Control Freak

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.

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.

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.

Everyone makes enemies unintentionally.  Someone says something you strongly disagree with, you respond a bit too quickly and before you know it things have gone pear-shaped.

What I find much harder to understand is why some people go out of their way to make enemies.  In particular control freak managers.  These are, after all, generally risk-averse and rational people so why should they do something that seems to only cause problems?

The people they make enemies of appear to be those that resist or defy them, or possibly even just disagree with them.  On the surface this looks like straightforward ego, which surprises me since surely they would have their ego under control.

But I’ve begun to realise that this may be an inescapable side effect of being a control freak.

For the rest of us, if we encounter someone who strongly disagrees then we try to find out what their position is.  We share our position and this starts the process of discussion, negotiation and dialogue.  Crucially the end result of this process is often a new position that both can accept – in essence a compromise.

However, to a control freak this is basically failure.  The whole point about being a control freak is that they have their position and that is that.  Negotiation and compromise are alien concepts.  If anything they are a sign of weakness.

So when presented with a person who refuses to bow to the control, no matter what techniques are used, then this elicits a response of “does not compute”.  This person is then quickly labelled as an enemy and the backup process of isolating and discrediting them begins.

But deliberately making enemies is a very risky strategy.  Career paths are completely unpredictable and someone you make an enemy of today is someone you may be beholden to tomorrow.

It must be difficult for some managers.  They want to be seen as a great people leaders who help their staff grow and develop.  But at the same time they want to make sure that none of their staff ever look as good as them or even, heaven forbid, better than them.  Because if they did then that would be competition and as we all know, there can only be one boss.

This can prove a tricky balancing act.  What happens if, by some stroke of luck, the people management side actually works and a protege starts to grow and develop?  All of a sudden this has to be stopped.  But you can’t just say to someone “you are getting too good, please stop.” (or maybe you can?) so some other ways need to be tried.

Here are some common ways I’ve spotted:

1. Don’t give credit where credit is due.  Either steal it and take the applause yourself, or supress it and act as if it never happened.
2. Try to undermine the person’s confidence, perhaps by using a little white lie – “I’ve had some reports that you are showing off.”
3. Give them an impossible job to do, one that is bound to fail.  There is always the risk that they might pull it off so best to give them one that they don’t know is doomed.  You could even talk it up a bit so they are excited at the prospect.  Suckers.
4. Starve them of oxygen.  Don’t tell them the important facts they need to know and don’t pass on the things they think you are going to pass on.
5. Finally there are the real dirty tricks – reorganise them out, move them sideways, take away their team and so.

Of course these managers could always continue to encourage their protege and delegate more things to do, freeing up some of their time to do better things.  But for some people that’s just too much like good teamwork for comfort.

When it comes to recruitment there is the temptation to only employ someone in your own image.  Someone that thinks the same way you do, shares the same values, deals with problems in the same way and so on.  For some this is just more comfortable than employing someone different and being exposed to the unpredictable outcome.  After all, one person’s synergy of ideas is another person’s clash of opposites.

A proper control freak can take this one step further and not only employ people in their own image but also at an earlier point in their development – “You remind me of me when I was a …”.

That makes is so much easier to shape and control their staff.  It also maintains the feelings of superiority and lack of perceived competition that some managers need, to feel secure.

If you hadn’t guessed it already, I think this is plain wrong and a sign of real insecurity.  In the same way that we need bio-diversity to protect our environment, we also need idea-diversity, value-diversity, approach-diversity and so on.  It might be more of a handful but it is more productive, more rewarding and most of all, more human.

Back when I worked in the bureaucracy of the public sector I came across a few managers who had an odd habit when it came to communicating important things.

Because it was important they wanted to communicate it in person, but they weren’t the kind of people who would just wander over to your office and tell you. Somehow they never quite felt comfortable enough with the informality of that. It was as though important news demands a certain solemnity in the way it is conveyed, almost a bit of a ritual.

So instead they waited until their next scheduled face to face meeting. Even if that was weeks away and even if the information was really, really important.

For some of them the problem was even worse. Their failure to communicate wasn’t just because they couldn’t be informal, but they had actually decided that doing everything on a planned schedule was the best way to do it! It wouldn’t matter how important the information was, they weren’t going to mention a word of it until Thursday because that’s when our next meeting was scheduled and they could prepare for the ‘solemn ritual of conveying important information’. Until then, they buried the information in their brain and wouldn’t even remember it until the alloted time.

