A Manager Takes A Night Off….

We were just leaving a restaurant when we were stopped by an old friend and her husband who were taking the evening sun with a group of friends on the embankment by the river. We had a chat and talk turned to the latest book, how was it doing and for the benefit of the rest of the group who didn’t know, what was it all about. In a nut shell, we said, the book was about how the things that managers did to the workforce destroyed the workforce’s ability to work.

There were the usual nods of recognition around the table then our friend indicated the woman sitting on her own at the head of the table. It was obvious that this was an office party and the woman sitting on her own was the manager, even before our friend introduced her. Our friend said that she was the office manager, and the rest of the girls were the team who worked with her. The way they had arranged themselves around the table spoke volumes for their work relationships.

The manager sat at the head of the table, obviously because she was under the impression that she was the most important person there and therefore should have the most important seat, even at a social gathering. Our friend was the supervisor, second in command in the office, and therefore had to sit near her boss to show support, but even then she placed her husband between her and the boss so that she was not sitting too close but, as the supervisor, she was still the closest. All the rest of the girls were huddled together at the other end of the table, not a great distance away but far enough to make an obvious gap between them and us.

The manager, appraised of the content of the book turned her hubris up to maximum, demanding to know what right did I have to write books about management when clearly, as a practising manager, she was the expert. The easy answer would have been to explain how dysfunctional her social gathering really was, how that dysfunction was probably a direct result of the way that she managed her team and the relationships that she created at work. Fortunately before that thought had even begun to speculate about the possibility of crossing my mind she gathered her self up and delivered her management philosophy: They think I am a bitch, but that is my job!

I was absolutely gobsmacked.

Here was a manager who, I think not unusually, believed that the job of a manager was to be a bitch to the workforce. It was clear that there was going to be no conversation about how well she thought she was doing as a manager or any expression of desire to become more effective. She was proud to be acknowledged as a bitch and clearly thought that she was doing pretty well at it.

Looking at the cowed fearful expressions of the people she managed I could only agree that she probably was. This was a completely prehistoric management monster who was fully aware of what she was but had built her defences so high that there was no possibility that what she was doing as a manager, or why she was doing it, could be questioned.
She had set herself up as the bitch in the office and saw that as a valid management strategy, to behave like a bitch to frighten her staff into working.

She had not the faintest desire or curiosity to try to figure out if there was a way that she could allow her team to be more effective and therefore impress her own boss with how effective she was as a manager. Worst of all it was probably not even her fault. The ordinary person who spends a large part of their working life on the end of oppressive management practice, when eventually elevated to the position of manager, has no other model of management to copy other than the one that she experienced as a member of the workforce.

Her behaviour as a manager mimics that of the managers that she hated while she was being “Managed” and it is this same behaviour that she will then pass on to the people who will replace her, because they too will have no other behavioural model to work from when they become managers. We seem to be doomed, by our own example, to show each new generation of the workforce the same model of how not to manage people.

To break this destructive cycle of learned oppressive management behaviour we have to find another model. A good place to start might be to Google “Theory Y”.

This other model does exist and has been around for an awfully long time.