Control Freak

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