Hot Topics Special Edition

Managerial Malpractice:
The Dark Side of Organizational Life
by
John Nirenberg

Disclaimer: The statements and opinions presented in the following article are the views of the author and are not necessarily those of Lazarus Consulting Group, Inc., its practitioners, associates, or partners.

Permission to Publish: Managerial Malpractice: The Dark Side of Organizational Life is published with the kind permission of the author, John Nirenberg, Ph.D.

The modern workplace is filled with stress, constant change, rampant conflict and employee disgruntlement. But managers frequently assume it can be remedied with a simple, even obvious, quick fix that will make everything all right.

But this assumes management can and will apply appropriate solutions to problems they themselves might or might not create. And the assumption that management can do this; that they are indeed the source of the solution and not the problem, is the first mistake.

A good deal of the malaise facing our workplaces is a direct result of managerial malpractices and the organizations' inadequacy in dealing with them. It is no surprise that many problems in the workplace originate with inadequately trained, and incompetent or unsupervised managers. This isn't to say that employees are perfect, but we hear much too much about their inadequacies without questioning the suitability of their managers behavior. A sure sign that managers may be part of the problem and not the solution is their lack of knowledge about the vast management literature - managers and organizations appear oblivious to the resources at their fingertips. Perhaps even more damaging is their unwillingness to involve their employees, many of whom are motivated and knowledgeable, in seeking solutions to the problems they face.

In reviewing the literature about the failure of many managers (even those with the best intentions), it seems that there are some explanations. We call them managerial malpractices. It is because of the importance of the managerial role in the social system of the workplace that the following managerial malpractices are such heartbreakers. So much potential is lost. So much energy squandered. So many successes delayed.

You may detect a tinge of anger coursing through the following descriptions of these all too common malpractices. That is because of the great deal of pain these practices cause for so many people. Indeed, managers behaving in these ways are doing more damage than if they did nothing at all.

First, An Inappropriate Attitude

There are a variety of ways incompetent managers destroy the potential of tens, hundreds, even thousands of individuals. First, we must understand an attitude that permeates the thinking and behavior of many of the malpracticing managers. The attitude is of "superiority over" without "responsibility to" the "subordinate" or colleague. Like governance, parenting, doctoring, and teaching, managers have a sacred responsibility to execute their duties without doing harm and in a way that enriches and enlivens those they touch as well as the organization in which they work.

While great pains were taken to cautiously assign powers to our political leaders to guard against what was believed to be the inevitable corruption of those in office, we have totally ignored these principles as they apply to power holders (managers) in the workplace. They are virtual dictators over all they supervise. The manager's job is thought to be a simple one-person affair which is unforgivable when, by so doing, they ignore the contributions and potential of their own organizations and their workpartners - "colleagues and subordinates" - just because, given the power, they assume they are more knowledgable, more creative and more capable than others. This attitude is archaic and just an act of ego-gratification.

Hammurabi's Curse

Frederick Taylor is considered the person who recommended separating management, the act of thinking, from labor, the act of doing. But it was Hammurabi, the King of Babylon, almost 4,000 years ago, who first established the principle that a manager was responsible for his or her workers.
Typically, a craftsman was held responsible for the work of his apprentices and as such each act of a laborer or apprentice was considered the act of the craftsman/contractor. Indeed, even today, if a craftsperson does a job poorly, the customer will more likely than not seek redress through the company, the worker's boss rather than directly with the worker.

This principle has been the basis for the separation of responsibilities and also a justification for the chain of command and the development of an adversarial relationship between what appeared to be mutually exclusive interests: management and labor. Management's interest was to assume full responsibility for the work and to make as much profit as possible through the maximum use of labor. Labor's interest was to collect the highest wage possible and ignore responsibility for the larger whole.

Believing this ancient formula still operable in a time of widespread education and the acceptance of one's at-work responsibilities, many malpracticing managers fail because they demotivate and discard the potential of those they manage.

