomes we have seen from BP and Toyota. Hell, with real leadership and individual accountability Congress would get a little work done.

Academics and consultants talk about it like it is the reality but it is not. The business world is dominated by managers who believe in power over, rather than power with. There is no room or reward for personal accountability until management goes away.

You Are Not The Boss of Me!

Jason-

Good stuff on dealing with a bad manager. Bad managers is probably a topic that we could spend a lot of time on and our Bad Managers Suck series could probably go on for a very, very long time. I think that a big part of the reason that things like The Office and Dilbert resonate with so many folks is that as ridiculous as they often are, they are also hit very close to home especially regarding our relationship with supervisors. There are a lot of things that contribute to bad management and we could spend a lot of time and energy cracking that issue open, but what about this…

Why don’t we just get rid of it? Why don’t we do away with management as a title, as a role, as a philosophy, as a source of so much unnecessary drama? In our manifesto we tell leaders to "get out of the way"...maybe they should really get out of the way?



What would happen if did some real “re-engineering” and let all managers go? We could of course allow them to apply for other open positions within the company, we’re not complete a-holes! Would things grind to a halt? I kind of doubt it. I am sure that there would be some initial confusion, but there would also be a lot less management related dysfunction.

What would a world without management look like?

What if “the organization” became a network of self-organized teams?

What if we went to an organization and took everyone that was in a supervisory role and we changed their role from supervision to resource coordination…they would have no authority over anyone but were responsible for helping the team that they were assigned to coordinate with other teams and access to the tools that they needed to be successful…whether it be budget, training, equipment, policy change, etc. Their purpose was solely to coordinate and make available resources and support for the department or team that they were assigned to.

What about, rather than fixing management, we do away with it?
-joe

Bad Managers Suck - Chapter 2

Jason-

Bad managers…a favorite topic of mine. I got spoiled early in life by spending four years in the Marine Corps where not all, but most of the leaders I worked with were very good and a couple were off the charts amazing. I have not since seen a work environment that has as favorable a good vs. bad management ratio.

I have seen my fair share of the silent treatment that you mentioned and another one that I see frequently is the illusion of interest.

Managers who want to appear to be interested in what you have to say, but they actually could care less. For example, the manager who comes to visit with you about a pending change to “get your feedback,” but the decision has already been made. Or the manager who solicits input, but then explains away or disagrees with everything that is offered up, never really considering or exploring any options.

I personally am in favor of banning those managers from society, but that is probably going to be viewed by some as extreme.

The actual solution is probably a bigger piece of work. I think this is actually one of many symptoms of an underlying problem, and that is that we are still using a 20th century approach to management in the 21st century world of business, which is very, very different.

How we create value has changed, how we communicate has changed, how we organize resources has changed, but very little has changed about our understanding of and approach to management. There are some exceptions, certainly, but you and I both see a lot of command and control, manager as parent type of organizations.

Most managers are not truly interested in the ideas and perspectives of their employees because they have somewhere along the line bought into the belief that being management means that they know best.

Managers rarely know what is best. They might know the inside scoop from the board room and they might know the latest budget numbers, but they rarely know what is best. It is almost impossible for managers to know what is best because they are further removed from the front line products and employees.

If you are any good at hiring people, you will end up with a team that together knows far more than you do. This is just reality and you should not pick a fight with it or pretend other wise.

Managers that are not willing and able to really tap into and value the perspectives, ideas and questions of their employees will eventually quit getting any of them and that is horribly wasteful.

-joe

Put that Freak Flag Away!

Jason-

Organizations are conformist by nature. Some organizations are really conformist and some not so much, but there is always some degree of conformity...that is true of any social group actually. Conformity is the cost of membership.

Too much conformity can be really, really bad and you can see examples of this ranging from Enron to Nazi Germany. Too much conformity has always been problematic, but conformity in general has become more costly to organizations because of the changes in how we do work and how we create value.

When an organization was just trying to make as many widgets as quickly and cheaply as possible, conformity seemed pretty appealing. When my role as an employee was simply to paint as many of those widgets as I could as quickly and cheaply as possible...my supervisor might not have cared about much else. My supervisor might not have cared about my ideas or questions or other skill sets. Painting. Uniformity. Quickly. Cheaply. That is likely what my supervisor would have cared about.

