Last time, I stopped by to discuss how the different goals of management and employees are bound to create tension within in an organization and lead to its inevitable decline. I concluded that resolving this tension is the job for the middle manager. If the tension becomes too great, the organization will start to decline and the middle manager is bound to lose the job.
Today, let’s do a little hypothetical exercise to demonstrate how this tension manifests for the manager and the responses available to arrest the organization’s decline. Suppose you are a manager and you’ve just learned that your organization is in decline. The prophecy comes from either management or the employees and it could be either right or wrong – therefore, there are four total scenarios.
In each scenario, you have two options - focus on the core of the job (train or motivate the employees, gather information and distribute it, all the stuff I’ve covered here in the past) or play a little bit of politics (which I define using Ben Horowitz’s ‘advancement by means other than merit’ definition he shared in The Hard Thing About Hard Things). Let’s define the choices as ‘focus’ or ‘politics’, respectively, and look at how each of these options will work in the four scenarios outlined above.
1) If management is correct…
This means market conditions are working against the organization or that the employees just aren’t very good at their jobs. It suggests performance will drop soon. And when performance drops, the manager will be let go because managers are very often judged according to team performance.
Your moves…
Option: focus
Let’s first look at the market conditions. If these are conspiring against the organization, there isn’t much a manager can do. At some point, the organization will need to consolidate its resources and learn to survive on a smaller revenue stream. There is a reason small organizations don’t have a layer of middle management and you’re about to learn the hard way.
If you want to play it straight, it might be possible to save your job by outperforming other managers on the same level. This could work out very well if peers are let go but you are retained. If you are let go, playing this option will leave you with good references for the next move. If people in your team also get laid off with you, you’ll have some workers you’ll be familiar with if you take on another managerial role and need to hire new people.
If the market is OK, then the problem is with the team. Again, focus is a good option because the remedy for bad performance is all the good stuff about managing – training, skill development, team building, and so on. If you do the job well, the team will improve, and management should eventually agree that their predicted organizational downturn did not come to pass thanks in some part to your renewed managerial efforts.
Option: politics
Again, this scenario has two branches. If the market is headed south, there is no help in allying with anyone above or below on the organizational chart because the market constraint will put downward pressure on every measurable. Sure, you like your team and all that, but never forget that the ship is going down. You don’t want to captain a sinking ship.
Instead, look at the organizational chart and determine how to best represent your performance. The key is to work across the chart, not up or down, because when management makes tough decisions about who to sack or employees make choices about teams and projects to contribute to, the decision will involve comparing you with your peers. Remember – when the water level falls, just treading water is enough to keep you at the top.
I advise getting involved in projects that have low-downside potential or even starting projects that allow you to pull in the highest performers from other teams. Do not get distracted with training, communicating, or making the organization a better place to work – all of that is just moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic. When it comes time to crunch the numbers, you need to be able to say something like – hey, I know we had a tough quarter, but at least my teams/projects broke even.
Recommendation #1: ‘focus’ if you are thinking long-term, ‘politics’ if you are thinking short-term
Managing through a difficult period is really just another way to define the manager’s job. Any manager can train an elite worker and no manager will fail to communicate harmoniously when all the news is positive. Learning how to turn a struggling employee into a productive part of the team or knowing how to get bad news ASAP to the right people without getting into a ‘shoot the messenger’ situation are among the most valuable skills a manager can develop and chances to cultivate these abilities must be taken at every opportunity.
On the other hand, if these skills seem silly to you, it’s a good sign to get out of the manager career track. When the head honchos tell you the organization is turning south and you have no interest in arresting the slide, I think it’s the surest sign you’ll ever get that you have an employee’s mentality. In other words, the manager role is the wrong one for you. I would advise playing the short game, forging a couple of strong alliances as outlined above, and trying to hang on through the rocky period. If you survive the layoffs, the inevitable organizational restructuring will provide the right opportunity to redefine your job role to better align with your strengths.
2) If management is incorrect…
This means the market is favorable and/or the employees are good at their jobs. Do you know what it means if your boss thinks it’s about to rain and you don’t see a cloud in the sky? It means you work for a fool, fool, and fools are defined by their propensity to do foolish things, like firing their best managers.
Your moves…
Option: focus
The argument here is fairly compelling if the market is favorable. Even if management is technically incorrect in the sense of overall organizational success, they might be onto something in terms of how the organization is positioned to take advantage of favorable conditions. Training your team to prepare for coming opportunities and establishing better communication to help coordinate the efforts of disparate teams will only improve the organization’s position for strong performance in the future.
If the employees are already good at their jobs, this option is a little dicey. The team is performing well but management isn’t convinced? Let me put it bluntly – if your best isn’t good enough, you’re headed out, superstar. The bottom line is that managers should be assessed by their team’s performance. If the team is performing well but management can’t translate this information into a positive assessment, this is a good sign of something unrelated to performance going on in the organization. It might even be personal. In any event, training the team or optimizing communication paths isn’t going to do much since these actions will only improve performance and, as I mentioned already, performance doesn’t seem to count for much in this scenario.
Option: politics
In a favorable market with pessimistic management, politics is really out of the question. The opportunity to improve performance is too good to allow for distractions like forging alliances or talking up past accomplishments. Think of it like a little kid approaches Halloween, reader – is the best trick-or-treater the kid who shares candy with his friends on the street after each stop? Is it the kid who got a lot of candy last year? No and no – the best is the kid who runs from house to house collecting the most candy! The right move for a manager in this situation is to train the team on how to best exploit the market and make sure everyone has all the information required to get into the highest-value areas before the competition. So, stop shaking hands, stop kissing babies, and stop making empty promises – instead, get out there with your team and pick out the best fruit from a ripe market.
