Control Freak

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.

Not everyone gets into work on time every day. One minute early one day, five minutes late the next, people are so unpredictable really.

Now some managers, when faced with this normal variety of human behaviour find it quite difficult to deal with. After all, five minutes can become ten and then ten can become thirty and the next thing you know there is complete chaos with everyone coming in two hours late and spending their entire time talking.

To prevent this breakdown some order has to be imposed. Anyone coming in late is given an interview to discuss the reasons and a note is put on their file. Of course then the time has to be made up before they go home.

Quite often though this isn’t enough. Before you know it the people who come in late are also working slower than the others, they just don’t seem as motivated as the others. So before this turns into an epidemic action has to be taken. Targets are set for how much work is done and anyone that doesn’t meet those targets is given an interview and a note put on their file.

Just when it looks like it is all under control, it takes a turn for the worse. We begin to discover that there are some people who not only get in late and work slower, but they also have the ‘wrong’ attitude to their management and company. Now we have the most awkward of HR issues - problem staff.

Of course this could happen so differently. We could decide to ignore the timekeeping variances of the good workers, and only deal with those that take the piss. In fact we could decide to deal with people as individuals on a personal level and be flexible in our approach. This might even run the risk of motivating those people to work a bit harder. But then that is so much more work than adding a new level of control.

Years ago I appointed a manager who was a complete disaster, but I didn’t get a clue of this during the appointment process.  The problem only appeared when he started work and it turned out that he did not have a clue how to communicate or even get on with the people who worked for him.  In contrast to this he was very good at dealing with his peers and me as his manager, which made it very difficult for me to understand just what his team were complaining about.

I’ve seen this again a few times since then and now I can characterise the symptoms.  There are some people who think that the team they are part of only includes those who are their equal in the hierarchy and their manager.  They simply don’t see themselves as part of a team with the people who work for them.

This affects all of their relationships with their team. Specifically:

• They don’t share their ideas, concerns, hopes etc
• They don’t really listen to their staff. In particular they don’t really appreciate the ideas that their staff have
• They don’t acknowledge that their staff have a role to play in the difficult work the manager is responsible for, such as contributing to strategy or politics.
• They only occasionally talk to their staff in terms of the wider picture (if at all).  Normally they deal with individuals about individual details.

This is so demoralising for the team involved, since, more than anything, this is disrespectful.  It also fragments the team, stops them seeing the bigger picture and thereby reduces their effectiveness.  It even ends up significantly undermining the manager concerned since they are refusing all the support they could otherwise get from a loyal team.

Quite often someone gets appointed to be a manager for the first time because they are such a diligent worker.  They have their own routine and way of getting things done and all of a sudden they have the resources of other people to help them.  The natural temptation for these new managers is to use these people as though they were extensions of themselves.

That means expecting the team to do the things they want done and work the way they work.  If the team is sufficently compliant then this is generally a successful strategy.  Quite often the team are not that compliant but after a great deal of brow beating they appear to be.  Occasionally some people make a stand to retain their individuality and it all turns nasty.

If that isn’t bad enough then it gets much worse as the manager rises up the chain of command and the person they are responsible for in turn become more senior.  The more senior the team, the more they expect to think for themselves and the more they can resist the push to homogenisation.  The result of this is a painful process to go through as they learn how to manage their team in a different way.

Unfortunately that is the path I followed and it took me some time to learn this the hard way.  My advice would be for new managers, or experienced managers who are now experiencing the pain to learn a different way now.

This better way is to recognise the team as a collection of individuals, each of whom works in a different way and each of whom needs to be treated as an individual.  Getting the best from people is no longer a matter of dominance, but one of discussion, negotiation, understanding and all the other best practices I talk about here.

The strength of a team that works as a team of individuals is far more than the team that works under a single authoritarian control.  It is hard work at first to curb the urge to be a control freak, but the rewards easily outweigh it.