There has been a dearth of articles about middle management issues with big companies recently.  Vanity Fair had a great article about how stacked performance reviews has killed innovation at Microsoft, but it really described the problems with most big companies.  The irony was that it pointed out how Microsoft made fun of IBM, yet  Microsoft had now repeated the same mistakes they IBM has suffered from for years.

Additionally, not to exonerate any big company, all of which have middle management problems, many also have stacked performance reviews which clearly has caused a big morale problem at companies I worked for which is also documented in the article at Microsoft.  From what I’ve heard from my associates around RTP, most of the companies (with the exception of NetApp) including but not limited to IBM, , Lenovo, and many others use this type of employee rating.  See Stacked Performance reviews below for a further discussion.

FIRST LINE MANAGERS, ONE OF THE WORST JOBS

When I worked as a plumber, they told me I only had to know 3 things to be qualified.  They were; 1) payday is Friday, 2) $h!t flows downhill and 3) the boss is an a$$h0le.  This is basically true in a lot of jobs.  The first line manager has to usually do their regular job, plus be a people manager for which most aren’t trained for and most are not good at.  They have extra work for the same pay just on the promise that they would get ahead, which almost none do.  It may finally pay off for some, but only when they reached VP or higher.  Directors have to take it from the VP’s, but at least can delegate the crummy work to the first line managers.

The reason this job is such a loser is that while you have to deal with the day to day issues, in this economy your managerial duties are to basically give bad news that there are little to no raises, people are being laid off so be happy you’re still working….also that there won’t be any bonuses this year.  I watched these managers get dumped on by their next level of management as they had to do the dirty work (some then got laid off just after they let others go).  Very few made it past this level of management as there just are so may executive jobs available, and there are many vying for those positions.  Plumbers rule numbers 2 and 3 apply here.

Here is an excerpt from Forbes which describes the problem with middle management.

I watched this phenomenon also ruin morale at my last company and David Williams nails some points starting here:

In my opinion, a company needs leaders—not managers.

What does that a leader look like? We start with two of our 7 Non Negotiables of leadership—we Trust and then we Empower. You know how leaders will typically say “I empower my people”—and then they don’t? The tendency is all too common. (This happened in my last job before I retired.  I was told by my then manager to be more independent, but I had to run everything by my him before I did anything, and trusted the opinion of a new hire over my review of a meeting that said new hire didn’t attend…talk about lack of trust and sending mixed messages to your employees).

The minute there’s a mistake it’s like a rope around your neck that snatches back—you either get your head taken off, or you get yanked back so hard the natural reaction is to hunker down and become “less” instead of growing to “more.”

With my own paired leadership partner, Fishbowl president Mary Michelle Scott, we start at the top of the company with a holistic, high altitude view of what we want to achieve. Then we bring in the department captains (there are 3 pairs) and say, “This is what we’re thinking. We think it’s time to open up Canada, the UK and South Africa.”

We give that big piece of meat to the captains. They chew on it for a while and come back with either 1) they don’t like it (generally coupled with a counter proposal), or 2) the multiple ways they see to go about achieving the goal. The captains are leaders who play a core role in the strategy’s formation. Then they run the day-to-day deployment of the strategy that’s been jointly created and set.

Yes, there’s a fine line between leadership and management—but there’s a massive difference as well, I maintain. Our approach makes the groups and leaders autonomous, but also interdependent. They are bright. All voices are heard. We decide on the “best” idea, no matter who originates it, and most of the time, we actually forget who brings the idea forward. Nobody worries about “the glory” because all will benefit as a team (my compensation strategy is here.) They come up with better answers than we could ever hope to achieve on our own.

(Editors note here: My view as the author of this blog is not everyone is cut out to be a manager.  There are a lot who think that it is their career path or a way to get ahead, but that doesn’t make them qualified.  I had a few managers who just were not people persons.  Some middle managers  held success against the top achievers when they out-performed the manager,  or couldn’t handle the fact that some made more than others including the manager.  They shouldn’t have let this guide their decisions, but they did. People like this shouldn’t have been allowed to be managers.  This guy also used age discrimination while at IBM to get rid of a competent worker, Bill Gesick and wouldn’t re-hire Sid Baker, a veteran coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan.  Further, this person whom his employees named Mr. Feckless bragged that he tried to get rid of me (because I  (made more money that he did) as well as bragged at how he gave no extra pay to others, which everyone promptly told me about.  I just tried to consistently do good job and was always more successful than he was with work. An example is this success story which I kept him out of on purpose so he couldn’t ruin it.  It was how I had to deal with him as did his peer managers as well as his boss (who later told me he wanted to get rid of him and would have had the company not been sold to Lenovo).  It is a clear case of a person that should have had a staff job.

This happens at every level.

Why leaders hear too many questions? – From The Leadership Freak

You’ve delegated tasks rather than results, vision, and resources. Delegating tasks is too granular and suggests your need for granular involvement. Delegating tasks causes others to focus on tasks. Delegating vision along with resources frees good people to make decisions on their own.

You may hear too many questions because you don’t have clear processes and procedures. People ask too many questions when they aren’t sure what’s next.  Establishing processes and procedures for repeated activities frees both leaders and employees.

On the other hand: The best leaders/managers I worked for had the following trait.

