Month: March 2007

Information doesn’t flow up in a hierarchy, something no manager can have failed to notice. There are a whole host of individual reasons why people don’t like to push it up and when added together they throttle the flow.

Bad news in particular doesn’t flow up, for the good reason that people think the manager will shoot the messenger and they don’t want to get shot.

• There’s the example where the manager has pushed for a particular project or way of working, possibly against some resistance from the team. If the team discover some real problems, when they actually get to work on the project, then they know full well that if they push the problems up the line then this will be seen as a continuation of the resistance. It may or may not be, and the people may or not be the same as those previously resisting, but that doesn’t mean the problems don’t exist.
• A follow on from this is where there is only one person who pushes the bad news up and the rest of the team don’t. Many managers take this as the rest of the team denying the problems. In fact the fear of pushing bad news up is so strong that many people will go so far as to deny it exists when asked point blank about it. So the one person who does do it has their viewpoint dismissed. They can then be labelled as a misfit, a stirrer, who is out of step with the rest of the team and marked down for behavioural adjustment or elimination. Ironic when they may in fact be the one person with their eyes wide open and saying what they see.
• When the bad news is about a person, particularly another manager, then too often loyalty outweights rationality. This can lead to some people being viewed as ‘protected’ and bad news about them is supressed.
• Of course, sometimes the bad news is about a mistake and owning up to a mistake brings with it a whole set of difficulties. What some managers fail to realise is that it takes a huge effort for someone to come to them and admit a mistake. If it isn’t handled sensitively, very sensitively, then future mistakes are either hidden or downplayed.
• There are plenty of people who would willingly tell their manager every bit of bad news but they don’t because they don’t think there is any point because nothing will be done about it. In an organisation with paralysed or ineffectual managers then this effect compounds the problems as it makes the managers isolated from below.

Despite these blockages, information still tries to flow up but with the path directly above blocked it has to find another route. There are a variety of these – the sympathetic manager of a different area or the colleagues in another team. Unfortunately a different path means the content is diluted and the message is often lost.

If you want to hear the bad news then you need to build up a reputation as to how you deal with it. Some simple tips:

• Don’t shoot the messenger, even if you are certain they are a lying, conniving manipulator.
• Don’t dismiss the bad news, always examine it rationally, investigate if needed and make a measured judgement.
• Either do something about it, or explain to people why you are not going to.
• If you are facing someone owning up to a mistake then just imagine how you feel when you have to do the same thing to your manager. Everyone makes mistakes.

This way you might hear some remarkable things.

Lots of managers tell little lies.  Not because they want to deceive someone, but just to help them say something to a member of their team that they would find difficult otherwise.  After all, telling someone something awkward can be so much softer if you pretend to be a neutral route for the information.

So rather than saying “I have decided to restructure …”, a manager might say “I have been asked to review …”.  Or, rather than saying “Your attitude …”, a manager might say “I’ve had reports that your attitude …”.

For most managers this seems to make bad news so much easier to convey, especially for those that find any form of conflict or confrontation difficult to handle.  It also makes hearing the bad news so much easier if you think the person telling you is not responsible for it.

This can become a bit of a habit for a few managers.  Whenever they need to explain where a decision or viewpoint originates, they tell a little white lie to divert the focus away from themselves.  After all if it makes the process easier then why not?  It also means that so much more can be conveyed this way.

Gradually their influence grows, but the side-effect is that their influence also becomes invisible.  Some managers prefer it that way.

Not everyone gets into work on time every day. One minute early one day, five minutes late the next, people are so unpredictable really.

Now some managers, when faced with this normal variety of human behaviour find it quite difficult to deal with. After all, five minutes can become ten and then ten can become thirty and the next thing you know there is complete chaos with everyone coming in two hours late and spending their entire time talking.

To prevent this breakdown some order has to be imposed. Anyone coming in late is given an interview to discuss the reasons and a note is put on their file. Of course then the time has to be made up before they go home.

Quite often though this isn’t enough. Before you know it the people who come in late are also working slower than the others, they just don’t seem as motivated as the others. So before this turns into an epidemic action has to be taken. Targets are set for how much work is done and anyone that doesn’t meet those targets is given an interview and a note put on their file.

Just when it looks like it is all under control, it takes a turn for the worse. We begin to discover that there are some people who not only get in late and work slower, but they also have the ‘wrong’ attitude to their management and company. Now we have the most awkward of HR issues – problem staff.

Of course this could happen so differently. We could decide to ignore the timekeeping variances of the good workers, and only deal with those that take the piss. In fact we could decide to deal with people as individuals on a personal level and be flexible in our approach. This might even run the risk of motivating those people to work a bit harder. But then that is so much more work than adding a new level of control.