From Hammurabi to Taylor, the vast majority of the labor force was reduced to virtual wage-slavery disempowered from making decisions regarding their work and their lives in the workplace.

Freedom's Nightmare

It is sad, to say the least, that while democracy and entrepreneurship are breaking out in some of the unlikeliest places on Earth, workers in the most open economies willingly subjugate themselves to unelected, virtually unaccountable bosses who tyrannize them daily. And, as Shorris has reminded us: "In business, [people] do not arrive at totalitarian methods because they are evil, but because they wish to do the good in what seems to them the most efficient way, or because they wish merely to survive, or with no more evil intent than the desire to prosper." (Earl Shorris, Scenes From Corporate Life, New York: Penguin, 1984, p. 16.)

What is most amazing is the resiliency of many workers who still give their best under the most difficult conditions. Their ability to handle systemic problems is quite good, being resourceful they get around work flow obstacles and succeed in their endeavors in spite of a malpracticing manager. But what they can not get around, in most cases, is the "boss" himself who can be malicious, bull-headed, unresponsive, ignorant, fearful and even violent. While the organization often survives such managers, the waste of human talent is a dreadful commentary on the system. Surely such organizations suffer more than they know.

Management as a Fringe Benefit

In freedom's nightmare, attaining a management position is to acquire the most incredible fringe benefit of all - the ability to treat those you are managing as personal vassals to run errands, to be given assignments late Friday that are due on Monday, or to send to corporate Siberia for the pleasure of uprooting families to test their loyalty. Ah, the forced overtime; instilling the dread of job loss by invoking "the fear of foreign competition." Or, the corporate greenmail to relocate facilities to low-cost cities while extracting tax deferments, infrastructure paid for by the workers and low wages. Ah, the union givebacks to keep their member's jobs in a last ditch effort before plants are moved across the border.

These behaviors occur frequently enough. You would almost think it were normal, acceptable, behavior and not a form of organizational abuse. But the machinations of aspiring managers to do their own thing and see "subordinates" as mere instruments of their personal will is often much worse. The first or second promotion frequently results in the creation of a "loose cannon" - an individual who becomes unpredictable in the new role. Typically these individuals do not know how to use power, lack the confidence to express themselves, are inconsistent in what they require of others, are unclear about their ultimate purpose as managers, are uncomfortable with the relationship-building aspects of the job, and just can't seem to win the confidence of those they are now "responsible for" as they deploy their "human resources" in capricious or thoughtless ways.

The most vicious type of dysfunctional manager sees the appointment to the position as anointment: these managers perceive themselves as masters of a fiefdom. Direct reports become servants expected to follow through and carry out every conceivable whim thrust upon them. The truly frightening aspect of freedom's nightmare is that they are just modeling their own manager's behavior and in so doing give the impression to the next generation that that is the way effective management is practiced.

Managerial Incompetence by Ignorance

Most managers have never formally learned how to manage people (to lead, coach, be with, support, encourage, inspire). Unless they received training in the armed services or through extracurricular activities in school or, perhaps, in self-financed training programs such as an SIM leadership seminar, the people-management aspects of collegiate business studies programs and on-the-job opportunities are simply too trivial to matter.

This is the frightening and demoralizing fact of work life that is creating a tragedy of untold consequences for thousands of people in the workforce subject to the desperate trial and error methods used by most managers. The helter-skelter adoption of various strategies and techniques to lead and motivate, to communicate and inspire - in actuality, to cajole, control and intimidate others to perform for the good of the manager, the company and distant stockholders - have left professionals and union members fed up. The endless manipulative and disrespectful application of techniques that pass for sensible management has become a constant annoyance and source of stress for huge numbers of people. It is amazing that anyone responds at all to the call to give of themselves at work.

The constant process of reorganizing and instituting and reinstating short-lived "motivational" or "quality" or "efficiency" or "customer first" campaigns no longer fools anyone. Most managers using this helter-skelter approach only demonstrate their ignorance and whether or not they fail miserably their followers will be suspect of them and any "program" they try to implement. Clearly managers are desperate to get results - economic results to justify their existence -- but like a person in a darkened workshop it seems too many managers are convinced that any tool they grab will do.

