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Avoiding The Signs Of Toxic Management
Toxic Belief #1: We are a meritocracy. The idea is that management only awards promotions and salary increases as the result of proven performance. That’s the theory. But it’s total BS. The idea of a ‘meritocracy’ ignores that many other factors influence (who gets what inside a corporation) decisions. For example, tall men and pretty women have an inside track that’s purely genetic and has nothing whatsoever to do with their actual contributions. Similarly, many employees enter a company with pre-existing connections, both through colleagues and family members. A son with minimal talent takes over his father’s job. An executive comes in at the top and pulls a bunch of his cronies in with him. Somebody has an affair with the CFO and then becomes the chief auditor.
Deals are cut between drinking
buddies. Talent has little or nothing to do with it. Beyond that, the corporate world is full of toadies and lickspittles whose sole ability to survive and thrive is based upon an unerring sense of who in the corporate structure needs periodic sphincter oscillations. Even if those factors were absent from the corporate milieu (which they’re decidedly not), the Peter Principle still remains valid. As anyone who looks at any business carefully can tell you, people are FREQUENTLY promoted to their level of incompetence, where they remain for years. Reason that this belief is so toxic?
People who are lucky, connected, or oily use the
‘meritocracy’ belief to justify the fact that they’ve gotten ahead. It makes them feel that they ‘deserve’ their success, and therefore owe nothing to anybody else. Back in the day when belonging to an aristocracy meant automatic advantages; they had a concept called noblesse oblige. Aristocrats knew that they didn’t really deserve their privileges, so they felt obligated to treat the hoi polloi with a modicum of kindness and restraint.
Toxic Belief #2: I must control my employees. We’ve been told for so many years that managers are supposed to be ‘in charge’ that any other definition of management seems absurd or naive. All too often, well-meaning managers try to control their way out of problems, control the behavior of the people who work with them, control events that are going to happen whether they like it or not. But thinking of management as control misses the entire point (and real power) of management. Ideally, a manager should be a servant, coach and mentor to the people who work inside the Page 1 of 5
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group. The goal of the manager is to make everyone else in the group successful, and thereby make the group successful. You can’t ‘control’ that outcome. The reason this belief is ugly that it leads an organization to concentrate power at the top. It causes the proliferation of complicated rules and regulations, the growth of bureaucracies, and the need for expensive reporting mechanisms to pass information up and down the management chain. Even so, the need to control can be very seductive. The illusion that we can bend other people’s hearts and minds and get them to do exactly what we want is a comforting one in a world that’s admittedly chaotic. What’s most dangerous about ‘control’ is that it works for a while, but it eventually creates massive resentment. The controlling person looks around the conference table one day and finds that he or she is surrounded by enemies-people who would stab the controlling manager in the back, if given half a chance. So the manager comes up with some new way to control or manipulate, while the employees continue to maneuver and posture to avoid the heavy hand of management.
Toxic Belief #3: Our Company is like a machine. Listen to the way executives talk and business authors write about corporations. A successful corporation is often said to be a ‘well-run’ or even a ‘well-oiled machine’ it also is said to be a ‘good system’, one that is ‘efficient’ and ‘well-designed’. When you hear these descriptions or hundreds of others like them, you’re hearing the belief that employees should be cogs in the corporate machine. Machines are, by nature, rigid and stable. Machines never grow; they never change on their own.
They only break, because machines are, by definition, comparatively brittle.
corporation actually a collection of human beings?
And isn’t a
Organic creatures who can adapt and
change with relative ease? The machine analogy creates other absurdities as well. For instance, machines need to be ‘run’. Therefore, the whole corporate machine mindset encourages top managers to visualize themselves in the control room of a big machine. This is supposed to make them feel that they’re in control, but ironically it can create a sense of helpless. Why is this belief so toxic?
It dehumanizes people. If you think that everybody is just cog,
nobody is essential; anybody can be replaced.
What’s important is the machine and (by
extension) the people who are running the machine.
That, in turn, creates wretched work
environment that cannot and will not reward creative thinking or recognize the value of intellectual differences. People who feel they’re just part of a machine aren’t going to go out of their way to help an organization achieve its goals. In the worst case, they might be tempted to exact some kind of revenge on the company that’s treating its employees like sub humans.
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When managers treat employees like cogs, work slows to a crawl. People do the minimum, just enough to keep from getting fired.
Then some idiot manager gets the bright idea to
‘reengineer’ the machine, thus creating even more misery and even more lousy management. Resistance is futile.
