Let me pose a not-so-hypothetical question. Assume there was a corporate practice that damaged the relationship between bosses and their subordinates, kept employees from speaking honestly about themselves and company practices, helped bad managers be bad managers and hindered good managers from being good managers, and ultimately hurt the bottom line. Further assume that there wasn’t a shred of evidence that anything good came out of this practice.
What do you think managers would do?
Nothing, it seems. Exhibit No. 1: the performance review, a practice that is as destructive and fraudulent as it is ubiquitous. And despite all the evidence—despite the fact that almost every person reviewed and every person reviewing knows that it is bogus—corporate bosses do nothing to hasten its demise. They won’t even acknowledge that they have a problem.1
I’m sobered by a career spent exposing the negatives in mainstream good management practices, mistakenly assuming that well-intentioned managers would revise their erroneous ways once they realized the negative effect they were having. It’s not that I’ve gotten much pushback about the dysfunction I’ve exposed, or disagreement about what revisions would be in everybody’s best interests. Yet despite all the good intentions, little gets altered. Apparently, the practices I’ve been urging managers to revise are much too insidious and culturally embedded for any manager, or ad hoc group of non-top-level managers, to change on their own.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a world-of-work Father Flanagan2 contending there’s no such thing as a bad manager—just managers who inadvertently do some bad things. That’s not at all what I think. Yes, there are some mean-spirited, insensitive, selfish, and incompetent managers who feel no guilt or shame for the negatives their bad behavior inflicts. I think Lord Acton had it correct when he warned that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Organizations have a way of unleashing power-hungry bullies who, misusing their rank, perform payback beatings, perhaps for the ones they suffered as children. It’s not my intent to ignore what they do. The problem is that they look like the rest of us, and sometimes we miss recognizing them until their dirty work is done. In fact, I’d like to make a plea to religious people reading this book. See if you can get your chosen deity to turn every mean-spirited manager’s left ankle so we see them coming, and can run like hell before they start berating us with their “right.”
I empathize with the vast majority of managers who mean well but can’t emancipate to act differently. I see them stuck between the proverbial rock and hard place. Their companies reward managers for racking up accomplishments far better than they reward creating the circumstances for others to accomplish and succeed. It’s analogous to professional football. Players who cross the goal line carrying the ball get big paychecks, while the players whose blocking makes it possible for them to score get pats on the back. Dreams to realize, mortgages to pay, and families to support, managers aren’t in a position to look out for employees if it means forgoing the rewards they seek. Quickly managers learn to look out for themselves first, because who else will? In today’s competing-for-credit work environment it’s seldom the higher-level person to whom one reports.
It’s no wonder so many managers feel vulnerable when the topics of management styles and management practices are raised. Deep down, most managers know what they’re doing is more “right” for themselves than for their employees. And deeper down, they know that whatever they’re attempting to do is more about being seen as doing things right than actually doing what’s right for the company. Most managers feel too vulnerable to think things through for themselves. Under so much pressure to appear how they’re supposed to be—you know, like objective—it’s easy for managers to lose track of what they authentically think and feel.
Self-interested pursuits are natural; they’re everyone’s top priority. But self-interests are prohibited in the workplace out of fear that people might put what’s self-advantageous ahead of what the company needs. This applies to fiscal gain, and it also applies to a manager putting self-advancement and accomplishing ahead of looking out for employees.
Sadly, it doesn’t stop with the workplace prohibiting self-interested pursuits. The work culture also has people convinced that being genuine and heartfelt—yes, authentic—is risky. It bullies people into hiding their beliefs, insecurities, and ambitions, because everything has to be objective. To be personally involved is unprofessional. And even though self-interests are often cited as a top-priority motivator, they’re not to be explicitly acknowledged. Thus, managers don’t feel they can show their real colors. Instead, they puff up their chests and, concealing their flaws and exaggerating their strengths, they wear masks and put on performances. As you can imagine, this leaves managers with a lot of guesswork, trying to contemplate what their peers know about them. I don’t know about you, but I much prefer playing charades at home with friends than with people at work—especially while trying to get important things accomplished.
So let’s peel the onion back an additional layer to understand just what it is about the pretense of objectivity that has so many well-meaning managers on edge.