There is simply no required "people-training" for individuals who become managers. Thus, the act of management becomes a drawn out exercise in trial and error learning. As such, managers frequently have no idea about their responsibilities regarding the relationship between themselves and others. It is startling that even in ostensibly democratic countries, managers, bosses, and owners feel entitled, because of a position or financial investment, to dominate those who hold a "lesser" position. "Subordinates" are virtual slaves.

Managers believing that management is their "right" will, of course, eventually destroy their credibility. And as this practice becomes widespread it destroys the credibility of the entire system. How long will it be before the many who have been subject to the capriciousness, arbitrariness and ineptness of incompetent "bosses" cry "enough!"

The Conventional Wisdom Is Indeed Very Conventional But Not Very Wise

The conventional wisdom tells us that the organizational system is fine. The structures are sound and the policies are sensible, just as they are; and, in order to institute any new change in the system it must first be shown that the new idea: (1) is more profitable (or cheaper) than an existing practice, (2) save time, and be instantaneously applied with near magical consequences and (3) not diminish the standing or power of yourself or your bosses.

Accepting this practice, in fact "toughing it out," believing unquestioningly in the biases of those in power, being thoughtlessly loyal as a way of perpetuating the status quo - all premised on the idea that the most persistent, hardest working, most committed manager will rise to the top - perpetuates the conventional wisdom.

The saddest part of subscribing blindly to the conventional wisdom is that while we are ready to innovate and improve our "stuff" - the products and services we offer - we loathe anyone who would dare tamper with the system itself. Strange how we protect and defend a system that so painfully fails us. Why are we so reluctant to improve our relationships with one another, while so eager to build quality stuff?

Raw Personal Power
(The "Bottom Line" Is Just The Excuse)

It is easy to understand an individual's lack of skill to practice sound people-management. But, for some managers there is a deliberate, gratuitously malicious disregard of solid management principles simply because these do not reflect their personal preferences and inclinations. In few professional realms can an individual's prerogative be so arrogantly exercised.

An accountant cannot choose to disregard the GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) no matter how personally objectionable the principles may be. Engineers cannot ignore the appropriate mixture of materials comprising concrete and expect to escape professional and legal sanctions. A lawyer cannot disregard court procedure when conducting a case. Yet anyone holding the position of manager can virtually do as they please in terms of the treatment of "subordinates." If a manager believes it is "motivational" to threaten the workforce with dismissal, so be it.

The accumulated knowledge and insights regarding "good people management" remains a matter of arbitrary application. We have experienced an erosion of what would once have been described as good etiquette or manners or "common sense." So, interpersonal relationships in the workplace have become muddled. Adherence is still a matter of personal choice. And that choice will be a reflection of your personality and character rather than what has been proven effective. Indeed, because we are increasingly subject to a system that unashamedly espouses the profit motive as the basis for all action, each decision is justified simply because it is thought to be the most profitable. Thus, the system itself encourages managers to disregard sound interpersonal behaviors and people-management processes.

The literature is replete with research support for the value of creativity and participation, of ownership and empowerment. The literature is also abundantly clear about the requirements for our collective satisfaction and survival. Resistance to practicing our knowledge is not due to the intellectual difficulty in understanding the concepts. It is due to the exercise of personal prerogatives, the expression of individual personality and the personal responses crafted (intentionally or otherwise) by individuals who do not practice valuing the collective and who choose to blame the constraints imposed by the system itself to substantiate this behavior.

For example, time pressure alone discourages, if not denies, many managers the means with which to practice what they know to be good interpersonal relations. This is so appalling to some people that the greatest pain suffered on the job is the knowledge that they are not living their values; they are caught up in a system which feels beyond their control. They live a demanding way of life requiring a sacrifice of part of their humanity just to "put food on the table."