But today much is different.

Quick and cheap and uniform are opportunities for competitive advantage for almost nobody today. Unfortunately, our way of leadership has not changed in any significant way to reflect the transformation in how we create value today.

Conformity, which had some real benefits 50 years ago is increasingly costly and even dangerous for organizations. Conformity makes it hard to innovate, hard to learn and hard to change and evolve as an organization. It is becoming important to organizations that their employees are able to bring their whole self to work, because their ideas, perspectives, assumptions, questions, etc. are now valuable materials.

I shared a few thoughts about this transformation in Whole People Build Whole Organizations and The Whole Truth. In your post you pointed to a few ways organizations make it hard for us to "bring our whole self to work;" avoiding conflict, not promoting weirdos and companies still thinking they are in control.

I agree with the three things on your list and I think that at their core, each of these things can be boiled down to not understanding the dynamics and the value of difference. I think that difference (or diversity) is likely the most poorly understood thing in the world of business today. It also, in my humble opinion, explains one of the statements toward the end of your post:

"This isn't an issue of self-confidence or even being comfortable in your own skin. I feel relatively far along in both of those areas and yet I consciously pack away parts of my true self when I head into the office every day."

Your self-confidence might be fine and you might love your own skin. But you know, as everyone else knows, that standing out can be costly. Unfortunately most of us tend to see difference as a threatening or negative thing rather than a valuable thing (especially in the organizational context)...conversely, most of us spend a lot of time, and a lot of energy trying to fit in. The more we work to fit in, the less authentic we are as we have to truncate our true identities to look, talk, walk, dress, smell and think the way everyone else does.

So, what do we do about it? I will tackle that in another post.

-joe

Building the right kind of Container

Jason-

Thanks for the great list on increasing our capacity to work with and through conflict. Good stuff and very actionable. There is only one thing that I would add to this list and it is really a pretty common theme in our work and in our ongoing discussions. I think that the nature of our relationships is probably a large variable in the capacity for those relationships to withstand and actually benefit from some conflict and tension.

One thing that every single one of us can do, regardless of our role or title, regardless of our education or amount of experience is make a greater effort to develop and maintain real and resilient relationships…relationships strong enough to tolerate a bit of conflict. We have talked a fair amount about social capital in this space and I think that it is a dead horse worth beating.

Conflict, tension, and dissent are not bad things necessarily…in fact they can be very good things. They can be a sign that people are awake, paying attention and actually give a shit about something. They can be a sign that people are willing to be honest…which unfortunately is not terribly common in my experience.

If you want the benefit of that honesty and those different perspectives, you have to create the right kind of container. If you cannot create that container, then conflict is likely to break things pretty quickly. Your list is a great way to go about building that container, as is an overall focus on building strong relationships.

-joe

Can you handle the truth?

Jason-

Really, really good post. I think this is an issue at the root of many challenges that organizations and leaders face.

You posed two questions for me...

1.) Does my experience align with yours regarding the desire of most folks to avoid conflict (even at great cost)?

Yes. Emphatically yes. In some of the workshops that I do inside of organizations we spend time considering the culture...we actually examine specific aspects of the organizations culture, assign them a grade and then talk about opportunities for improvement. People seem to enjoy doing this and have no problem identifying specific things that the organization or senior leaders can do better. Then we move on to talk about individual opportunities to contribute to a better organizational culture and the entire conversation dries up. I start to hear things like:

"You just dont rock the boat around here...if you do there will be blowback."
"Change starts at the top, how am I going to make something happen."
"I just do my job and keep my head down."

I do not know if real change ever starts at the top, but there are a whole host of reasons that people have (regardless of their title) about why the environment is not quite right for them to speak out or to take some ownership for organizational culture.

2.) What must we do to solve this problem?

Probably several answers to this question, depending on who "we" is. But I think that the big answer is that we must strive to build organizational culture and organizational leadership that values and rewards personal courage and risk taking. This is a really big shift, as we currently have a way of leadership that defaults to defense of the hierarchy and the status quo. This always compromises truth...which compromises everything else.

