Why management breeds mediocrity

photo by Nick from Unsplash

My son routinely finds life incredibly unfair because he can’t make his own decisions, like watching cartoons or having candy whenever he feels like it.

My answer to him often is :

‘when you become an adult you’ll be able to make your own decisions. Until then, you don’t get to choose to just switch on the cartoons’.

Growing up, I remember wanting to get out of the house so I could start my own life, on my own terms.

And that’s the pact, right ?

We take it for granted that as adults, we’ll be making the majority of our decisions of our own free will, or at least we’ll be in the front row seats of those decisions : which topics to study at university, who to marry, how to raise the kids…

Reaping the rewards of good decisions and learning from bad ones are all part of the territory of owning our lives when we hit adulthood, and we totally buy into that.

And then something strange happens at work.

We walk through the doors of our jobs and all of a sudden, we also seem to take it for granted that we will have a manager sitting above us, calling the shots on how we get to spend our days and whether or not we get to make our own decisions regarding our work.

The manager often becomes the father figure; the rigid, disciplinarian father in a work environment that’s strictly hierarchical and ‘old school’, or the benevolent, empowering father in a more progressive organisation. But a father-figure nonetheless, one who will decide what our role is, how that role is to be divided into tasks, and how well we’re performing, which will in turn decide whether we get to have our year-end bonus (cough brownie points) or not.

Working ourselves into regression

All of a sudden it’s like we’re back to being children, looking up to the adult for validation.

This transforms the way we work. This power dynamic encourages politics and discourages ownership, it fosters comfort, maybe even complacency, over pushing our own limits lest the boss thinks we’re being too unruly and seeks to ‘punish’ us through not being our ambassador at the next succession planning meeting.

It encourages us to play our manager’s game so we become more visible within the company rather than focus on the real priorities within our domain, even if they’re unsexy. It encourages self-censorship and fitting into the mold even if we know that innovation isn’t spearheaded by those constantly seeking to fit into the proverbial box.

All of the above sets us up to be mediocre over time. Understanding the rules of the game is useful to the company when the employees understand them well enough to transcend them and keep pushing the envelope on how to make the business evolve with the times, not when they use them to get comfortable or political about how to advance their careers.

The paradox of this all is that upper management, while encouraging mediocrity, will tout the word ‘innovation’ on the rooftops and will be paying expensive but clueless consultants to ‘infuse’ the culture with innovative and out-of-the box thinking.

In a nutshell, management, irrespective of how much it wants to ‘empower’ others, always ends up infantilising people because at the end of the day, the power dynamics will always be in favour of the one calling the shots on things like compensation and career mobility within the company.

This is why ‘management’ seems to always come up as the number one reason people end up disgruntled at work. It’s like playing the russian roulette : you’re a winner if you’ve found someone that infantilises you less than the previous one. You were lucky this time; heaven forbid you come across an ego-driven boss (and there are plenty of those out there) next time.

Management, however modern a shape it might take, can in no way foster complete accountability and ownership. In fact, it does the opposite.

So how do we grow into adults in organisations ?

We tend to think that hierarchy and having a manager sitting above us is the only viable alternative out there.

That’s not the case.

A year and a half ago, I joined a company that operates on holacracy as its governance system. Holacracy is a self-management system, meaning there are no managers as we traditionally understand them to be. In other words, no-one has the power to tell you what to do.

When I tell people this, the knee-jerk reaction tends to always be :

‘so it must be chaos ! Or this communist-style way of operating cannot work, can it?!’

It’s certainly not perfect (which system is?), but it does work.

And self-management does not mean absence of management. It just means that the responsibility concentrated into ONE person previously gets split across multiple functions so that decision-making is distributed and closer to where the actual work happens, and not in a C-suite behind closed doors.

It focuses more on cultivating leadership — i.e. the ability to take the lead on one’s own work and the ability to inspire and lead team members without imposing anything on them.

This isn’t some fluffy, esoteric concept with no grounding in real life.

Companies have been experimenting with self-management for decades now, with surprisingly positive results : record-high employee engagement and motivation, rife innovation, less stress (especially for founders) all leading to better company results and overall well-being.

This system has been so eye-opening on so many levels that I’m surprised not more companies are experimenting with it.

Does this pique your curiosity ? Which aspects of self-management would you like to learn more about ?