When I reflect on the abundance of mismanagement behavior I observe, the verbal tiptoeing and doublethink explanations managers use to justify the negatives in their behavior, and their reluctance to correct practices that are blatantly wrong, my analysis always leads to the same conclusion. The underlying cause for managers continuing with practices that systemically block employees from being their most effective, from speaking their minds, and from working independently, is insecurity. And while there are as many sources of insecurity as there are managers—insecurities due to job demands, faulty performances, and the remnants of life situations faced past and present—I find insecurity resulting from a manager’s fear of a competence-disparaging attack from a cohort manager to far exceed insecurity arising from any other source.
That’s right. Strange as it may sound, I find most managers unnerved by the ever-present possibility that something they say or do, however inadvertently, will prove so unnerving to a cohort that it will set that cohort off on an aggressive course of criticism—using accusations and innuendo to malign the manager’s image, and to devalue the work they perform.
What’s ironic is that the criticisms I find managers fearing most from a cohort are provided by what the work culture falsely idealizes—criticisms for not being objective, being emotionally involved, acting with bias, and for the clandestine pursuit of self-interested agendas. Managers are also vulnerable to accusations that they’ve self-conveniently crafted their work style to align with skills they possess, with minimal need for skills they see themselves unable to master. Ridiculous as it may seem, managers fear cohorts assailing them for being flawed, imperfect, emotional, nonobjective, and self-interested.
Wait, did you catch that? Managers are afraid of being seen acting human!
The provocation for an attack might be anything a cohort finds threatening. Perhaps it’s for objecting to a plan in which a cohort was self-interestedly invested; perhaps for saying something a cohort took as image-diminishing, or disparaging their value to the company; perhaps for demonstrating a skill or competency that a cohort sees as competitive with their expertise; perhaps for taking an action a cohort saw encroaching on his or her domain of authority. Whatever the provocation, the cohort’s reaction won’t necessarily be a valid reading of a manager’s actions or intent. Moreover, and here’s one you can take to the bank, the cohort’s criticism is all but guaranteed to be based on grounds unrelated to what set them off. Whatever misbehavior is cited, the cohort will allege their criticism “objective,” and totally aligned with company-needed outcomes.
Talk about insecurity stemming from capable cohorts demeaning one another! Take a look at this story related by a young professional who is struggling, wanting to keep her firm on track, because managers above her were locked in a competition she saw jeopardizing everyone’s hard work and chances for success. Why do these managers treat one another as she describes? What blocks them from agreeing to disagree, and working together for the company’s sake? Here’s how this professional wrote her concern to me:
I work in management consulting, which is all about sales. Everything we do, every conversation we have is aimed at getting the next engagement. My firm may soon acquire the biggest sale in the history of the company—which seems like a good thing but may ultimately tear us apart.
Two managers above me own client relationships that are critical to our group’s existence. One has a pending sale from a Fortune 500 company that will be the biggest we’ve ever received. If this happens, both managers will be made partners, but these women constantly clash. They undermine one another with their staffs and always look for an opportunity to get ahead of the other. I’m totally perplexed by the slandering criticisms they levy, and can’t figure out why they refuse to cooperate. We’re on the same team, right? Working in factions is not going to get us that sale, and both of them, along with the rest of us, will suffer.
I have casually mentioned how our team should work together to “expand the pie” and not compete against each other for one tiny slice. This is only in everyone’s best interests. But my comments make no difference. What else can I do in my current role to make our team operate effectively? This is an interesting and vexing experience for me because I cannot fathom why my team, particularly these two individuals, let personality clashes and a competitive streak get in the way of something that obviously benefits everyone.
Clearly, there’s no trust between these feuding managers, or probably, for that matter, among many others in the firm. Instead of trying to understand one another’s needs, and probe the reasons for their differences, these managers spend their time looking for opportunities to devalue one another’s work and reputation. But for what purpose, and at what cost? Just imagine what a different and healthier workplace everyone would have if these managers spent as much time and effort improving protocols and practices as they do cutting one another down.
This brings me to a poignant question—why would a preponderance of managers feel vulnerable to trumped-up charges to the point where they are profoundly and perpetually insecure? Aren’t manifest competencies and established value to the company enough to keep one safe from reproach? Can people making important contributions actually find themselves devalued on a whim?