Toxic Belief #4: Business is warfare. Many traditional business leaders have a militaristic view of the way the business world works. A glance at the titles of popular business books-Marketing Warfare, Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, Guerrilla PR-offer ample testimony for this widely held viewpoint. We’re told that we must imitate generals and warlords if we want to be successful managers. Here’s the problem. If a company’s executives really believe that business is warfare, then that dogma will be reflected in nearly everything that goes on inside the corporation. Strategies that don’t fit the dogma-regardless of their potential for success will be rejected because they are literally ‘unthinkable’. For example, executives who believe that business is a battlefield will almost inevitably assume that victory in business goes to the ‘largest army’ and they will build large, complicated departments stuffed full of people and resources. Even when customers would be better served by a smaller, more focused effort, there will be an overwhelming drive to build a massive corporate army that’s ‘strong and ready to fight’. Military-minded managers also find it all too easy to become control freaks. Because they see themselves as generals and officers, they tell people what to do.
They think that good
employees should shut up and follow orders. This behavior destroys initiative as people wait around for top management to make decisions. And because top management is often the most isolated from the customer, the company loses track of what’s needed in the marketplace. Further, the ‘warfare’ mentality makes it impossible to put the decision making where it belongs (at the lowest level of the organization). Military thinking also distances employees from their customers. To the militaristic company, customers are, at best, faceless territory to be ’targeted and captured with marketing and sales campaigns. This strategy discourages the viewing of customers as living, breathing human beings with opinions, interests, and concerns of their own. What’s more, the entire ‘business warfare’ concept, with its buddy-buddy, band-of-brothers, shoot-’em-up consciousness seems ludicrous to many women.
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Toxic Belief #5: Employees are like children. Lousy managers love complicated rules, procedures, and guidelines that govern nearly every aspect of working life. These rules suggest to employees that they are not trustworthy, lack common sense, and have even less capacity for making important decisions. Employees who ‘break the rules’ or ‘misbehave’ are disciplined like disobedient children. It isn’t just manual laborers who are treated this way.
White collar employees, too, in many companies are
suspected of stealing office supplies, so management locks the supply cabinets, forcing employees to fill out a form to get a pen or printer cartridge. The absence of trust is implicit. And locking up office supplies forces people to spend valuable work time just accessing the tools they need to do their jobs.
This is seen as necessary;
however, otherwise employees (children) will be dipping into the corporate cookie jar. This infantile-zation of the workforce quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you treat people like children, they act like children. Disgruntled from the absence of trust and disgusted with management’s patronizing attitude, employees, unintentionally become participants in a corporate culture where it’s tempting to waste money, waste time, or even steal company property. Soon, not only is management treating employees like children, but the employees are acting like children. Managers and employees become trapped in a dysfunctional relationship that, weirdly, starts to resemble a family — a family that badly needs an intervention and years of therapy to become functional again.
Toxic Belief #6: Fear is an effective motivator. Many managers hold the threat of firing or demotion over employees’ heads. The message is clear: ‘Work hard or you’re outta here’; recent changes in the economy have made that threat all the more cogent. In the United States alone, tens of millions of workers have lost their jobs as a result of an economic downturn. This resurgence of insecurity in the workplace has reawakened the fear of joblessness in many workers in all fields. The problem with fear as motivator is that it makes companies less competitive and less adaptable, because it causes workers to become less, rather than more, productive. People become paralyzed and won’t take any action whatsoever lest they be blamed if it goes awry. Or worse, they act out of panic, making things worse. Organizations where fear rules, are truly miserable places. Managers start demanding detailed plans for everything in a vain attempt to guarantee that nothing goes wrong. Decision making slows to a crawl while everyone seeks to cover his or her behind. Distrust leads to bureaucracies that insist on checking every last detail. Tasks that, in a reasonable organization, could be Page 4 of 5
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handled in a few hours, in such an organization might take days, weeks, or months, or never be completed. Fear also degrades the quality of communications inside an organization. In an effort to deflect potential blame, employees engage in double-talk and ‘weasel’ words. Whenever you see a memorandum that’s a soup of industry buzzwords and half-truths, carefully crafted to spread blame and communicate next to nothing, you can bet that there’s a terrified executive or two cowering nearby. The result of double-talk is that people in an organization stop valuing truth, even if they can still recognize it. Information that is difficult for the culture to absorb gets buried and avoided. Over time, managers and employees alike lose track of what’s going on in the market because everybody’s afraid to state the facts. Rather than increasing the level of fear in the organization, effective managers seek to minimize it. They want employees to feel that they are in charge of their destiny - not waiting for the proverbial axe to drop.
They want employees to claim
ownership for their decisions, not seek to pass or share blame. Employees who are afraid don’t make good decisions, they don’t take well-considered risks, and they don’t act rationally.
They glance around the room frequently, waiting and worrying,
laughing a little too loudly when the boss cracks a feeble joke, agreeing with whatever idea seems popular or politically correct.
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