I’m not a big Talking Heads fan, but this part of "Life During Wartime" is one of my favorite lyrics of all time:
I’ve changed my hairstyle
So many times now
I don’t know what I look like.
If you remember the post from a few weeks back about consultants, then you will understand how this snippet fits in to a blog about business and middle management. There is a little more to it than that, but it is at the core of one of our problems.
My first job out of college was at a plant that was part of a public company but two families owned a majority of the shares. One family ran the business, and the other controlled the board. It had been that way for decades. Things there did not change – you could set your clock by the CEO’s trips to the cafeteria to smoke his Nicaraguan cigars. All promotions were from the inside. If you cut your teeth in one area of the plant it was unusual to take a promotion to another area. In a word, the place was inbred.
In some ways it was idyllic. There was never any late-term push to generate production to make the monthly or quarterly numbers. The families were in it for the long haul, and even though they listed on the NYSE they did not obsess over the share price. When I was there only one person was fired, and it was for legal issues from outside the gate. The equipment was never first-rate, but the families weren’t afraid of having things with serial number 1. Not until the end of my time there was I ever asked to take a short-cut on an installation or a procedure. I knew I would get a raise every year and I knew how much it would be, and I also knew that my peers would receive the same raise, no matter who the better performer might have been. It was somewhat…um…socialistic.
Basically, the company knew what they wanted to be. They did not have pretentions to greater glory. They were solid, conservative, paternalistic. (Full disclosure – they aren’t this way any more. One of the families decided to sell out and the whole company was taken over by a NYC arbitrageur and sold off piece by piece. Welcome to the real world. Now they are just as screwed up as the rest of us.)
Contrast that with my present place of employment… We’re on our fourth owner in the last ten years. Every month someone gets stomped when their numbers are less than expected. And, as you might have read recently, there is always the threat of being flushed.
We have a management group with atrocious people skills, yet the whole lot of us have had extensive soft skills training. There are a huge number of engineers in senior management, and the demand for backing data is always onerous, yet we’re expected to move quickly. We get chastised for not having backing data on proposals, but management routinely pushes through projects on hunches. We are told to go through channels, but the old-boy network is alive and well, often more efficient than the chain-of-command.
Management recognizes that the situation isn’t ideal, but their expectation is for the lower ranks of management to bend, not them. We expect them to bend, but they don’t. Thus we change and we change and we change and nothing ever changes. There is always something wrong with us, something that needs to be altered.
If you want to be a leader in our organization, this is what you should do. First, find a problem. Second, blame someone. Third, propose training. Fourth, return to step one. It’s is a continuous improvement process, I’ll admit that. I’m not sure what we’re improving, though. We may lead the industry in cynics.
We don’t have the slightest clue who we are.
We could get a start if we fired most of the senior management, but they’ll hold the Winter Olympics in Palm Springs before that happens. As a middle manager, the best I can do is accentuate the behaviors I think should be part of our culture and ignore the parts I don’t think belong. For instance, we honor hard work. There aren’t many folks who drive away at quitting time. Lately we have been buying meals for the folks who have to be there late. It’s just a token, and the cost is low, but it is recognition and people notice when you notice.
Any other ideas?
I’ve changed my hairstyle
So many times now
I don’t know what I look like.
If you remember the post from a few weeks back about consultants, then you will understand how this snippet fits in to a blog about business and middle management. There is a little more to it than that, but it is at the core of one of our problems.
My first job out of college was at a plant that was part of a public company but two families owned a majority of the shares. One family ran the business, and the other controlled the board. It had been that way for decades. Things there did not change – you could set your clock by the CEO’s trips to the cafeteria to smoke his Nicaraguan cigars. All promotions were from the inside. If you cut your teeth in one area of the plant it was unusual to take a promotion to another area. In a word, the place was inbred.
In some ways it was idyllic. There was never any late-term push to generate production to make the monthly or quarterly numbers. The families were in it for the long haul, and even though they listed on the NYSE they did not obsess over the share price. When I was there only one person was fired, and it was for legal issues from outside the gate. The equipment was never first-rate, but the families weren’t afraid of having things with serial number 1. Not until the end of my time there was I ever asked to take a short-cut on an installation or a procedure. I knew I would get a raise every year and I knew how much it would be, and I also knew that my peers would receive the same raise, no matter who the better performer might have been. It was somewhat…um…socialistic.
Basically, the company knew what they wanted to be. They did not have pretentions to greater glory. They were solid, conservative, paternalistic. (Full disclosure – they aren’t this way any more. One of the families decided to sell out and the whole company was taken over by a NYC arbitrageur and sold off piece by piece. Welcome to the real world. Now they are just as screwed up as the rest of us.)
Contrast that with my present place of employment… We’re on our fourth owner in the last ten years. Every month someone gets stomped when their numbers are less than expected. And, as you might have read recently, there is always the threat of being flushed.
We have a management group with atrocious people skills, yet the whole lot of us have had extensive soft skills training. There are a huge number of engineers in senior management, and the demand for backing data is always onerous, yet we’re expected to move quickly. We get chastised for not having backing data on proposals, but management routinely pushes through projects on hunches. We are told to go through channels, but the old-boy network is alive and well, often more efficient than the chain-of-command.
Management recognizes that the situation isn’t ideal, but their expectation is for the lower ranks of management to bend, not them. We expect them to bend, but they don’t. Thus we change and we change and we change and nothing ever changes. There is always something wrong with us, something that needs to be altered.
If you want to be a leader in our organization, this is what you should do. First, find a problem. Second, blame someone. Third, propose training. Fourth, return to step one. It’s is a continuous improvement process, I’ll admit that. I’m not sure what we’re improving, though. We may lead the industry in cynics.
We don’t have the slightest clue who we are.
We could get a start if we fired most of the senior management, but they’ll hold the Winter Olympics in Palm Springs before that happens. As a middle manager, the best I can do is accentuate the behaviors I think should be part of our culture and ignore the parts I don’t think belong. For instance, we honor hard work. There aren’t many folks who drive away at quitting time. Lately we have been buying meals for the folks who have to be there late. It’s just a token, and the cost is low, but it is recognition and people notice when you notice.
Any other ideas?
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