Managers would like to believe that demonstrated value in producing important results can withstand self-serving, trumped-up criticism. But I find most managers see themselves vulnerable to capricious labeling. They may say they believe something different, but that’s not how most behave. They walk on eggshells. Maintaining a vigil, they respect other people’s sensitivities, conduct themselves “professionally,” and go all out in observing political correctness. Good luck getting to know anyone’s true self in this kind of work environment.
Feeling vulnerable, managers avoid owning up to and expressing what they truly think. They speak in the third person, use the king’s “we,” and communicate in a style that makes mere opinions sound like established fact. Now let me tell you an actual fact, since we’re speaking factually. Nothing in people’s behavior at work—absolutely nothing—is objective. The same events, the same words, the same anything will be seen and interpreted differently according to the mind-sets, motives, and background of each participant and observer.
There’s little to debate. Subjectivity, personal bias, and self-interests are inevitable and, yes, natural. Subjectivity colors each person’s perception and assessment of every work situation, with interpretations as different as the lives people lead. Apparent or not, every preference that’s shown, every decision that’s made, and every judgment that’s rendered is shaded by inner attitudes, whether or not an individual is aware of their influence and actually believes their opinion grounded in objective fact. Often, the extent of the shading is determined by who else is present and the amount of self-serving distortion the individual believes he or she can get away with, given what the people in the room know and believe. It’s what the market will bear.
Claiming to be “objective” implies that all “unbiased” people will see events as the objective-alleging person views them, will characterize what they see in similar terms, will attribute the same meaning and significance to what they believe is transpiring, and that any differences in perceptions and interpretation can be discussed rationally and reconciled. But this is never the case. I mean, it takes decades for historians to get history they personally witnessed into some semblance of even-handed perspective and agreement.
Just implying objectivity, let alone asserting that a depiction of human events is objective fact, flies in the face of experimental social science. What actually transpires is exemplified in such popular psychological canons as “motivation determines perception,” “where you stand determines what you see,” and “you can forget the past but the past doesn’t forget you.” Just because someone fails to recognize the personal needs prompting their actions, or the past experiences coloring their sentiments, does not negate subjective forces as drivers. People go into therapy, engage in consciousness-raising, and watch political debates to see beyond their personal filters. There’s a saying that people who decry psychotherapy like to use: “analysis is paralysis.” Nuh-uh. That doesn’t fly with the psychologist in me. I think that failing to recognize the subjective forces directing a person’s actions is a sentence for that person to repeat mistakes of the past. This reminds me of a cousin who married and buried three guys named Stan, despite the fact that when introduced to the third, I urged that Stan to run.
If you need more, think of it this way. Everyone’s perspective is as unique and different as their thumbprints. Take any topic or social issue where people’s opinions differ: politics, sporting events, gay marriage, healthcare, gun safety, vaccinations, et cetera. Even movies are a good example. Every day people go to the same movie and walk out with completely different opinions. They saw the same actors, listened to the same lines, and ate popcorn from the same concession stand. But one person could hate the film and demand a refund while another could say it was as profound and as meaningful as any film they’d ever seen. Whatever their opinion, no matter how strongly believed and vigorously expressed, it is not objective.
Seldom stated as starkly as how I think it needs to be emphasized here, the mainstream work culture requires managers to buy the belief that outlawing subjectivity makes subjectivity disappear. But banning subjectivity doesn’t make it disappear any more than the prohibition was able to ban alcohol and make it disappear. Outlawing subjectivity only drives it underground, which is where managers keep it. Its constant presence is easily viewed in the words that top-level managers speak, and in what you see them actually doing when they tell you they’re doing something else. It’s even easier to detect in what’s spoken by managers lower down.
The performance review is the worst example of what is often held up as “objective” because one imperfect manager’s biased opinion of an employee’s imperfections gets represented in the employee’s file as a truthful, objective fact—not a self-serving opinion. To be fair, any evaluation should include the personal preferences and comfort zones of the manager assigning the ratings, and the fact that the rating system allows one manager’s high-scoring “team player” to qualify as another manager’s low-scoring “conflict-avoider.” Here’s another fact. Employees receiving reviews from multiple managers will, more likely than not, receive significantly different scores from each. In science that’s called “lack of inter-rater reliability.” And in science, that lack serves to invalidate all subsequent conclusions drawn.
