Middle Management isBullShit
“Middle management is a disease.” — Massimo Vignelli
“The folks in the middle see you as threat to their livelihood including their children’s education and their vacation home in the mountains. This a delicate affair. Some may actually actively block you on your way: being stopped at every floor to demand and explanation makes riding the elevator not really faster then taking the stairs.” — Gregor Hohpe, 37 Things One Architect Knows About IT Transformation
Middle management is a blocker to change, disruption, and innovation for three reasons: 1) People are promoted for the wrong reasons. 2) The Peter principal ramifies itself for many managers during their first promotion to management (aka leadership) — most managers should have never been promoted to management. 3) Explosion of management as companies mature. We will explore each of these three reasons for why middle management impedes, sabotages, and subverts transformation efforts.
Let’s start with reason number three — explosion of management. Empowerment, communication, honesty, and transparency is a remedy for management explosion. I recently viewed this interview segment with the CEO of NVIDIA that delves into preventing a hierarchical organization. The three root causes of middle management explosion at companies:
- No career path to make more money and grow career without advancing to a leadership position— Technology companies I have worked for over the last four decades have all struggled with the quandary of offering a career growth (money and responsibility) beyond a management career path. The easiest way to make more money at a company remains getting promoted to a leadership position. The simplistic way to take on more responsibility, ownership of business critical projects, have a bigger, broader company impact, and be involved in complex, complicated decisions remains a movement into management. It is almost seems as though all companies utilize the same human resources career progression playbook, and no one has been able to vanquish this communal corporate career growth sacred cow of “up or out”.
- Companies don’t value and reward ‘range’ — Companies espouse the virtues of having individuals that are well-rounded, diverse in thinking, capable of being flexible, and willing to learn new things. However, as companies grow, specialists permeate the organization. A company becomes a bunch of highly compartmentalized “widget” movers — no one is inventing or thinking outside of the process that governs their widget. Individuals that understand the rampant diversity of products is rare, and the best way to get promoted is to stay in your current role.
- Leaders don’t know how to say no, and lack transparency — If you are or have been a parent, you probably have said no thousands of times — mostly when your children were two or three years old, and when they were teenagers. If you didn’t, you are most likely living with an entitled, spoiled, narcissistic, selfish, uncooperative adult son or daughter. This is what happens to team members if you don’t say no to them. I have witnessed many individuals that have been promoted into leaders solely because their leader is not transparent, honest, open, and refuses to say no.
Some companies advance further into the abyss of management hell by adding team leaders. Team leaders add another layer of management that is stealth and unaccounted for as they are not designated as managers. Team leaders are required as managers become ‘baby sitters’, meeting junkies, and spreadsheet enthusiasts that are disconnected from customers and the job their direct reports are engaged in. So, the team leader is inserted so someone can provide feedback, advice, mentoring, and coaching.
Let’s examine the people that get promoted into management positions. Once again, let’s think in three’s. Speaking in threes is a technique I learned from Thomas Kurian while I was at Oracle. Thomas would start a session enumerating the three things he was going to talk about, expound upon the three things, and summarize the three things. An effective orating skill as history and studies have demonstrated people retain and are impassioned when information is dispensed in threes. These are the three common archetypes of people that get promoted:
- Ass kissers — These individuals connive, plead, and complaint (people in charge) their way up the corporate ladder. They are the first to volunteer for special projects, get the leaders morning Starbuck latte at just the right temperature with the precise number of pumps, complaint the boss in meetings, and laugh at the leaders feeble jokes. You may laugh, but I have seen all of these techniques utilized to perfection by ass kissers. They are often mediocre performers, or outright suck at their job. They are shrewd at playing the corporate game — keeping their manager happy, stroking the leaders ego, doing what they are told, and minimizing and deflecting mistakes.
- High performant individual contributors — This is the perennial favorite. Individuals are highly proficient and competent engineers, sales people, trainers, doctors, baristas, accountants, or teachers. These individuals are then promoted to be rewarded for the value they bring to the company. The irony is the skills, innate abilities, background, and mindset the individuals possess may actually make them a feeble leader.
