Top of Their Games?

 

I have often stated in previous postings how the worst 20% of managers, in command of 80%of the information they need to obviate any given decision, will consistently outperform the top 80% of managers who have access to only 20% of the relevant information needed. So, what happens when those bottom 20% managers are in command of that coveted 80% of the information? Well, usually, success … but not indefinitely. What derails them? In my experience, the most common element is … hubris.

These bottom 20% of managers likely don’t know the real reasons they came to their success, and will often attribute it to their own (non-existent) talent. Much like lottery winners who delude themselves into believing that their new wealth was somehow merited, low-talent managers will indulge their conceits at the expense of their associates, almost always with wrecking-ball-like results.

Take the hiring process. Once an organization has experienced success, the temptation on the part of poor management is to mis-identify how they became successful in the first place, and further mis-identify the causal factors as having something to do with them, personally. They then tend to hire those like themselves, objective measures of merit be damned. Once the realization that advancement within the macro organization is being based on something other than actual accomplishment, several other pathologies are introduced into the business model, including:

·         Morale plummets,

·         The best decision-makers are displaced from positions where their decisions matter, to be replaced with the poorer decision-makers,

·         Everyone in the organization instantly recognizes that all of that fluff in the organization’s mission statements and strategic plan, about how the execs care about their customers and their people are their greatest asset, blah blah blah, is exactly that: fluff.

·         A cynicism sets in, where the rank-and-file treat any communication from the executives with skepticism at best, derision at worst.

As these organizational behavior and performance pathologies become more commonplace, the threat is that the organization will enter into a self-defeating cycle – a tailspin, if you will, that makes the adoption of the tactics needed to maintain the organization as an ongoing concern more and more difficult to uncover, much less implement.

I’m sure most (if not all) of my readers have experienced involvement in a failing enterprise at some point in their careers, and it’s a thing to behold. The pettiest, most irksome of managerial personality traits, once attached to the business model, become amplified into company-busting anvils raining down on the office roofs of the executive suite. But let the aware reader beware: the existence (if not prevalence) of poor managers is pretty clear evidence that there’s something going on behind the scenes that protects these guys from receiving the comeuppance any other employee would receive for demonstrating a pattern of poor performance. And that “something” almost always has to do with the existence of agendas that are being pursued that are not articulated in the company’s official mission statement – in other words, politics.

And just to be clear – I have never encountered the management blogger, author, or columnist that can provide intelligent insights that are broadly applicable on the subject of office politics. Why? Because political, sub-rosa agendas are secret for a reason. By definition, they run counter to any of the precepts of management science theory.

And they also keep the lowest 20% at the top of their games.