Control Freak

Why do some managers think they are the only people who have good ideas?  Okay, maybe they don’t think that way, but they certainly act like it.

Here are some obvious behaviour display of this weakness:

• Do they automatically reject any big idea they have not had themselves?
• Do they always want to tweak something, even if it is the work of experts in a field they know nothing about?
• Do they only accept something you say when enough other people agree with you?
• When they have a dumb idea does it take a superhuman effort (possibly involving lots of you) to dissuade them from it?
• Do they claim other people’s ideas as their own?
• Do they genuinely forget that the idea was someone else’s and truly believe it was theirs?

A decent manager has to learn to spot this behaviour in themselves and stop it from happening. If they don’t do it themselves then it is unlikely anyone will be bold enough to point it out to them.

jay Leadership

Setting up a straw man is one of the most blindingly obvious techniques a control freak will use in an argument. I’ve seen it being used so often with such success that I just cannot believe people do not pick up on it more often.

There are two basic ways of setting up a straw man.

The first is to listen to what the other person has to say and then pick something they mentioned that is entirely incidental to the argument. It does not matter if it is entirely irrelevant, all you need is a way to turn that thing into an attack. It is also useful if the incidental statement is one they don’t know that much about and you can claim to know more than them.

For example, you say

“One of our competitors has won an award for a great new invention. Why aren’t we inventing anything?”

I reply

“We can’t waste time and money trying to win awards, we’ve got real work to do.”

Now what goes through your head after this is, “Hang on, I was talking about inventions not awards”, but most people simply don’t say anything and just let it go. Perhaps they’re ashamed they left a chink in their argument that someone could exploit like that. Or perhaps they are distracted.

The second way to set up a straw man is to simply invent one. This works best if you invent one that embodies a whole set of characteristics that others despise and then attibute a heinous view to it, which you then rebut. Politicians do this all the time.

For example, you say

“Some of the team don’t agree with these proposals, they think they will make some customers very unhappy.”

I reply

“Some people will reject all change, they don’t want to see any improvement, they are only interested in protecting their own position.”

Alright, maybe that is normally a bit more subtle in practice, but you get the idea.

So please, if you see a straw man, then point it out, especially to politicians.

jay Leadership

There you are in a meeting when someone pipes up with a problem they’ve spotted that needs fixing and your jaw drops open because you know perfectly well that they were the person who caused the problem in the first place.

What seems really odd is that they’ve just lobbed the problem into the conversation with no intention of fixing it themselves but equally not trying to offload it onto anyone in particular. To make it worse they seem to be over-emphasising the seriousness of the problem.  Guilty conscience perhaps?

jay Leadership

Everyone has their own limit on what is good enough, what will do, what they will accept.  Some people have fairly low limits and some have extraordinarily high limits.

From what I’ve seen, those who set the higher limits, those that really push others for things to be done well, those that demand perfection, tend to rise up the hierarchy.  They may not come close to achieving perfection themselves in their own work, but this act of insisting upon it from others has real power.

So what makes this behaviour so succesful?  Well, as usual, it all comes down to control.  If you set the standards then you get to control when something is good enough.  You are the only one who can agree to a softening of the demands and accept the work is complete.  If anybody else tries to declare a victory then they get slapped down with a “but it isn’t finished as we want it!”.

This is a technique almost every manager uses, whether knowingly or not.

Now in order to be the one that sets the standards, there is nearly always a bidding war on just how high the demands can go.  There has to be because if someone else sets higher expectations that you then you’ve lost control and someone else has it.  So you have to up the ante by expecting even more than anyone else involved.

You can actually see this bidding war happen in meetings some time, when different managers trying pushing the expectations closer and closer to perfection.  In the end normally the most senior one wins by setting impossibly high standards.  I bet you’ve come across that lots before.

That’s why so many people at the top of an organisation appear to always expect the impossible – because they have had to bid that high so often they have got used to doing it as a matter of course.

But what about those people who actually aim for perfection all the time in their own work?  As far as I can see, those that only expect perfection of themselves and don’t explicitly push others to achieve it, don’t have the same upward path.  If anything they tend to get kept at a static level and taken for granted.

For a start it is too prone to failure.  Some people in their aim for perfection never get anything done, which is a real career killer.  Some people come close, very close but they kill themselves doing it, or they trample on office relationships or they take so long it was never worth it.

For most of them though, nobody really notices.

jay Leadership

The culture of an organisation does not sustain itself. Left to its own devices culture shifts in unpredictable directions as new people arrive with different backgrounds and others, who were part of it, move on.

In small places were the people don’t change then maybe it can remain fairly constant, but even then people forget things or fall prey to their own fears.

