I must have heard a jillion stories explaining why someone was selected for a managerial assignment. Of course, at-hand availability, comfort level, and merit are always mentioned. But digging deeper, I find the selection almost always based on someone’s, or some committee’s, gut-feel belief that the person selected will get work that needs doing accomplished—reliably, technically, and practically. Take note. I didn’t say they were selected for their interpersonal style, emotional intelligence, team-play mentality, or ability to communicate and actively listen. You know, all the skill sets human resource (HR) professionals cite when stipulating what the company needs in a manager.
Keep in mind there are two kinds of managerial jobs: jobs managing functions and jobs managing managers. Function refers to an activity that people can see taking place and from which tangible results are expected. Sales is a function; so are engineering, marketing, maintenance, accounting, information technology (IT), and just about every activity that produces an effect one can see. For our purposes now, let’s start with how functional managers are selected. That’s where the majority of managers begin their climb up the hierarchy. It’s also where the formative experiences that determine how managers think about the people they manage take place, and where they eventually learn the people skills required for making it to the next managerial level and beyond.
I find most selectors act on the assumption that, until someone proves otherwise, anyone can be a manager. During the hiring process, many selectors talk core competencies, but seldom included in what they list is interest in, and skills for, working with people. It seems people skills only become a factor after a new manager gets into “trouble.” The trouble may be in the form of disappointing work-unit results, or from people complaining about the way they’re being managed.
Seldom are one person’s complaints called “trouble.” One person complaining is usually chalked up to a manager developing “sea legs.” No intervention is deemed necessary. I mean, you don’t want a new manager distracted, preoccupied with someone scrutinizing every action they take. Good management of managers requires giving people ample opportunity to work out problems for themselves. However, when more than one person complains, it’s best to get that manager some “help,” so the thinking goes. Better to nip the problem in the bud. Get this person some coaching and training lest their insensitivity negatively impact others, and ultimately company results. In the process, the assumption that anyone can manage goes unexamined.
I realize what I’ve been describing is different from the storied state-of-the-art selection processes large companies use when recruiting someone to manage a function. Yes, many large companies use recruiters and HR professionals who consider people skills a priority. But after HR vetting, the recruit comes to the company to be interviewed by people whose prime concern is getting work performed competently—whatever it takes. They don’t worry about people skills; everybody has them.1 It’s a “get the job covered and train the manager later” mentality.
This is how the fast-talking star salesman gets appointed sales manager. Someone assumed his stand-out results would transfer, perhaps by osmosis, to other sales people. Likewise for the socially reserved, hardworking woman who so competently gets IT work performed. Someone with authority believes too many like activities are being performed differently, and worries that the company is not getting best practices across the board. That individual then concludes it’s time to collect individual functionaries and provide them a manager to even out quality and workload. I realize I’m using clichéd examples of situations in which people skills are ignored but, sadly, clichéd thinking like this is today’s rule rather than the exception.
You want a specific? Here’s one that’s right on point. It’s excerpted from a paper turned in at the first session of a “Leadership, Motivation & Power” course I teach to fully employed professionals working on their MBAs. Taking care not to bias their responses, I ask students to describe “a personal experience where either good or bad management was apparent.” By the way, can you guess what type of management, good or bad, fifty-seven of sixty-two students wrote about? I bet you can, and you’re correct! At least five students had a good management experience they could write about. Here’s one from the many accounts of bad management:
The worst manager I ever met was me. I was hastily appointed by the senior partner in charge of ABC Investors’ New York office. He chose me after two sales guys almost came to blows over who got the commission for a jointly serviced client. The guy I replaced quit when, dealing with the brouhaha, the senior partner stepped in to decide things. Later on, when that partner asked me to step up to manager, I told him I lacked any experience. But I couldn’t talk him out of me. He said not to worry. I could count on him to hold my hand.
I was twenty-six, four years out of college, and this was my first job in finance. To say it was learning under fire would be a gross understatement. I lacked interpersonal skills, never managed, but did think I had passion and could motivate. Reporting to me was a large team of twenty sales executives and five traders. Each sales executive had a different background and idiosyncratic goals.