You probably have some additional and more specific answers relevant to your role inside the machine. I think that I have to be very intentional about holding myself accountable on this issue, because as an external consultant I can fall into the same trap of focusing on what others want to hear rather than the whole truth. I have gotten much better at having candid (and often times very difficult) conversations with organizational leaders about my observations, but I know that when I first began work as a consultant I did not do a very good job of this.

Again, I think you have touched on a really important topic here and I would love to hear a bit more from your perspective about solutions...are there things that you do to develop the comfort and skill in your direct reports for handling conflict?
-joe

Rally 'round the Family

Jason-

Nice post and good points.

I completely agree and feel that it is important from time to time to remind ourselves and each other why we do this stuff. We poke and prod and stomp and shout because we love this body of work and we love its potential to change the world. If it were not for that love we would not care and we would find something else to stomp and shout about.

I am going to add one more thing to your list...

Courage. I see more and more evidence that there are courageous people stepping up to move our flag forward. I see more and more:

• people that are not willing to wait until someone in charge of something will decide how things are supposed to be done
  
• people that are less interested in what worked yesterday
• people that are less interested in asking for permission
• people that are quite happy to go make stuff up

Case in point, HRevolution 2010

I am not saying that it takes any courage or us to attend or participate in this event, but I do think it takes some courage to make something like this happen. Truth be told, there are about eleventy wazillion of us that have been complaining about the shortcomings of traditional conferences. Almost all of us eleventy wazillion talented complainers did nothing more than complain. A few people actually did something. They decided to try something different.

I think it will prove to be extremely valuable to this profession that there are people now having different kinds of conversations about different kinds of things, and they are doing it online and they are doing it with different kinds of events.

I think that this is significant not only to our profession, but also to business in general. I think that we continue to get evidence that the courage to do what needs to be done is often lacking and that courage just might be showing up in the craft of Human Resources.

See you in Chicago.
-joe

Empowerment is Overrated

Jason-

“Empower” is increasingly becoming one of those words that tends to make me a little twitchy, but interesting post nonetheless.

I agree that personal responsibility is an important part of this conversation. I subscribe to the framework Kurt Lewin laid out nearly 100 years ago:

B = f(P,E)

Behavior is a function of both the person and the environment.

When we say that we need to “empower” employees I start to twitch because it seems to me that we are saying that the environment is fine or acceptable and employees just need to deal with it and "step up"...and I think that is a fundamentally flawed place to start from. I think that the organizational environment is almost always dysfunctional and that should always be our first obligation.

I think that we almost always overlook this, accepting our organizational environment as the default context. And I think that in HR this underlying belief shows up in our actions and words all the time. For example, you said:

"As we discussed personal accountability of the employee, your comments quickly turned to how the organization bears the responsibility for making it "safe" to confront bad management. That's a bit like choosing not to play a game unless you are certain you will win before you decide to play. There isn't much accountability or responsibility in that equation on the employee's side. The reality is that any environment where it's "safe" to confront bad management probably has pretty decent management already."

I disagree with pretty much every single word in this paragraph.

Choosing not to play a game unless you are certain you will win is actually something very, very different than what I am talking about. I am talking about having some rules in place that apply to all the players. If the game is rigged there is not much point in playing it, and it is bit ridiculous for you to think that you will "empower" me to do so. Choosing not to play the game unless you are certain about the outcome is actually what management (and at times HR) has a tendency to do when they punish or exclude truth-tellers. And when we say that places where it is safe to tell the truth have "pretty decent management" we are setting the bar really, really low for decent management.

The presence of truth-telling is not an indication of good management, it is simply an indication of an organization that actually values the truth and wants to create the opportunity for management to learn and improve.

I think that we should be advocates for personal responsibility for all employees and especially for senior leaders because they have a disproportionate influence on the working environment of others.

I think that if HR is going to break this cycle you are talking about, it is far less about “empowering” employees than it is about getting ridiculous bullshit (see organizational politics, HR policy, bad management, etc.) out of their way so that they can be honest with each other and with their supervisors, so that they can apply some common sense to their work.

-joe