I’m sure you can guess this drove me mad. I even started to nonchantly stroll past their office when I knew something was up and ask “heard anything interesting recently?”. Even with that prompt some of the buggers would still not tell me until the scheduled moment. Infuriating.

I’ve used this analogy so often and for so many years that I almost forgot to write it down.

Imagine you are holding a long piece of thread outstretched before you. You, the leader, are on that thread and just a short way behind you are the followers. Now followers like to progress, which means they are moving along that thread towards you.

Now assuming you want to retain your position as a leader, how do you ensure that they don’t catch up. here are some wrong answers:

• Try to stop those at the back from moving forwards. Best done by holding on to things and stop the followers from taking them on.
• Try stretch yourself as wide along the piece of thread as possible. As well as holding on to things try to pick up new things as well.

But these actions inevitably lead to blockages and conflict.

If you want to move forwards then you simply have to let things go and let the followers take them up. That way you get the capacity to learn new things and so you move along the thread.

You can even be proactive about it and push things to the followers to speed up the movement. They might be reluctant to do this, but if they can see that this is progress along the thread, not some random act of management, then that nearly always works.

Information doesn’t flow up in a hierarchy, something no manager can have failed to notice. There are a whole host of individual reasons why people don’t like to push it up and when added together they throttle the flow.

Bad news in particular doesn’t flow up, for the good reason that people think the manager will shoot the messenger and they don’t want to get shot.

• There’s the example where the manager has pushed for a particular project or way of working, possibly against some resistance from the team. If the team discover some real problems, when they actually get to work on the project, then they know full well that if they push the problems up the line then this will be seen as a continuation of the resistance. It may or may not be, and the people may or not be the same as those previously resisting, but that doesn’t mean the problems don’t exist.
• A follow on from this is where there is only one person who pushes the bad news up and the rest of the team don’t. Many managers take this as the rest of the team denying the problems. In fact the fear of pushing bad news up is so strong that many people will go so far as to deny it exists when asked point blank about it. So the one person who does do it has their viewpoint dismissed. They can then be labelled as a misfit, a stirrer, who is out of step with the rest of the team and marked down for behavioural adjustment or elimination. Ironic when they may in fact be the one person with their eyes wide open and saying what they see.
• When the bad news is about a person, particularly another manager, then too often loyalty outweights rationality. This can lead to some people being viewed as ‘protected’ and bad news about them is supressed.
• Of course, sometimes the bad news is about a mistake and owning up to a mistake brings with it a whole set of difficulties. What some managers fail to realise is that it takes a huge effort for someone to come to them and admit a mistake. If it isn’t handled sensitively, very sensitively, then future mistakes are either hidden or downplayed.
• There are plenty of people who would willingly tell their manager every bit of bad news but they don’t because they don’t think there is any point because nothing will be done about it. In an organisation with paralysed or ineffectual managers then this effect compounds the problems as it makes the managers isolated from below.

Despite these blockages, information still tries to flow up but with the path directly above blocked it has to find another route. There are a variety of these – the sympathetic manager of a different area or the colleagues in another team. Unfortunately a different path means the content is diluted and the message is often lost.

If you want to hear the bad news then you need to build up a reputation as to how you deal with it. Some simple tips:

• Don’t shoot the messenger, even if you are certain they are a lying, conniving manipulator.
• Don’t dismiss the bad news, always examine it rationally, investigate if needed and make a measured judgement.
• Either do something about it, or explain to people why you are not going to.
• If you are facing someone owning up to a mistake then just imagine how you feel when you have to do the same thing to your manager. Everyone makes mistakes.

This way you might hear some remarkable things.

Lots of managers tell little lies.  Not because they want to deceive someone, but just to help them say something to a member of their team that they would find difficult otherwise.  After all, telling someone something awkward can be so much softer if you pretend to be a neutral route for the information.

So rather than saying “I have decided to restructure …”, a manager might say “I have been asked to review …”.  Or, rather than saying “Your attitude …”, a manager might say “I’ve had reports that your attitude …”.

For most managers this seems to make bad news so much easier to convey, especially for those that find any form of conflict or confrontation difficult to handle.  It also makes hearing the bad news so much easier if you think the person telling you is not responsible for it.

This can become a bit of a habit for a few managers.  Whenever they need to explain where a decision or viewpoint originates, they tell a little white lie to divert the focus away from themselves.  After all if it makes the process easier then why not?  It also means that so much more can be conveyed this way.

Gradually their influence grows, but the side-effect is that their influence also becomes invisible.  Some managers prefer it that way.