In retrospect, I see how misguided I was spending the majority of my time trying to mold them to fit my vision of what professionals in a Wall Street firm should be. It never occurred to me that I should have been trusting them to find their own style and mission. And the partner who was supposed to co-manage the group, and guide me, treated me like a dog. Our titles were supposed to make us equals, but he hoarded information and created a faux camaraderie that evaporated every time he didn’t like what I said.
I find reason for guarded optimism here. Working to get his MBA, this man signed up for an elective that might serve his resolve to make himself a better manager. Look at the sacrifices he makes in trying to improve. He works full-time, studies in the evenings, and goes to school on weekends, not to mention shouldering the expensive tuition. I can’t imagine what more a well-intentioned person wanting to learn how to manage might do. But, and this is a big but, it’s an open-ended question whether MBA schooling is going to deliver “the goods” he needs for living out his good intentions. After all, the latest statistics2 show that over one hundred thousand MBAs graduate from US universities annually. That means in less than ten years there’ll be a million more MBAs in US companies, with a high percentage holding managerial jobs. This should be the good news but I’m not sure it is. Consider all the MBA graduates up to now. There’s no evidence that what is clearly off is getting fixed. What are these people being taught?
Given the numbers, it’s obvious that part of the problem in getting good management is rooted in what’s emphasized in schools of management. Sorry to say, I don’t see much emphasis on providing MBAs the skill sets needed for helping others accomplish and succeed. Sure, some interpersonal skills are taught, such as “active listening” and “getting to yes” negotiations. But what’s needed, and not often enough taught, is active inquiry, power-sharing, and collaborative skills that begin with taking stock of one’s self. Not many students learn the importance of straight-talk relationships, and of actually engaging what other people tell them, especially when it goes counter to what they want to hear—not as an obstacle to circumvent, but as an opportunity to enhance their perspective and better relate. Too seldom are students taught to reflect about how their upbringing affects their worldview, and how both impact their interactions with people at work. Such reflection is essential in learning to appreciate mindsets and mentalities different from one’s own, and in realizing that, more often than not, the root cause of what one finds off-putting in others resides in one’s own psyche.
But introspective topics like these are glossed over in MBA schools, if even taught. So when these bright minds enter the workforce, it’s no wonder they don’t think to ask questions of themselves or others. They graduate ready to compete and dominate rather than interact, respect, and eventually bond with people who will never think in the same way as they do.
Consider today’s MBA schools as an entity, and the role model they provide. Just like people, they’re consumed by the work culture’s extreme focus on success—competing with one another for rankings and stature. The people running these schools have also drunk the water and use increases in their school’s stature to document that they are accomplishing. Even though they’re called schools of management, it’s clear that the emphasis is not on management. It’s on equipping individuals to succeed. That’s how they get students to pay big bucks, and that’s how these schools get their prestige. Many variables may be used in compiling the rankings, but none is more important than having graduates recruited into high-stature, big-paying jobs. If “truth in representing” was upheld, instead of MBA schools being called graduate schools of management, they would be called graduate schools of success.
If you don’t believe me, check out the courses. I’d venture that over 90 percent of the courses in most MBA schools teach disciplinary skills and economic analysis. Even when the label “organizational behavior” is used in the course description, only a few courses emphasize other-directedness. And students taking those courses literally refer to them as “soft-skill classes.” No one recognizes that this is a drastic misnomer, or tries to correct it. But calling them soft skills is correct, at least with respect to the surface-level treatment these topics receive. It’s not uncommon for students who get As to go out and flunk the practicum application. They may be able to recite the theory, but seldom do they graduate knowing how to identify what other people are up to, why it’s important to them, and how to interact authentically with people reasoning differently than they want them to think and behave. This is a real shame, because it’s essential for all managers to have the inclination and the ability to appreciate and value thinking disparate from their own. MBA schools would be a great place to learn to do this, and to practice skills that help them do so.
