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Wednesday, June 12, 2019

A Guest Omnivore: Ask A Goddamn Managing Director

Ask a Goddamn Managing Director
The Omnivore is gambling in Havana. While he sorts that out, he asked me to ‘make it look like his blog isn’t dead.’ I’m doing the best I can here.

So, for reasons too boring to go into, I ran across a professional workplace advice column called Ask A Manager, which, like all advice columns exists primarily to make you feel better about your own life.

But it also raises the question, ‘What if people asked me for advice??’

The actual answer is I’d give bland ‘do what you think is best, man,’ guidance so as to indemnify myself when things inevitably go pear-shaped, but in Imagination Land -- or the anonymity of the Internet -- I can give actual, real advice to imaginary askers.

Or, in this case, innocent bystanders who came here looking for politics.

You’re Welcome.
My credentials
The only credentials you need to be an advice columnist is to be asked. If you’re going to spew advice at people who didn’t ask, you to have credentials. But since this is the Internet, I’m not going to share mine. I’m going to ask, instead, that you imagine my words coming out of the mouth the last guy you saw yelling about the end of the world on the subway. His credentials are that God told him, and honestly? I can’t beat that.

Also: I, in case you hadn’t noticed, learned how to embed links in my articles. That shit’s going my resume.
What I want you to know
We’ll start with some of the basics and then I’ll get to the main point that moved me to write something. The ‘basics’ are all things you already know and I’ve included them because if I didn’t this would be super short.
Basics 1: #Me Too
Of course I have to sound off on MeToo. I’m only human. Here’s my advice if you’re worried about Me Too: get your dick back in your pants.

My advice if you’re being harassed and you’re thinking about complaining: by all means, complain. The odds of someone listening and doing something about it are higher than they’ve ever been! But also know that you’re complaining for the same reason that bees sting -- so that people will respect bees. This position may not age well, but I believe it’s true right now, and I’m going to stand by it -- if you complain, you’re getting hammered. Your HR department is not going to protect you, and your boss & his associates will exact revenge. You’ll need to -- at least -- leave your company and maybe your industry.

However: the complaint sticks. It goes in their file, and the next person who complains about the same guy adds to it. Now there are two complaints. At some number, the Power That Be decide that they need to do something to mitigate their risk and the harassing manager becomes a liability. Then they’re gone. The cost -- to individual complainers -- is huge. Your job, your career. Your reputation, maybe. But if people keep doing this... well... when was the last time you saw someone sexually harass a bee?
Basics 2: How to make people do their damn jobs or: Always. Be. Escalating.
I covered this a bit in my first go-round, but I’m nothing if not redundant.

If you’ve ever wondered why it’s so hard to get people who work in your company’s service organizations (e.g. HR, IT, etc.) to do their jobs, wonder no more! I’ll tell you: their organization has been rightsized over the past 10 years so that they can handle about 70% of the expected demand. If 10 people ask them to do something they’re supposed to do, 3 are going to be gravely disappointed.

The drone service managers get to choose who gets disappointed. They choose the people who don’t matter, so if you’re wondering if your job matters to management ask your IT department to do something. If they won’t, there’s your answer.

You’re welcome.

But that doesn’t mean you’re powerless. You have exactly one working play when you’re being ignored -- escalate. Call their boss’s boss and make a formal complaint. You’ll suddenly matter, and you’ll get that one-thing done and then they’ll go back to ignoring you. They’ll also hate you and complain about you.

So escalating, when you get screwed-over, has a bad reputation. There is a better way: don’t just ‘escalate’ -- always be escalating. This has two key parts

  1. As a matter of course, create a credible threat of escalation with through documented commitments
  2. Name-drop their executive’s name like a B-52 over Hanoi
Credibly Threatening and a Date-for-a-Date
To be credibly threatening, you need an email from them that says they’ll do <whatever it is> by some date. Note that they recognize how dangerous this is, and will refuse to give you a committed date. They simply ‘don’t know yet’ because there are ‘many factors.’

Your play is acknowledge that that’s fine (after all, you’re a reasonable guy) and ask them to tell you ‘by when’ they can have a date -- a ‘date for a date.’ Suggest a week. This is all professional behavior. You get to expect them to give you some kind of planning date. You get to expect them to do their job. And when they get back to you, you have their word that they’ll do X by Y.

Note that they will often want to do this verbally so they can deny it later. That’s fine. Document the date in the meeting minutes and publish to everyone who might possibly care. Keep your minutes short and to the point, and front-end them with a reiteration of the commitment. No one reads your damn emails, and if you ever have to go to court, a commitment buried in the 3rd bullet point is going to be plausibly deniable.
Preemptive Name Dropping
Everyone hates you for this, but if you can pull it off, they’ll believe that there’s a distinct possibility you might take their failed commitment to their boss. Name dropping creates the illusion of familiarity and demonstrates a lack of fear of the hierarchy. The more naturally and subtly you do it the better. If you make an obvious name-drop in a tense situation, you’re going to get laughed at.