The Natural Impact of a Power Imbalance

Mardy Grothe, co-author of Problem Bosses: Who They Are and How to Deal With Them, says, "In any two-person relationship, the person who has the least power will hurt more and we don't appreciate the extent of the hurt. This is because the typical boss just has no idea what a powerful effect he has on the emotional health of his employees ." One case dramatically demonstrates both the difficulty in challenging the status quo and the myth that managers always respond to scientific evidence that productivity improves with power sharing. A 1992 Fortune article reported that "The Gaines pet food plant in Topeka Kansas, just celebrated 20 years of self-management. For two decades under three owners . . . Topeka has always placed first when its labor productivity was compared with that of other pet food plants within its company." Why haven't the other plants not followed the twenty years of evidence that the self-managed plant was most productive? It seems it is management refusing to compromise. It seems the need to crush change, even when it is demonstrably best for profits, is due to management's attachment to the powers and perks of office. It is the rare manager who can turn away from the seductive trappings of power for which they have vied throughout their professional careers. Without a change in the structures of the workplace, the re-design of internal relationships, and the reformulation of assumptions about your appropriate role in the workplace, real reform and power sharing will likely remain an elusive goal. And we know that it is power sharing and collaborative effort that make people-management tools and techniques work.

Trial and Error Management Leads to a Fad Frenzy

The cruelest form of hope foisted upon contemporary workers and middle managers alike is the notion that change-management fads, in their apparent simplicity will actually make a difference in their working lives.

Trial and error management embraces each new concept with a fervor unknown outside cult circles. Even the most inglorious examples of the fads enter the bestiary of management techniques with only the slightest critical examination. A sure indication of nascent fad fever is hearing the refrain, "What's new?" at professional gatherings. These events result in groundless incantations of current buzzwords rather than real understanding and implementation of management change strategies with intentionality.

Lack of attention to the system is the reason managers experience so many and varied symptoms driving them in a frenzied search for panaceas. Even managers who are capable, sincere and willing to treat breakdowns simply have not become aware that the locus of most problems is in the system itself or due to the inadequacy of people management skills.

MBA/DOA (Dead on Arrival)

For every profession and trade except business, it seems, a paper qualification is not enough. In other professions experience counts. Counselors have mandatory internships, doctors have residency, lawyers often clerk for judges or spend serious time in moot court, teachers do student teaching serving under a master teacher, while earning tenure, and architects have a fifth year internship. However, many MBAs, after course work mostly in analytical methods, expect to receive the keys to the castle upon arrival on the job. Arrogance and the expectation of a quick path to the top have been frequent complaints about the MBA graduate.

It makes little sense to value qualifications for their own sake and then to allow that sole distinction to outweigh virtually all experience. While it may be one way of determining the most prepared candidate for a job, it does not make sense that the qualification should be the sole, or even primary, evidence of worth. This is a major mistake when assessing either the preparation or the effectiveness of an individual to manage others. MBA programs today require only an infinitesimal number of courses on the management of people and virtually no practice in doing so.

To assert the supremacy of educational qualifications rather than hands-on knowledge, experience and expertise may be a useful way to make some choices, but it does not make sense to assume it renders a manager's actions infallible.

The Bully

A case comes to mind of the CEO wanting to make a quick, powerful first impression. A family brewery turned to an outside individual to become its CEO. His first two acts almost caused a revolution. After the company had devoted a long time instituting teams, he unilaterally declared that there was "no time for that anymore." Attention first had to be placed on "improving the profitability picture" as if teamwork and profitability are unrelated! Second, to get new ideas he believed it was necessary to "churn up the organization." His plan was to fire the "bottom ten percent" of performers each year even if the entire workforce was exceptional. It was this particularly nasty and misguided effort that the brewery owners refused to agree with, "After all, we have been like a family for generations." While his second act was reversed by the family, the CEO remains at the helm, and the efforts of the organization development department to build self-managing, high-performing teams was obliterated over night.