Sure, MBA students are exposed to the value of making a social contribution, and many get involved performing community service. So there is some sense of other-directedness encouraged in these programs. But the key motivation for student involvement is building a résumé that appeals to recruiters. It’s about distinguishing one’s self from the pack, and doing whatever good deeds it takes to create a stand-out image.
Teamwork is also emphasized in MBA curriculum, along with learning the importance of harmonizing different work styles. Here is another opportunity to practice understanding why others feel compelled to behave as they do, and the valuing of mindsets different from one’s own. But this learning opportunity is often subordinated to winning the competition and succeeding. Team exercises intertwine student fates so that getting along with teammates and helping them accomplish is the only way to get a good group grade, which is essential for graduating with a good job. Teamwork is a means to an end, and too often a time-consuming one that students dread.
Managers with a record for getting things done without their manager having to spend much time reviewing their work, or having to perform an extensive amount of damage control, are given additional responsibilities and promoted. Managers who require oversight and aren’t able to keep the background noise down eventually fall by the wayside.
Progressing up the ladder, managers find themselves balancing multiple commitments, any one of which could monopolize their time. They are constantly encountering situations unlike anything they’ve previously experienced. Required are people skills far more nuanced and sophisticated than the line-authority dictums that gave them sway with direct reports. Most provocatively, they find themselves challenged by cohort managers making demands they lack the means to redirect or control.
Further complicating matters is the growing realization that the opinions these cohorts form of them substantially determine how they are viewed and valued company-wide. With direct reports, managers can assert themselves and insist that things be done the way they believe is right. But with cohorts, they risk damaging their good image each time they express a differing viewpoint, or fail to give someone the response that person wants. They find themselves in long meetings groping to decide which variation of some way of concluding, that doesn’t seem viable to them, will be deemed “best” by the group—just because no one strenuously dissented. The pressure to avoid conflict and homogenize their views eventually becomes so great that they start losing track of what they truly believe is correct.
Gradually, managers get the message about what their next promotion depends on. They learn that building genial relationships and managing their image is every bit as important as accomplishing company-desirable results. They begin seeing a political dimension to everything they say and do. Suddenly work life is less spontaneous and everything is calculated.
Few managers appreciate the irony of the “loss of power” feeling that moving up the management chain causes in them. How can they assert themselves when the people they’re working with, whose opinions about them matter so much, appear overly sensitive, judgmental, and competitive? As if all this wasn’t constraining enough, they find their candid off-the-cuff comments of frustration getting them into trouble. As a result, they lose their spontaneity and affect a subdued persona—which is another irony. Being subdued is viewed as a positive quality. Peers and higher-ups don’t see them “holding back.” They see them “maturing.” Now they’re team players and—get this one—“low maintenance” for upper-level managers. Most ironic of all, and most managers would see this if they were to stop and think about it, is that nothing they accomplish seems to matter unless the person viewing it likes them personally.
Thrown into such politicized waters, managers have little choice but to swim. On their minds is playing it cool long enough to get promoted to the top tier, where they can be the ones whose sensitivities are respected, and whose judgments count. Their energies are focused on making people feel good when they’re around. Finding out what people need in order to feel good in their presence requires a new level of sensitivity, especially to what they see implied by a person’s affect and behavior, and not explicitly verbalized. Without realizing what they’re doing, they find themselves enrolled in work-culture “charm school.”
Their needs immediate, the messages get through. “Soften your tone, polish rough spots; don’t be so direct, leave people an out; be seen associating with people of stature and power; keep your hands away from your face when you talk; hide anxiety; sound confident; dress up when making a presentation and limit your slides to a half dozen; expand your network; never pass on an opportunity to compliment someone; make sure people get your name; don’t over-cc your emails, but make sure everyone who sees themselves relevant gets one; dumb it down but not too much; don’t repeat to emphasize; if you think you can get your point across by hinting, give it a try, but then make sure they got it right.” This is the new people-skill education managers get. Think what you want about it, but I don’t find it much different than what MBA students learn about getting along with cohorts, and managing their image, in their socialization at school.