So you do it preemptively, before there’s a problem. Maybe you refer to their boss and ask if ‘we should keep him in the loop’ or something. If you can credibly claim to be working with him on some other thing, mention that in passing. If they think you interact with that guy in the course of regular business, you’re terrifying. You could also offer to brief him on the hyper-important thing you’re working on with his people together. The best kind of name-dropping suggests that you might -- if everything goes swimmingly -- make them look good in front of their management. If you can pull that off, you’re not just engaging fear, you’re also playing on their desire to impress.

If you do these things -- operate with documented commitments and creating the illusion of familiarity with their management -- then you will rarely have to actually escalate. You’re credible, you’re dangerous, you matter. And your request get serviced and it’s some other poor slob who didn’t read this blog’s turn in the barrel.
Basics 3: Open Plan Offices: Take It Personally.
You know the kind -- they take away your walls, and make you sit in gen-pop with everyone else. They will justify this by saying it’s to ‘foster collaboration’ or ‘communication’ or whatever. Sometimes they’ll say that it’s how Facebook (or some other company they desperately aspire to be like) does it.

This is rank bullshit, and you should take it as what it is -- a direct, obvious insult.  If they really wanted to be “like Facebook” they could do the things Facebook does that actually matter (not a topic for this essay, but believe me -- Facebook didn’t become Facebook because they want the cheapest possible floorspace solution).

If you’re being put in open-plan office and you’re not working at facebook, you are being insulted by your management. They are doing it, of course, because it’s cheap and they don’t respect you or care about your comfort or sanity at work.

But I don’t have an office, the Big Boss says! Uh-huh. So: 1) The Big Boss takes all his calls -- which he’s on all day -- from a conference room. He basically has an office. It’s not like he does work, and because of who he is, his secretary can always get him space. If you try to get a conference room all day, every day, you’ll find they’re all allocated.  You’ll also note that even though everyone’s agreed that Work From Home went out when Yahoo figured out no one was actually, you know, working, that people who matter can work from wherever the fuck they want.

And the big-big boss? He has, like, the whole corner of the building to himself so even if there’s no walls, there’s plenty of space for him to look at porn or fart in peace.

So, yeah -- for those guys it’s fine. For you, it’s an insult and an unmistakable message that no one cares about what you think.
Basics 4: The Annual Employee Survey
Does your company do an annual survey of employee satisfaction? If you work for a big company, the answer is probably ‘yes’ --  their consultants told them to. If not, then just imagine that once or twice a year they have you go online and answer ~100 questions like, “My managers communicate the strategic direction” from a scale of Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree.

In the pure and perfect world of Management Consultant PowerPoint, these surveys are used to gather data about what’s working and what’s not, so moral, motivation, and perception issues can be addressed. To that point, most managers have some kind of formal goal around having decent employee morale so they’re, you know, motivated to get good scores.

This is the sort of thing that sounds like it would make a difference.
The Truth -- Management Does Not Feel Responsible or They Don’t Care
In practice, in the fallen world we actually live in, these things rarely drive any kind of change because the people reading them don’t accept that cultural and morale issues are caused by poor leadership.

If you’re not in management, this may sound absurd, but trust me: Management (as a whole) does not believe they are responsible for things like morale and culture. That’s “everyone’s” job, which means it’s “no one’s” job, which means if you have bad morale, it’s your problem. Occasionally -- once in awhile, maybe at an offsite or a retreat -- they will give lip service to issues being caused by “them” but that’s more taking credit for anything good happening and less any kind of introspection that would lead to change.

Now obviously if a particular manager is out of favor, then his bad employee morale ratings will be used to cook his goose along with any other metrics that can justify a poor review. But a guy they like? With bad ratings? It’s the rank-and-file’s fault.

But you knew this: the lowest scored questions on these surveys is always, “This Survey WIll Result In Positive Change.” People know better.

So what am I going to tell you?

This: Savvy managers know how to punish their employees into giving them good grades.
Collective punishment for a bad review: The Newsletter
Neophyte managers will just ignore poor results -- they’ll dutifully read off the stats at a staff meeting and then never speak of it again.

Rising stars know that the thing to do is reorganize the department right after the survey -- that way you can both discount the results (“that was the old configuration”) and credibly claim to be addressing the problem (“this new organization is gonna get great results!”).

Expert managers are always reorganizing because no one can distinguish progress from change.

But true masters: they teach their employees to give them good ratings... or else.