I often hear managers using terms like objective and fact-based analysis, and hear of performances quantified in percentages and statistics, as if these terms and numbers eliminate the subjective element. It’s a well-known fact that even scientists place the most emphasis on the numbers that support what they think, and downplay the ones that question or contradict their beliefs.3 The point is that any characterization made by one manager of another is subjective and wouldn’t hold up as scientifically valid in any court of law. Their representations are based on their own points of view and life experiences. Managers open themselves to criticism each time they present self-convenient beliefs and opinions as hard fact. All it takes to invalidate their conclusions is for someone to point out the self-serving motives behind their beliefs, and then depict what they have to gain.
What gets termed “reality” at work results from tacit politicking, as stakeholders vie and negotiate to get events and actions labeled to reflect their individual—and hidden—agendas. Of course, what’s agreed to, both in terminology and valuing of an activity, will usually be less than what any stakeholder actually believes. In the workplace, few facts speak for themselves. Facts are used, ignored, and labeled to support how people with complementary personal agendas have tacitly agreed to speak about what’s taking place—despite disparities in personal views.
Taking care not to veer far from work-culture-stipulated good management behavior, managers are ever pretending their viewpoints and actions are objective, and free of self-interested gain. They frame their advocacies impersonally, as if what they are saying is “the only right decision to make,” “the absolute best action given our goals and resources,” “what the marketplace requires,” and “the only tried-and-true way to get results.” Using such phrasing allows managers to gain plausibility for just about any action they want to take. Likewise when accounting for mistakes made, and undesirable results. All that’s necessary to avoid criticism and blame is being able to credibly allege one acted objectively, doing what was best for the company—coupled with sufficient organizational power to deter cohorts with competing interests from objecting.
If you think having to live with managers playing mind games is bad for employees, it’s worse for the managers who have to live with and defend them. To maintain credibility, managers have to constantly pretend that everything they stipulate is based on objective fact—which, of course, it never is. Since all people—even managers—are subjectively-driven beings, they’re never going to be objective no matter how convincingly they pretend.
Constant pretending puts managers in tough spots. They find themselves out on a limb knowing that anyone seeing subjectivity, or self-interest gain, in what they advocate as good for the company has grounds for thinking them duplicitous, dishonest, or worse. People feeling manipulated, misled, aced out, or taken advantage of get angry—especially when what’s being attempted is performed by a person professing objectivity. Depending on the stakes, seeing oneself duped readily sparks an impulse to expose the perpetrator’s ruse.
The myth of objectivity leads to expectations no manager can meet—that is, without free-rein use of doublethink. It’s as if the work culture at large fears that condoning the everyday presence of self-interested pursuits is tantamount to opening the floodgates of self-indulgent rip-offs. Talk about bankrupt premises. What’s to lose by making it possible to discuss and exchange opinions about what each self-interested and biased person sees going on?
While few managers seriously believe that anyone is objective, all managers are under pressure to pretend they are. Some acknowledge their sentiments, inclinations, and personal values in the general case. Everyone reveals something about their biases and needs and, very important, the origins of them, each time they tell a personal background story. But seldom will you hear a manager explicitly acknowledge a specific self-serving element in an action planned or taken. Now, some managers do profess objectivity more earnestly than others, and I find the most earnest are managers who don’t know beans about human nature. For them, pretending to be objective accomplishes an additional self-serving motive. It allows them to delude themselves into thinking their inattentiveness to employee needs is acceptable. To me, that’s doublethink squared!
This is not to say that managers never have the best interests of the company at heart, nor speak the truth as they know it. The vast majority of managers I know are very fair, take pains in recounting facts as they know them, and are concerned about their employees’ interests even while pursuing their own. But communicating the truth as one knows it is seldom the motive driving a manager’s portrayal of any event or action taken. More prominent in most depictions is getting another person’s buy-in, usually by emphasizing what they guess that individual will find self-beneficial. Ever-present in the back of one’s thinking is spinning words and actions for the purposes of getting other parties to agree that the self-interested path they don’t admit to taking leads to company-desirable results.