Moving up the ranks, finally making it to the top tier, it’s natural for managers to think they’ve been around long enough to make an easy transition to their new assignment. They see a lot going for them. They have many long-term relationships, and firsthand knowledge of how managers below them think. They know how the system works, and there are plenty of people whose capabilities they know well. For years they’ve had pockets of organizational ineffectiveness in their sights, but lacked the authority to fix what they saw as broken. Emboldened by their top-tier clout, they feel confident asserting their ideas and redirecting people accordingly. Best of all, they can relax and enjoy hanging out and bantering with company friends. The sigh of relief is almost audible in this excerpt from an email sent to me by a newly appointed top level manager.
I was particularly struck by a comment you made in the SLC [Senior Leadership Committee] meeting when you critiqued middle management requiring more “image” than “authenticity,” and “relationships of substance.” I kept thinking how my ability to say the right thing, to withhold negative feelings and emotions, and to connect with others in shallow but pleasant ways has fostered my success in the company. No wonder my years have taken such a toll—I’m drained from carefully and constantly managing how people see me.
After the meeting I ran into a woman with whom I spent a year working when on assignment in Seattle, who now is working here. Because of what you said I decided to share something I normally withhold. I told her how exhausted I was and that I had somehow managed to hold on long enough to get this promotion. She expressed surprise, saying she always saw me as someone who had it together and made everything look easy. I told her it’s an image I worked hard to project, and that my avoidance of sharing struggles, and what challenges me, is a defense. After a few more minutes of conversation, she thanked me for sharing, and invited my wife and me over for dinner with her and her husband. It was an honest invitation, not the superficial “Oh we should hang out.” I felt she was reaching out to provide an opportunity for more realism. I look forward to keeping authenticity in focus and am questioning how I can utilize more of it in my new sphere of influence.
Although it is perhaps a bit more dramatic than some, I found this email fairly describing what many managers think is possible when first assuming jobs at the top.
Asserting themselves and beginning to make improvements, newly promoted top-tier managers find their experiences deviating considerably from what they expected. The changes they initiate, that seem so logical to them, appear to unnerve the people they were counting on to carry them out. People lower down seem resistant to leaving their comfort zones—fearful of exposing limitations that in the current schema they are able to keep hidden. They get pushback from people they never suspected were so defensive. Engaging people they believed to be in-company friends, whom they knew well and worked with for years, they find themselves back at square one, attempting to re-establish trust. Too much of what they thought they knew, that led to their feeling secure in their elevated job, turns out to be incorrect. All of a sudden they’re unsure. Here’s a vignette that graphically illustrates what I’m describing. It was told to me by an ad agency executive a short time after he was elevated to chief operating officer.
For years I looked at our account managers quite critically. Their clients never seemed to know how our agency worked, or how we priced their projects. And they always seemed so vague when presenting their clients’ needs inside the agency. During meetings they were always telling clients not to worry—that what was planned for their campaigns wouldn’t go over budget. But it always did.
After being promoted I found individual meetings with these guys a very pleasant surprise. My respect grew considerably and I began thinking that I had them all wrong. Then something happened in a client meeting. I forget exactly what was said, but it caused me to question my change of heart. I realized the reason I looked forward to meetings with these guys individually was that they only brought good news, and always said flattering things about me. I saw that I was right about how I initially saw them. These guys don’t know our business. They make a living off of their ability to tell clients what they want to hear. And our clients are nuts about them. So who am I to complain?
Wouldn’t you think by the time a manager reaches the top tier that their number one priority would be total-entity results and overall company well-being? Many people think it should be that way, and probably no one wants this more than the CEO, who’s on the hook for everything that happens in the company. That person counts on top-tier reports placing company interests ahead of any jurisdictional accomplishment.
No CEO wants the marketing department to meet its goals by pushing last year’s models at the expense of new-direction products, just because they’re easier to sell. No CEO wants to see top-tier managers engaged in turf wars, and struggling with one another for dominance. They need managers at the top viewing every decision, and action contemplated, from an enterprise-first-and-foremost perspective.
