X Theory Management

Suspicion

I was recently given an account from a friend that reminded me of an article I read by Esther Derby on Bully Bosses.  Esther’s article paints a very grim of some of the worse-case situations employees might find themselves in: abusive, yelling, coercive or threatening managers who for whatever reason feel they need to exert authority and control over their staff.

The case I heard differed considerably from these extremes – which I’ve had the good fortune to have never experienced – but still fits into the Bully Boss category: the defensive manager.

Conservative Defensive Management

Defensive Management is a style coined by Tim Lister and Tom DeMarco in their very excellent book, “Peopleware – Productive Projects and Teams” (Dorset House, 2nd ed. 1999), which assumes that your staff are generally incompetent or mistake-prone.  Staff can’t be trusted to make the right decisions and their errors will reflect on you.  Only your judgement is competent; anyone else’s is supect.  Therefore you should vet and approve any and all important decisions before they are put in place.

Conservative Management is a style I’ve seen particularly prevalently in the public sector and in the finance sector.  These industries are by nature very risk and change averse and prefer to stick to well-established historical practices regardless of what might be happening in today’s market.  The management of these companies is often of a similar vein, with a career upbringing in strict heirarchy and an habitual acquiescence to upper management decisions.  An old-school management style of “if I say to you that the walls might look better painted green, you say ‘What shade?’”.  I could be wrong, but this type of disciplined management style is generally only found today in the armed forces.

Put these two together and you have a manager who expects all staff to conform to his way of thinking and agree unquestioningly with his decisions, who doesn’t trust his staff with any meaningful autonomy or authority and who needs to be involved in every decision.  This type of manager can be even harder to work under if he is prone to dark moods or creation of arbitrary deadlines that must be delivered.  This is a form of micro-management, but done in an intimidating way such that staff are afraid (or at least reluctant) to speak up or disagree.

As DeMarco and Lister argue,

the only freedom that has any meaning is the freedom to proceed differently from the way your manager would have proceeded.

Staff who feel untrusted, coerced and insignificant are less inclined to form together and work well as a team and are less likely to feel motivated at their work generally.  Productivity can only inevitably suffer as does innovation and growth.

This type of Bully Boss is something of a unique variety because he may be cheerful and approachable for much of the time, but as soon as something happens that doesn’t fit with his expectations, he can become grumpy and condescending, asserting his view of the way things should have been done and making people feel small and guilty.  Employees who have this type of manager typically adopt one of two coping mechanisms: they tolerate the behaviour and just try to get on with each work day, or they leave.  Esther’s article (above) lists other effects including stress, information hiding and a lack of engagement (a signficant one in my view).

Read Esther’s article (or better – subscribe to her blog!) and consider some of the coping strategies she suggests.  Have you had your own experience with a particular personality type in your direct management?  Tell me about it.

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