“Nothing taught by force stays in the soul.” 

– Plato

The best-known and most effective mechanism for error correction is feedback. Without it, those in leadership positions will think that all they do is right, infallible. As a consequence, they will develop an arrogant attitude and antibodies to criticism. We’re going to refer to those leaders as bosses.

Favoritism

In order to sustain this artificial situation, bosses need to develop a tight-knit group of trusted lieutenants to protect their turf. These lieutenants fast-tracked for promotions to occupy strategic positions so they can circle the wagons. But this cannot be so obvious, so they promote a person here and there, usually in lower ranks. Concurrently, they tell a story to everyone else on the team that the organization is special, with much higher standards than the rest of the company. This gives them a convenient cover-up for the excuse that otherwise great contributors aren’t ready for a promotion. This is a form of corruption and it affects the team, collaboration with outside organizations, and the company as a whole.

For this scheme to be successful, the head boss manages the kissing up, and the lieutenants are in charge of kicking down. This separation creates a buffer between layers, allowing a pretty picture to be presented to senior leadership, whereas the reality for subordinates is rather different. And whoever voices dissatisfaction receives abysmal performance reviews and soon finds themselves out of a job.

All the while, the boss and lieutenants maintain compliance with HR requirements and have plausible deniability. After all, the person was a “poor performer,” even when their track record suggests otherwise.

Managerial hierarchy and pivots

Project proposals and definitions are nearly always top-down; they’re also vague and lack a technical definition document. This allows the boss to sell themselves as visionary to senior leadership, but results in the teams under them having minimal buy-in and little to no commitment. People end up implementing what they were told, at the price of products with inferior quality, problems abound, lack of documentation, and a constant need of refactoring.

Bottom-up initiatives cease because they face an inhospitable environment, as arid as the Mojave Desert. The chances of project approval for implementation are slim. But somehow proposers never hear a straight no from the boss. Instead, they keep asking for ever more details, technical specs, and application viability, until the person gives up.

Team morale is invariably low, and sentiment deteriorates to perennial fear and disdain for the boss and lieutenants. 

Because good products can’t be developed or delivered, there is a constant need to pivot to new trends, projects, and priorities. This is by design, rather than incompetence, as this lack of benchmark conveniently shields them from accountability and from having to acknowledge their own fallibility. It’s always someone else’s fault.

Even high-performing employees see a dip in their productivity. Why should they put effort into building a product if the project is likely to be abandoned to make room for the next high-priority initiative? Instead, they pay lip service and wait for the next pivot.

In meetings, especially if upper management is attending, the boss will talk most of the time and monitor what everyone else is saying, so no one steps outside the line. They will even have a sacrificial lamb project to highlight as an area where “we” could be doing better. The message is always that the future will be bright, but strangely, never the present. A new project or technology is sold as the solution that will make the difference, yet the future is like chasing the horizon; you can never catch it, no matter how fast you move.

The boss will claim that senior leaders are happy and impressed with the work that they’re doing, so to discourage direct communication in a skip-level meeting, risking making a fool of yourself.

Just like in classical confidence games, collaboration with other teams will be discouraged under the excuse that the organization is superior and can’t afford to be slowed by lesser teams. Contact with others outside the organization will usually go through the boss or a lieutenant. And if initiated independently, a follow-up damage control meeting often takes place.

Reorgs

Reorgs are another tool in their toolbox. Legitimate ones have the purpose to allow the company to move into a different direction when major change is needed. Teams, naturally, have vested interests in existing projects and want to complete the existing work or even extend the life of certain products. But when those products have little or no place in the future of the company, a reorg enables senior leadership to dismantle the old to make way for the new. Reorgs don’t solve problems by themselves, but they can be a necessary first step.

But bosses give them a bad rap by abusing them. The reorgs are used for dismantling teams that stand out (especially consistent, high-performing ones), because their success becomes a yardstick to measure and contrast against the boss’s incompetence.

Art imitates life

Unfit bosses aren’t the norm, but they’re far from uncommon. Pop culture gives us many examples in movies, TV shows, and other art forms, such as “Office Space,” “Halt and Catch Fire,” “The Office,” and “Dilbert.”

For example, in the TV series “Halt and Catch Fire,” Joe MacMillan (played by Lee Pace) constantly changes project priorities, interferes with the team, and goes as far as to torch the first shipment of their PC clone named the “Giant,” a project the hardware and software teams spent months developing.

And he is not alone. Cameron Howe (played by Mackenzie Davis) is intransigent, insisting on having her way, and refuses to acknowledge Mutiny’s necessary pivot from a gaming company to one offering an online chat via a Bulletin Board Service (BBS).

The path forward

Surprisingly, there is awareness from upstream, but they tolerate it with a blind eye and convince themselves with excuses that this is the “cost of doing business.” Despite always receiving stellar news and glowing reports, they’re able to smell the stench.

It takes what feels like an eternity, and many people to lose their jobs for the situation to become unsustainable and require that something be done. When the boss and lieutenants are finally let go, they leave the organization in disarray, requiring a monumental effort to rebuild it from the ashes.

Senior leaders in a position to act have a fiduciary responsibility to the company and its employees. The situation only gets worse with time.