Intellectually, every top-level manager agrees. No one says anything different. Of course company interests supersede any jurisdictional predilection. But this is not what most top-level managers practice. The perilous journey they took to get to the top has left them determined to never leave themselves vulnerable again. No matter how dire the entity situation, or great the opportunity, they cling to survival mantras: “never miss your numbers”; “accomplish everything you, and the units reporting to you, have been assigned and agreed to”; “allow no one to encroach on, or exercise, your authority”; and “don’t confront any jurisdictional leader with facts they don’t want others to see them knowing.” Yes, sacrifice for the greater good, but only after jurisdictional interests are secured. When the company doesn’t do well, managers expect to feel some pain. But when their jurisdiction doesn’t meet expectations, they fear more than pain. They fear career morbidity.
Even if CEOs realized all I’ve alleged, and many do, their need for entity-first support is so great that most can’t help but get seduced by their own desires. They don’t realize it’s their doubts, not their positive convictions, that have them anointing top-level managers as the company’s senior leadership team. Initially flattered by the stature bestowed on them, top-tier managers soon find themselves committed to what many complain is an endless stream of unnecessary meetings. But the CEO sees these meetings as essential to top managers internalizing an entity-first orientation. Minimally, the meetings are an opportunity to get them all in the room to jointly scrutinize for instances of someone’s not walking the company-first talk.
Discussed are all matters impacting company operations and profitability, tactical and strategic, present and future. I’ve observed and consulted to CEO-led teams in dozens of companies and, specific hot issues notwithstanding, I find few differences in CEO motives. All want, and urge, their top-level managers to speak up on matters extending beyond their jurisdiction. No CEO likes to see any individual mincing words or playing it safe. Many count on outlier viewpoints, and the interplay of top-level managers’ opinions, for sounding-board advice and a pulse-taking perspective of what people deeper down in the organization are thinking. And CEOs like to assume that the logic behind any jointly decided matter will trickle out into every work unit and activity.
Unfortunately for CEOs and their companies’ shareholders, most top-level managers are so snakebitten and security oriented that they are unwilling to put jurisdictional matters on hold, no matter how compelling the company priority. As well-intentioned as any might be, I’ve seen many top managers who think they’ve fully joined up overlook visible signs of their own resistance. Saying all the right words, they resist giving others deep windows into jurisdictional affairs, won’t take controversial stands, and don’t ask other-revealing questions. Lots of luck to any CEO naïve enough to expect candid discussions in senior leadership team meetings.
So who gets taken in most—the CEO or that person’s senior-level managers? In most instances it’s the CEO, especially if it’s a person brought in from outside the company. It’s not that the CEO can’t succeed without receiving more candor. It’s that the CEO should not be working under the illusion that top managers, who seem happy to do their bidding, feel sufficiently secure to trust that CEO with their back—especially when that person is a newcomer.
For an in-your-face example of what I’m describing, consider a situation that took place at the Tribune Media Company–owned Los Angeles Times. It’s one I learned about when a reporter called requesting my reaction to the newly announced change in the company’s vacation policy and the outrage it incited in employees. Here’s how the debacle played out.
Late afternoon November 13, 2014, every LA Times supervisor, manager, and salaried employee received an email “introducing a new Discretionary Time Off (DTO) policy.” Sent from “Internal Communications,”3 it described, in two-thousand-word detail, a new vacation policy that would take effect six weeks later, on January 1. Instead of accruing a set number of vacation days each year, to use or bank, employees desiring time off would merely ask their boss. If they could be spared, the request would be granted. Employees could have time off whenever they needed it, and the company would realize a substantial savings by taking a huge and growing banked vacation charge off its ledger. Simple and straightforward, a win for everyone. Right?
The reason I was asked to comment was that employees were going berserk. Supervisors and managers were affected and no doubt they were upset as well. They too would have to petition their boss for time off. Thinking the plan bizarre, they couldn’t complain out loud. Every career-oriented manager knows complaining is not a smart thing to do.