Not long after that adjustment the CEO was successful in disbanding the entire organization development (OD) department because it was no longer justified in light of the streamlining policy - "to do only those activities directly related to brewing and selling beer." This act generated doubts in the workplace spawning questions like, "when is the accounting department going to be laid off?" Here we have a combination of bullying behavior and managerial incompetence by ignorance. These actions represent a failure to understand the role and value of the OD department. Disbanding the OD department without discussion, sent a message that the new CEO planned to "motivate" his staff solely through fear. These events created a massive morale problem and the psychological on-the-job withdrawal of hundreds of people from the workplace.

So many people seem stressed out and on the brink of a major trauma it is up to management to take the lead in pulling back. As one sage said, "sometimes what you don't do is more important than what you do." As a manager, needing to prove your worth and wanting to build a record of achievement, it is always tempting to wield power but the situation may actually call for doing nothing.

Noblesse Oblige Is Not Enough

To a layman, executive pay is astonishing, the perks incredulous, the rationale for the largess logic-defying but the really amazing differences between a CEO and the rest of us can be found in the style of living and working. The case of Bill Agee at Morrison Knudsen partially illustrates the extent to which CEOs have become latter day princes.

After a string of questionable performances as Chief Financial Officer, CEO, venture capitalist and failed corporate raider, Agee was appointed CEO of Morrison Knudsen. Before he was finally ousted on the eve of the company's impending bankruptcy, he had administered his fiefdom, located in Boise, Idaho, from his palatial estate in Pebble Beach, California, several hundred difficult-to-get-to miles away. Not only did he remove himself from the company he required executives to commute to work with him. The company chipped in $28,000 to move him to Pebble Beach. You can only wonder how that distance and that expense was justified to the board of directors. Given that investors lost 47% of their money over the course of Agee's six year reign, his contribution to the value and financial health of the company was questionable at best.

At least there was a time when the rich and powerful also accepted a duty to manage with decency. We called it paternalism or Noblesse Oblige and its ultimate effects may have been the same as those from tyrannical or incompetent management, but at least the intent was decent. It appears that those days are clearly gone.

The books we devour by respected and admirable retired CEO's such as the Max DePrees (Leadership Is An Art, Leadership Jazz) and James Autrys, (Love and Profit) are perhaps the cruelest of temptations. We desperately want the Prince to be benevolent so that the system can go on, take care of us once again and, hope that in the end the pain is relieved. We seem to want this so much that we actually come to believe monarchy works! By the time the books reach the bestseller lists their tales no longer represent reality because there is a successor Prince-CEO who doesn't quite live up to the promise.

Consequences

The consequences of maintaining a system that breeds managerial incompetence are many and destructive. Besides the obvious impact of breeding a cynical workforce fed up with "flavor of the month" managerial manipulations, the management literature is made virtually irrelevant and the management tools become mere instruments of exploitation. Worse still, is the dehumanization of those subject to this system's dysfunction; ultimately the organization suffers. The major fallout from persistent incompetence is employees asking consciously or unconsciously - "Who cares?"

Who Cares About Quality?

Imagine, you are not involved in decisions, your tools are mediocre or out of date, you are asked to do more in the same amount of time, expected to work limitless overtime, do not feel safe enough to say what you think to your boss and have no job security. Why would you care about quality? Personal work ethic? A personal sense of responsibility? A fair days effort for a fair days wage?

If individuals are routinely treated as disposable, expendable, inferiors, it is not likely that they understand what quality is and certainly can not or at least should not be expected to actually care about contributing their best for such treatment. Want quality? Give quality.

Who Cares About Profits?

Tell the fellow buried in the Mickey or Minnie Mouse costume at Disney World to care about profits when, in 1992, Michael Eisner the CEO of Disney was rewarded with $203,000,000! That is a lot of money. That was the most any manager has ever been paid in the recorded history of the human race to that time. That is $812,000 per day or $1,353 per minute based on a ten-hour workday. By way of contrast, say the Disney employee in the mouse costume makes $10 per hour (almost twice the minimum wage). That is $20,000 per year, or $80 per day or 17 cents per minute. Minute for minute, the ratio of the CEO's pay to his would be 7,958 to 1.