Seldom is the mere recognition of self-interests in a manager’s advocacies or actions enough to set a cohort off on a campaign to castigate that manager. But trouble is likely once one or more cohorts, either by intuition or tangible evidence, suspect that the self-interests being perused will lead to actions oppositional to what’s important to them. With no means for engaging and reconciling hidden differences, the motive to discredit is born.
Lacking specifics, cohorts fear that even a perfunctory inquiry to quell suspicions will alert a manager of imminent danger, possibly prompting a preemptive strike. Cohorts realize the person attacking first has the advantage. Ironically, all indictments are for violations of which every manager is culpable: feigned objectivity, personal blind spots, self-serving pursuits, and lack of some role-essential skill or job-required competency.
Especially in large companies, and in any organization where people see themselves vying for dominance, jurisdiction, assignment, resources, et cetera, managers worry that something they do, however inadvertently, will set off a chain of contentious actions like the disparaging ones I’ve been describing. And because indicting allegations seldom reflect the concern provoking a cohort to attack, there’s little opportunity to learn what the cohort found so threatening, discuss it, and possibly correct a mistaken interpretation.
With so many possible adversaries, a manager can never relax. Drop the pretense, be authentic, state your underlying motives, tell people your true views, and the only thing you accomplish is increasing your chances of being assailed. Can you imagine a situation where a manager expressing his beliefs with conviction encounters a cohort who discredits his views on the grounds that he is “overbearing and argumentative”? Can you imagine a manager seeking to bring out each person’s best, listening attentively to other peoples’ ideas and asking follow-up questions, finding herself bum-rapped as “a person lacking original ideas”? I can. In fact, I witnessed each quite recently.
Most managers realize that reward, promotion, and all forms of personal success are always at stake during office hours. One mistake—just one convincing accusation—can cripple a career and dash one’s dreams of success. Giving the work culture the good management behavior it expects requires so much pretense that even the most seemingly confident manager becomes susceptible to bad management accusations and finger-pointing. There’s little choice for most managers. Keep your guard up, stay alert, and watch your back.
The last time I asked for a show of hands about this, the majority of full-time professionals and managers taking my leadership class rated “avoiding standing accountable for a mistake” a weightier force than “receiving recognition for a good job performed.” If this informal poll is the least bit valid, it shows how insecure people are. How can a person take risks if they fear standing accountable for a mistake?
Taking pains not to provoke, most managers mute their outward affect. They stick with what their peers will find conventional, adhere to norms, meet cohort expectations, and maintain precedent. They speak politely, observe company etiquette, emphasize similarities, and only reluctantly express even watered-down disagreement. They do their utmost to conceal anger, not criticize, and avoid face-to-face venting of frustrations. They spin words and phrases around known cohort sensitivities, and, when initiating work-related discussions, craft their words to maximize agreement. They avoid blaming and holding cohorts accountable.
Wanting to elude conflict, experienced managers voice their criticisms far from earshot of the people they fault. When frustrations build and the need to vent becomes overwhelming, they do so only with selectively chosen third parties. They must be careful. Experience has taught them that criticisms told third parties in confidence often get back to the people assailed.
Eventually, a daunting realization sweeps into most managers’ thinking. If they have all they need to cast aspersions on cohorts, then cohorts possess like means for indicting them. All it takes to have one’s character and competence maligned is a threatened cohort motivated to expose them for what they actually are.
Ever on the alert, top-tier managers embrace all the safeguards and self-protective routines at their disposal. I’m going to show you precisely how they go about it next.
1. S.A. Culbert, “Why Corporate Leaders Won’t Abolish Performance Reviews,” HBR Blog Network, September 21, 2010. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/09/why_corporate_leaders_wont_abo.html#comments
2. Edward J. Flanagan was an Irish-born priest who founded a center for troubled youth known as Boys Town in Douglas County, Nebraska. Seeking donations, he coined the slogan, “There is no such thing as a bad boy.” https://abbey-roads.blogspot.com/2009/05/there-is-no-such-thing-as-bad-boy-fr.html
3. I. Mitroff and R.O. Mason performed what for me was a revealing study on the lack of objectivity amongst scientists. “On Evaluating the Scientific Contribution of the Apollo Moon Missions via Information Theory: A Study of the Scientist-Scientist Relationship,” Management Science 20, no. 12 (August 1974): 1,501–13.