Having survived extreme cutbacks in staffing during the 2008 recession, most employees were experienced professionals. From my knowledge of news organizations, these had to be smart, savvy people fully capable of envisioning more negatives than just being “gypped” [in the words of one staffer who spoke to me] out of time off. No doubt many feared the added muscle their direct overseers were getting that could be used to intimidate them on any matter, and the ingratiating, boot-licking behavior in store for them when petitioning for time off. Then think of what’s ahead for the overseers—managers and supervisors—and the pressure they’d be under not to go too deep into the time-off allotment budget that had to exist, even though it hadn’t been mentioned. Imagine the storytelling they’d have to go through justifying why they weren’t overstaffed yet could do without the people to whom they granted leave, all the while defending themselves against accusations of leniency and favoritism shown. No matter which end of the lens you looked through, this DTO was an absurdity from inception.
Sometimes sanity restores quickly; happily this is such an instance. But a lot of damage was done during the eight days that passed prior to a bolt-of-lightning edict telling everyone the plan was rescinded.
Let’s examine how this situation unfolded and why top-level managers, who must have known employees wouldn’t like the DTO plan, allowed it to go forward. No doubt a plan such as this starts at the very top, and at the LA Times, that’s the person holding the title of publisher and CEO. On the job just three months, this individual was not only new to the paper but new to the publishing industry. A quick examination of his credentials depicts him as a banker who made millions on Wall Street and then acquired a good deal of civic knowledge working as the dollar-a-year deputy mayor of Los Angeles. A philanthropic giver, he sat on the boards of several art and social service nonprofits. Truly a man for all seasons, he arrived with many high-stature connections.
Then there was the CEO’s “right-hand person” for day-to-day administrative and management advice. At least that’s what the title “Senior Vice President (SVP) for Administration and Human Resources” communicates to me. Prior to stepping up, she spent over a decade heading the company’s HR function, and had been with the company several years before that. I’d say that’s more than enough time to know how mid- and lower-level managers, supervisors, and salaried employees might react to a DTO plan. If there was anyone savvy enough to use the pseudonym “Internal Communications” to keep their name off the initial announcement people received, it had to be her. Apparently, the switch to DTO was the new CEO’s idea, and she went along.4
For me, the smoking gun exposing the SVP’s complicity in going along with the CEO’s idea and being reluctant to assert herself—even though that’s what someone in her role should be doing—came three days after the announcement in a follow-up sweet-talking email sent to all exempt employees, this time under her own signature. Aimed at quelling the ruckus, she wrote a simply stated “taste it, you’ll like it” message. But taste was not what employees were objecting to. They didn’t like the way it smelled! No doubt most, if not all, other top-level managers were consulted. They had to be. The policy change affected every non-union person working at the Times. Any manager inclined to speak up would have had a pretty easy time making a case against this action. But apparently no one did, at least not forcefully enough to make a difference.
Now for the grand finale. Did anyone at the top stand accountable? Which top-tier samurai had the integrity to fall on their sword? No, outside of what I told you up front about having the change rescinded, you get none of the accountability you might expect. Not even an apology for the upset caused.
The rescinding notice did not come from the LA Times CEO, and it did not come from the SVP. Embarrassingly, it came from the big boss in Chicago, the publisher and CEO of the Tribune Media Company, the man who hired the LA Times CEO. He wrote a hail-fellow-well-met “Message from Jack” email, addressing the complaining throng as “Colleagues.” Not one to beat around the bush, he covered over the matter succinctly. Check out his first paragraph.
Colleagues:
The change in policy outlined in the note created confusion and concern within the Company. The purpose of this note is to let you know that, based on valuable input from employees, the DTO policy is rescinded.
No ambiguity here. Then, after three equally short and blah paragraphs, he closes out with:
Thank you for your understanding and continued commitment to helping shape our new Company.
