Types of Bosses: The Cheerleader

There is a particular type of manager who only sees the positive side of company policy.  Like Dr. Pangloss they assume that what is happening is the best that can be done in the best of company's. They appear to be able to believe ten impossible things before breakfast.

Now for an old hand like myself they are either unbelievably naive or apparatchiks of the most mindless sort. Experience indicates that the latter is true. Nobody can be that naive!

If you have a problem recognizing this managerial species then you will fail as a politician.  The female version sounds like a kindergarten teacher always warning against running with scissors, while the male version has more enthusiasm for an obscure change in purchasing rules than any rational person should have.

Now although they may be the butt of jokes from the more worldly members of their teams they should not be underestimated. Their sugarcoated personas can hide a very ruthless streak. When challenged they react badly. Anyone who challenges their delusions is deemed as not being a team player. The upmost crime in their world. And once you are condemned of that deviancy you are in trouble.

So how do you handle this type? Well you just pay lip service to their enthusiasm. Politicians are accused of having too many faces and they practice this because they need to work with many people to build alliances. You can't disagree with everyone all the time and still get things done. So if the manager has this personality then just humor her.

However if you work for a company were the management culture is more akin to a cult, with daily cheerleading sessions, typically they are American, Europeans being too cynical and buttoned down for silly games, then you have a decision to make. You can either sign up or you can move on. A lot of companies with this ethos have terrible working conditions and see regular and extensive overtime as being a sign of loyalty. Commitment to the team is everything!

Also don't mistake enthusiasm for commitment to doing things. One of my first experiences of this behavior was on a trip to the US where I attended a weekly production meeting and at the end they had a "lets do it" ritual. Which was strange to me coming from the UK where meetings typically end on a low note, chairs pushed back, participants shuffling out as if burdened by the extra workload.  The problem was that they didn't, do it that is. The next week the only person who's finished his assigned tasks was me. The cynical Brit. The others had excuses, but still did the "lets do it" ritual at the end of that and every subsequent meeting. I reached the conclusion that "let's do it" was the same as "mañana" but without its overwhelming sense of urgency. 

Types of Bosses: The Jilted Lover

One of the recurring themes in management literature is the need to generate loyalty in your company. However this concept is in some cases a one-way street. You are expected to be loyal but your manager isn't. This usually takes the form of you being expected to sacrifice your personal life for the good of the project, the company, but come a slight downturn in business then you are as dispensable as a face tissue.

But that is the way of business, nothing special there. The jilted lover comes into play when you decided to leave your current position for another one within the same company, or within the same group of companies. They become upset because you are leaving him, abandoning her, you are an ungrateful person.

Like a jilted lover they take revenge: They refuse to sanction your transfer, give a poor review to spike your chances, bad mouth you to the other organization. If they can't have you then nobody else will!

How do you recognize the trait? Well they either have a record of doing this sort of thing or in the case of the organization they have an unwritten rule which most of the experienced people know about. The trick is finding out.

How do you do that? You use the Observe step of the OODA loop. You listen to the office gossip; there is always some recent case that has occurred. Also you can ask some of the more experienced people who you trust about what happens if you want to move departments. Do not take on trust that because the company proclaims an open movement policy or advertises internal vacancies that all its managers and units adhere to the principle.

A young relative, a civil engineer, found that out recently when he applied for a transfer from the east to the west coast that he had inadvertently broken an unwritten rule that frowned on the transfer between group companies. The company had been bought but still viewed itself as being separate and special. The result was the transfer was blocked; he was suddenly an employee with an "attitude" issue, not a team player, and no annual bonus.

So assuming that you find out that this is the situation what now?

Well you can circumvent this behavior by not directly asking for a transfer. You get the other department head to ask for your specific skill set. Make it look like your current boss is doing everyone a favor. You’re not rejecting him; you are helping him look good in the eyes of his peers. Similarly get the other company in the group to request help in filling a position with your skills.

“Let us speak of Bottlenecks and Silos”, said the Carpenter to the Walrus.

This week I've witnessed an example of the impact of silo management on project delivery and a lack of understanding of what the real problem is.  The company concerned has a strong silo management mentality: they don't just have silos they have silos within silos. They have the silo equivalent of those nested Russian dolls!

A spate of projects has found themselves competing for time and resources in the QA testing department. So the Pavlovian response is that the QA management team needs to have additional support from the PM team to help them manage the issue. Poor throughput and resource contention must be a department management failing, right?