- Loyal team members — Many leaders place a premium on faithfulness, consistency, predictability, trustworthiness, and fidelity. These are all attributes a loyal individual embodies. Loyalty allows a leader to indulge in a game of favors. A leader that promotes a loyal person implicitly understands the person will look after them (do them favors), and favors they do for their direct report manager will be reciprocated.
Now a company has an excessive number of people in leadership roles that probably should not be their. These people are tasked with maintaining the current processes, procedures, and mechanisms. They are most likely not the innovators, rebels, or change agents. They are the ones looking to mitigate risk, be loyal, and look to move up to the next level. Leaders are typically inflected with these flaws which prevent them from succeeding:
- Lack of self-awareness — Self-awareness is a word that I heard often during my first three years at AWS. It was one of the unspoken principals that was often used to assess an individual during the interview process. It was highlighted in promotion documents and mentioned during group reviews of team members. Self-aware people are tolerant, considerate, thoughtful, and kinder to others. These are all attributes that make great leaders successful. I believe a manager lacking self-awareness will never be a good leader.
- Imposter syndrome — Individuals that suffer from imposter syndrome lack confidence, doubt themselves, and feel they don’t belong. Managers are tasks with identifying, hiring, and promoting smart, talented and hard working people. Managers with imposter syndrome instead feel threatened by talented, intelligent, driven, and competent people. These people are the competition.
- Risk aversion — Leaders become astute at risk mitigation and aversion. I have seen a majority of leaders take credit for the good, avoid the slightly risky situations, and distance themselves from the bad. Worse then not taking risk is a common trait of deflecting accountability. This is called ‘throwing someone under the bus” — a common, prominent management phenomenon. Chasing predictability causes another well-known management phenomenon: sandbagging.
These attributes are particularity harmful to the success of a company. There are three things that can be done to stop the proliferation of management, and avoid promotion of inept leaders. These things will not prevent issues with your a current or imminent transformation initiatives as they take time to implement and produce results.
- Provide a real career path — What value is a person bringing to a company? Span of control is just one measure, but seems to be the dominate measure. Value creation of an employee needs to be redefined. Reward people for moving laterally, moving to a new geography, leading initiatives, and doing the job of multiple people because of range. Companies continue to say they want to retain people, and provide alternative career paths. Yet they continue to give more money to people that move up the corporate hierarchy
- Leaders need to “grow a pair” — Stop appeasing, and learn to say no. The first thing a leader needs to understand is that you will inundated with requests, demands, and asks from direct reports, other leaders, vendors, and partners. You can not even please half the people half the time. You will irritate, annoy, and displease people on a daily (no, hourly) basis. If you don’t, you are not a leader, you are a people pleaser. Leaders are paid to make decisions, tough decisions. Making decisions involves pissing off people. Critical feedback also aggravates and annoys people, but is essential to leadership. Constructive feedback that is timely, objectivity, and compassionate will always be well received and lead to positive results.
- Promote the right people — The promotion process is tainted with subjectivity, emotion, and personal bias. Promotion processes possess rules, checks and balances, and rigor to supposedly avoid promoting the wrong person. These processes are easily circumvented, manipulated, and ignored. The skills of a technical individual contributor are unambiguous, measurable, and tangible. The attributes of a leader are fraught with subjectivity and soft-skills. There is no multi-choice test for becoming a leader, there are copious tests to become an accountant, engineer, lawyer, electrician, or any other trade. Promoting someone into management often becomes a likability contest. Leaders want someone else in leadership they believe they can “work with”.
Until these root causes are addressed, the disease of middle management will continue to infect and infest the precarious nature of technology transformation. It is not the fault of individuals. Individuals are simply navigating the system to achieve their desires. Individuals are given limited choices as to how to navigate the career path labyrinth, and existing leaders are guilty of perpetuating the proliferation of incompetent future leaders.