Best,
Jack
Fiasco come and gone, researching this case I find no involvement whatsoever by the LA Times publisher and CEO, who, in my mind, had to be the biggest culprit of them all. Looking back, I see his fingerprints on this plan when, three months earlier, in an LA Times–published article, he described his mission. Referring to his job as publisher, he said, “. . . it’s an organization that has to change in order to prosper. If they’re looking for a caretaker they picked the wrong man.”5
Unfortunately, for Times employees, it seems they did get a care taker. He took a lot of care avoiding responsibility for the debacle he initiated. Minimally, he should have learned an important lesson from the circle-the-wagons action his boss took protecting him. Jack knew he had a dog in the fight and, in the service of helping “colleagues,” knew how to keep that dog safe—this time. On the other hand, guess who’s coming to work at the Times as a top-tier—may I use Jack’s term—“colleague,” with duties not initially specified? An industry-savvy, recently retired, long-time senior editor from the world-class-managed New York Times. Perhaps he was sent as a CEO “minder.” Or perhaps for “bench strength,” just in case Jack concludes a replacement is needed.
Being a top-level manager in a profitable company, or in a nonprofit without financial woes, is not enough to prevent managers from feeling insecure when their boss asks them to identify a backup and make sure that person is sufficiently trained. I’ve already covered the main stressor. It only takes one person to fire them—the CEO. But usually that threat is readily managed: make sure you bring in expected results, be forthright and honest in stating your problems, and lack a backup sufficiently skilled to replace you.
Good-hearted or bad-hearted, living the top-tier life—pay increases and bonuses paid for results, expense account–supported good living, savings accumulating, and lifestyle going up—many managers fear having people around who are able to do their job and for less pay. In response, I’ve seen many managers gravitate to a self-protective routine for job-security insurance. It’s one I recognized almost as soon as I saw it because I grew up seeing it applied. In fact, until I saw it used in companies, I thought my Aunt Bessie invented it.
My mother, Rose, had two sisters, Kate and Bessie. Each of them was a to-die-for baker. Of the three, Bessie was the best. Her Chicagoland baking reputation challenged Julia Child’s. Everyone who tasted one of her pies, her bread, or a cake claimed they had never eaten anything comparable. Smart people were always asking for her recipes, and Bessie generously gave them out. But, as only our immediate family knew, there was a reason why no one’s baking ever held a candle to Aunt Bessie’s. Turns out the people asking for recipes weren’t so smart, because none of the recipes Bessie gave out were precisely the ones she used. Writing them down, Aunt Bessie always left something out, or adjusted the quantity of an ingredient.
Many top-tier managers act similarly. People groomed as their backups are periodically staged to screw up. It’s done differently each time, and almost always in a multi-party setting, where backups are either asked to explain something they’re unprepared to do, or report on a project about which they’ve been provided incorrect or insufficient information. Thus, up until the day a top-tier manager decides to leave, their backups never appear quite ready to replace them.
I don’t think many well-intentioned people who become managers expect the travails I’ve laid bare in this chapter. I’ve cast the motivation for managers acquiring people skills as more for image and defense against criticism than for facilitating employee effectiveness. My portrayal depicts managers as far more vulnerable and insecure than they, or anyone else, wants to see them. Now for the bad news. I’ve barely scratched the surface. More perils than I’ve alluded to face managers in their quests to feel sufficiently secure to give employees the good management behavior they deserve. That’s what I’m out to explain in the next two chapters, the first of which is based on a supposition that I bet most readers will find a stunning, although plausible, surprise.
1. Perhaps in another life I’ll write a book-length version of the flimflam that goes on when managers are selected. For our purposes here, I’m ready to stand my ground in asserting that interpersonal skills and management training are the fix after a problem surfaces, and not primary considerations in the selection process of a manager.
2. According to a Graduate Management Admission Council study. M. Murray, Business Education & Administration 3, no. 1 (2012): 29–40.
3. A function that didn’t formerly exist and is not identifiable on any organization chart.
4. Not to mention checking the legality of the DTO policy, getting buy in from all top-tier managers, and drafting it for public consumption.
5. Christopher Goffard, “Austin Beutner Named Publisher and CEO of Los Angeles Times,” Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2014.