The ‘else’ is... the Newsletter. Or the Morale Project. Or whatever. Here’s how it works: when the bad news comes out, you take a bunch of low ranking employees of the sort who probably groused, and assign them do a special project to come up with ways to address the failings of the department. This is a real project with deliverables, presentations, etc. and it’s on top of all their regular work. It’s also pointless and doomed: Private Johnson can’t even recommend that anything substantial change, so all the deliverables will be degrading bullshit.

Look -- morale problems at work typically are caused by

  • Asshole coworkers
  • Asshole managers
  • Too much work (too few employees)
  • Horrible processes (too little automation or intentional obtuseness to save money)
  • No one gives a shit about your work unless you fuck it up and then they scream at you
  • Dead-end: no hope of advancement
  • Lousy work spaces (e g. Open plan offices)
  • Management doesn't tell you the things you need to know (like that they're moving the office someplace dire and you're all going to sit at picnic tables, and you'll have to pay for parking. And you'll all need tetnus shots)
  • Etc.

These are not problems management is willing to fix: they exist because management wants things that way (or doesn’t care enough to change things). They could fix any and all of those by adjusting funding, work-load, or just changing their attitude... but they won’t.

So the poor suckers who are stuck with finding solutions have the degrading job of pretending the real problems don't exist and then the even more debasing task of inventing fake ones, and then making some shit up that sounds decent.

And that's the dreaded News Letter. Or the Communication Lunch and Learns or other unnecessary and unwanted activities ostensibly meant to share information, improve communication, provide visibility, etc.

Common Example: the survey reports that ‘communication’ is an issue. The real problem is that management makes important plans for moves, reorgs and layoffs that really impact people, in secret. No one who’s going to be hurt by the new change is consulted and then they're told at the last minute so they don't have time to react.

It’s an ambush.

What people want, of course, is to be asked or at least given some kind of forewarning.

But management knows that if they told you what they had in mind
  • The good people would quit
  • They'd have to listen to everyone else bitch for six months
So, yeah. You're not getting the kind of 'communication’ you want.

If the Project team came back and proposed the Truth -- that management should stop plotting in secret like a goddamned team supervillains and treat the employees like adults who deserve some knowledge about their fates, the Project Team is getting laughed at. And then hammered.

So, instead, everyone pretends that what you really asked for is more of the kind of useless communication you already get. So the Morale Project comes up with nonsense like status readouts for the whole department, and a twice-a-week meeting where everyone has to explain what they do with themselves all day. Or they decide to publish a department newsletter and then every three weeks you have to come up with potentially career-threatening article that is calculatedly bland but not so worthless as to be embarrassing.

This is Hell. It's the punishment for saying you were unhappy on the damn survey.

Experienced managers know that if they do that once or twice no one will dare ask for more communication ever again!

You're welcome.
My Point, Finally: When your boss quits, it’s time for you to quit, too
So... You knew all that. It was pretty basic and I'm not claiming otherwise.

Here's something you might not know unless you lived through it: when your boss quits, you're screwed. It’s time to leave.

I’m not talking about getting a new boss with a re-org where you / your function is carefully and thoughtfully moved somewhere else. If someone fought for your group? Great. They have skin in the game and they spent political capital to get you. They’re invested, you’re wanted. It’s probably going to be okay.

But when your boss exits suddenly, your group is left without an advocate or a leader and, yes, you’re going to get stuck somewhere, but the commander of the Somewhere Refugee Camp didn’t ask for you, doesn’t expect you to stick around, and doesn’t really want you.

At best, you’re off his radar so he can focus on the things he really cares about: his actual job. At worst, you’re a liability. If something goes sideways, he’s getting blamed and then you are. So you can bet that when he’s given limited resources to reward high performers in the annual review, he’s giving his people all the best stuff and you’re getting whatever’s left over (i.e. nothing).

Even in a best case scenario, where upper management finds a new guy fast, the new guy probably

  • Has no idea why things are the way the are and in his ignorance...
  • ... is (odds are) functionally dumber than the old guy and in case you think you’re coming off as a super-star...
    • ... trust me: when you don’t understand the reasons, the current state looks stupid
  • Has his own cronies he’d like to bring in and...
  • ... even if he doesn’t, knows you have zero personal loyalty to him. Someone he romanced and hired would, atl least, be grateful. You? You’re just doing a bad job of showing how annoyed you are with him because he thinks you’re all stupid

So yeah. When your boss quits, it’s time to go.
Proactive Quitting: How You Know and What You Do

The minute you get an unexpected all-directs meeting that’s 30 minutes long with an innocuous, title like “synch up” or “touch-base,” update your Linked In and set your status to Seeking Work.

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