Even without profits, managerial excess has no limits. It is not uncommon for executives to make huge salaries and bonuses even when a company is in bankruptcy. One of the latest outrageous examples involves Bradlees Inc., a New England discount department store chain. The Wall Street Journal, reported that "The company is asking (the bankruptcy court) for approval of a plan to pay Mark A. Cohen, its chairman and chief executive officer, a bonus of at least $2 million over five years. The company is also seeking to pay Peter Thorner, its president, a bonus of at least $1 million, and to increase his salary." To people who work for a living this is incomprehensible. Bonuses to the people driving the organization into bankruptcy!

The double standard represented with this kind of behavior not only sends a message of hypocrisy but re-establishes a virtually insurmountable gulf between the interests of management and labor. It invites labor's psychological withdrawal from any effort to save the organization, let alone make it prosper in new and imaginative ways.

Who Cares About Customers?

Here, too, organizations ultimately disappoint their customers because of questionable management practices. The clarion call to delight customers will fall on deaf ears until organizations begin to treat employees well and heed the advice of Hal Rosenbleuth, CEO of Rosenbleuth Travel, one of the largest travel related companies in the US He says, "the customer comes second." This statement is also the title of his book about how treating employees well translates into their treating customers well; when employees are served so too are the customers.

Service organizations are especially concerned with customer treatment since they are exposed to so many opportunities to retain or discourage customers. Not only is it important to serve people well but word of mouth is vital in the creation of a reputation that encourages or discourages the organization's current and potential customers. To a large extent, an organization's reputation is dependent on their lowest level employees. Poorly treated employees, however, can not justify proactive, thoughtful, committed service to the business or its customers.

Sometimes the treatment is so bad that despite the risk of losing a low-paying job, employees will strike. The teamsters actually struck Super Valu Stores' warehouse and distribution center in Denver over "dignity issues." According to the Rocky Mountain News, one of the reasons was management's suspension of "someone without giving them facts prior to the suspension." So the call for employee service to delight customers when the employee is treated without respect will fall on deaf ears. And this is a managerial malpractice.

Who Cares About My Job?

The ultimate personal defeat at work is for anyone, manager or worker, to simply wonder, "why should I care about my job?" Most jobs today are really a means to an end - making your livelihood, not an end in themselves. Only a small proportion of the workforce can see a link between what they are doing, personal meaningfulness and a larger societal purpose. Even in industries with an obvious connection to a larger purpose such as agriculture, construction, teaching, and health care, the sole operative model of management is still command and control, a separation of thinkers from doers.

Finally: It Is Really About Character

It is not taught in business schools and seemingly not taught at home anymore either, but the lack of character exemplified by the low integrity in organizational relationships ("Sorry, but this is a business decision, nothing personal. You're sacked. You have ten minutes to clear out your desk."), declining respect for others and a studied unwillingness to communicate authentically: ("If I tell people what I really think, they'll use it against me."), are the underlying reasons for the widespread demonstration of managerial malpractices. There is widespread disregard for, or blindness to, building reciprocal, balanced relationships.

These malpractices can be dealt with and eliminated from organizations willing to act with integrity, intentionally and for the good of each person involved. But it takes courage and that is another omission of the business schools.

John Nirenberg, Ph.D. is a provocative speaker, the author of Power Tools: A Leader's Guide to The Latest Management Thinking (Prentice-Hall, 1997) and a principal of TAO Global - a consultancy that helps organizations think deeply about their behavior in order to solve people-management issues. He can be reached at: john@taoglobal.com

April Edition of LazCast
Be sure to watch for the regular April 2001 edition of LazCast. This month's feature will be on "Integrated Business Planning." If you read last month's feature on Strategic Planning, you certainly will want to have this follow-up information on how to make your Strategic Plan a reality. Don't miss it!

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