If the employees are strong, the politics route looks a little better. The role for the manager is to better represent the team’s performance so that they are properly recognized for good work (and so you don’t get unnecessarily sacked). It should not be particularly challenging since the performance is already good. I would start by looking at how performance is being presented to management and making sure the right context is accompanying the metrics – performance year on year, for example, or perhaps compared directly against teams your group is outdoing.
Recommendation #2: ‘Focus’ if the market is strong, ‘politics’ if the team is strong
Unlike with #1 where I broke the recommendation down by short and long term, I think the right distinction to make here is along the lines of the organization’s strengths. In a strong market, the key is to leave no opportunity behind. This demands a highly trained team and, if you do the job right as manager, the performance of the group should eventually reverse management’s pessimistic outlook.
However, if the team is already strong, there isn’t much to be gained from training the group or optimizing process. It seems like there is no other choice but to resort to political measures. If you are philosophical about avoiding politics, reader, let me assure you – this idealistic train of thought runs on the route from the manager source to the unemployment terminus. Besides, since your team is good, the politics involved won’t be met with much resistance – just gather the facts, present them to your skeptical management, and maybe take care to dress well as you do it.
3) If the employees are correct…
This means they are seeing negative trends and do not feel empowered to reverse these trends through hard work. Put another way, this scenario suggests employees do not feel adequately prepared to fully exploit the opportunities available to the organization. Like with #2 above, it is a sure signal of mediocrity at the highest levels of the organization. Unlike with #2, though, in this case ‘the highest levels’ might also include you, hotshot manager, since the manager’s job is to empower employees and make it possible for them to do good work.
Your moves…
Option: focus
The success of this move depends on how well the employees understand the market. If the team understands the market, their pessimism is based on either knowing there is no real opportunity or recognition that the work process is not sustainable for continued success.
In the former scenario, I would actually recommend resigning instead of trying. If there is no market and the team knows it, there isn’t much you can do with better effort. Eventually, management will note the declining performance and move to get rid of you. They’ll do this because they’ll believe in the market until the very end (if they didn’t believe in the market, they never would have started a business in the market). If the organization is going to fail, it will fail with them running the ship into the ground.
The latter is a better situation. If the work process is unsustainable, a manager focused on getting every detail correct will reverse the trend. Good managers will remove obstacles, increase efficiency, and train the team. All of these moves will improve performance and help the team exploit the market.
Option: politics
Again, the team’s perception of the market counts. A bad market means the manager is going out no matter what… unless… the manager convinces the management that the problem lies elsewhere. Since we know the problem lies in the market and we concluded above that a market problem would always lead to the manager getting sacked, in order for a manager to remain employed while pinpointing ‘the problem’ means the manager must pinpoint a problem that isn’t the true cause of the performance issue. This means politics (and a pretty serious version of it, if you can stomach it).
If the market is good, politics isn’t advised because the manager runs the risk of someone determining that the team is underperforming. Eventually, the situation reverts to the case described above – in order to keep the job, the manager will need to focus on getting a good performance out of the team.
Recommendation #3: ‘Focus’ if the market is strong, ‘politics’ if the market is weak
When the employees sniff out a real problem, it means the market is giving the organization no chance or that the organization is giving the team no chance. The manager’s response must align with a realistic assessment of the current market opportunity.
4) If the employees are incorrect…
This means they are seeing ghosts and becoming unable to connect their day-to-day performance with how it improves the organization’s prospects. This suggests some critical problems with organizational communication, the compensation structure, or management competence. Fortunately, the consequences for these problems are not urgent because failing to address them will not cause the organization’s imminent failure. However, I suspect this is the scenario that frequently leads to employees leaving their positions. This can come back to harm an organization if the departing employees remain in the industry by joining competitors. In the worst-case scenario, employees leave to start new ventures that use their knowledge of the industry to eventually beat the place where they learned all of it – your organization.
Option: focus
In an organization where employees perform well yet remain pessimistic about the organization, a high performing middle manager isn’t very valuable. At some point, the team’s improving performance will no longer have any additional effect on morale, perception, or output because the team is not able to link improved performance to the organization’s goals. Managers who focus on performing well in this environment can position themselves to head out the door on good terms because they’ll have the team’s full support when they need a reference – look at how well we are doing and yet look at how bad things are in the organization!
Option: politics
This is the move for those with an eye on the long-term. As defined above, the employees are disgruntled and think the organization is failing even though the organization is actually doing well. This kind of mentality is a form of widespread organizational illness and the remedy can only be administered from the highest levels of the hierarchy. A manager who is interested in improving the organization must first find a way to move up and, as we’ve noted earlier the impossibility of using performance to make such a move, politics is left as the only reasonable alternative.
Recommendation #4: ‘focus’ if you are thinking short-term, ‘politics’ if you are thinking long-term
This is a simple case, I think, because the setup of the hypothetical leads to a straightforward analysis. The employees think the organization is failing but they are wrong – this suggests performance isn’t being properly measured. As politics is defined as advancement without merit, a manager who is thinking long-term in such an organization must become politically savvy in order to survive. On the other hand, a manager who is thinking about new pastures should remain performance driven because the dynamics of the organization position a manager to leave so long as someone who remains behind can vouch for the manager’s competence.
Conclusion
Here is how it all comes together, reader, for handy reference the next time you catch wind of your organization’s imminent decline:
If management correctly predicts imminent decline… focus on doing the job well if you are thinking long-term and play politics if you are thinking short-term
If management incorrectly predicts imminent decline… focus on doing the job well if the market is strong and play politics if your team is strong
If employees correctly predict imminent decline… focus on doing the job well if the market is strong and play politics if the market is weak
If employees incorrectly predict imminent decline… focus on doing the job well if you are thinking short-term and play politics if you are thinking long-term