So once you have the culture you want, you must actively maintain it. The most obvious way is to get to the new starters and indoctrinate them early on. That’s why most HR departments keep starters to themselves for hours, or even days, before they let them join their team.

But after that, you have to keep up the work by restating the cultural principles at regular intervals. Doesn’t matter if most people are well aware of what you are going to say because it is those that aren’t familiar with the vision that matter. They are the ones who will subconsciously pull the culture in other directions unless they are made plainly aware of where the current culture is.

Another good move is to spot when something happens that is a powerful embodiment of the culture and highlight that so that even the least clued up person understands the message.

I’m sure there are lots of other techniques, it doesn’t matter. So long as you don’t expect the culture achieved at one time to be the same some time later, without any work. If you think like that then you’ll get a shock one day when you realise that almost everyone else now shares a different culture and you are the only one who didn’t move with them.

jay Leadership

I love a good plan and I normally plan everything at work. It is only by an effort of will that I don’t plan what order to walk down the aisles in a supermarket. After all, too much planning can be the anti-thesis of spontaneity.

Most of my plans are pretty basic: “So I’ll do this first, then probably that, then I’ll find a way to solve that problem and then I’ll be able to do that”. When a detailed plan is needed then I’ll do a detailed plan. Overall it is a pretty simple process – I start with the big themes, then when I need to, I fill in a gap by adding all the detail I can think of.

But despite this simplicity there are two sets of behaviours I’ve noticed when it comes to plans that regularly surprise me.

The first is people just not planning at all. So often I see people go into something without any thought as to how they are going to do it. This does not necessarily mean that things go wrong, in fact things normally do work out, but it does mean that things don’t go as well as they could have done had there been a plan. To be more specific, I’d say that things don’t normally end up as complete as they would with a plan.

After thinking about this for years I think I understand the basic factors that lead to a lack of planning:

• Not part of the toolbox. Some people are just exposed to planning as an activity and so just don’t know that it is something they can do. I bought my eldest child a book on mindmaps for children and showed her how to make them because she was interested. She now does them occasionally for her homework. I’ve never told her to do it but she knows it is in her toolbox and so gets it out when needed.
• Can’t see the value in it. If you can do things alright without a plan, as normally happens then why bother. This is very difficult to get past. It is obvious to me how much more can be achieved with a plan and how much better the work is, but getting that across to some people takes time.
• Frightened of it. As I said above, too much planning can reduce spontaneity, and some people worry about this to the extreme that any planning at all will block all spontaneity. I try to avoid people like this. Others are concerned that once a plan is in place it cannot be changed and so the flexibility they need will be compromised. I have an answer to this below.

The other set of behaviours revolve around making plans, but then doing really weird things with them:

• Abandoning planning. I must admit that often my plans are vague enough to encompass most eventualities, but every now and then a plan goes wrong for me. When that happens I just redo the plan, changing whatever I need to change.Some people however just cannot do that and they respond by abandoning planning all together rather than redoing a plan. Maybe it is pride or maybe a dillusionment with the whole process, I don’t know.
• Never changing plans. I’ve come across some people that will never change a plan no matter what happens. The building could be falling down around them but they will not change the plan. Now this is definitely down to pride and an odd conception of what a plan is. It is as if they feel themselves being judged not just on the result the plan is intended to achieve but also on their ability to plan the whole route beforehand. Yet to be honest, for most real world situations you would have to be psychic to do that. And so long as nothing is damaged on the way, who cares so long as the result is a success?

To me a plan is just a best guess at any point in time of the way to achieve the result. What matters is the result not the plan. So if the best guess changes then the plan should change too since all it does is describe that best guess. Having a plan that says one thing whilst doing something else is pointless.

jay Leadership

Telling a bare faced lie can be fraught with difficulties. The most awkward one is making sure that you are not found out, which of course means that you can’t give anything anyway.

The best bet to avoid giving anything away is to lie in such a way that it sounds and looks just the same as if you were telling the truth. You need some front to make it sound normal. You’re never going to get away with it if you don’t do it with confidence.

But even that’s not enough. Someone clever or perceptive might see through the deception. So the other thing you have to do is put up a barrier that nobody dare cross. That barrier often has two parts. The first is to enhance your personal credibility:

• “look at my reputation and experience”
• “all these other people already accept this” (another lie of course!)

The second part is to give off subliminal messages about the penalties if they do try to cross the barrier:

• they will end up looking foolish with egg on their face
• you will take it as an attack and retaliate – if necessary then be threatening about it
• crossing the barrier will ruin everything the group is doing – “question me and you question everyone”

Now, many people can’t live with lies on their conscience. They leave a permanent skin-crawling feeling tucked away somewhere inside. So what better than to make yourself believe them.