So I was drafted into a meeting to discuss how we could "help" QA to fix “their” problem. When I started to explain that you couldn't analyze a sub-process in isolation and that you had to analyze the entire system you could see eyes starting to glaze over.

One of the failings of software managers is a reluctance to accept pertinent lessons from other industries. The dominant mindset is that software is different from other productive activities and therefore can learn little or nothing from their experiences. So as I related my experiences of manufacturing and Goldratt's theory of constraints, particularly how to identify and manage bottlenecks, it was as if I'd started speaking a foreign language. They sort of accepted my analysis but there was definitely an air of "don't ring us, we'll ring you" in their attitude at the end of the meeting.

What was not accepted, initially anyway, was that the problem was systemic. QA's problems where caused by uncertainty of output from development, allied to changes in management priorities. QA was not the problem, the bottleneck in development was. The fact that QA either had too much to work on or not enough indicated that most of its problems came from upstream, from development. But the strong silo management meant that they could do little to address this issue. Oh, they complained and they communicated but they were powerless.

Because development had its own problems, caused in no small part by a workload that was being created by four different organizations who launch projects without any regard to the plans of other departments. The result is a huge project backlog, with one department, for example, spending the part of every Monday re-prioritizing their 70 plus projects. They have the equivalent of Dick Clarke on American Bandstand announcing the weekly pop music charts, as PM see if their projects have moved up or down the chart. Great joy is experienced when your project goes up. Mind you moving from 41 to 37 is hardly earth shattering. But every organization needs its rituals and circuses.

The result is that the development group has constant pressure to do more projects while being whipped about by ever changing priorities. They can't predict their work which means they can't help QA plan theirs. We have a systemic problem that no amount of fiddling with sub-processes will fix.

I'm awaiting the leadership response.  Which I suspect will be of the "you need to work smarter rather than harder" variety all the while studiously ignoring the fact that is they who need to get smarter.

This is an example of how many people throughout a system know that it is flawed but the strength of the structure prevents the rational discussion on how to fix it. The Silos win and the bottleneck is preserved to wreak havoc for months to come.

You are what you think!

There was an experiment conducted in New York University by John Bargh and his collaborators in which they asked their students, aged between 18 and 22, to assemble four word sentences from the five words they were given. One group had the words: Florida, forgetful, bald, grey, or wrinkled, words associated with the elderly. When they had finished the exercise they were asked to walk down a corridor to another room for some more exercises.

The experiment was to see how long it took these young people to walk to the next classroom. The result was that the students who had been working on the elderly set of words walked significantly slower than those who had not.

They had been primed. Asking their brains to think about words associated with the elderly had primed them to act elderly. Fortunately for the students it is a short lived effect. But it does indicate that our subconscious is susceptible to being conditioned by what it works with.

So just be aware that you can sabotage yourself if you fail to understand that what you think about can impact how you behavior. Even how fast you walk. 

Management: the American myth and reality!

Go in to any decent sized bookstore and you'll find shelves and shelves of books on management: The vast majority of them written by Americans. Looking at the output it would be understandable if you assumed that American corporations were the best managed enterprises in the world. And if you consider the booming sub-section on leadership then America leads the world!

Well in both cases they lead the world in writing about both subjects. However in the realm where theory meets practice, or more bluntly where bullshit meets reality, Americans are no better at actually managing than the British, French, Germans, Italians, and Japanese.

Decades of experience in Europe followed by twenty years in the US have led me to the conclusion that nobody has the right to preach to anyone about the right way to manage anything. There are good managers and bad managers everywhere. The proportions are the same the world over: Far fewer good managers than bad managers.

The difference is that Americans write a good game. The invent new buzz words at the drop of a hat: synergy, tasked, focal, solutioning, etc, but their execution is no better than anyone else's.

Take what happened to me this week. I've been dragging a tool configuration project to completion through a more than usual farrago of bad requirements, management changes, and lack of resources. The DBA and myself have been the only ever present members of the team. We are five weeks away from going live. We are, as the great British soccer manager Sir Alex Ferguson as often said, at the "squeaky bottom" time of the project. So imagine my surprise when I was informed that I was being re-assigned to other projects and they wouldn't be replacing me. It was a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (WTF) moment if ever there was one!

What did I do? I just saluted, stored my project artifacts, and moved on. Why? Why not? If the senior management aren't interested why should I be! Sometimes you have to remember the serenity prayer:

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference."

Stoicism and pragmatism, seasoned with a tinge of cynicism, are useful virtues for all project managers.