Thursday, May 04, 2006
Unmanageable
I’m not surprised at all to see that research supports the notion that co-workers hoard their ideas; I was the lucky recipient of the blunt end of that particular instrument at one job. I had a couple of subordinates who thought that they should have been promoted, rather than someone (who turned out to be me) being brought in from the outside, and they ran through just about every trick in the book in their various efforts to unseat me. One of their favorites was to simply play dumb, and it wasn’t as effective as it might have been because I’m not all that bad at playing dumb myself. If all it took to get the information some other way was a bit of pride-swallowing and ratcheting up the charm, well...they weren’t impossible to go around. It was just incredibly annoying and inconvenient.
I was thinking about those two the other day when I saw this item about crappy managers leading to misbehaving employees. My first thought was that crappy employees can lead to misbehaving managers! But then I got to thinking about the line between employee fault and management fault, and how you can--if you can--tell which side of the line a given dynamic falls on.
It’s been held out as a truism by more than one manager above me over the years that there’s no such thing as an unmanageable employee--that if you’re a good enough manager, you can manage anyone--and I think that’s crap. There is absolutely such a thing as an unmanageable employee, though for the vast majority of employees it is, I think, a transient problem. People get sick, people have family problems, people get the notion in their heads that they’ve been wronged and work, or at least good work, moves right down their list. People sometimes have things in their lives that they value more highly than their jobs, and when those cases crop up there’s sometimes not a damned thing you can do. You have to either wait them out or fire them.
So while I’d say that a bad boss tends to produce bad employees, I don’t think you can identify a bad boss by looking solely at the behavior of his employees. It may well be that he’s doing a reasonable job with a situation that isn’t really within his powers to fix, no matter how good he is.
At that job I mentioned, I always had the fear that someone would decide that my difficulty managing those two individuals reflected more on me than it did on them. I had a fantastic boss, though, who saw what was going on and helped me wait them out. They did have a knowledge base worth holding over us, and they never acted out quite enough to make it worth losing that. After six months or so, they figured out that I wasn’t going anywhere, and things smoothed out. We eventually had such a successful exchange of information that I didn’t need to be replaced when I left. Sometimes I feel like that was the ultimate management victory, creating employees who didn’t need that layer of management anymore, but I’m also aware that it was a decision that they made to be manageable that made that possible. All I did was create a space in which they could do that. Simple and difficult, and it probably looked a mess from the outside, but it worked.