That is the real beauty of this technique because it makes you believe the lie in exactly the same way as your intended audience. It feels just like something true and you don’t dare challenge yourself to expose it – who does?

Hopefully though you are not the sort of person to lie, but would rather learn how to spot someone doing it. Well, just learn to spot the barrier being put up. If someone is really telling the truth then why would they need the barrier?

jay Leadership

This is a clever trick used by control freaks to get their way when they have the time to spare. It works by exploiting the frailty of human memory, or possibly just the frailty of peoples’ belief in their own memory.

• Step one: You start by presenting the first part of the argument. This has to be very carefully worded to avoid expressing an opinion. You only give them scraps, avoid the argument entirely, saying it is only the first part of the discussion and the real work will come in the next installment.
• If anyone on the other side tries to force the argument, set out their stall or even go for a win, then you are all ready to disarm them. Thank them for their contribution but reiterate that it is just too soon to make any decisions. You will of course take into consideration their views, but the time for real debate will come later.
• If you do this effectively then you can close down any debate quite quickly. After all nobody wants to expend energy needlessly. They might as well store it up for the real discussion next time. This is of course what you are after, the less said now the better.
• Step two: This comes after a long gap, preferrably several months to give the memory effect time to kick in. Now you go back with a fully formed idea. You explain that following the full discussions last time you have all the information needed to present the full picture.
• For the other side this is going to come as a shock and they may put up a struggle. You get aorund this by reminding them they had the chance to discuss it last time, we’ve been over this, no need to re-open old discussions. You remind them of any of the things they said the last time and show how you have incorporated them into the final outcome (just lie if necessary).
• If someone really holds out then you can get nasty and try to make them appear as someone who is going back on a consensus. Or even cast them as someone who will never agree a position. If you can isolate them then you should carry the others.

Surely it can’t be as simple as this? Surely people must be able to remember what happened before? Well I spot this being used almost every day and to my constant surprise the answer is yes it is that simple and no people don’t remember things that well. Especially if you appear to confidently remember things about the first step (again lying helps).

Now obviously this is a crude explanation of this technique. It requires subtlety in the handling of the conversations and a fair amount of bravado to get people to believe you. Watching a hypnotist should provide good inspiration.

jay Leadership

Having worked fairly low down the hierarchy in some places where there was almost an epidemic of consultants, I always believed that the managers that employed them were incompetent fools. After all, in those places, the consultants didn’t bring in any knowledge that didn’t exist within the company already. If only the managers asked the right people, whose expertise they were already paying for, then they wouldn’t need to spend exorbitant amounts on consultants. Pretty obvious, right?

Well no, that was a naive view. In fact those managers were by no means stupid. In fact this action was entirely rational given their controlling nature.

The real reason that senior managers use consultants, when they know perfectly well that there are others in the organisation who are quite capable, is so that they can maintain their empire.

The problem with getting someone else in the organisation involved is that they risk losing control, which is the last thing they want. So using cold logic they decide that rather than lose any control, they will pay someone external to do the work. This has some added advantages:

• In doing so they also increase the kudos of the project. If a manager calls in external reinforcements who are seen as experts in their field, it suggests that the task being undertaken is hugely important and far too difficult to be completed by the usual suspects.
• The manager can always get the consultants to present their findings in the way they want it presented. If someone internal was doing the work then they are less controllable, more likely to be independent and have their own views.
• The consultants are gone once the job is done. If someone wants to probe further into the consultants’ findings or take issue with the methodology then a clever manager will just delay the inquest until the consultants have left. But on the other hand, if the manager needs to distance themselves by ditching the consultants’ work then there is nobody around to be offended or defensive.

So, with all these built-in advantages you can see why the control freak manager, who puts empire protection at a premium, believes that consultants are really quite cheap.

jay Leadership

To some managers, knowledge is power and a lot of their power base is built by accumulating and hiding sources of information.

You can get hints of this all the time – you chat to someone and discover they were talking to this manager the other day and told them something important, but the manager never told you.  Or better still, just when you least expect it they produce some well hidden gem with a flourish as a winning play in an argument.

Needless to say I think secrecy like this is decisive and reduces trust.  I’m not sure some culprits realise just how much of a barrier this represents.  It certainly encourages those that fall foul of this to hide their knowledge as well, which can often be disastrous given just how hard it is for information to flow up.

My alternative approach starts from the principle that all managers have a duty to share their knowledge with their team.  Not just knowledge, but also the sources of the knowledge and even their analysis of it.  This has to be proactive as well, not just reactive.  They can’t just respond well when asked, they actually have to put some effort into identifying the knowledge to share and making it happen.

This can only lead to a stronger team, a more open team and a more trusting team.

jay Leadership