The captains don’t “manage” every day. They have just one meeting as captains per week. That meeting determines the deployment of strategy. We hand off to the captains—then they hand off to the teams, who hand off to the individuals who deploy day to day, and then they get out-of-the-way (as they resume their own production roles, side by side with their teams.)

Here is some advice on how to manage properly if most would take it.

Yes, there are some management components. But we try to stay away from the temptation to micromanage, which makes people so fearful of making a mistake, they feel they don’t dare to create something courageous. (Note: This happened with another manager who said she wanted each of us to take charge, but just couldn’t leave our work alone until we wound up having to do it as if we were her.  This made it very hard for our team as we all had different styles… none of them matched with the manager.  This of course killed our creativity and morale as we had to try to do things in the style as if we were her, all the while knowing that we knew how to do our jobs better and knew our area’s deeper.  The micro-management ruined our chances to succeed as well as our motivation).  We had to report every detail constantly making each task taking five times longer with way more revisions than it could have taken. She was one of the last managers I had, and certainly not a leader.

Conversely, the manager I had before her gave me the freedom to succeed by macro managing and encouraged me to try my own ideas which drove me to want to give it everything I have.  This fueled my creative juices including starting this blog and joining twitter.  I also wanted to help others learn social media, something the following manager didn’t support except by hiring a noob who turned out to be a loafer to basically handle tweet wrap ups.

The link above best describes how to do it this way:

Some managers fear empowering team members because a more powerful team might take some action or a make a decision that the manager would not have made. But you can’t over-control your teams. It’s the responsibility of a manager to know what’s going on but not to micro-manage.

It’s best if you can pick your own team and hire motivated workers who will inspire and enthuse other team members.

That 2nd manager of our Cross Brand team thought that she owned the ability to communicate and this just made it hard for us to get our jobs done.  The employees grouped together for self preservation.

The Leadership Freak comments appropriately here:

You may hear too many questions because you’re a control freak (see my micro-manager above). Your people are paralyzed by your need to know, control, and direct details. On a personal note, I don’t think of myself as a control freak, but I am. I mention that because you may not see your freakishness. In my opinion, leaders tend to be control freaks. Don’t toss this possibility aside without thinking it over.

You may hear too many questions because your people lack experience or need training.

You may hear too many questions because you punish rather than learn from mistake makers. Begin honoring both the lessons learned from and the persons with the courage to make mistakes. Obviously, mistakes from negligence, insubordination, or sabotage shouldn’t be honored.

Not all questions are good questions. Some questions indicate poor leadership. Are you hearing too many questions?

ANOTHER MANAGEMENT ISSUE: HOW STACKED PERFORMANCE REVIEWS ARE KILLING INNOVATION

excerpt From Vanity Fair:

Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

Blog Editors note: At my last company, we also had to compete against equal employee “bands” (level of experience commensurate with pay and responsibility) across the company.  This was especially unfair for remote employees as those in the home office of New York had access to the management and knew the strategy well before it was disseminated.

TELECOMMUTERS ARE DISCRIMINATED AGAINST

From the HuffPo:

The millions of Americans who are skipping out on the daily commute may also be losing out on a promotion.

These so-called ‘telecommuters’ are less likely to receive positive performance reviews from superiors than their colleagues who show up in the office, a new study by MIT Sloan Management Review shows.

The report chalks up much of the discrepancy to managerial subjectivity. Managers are less likely to be comfortable with a worker they don’t actually see on a regular basis. In fact, they may become more irritated with someone who they perceive isn’t available at all times. Telecommuting employees are also less likely to reap the benefits of showing up early and leaving work late than their commuting coworkers.

Advances in internet technology have allowed for telecommuting to become more widespread. About 20 percent of workers worldwide report that they telecommute, while 10 percent report that they work from home on a regular basis, according to a recent Ipsos/Reuters poll. That same poll found that 34 percent of workers, when asked, stated that they would telecommute on a regular basis if they could.

But according to some critics, telecommuting creates cause for concern. For instance, telecommuting could prevent workers from being able to fully understand what their managers ask of them, according to PC World. That’s because non-verbal facial expressions are an important component of the workplace that telecommuting, which often takes place over instant messaging or phone, doesn’t allow.

This definitely happened at my last job even though they claimed it was not true.  If you did not work in NY (it was an old boys club with both men and women), you didn’t stand a chance for promotion unless you were in the High Potential (HyPo) group, which means you were destined for NY eventually.  What was almost funny was that some of the senior management even made fun of those not in NY as if we had a lower IQ.  In fact, we knew we could do the same job for 30% less cost of living and didn’t have to go to NY, we just knew that we would only go so far unless we moved there.

I’ve had managers who didn’t trust you if you weren’t there.  He projected his own lack of work ethic at home on the team.  Each of us were mature responsible workers, except for the middle manager.

One of my favorite worst management lines ever was on the first day of a new job, the  manager said to me, “I’m too busy with my new job, you are on your own to figure out how to do your job”.  He since has been demoted to a staff job after not succeeding at another company and came back to IBM.

16 THINGS SUCCESSFUL LEADERS NEVER DO – BY LEADERSHIP FREAK

Not doing is one side of finding success.

1. Never let the bottom line be the bottom line.
2. Never pretend things are ok when they aren’t.
3. Never let what you’ve never done be the reason not to try.
4. Never get ahead by resenting those who get ahead. – My former boss Ray G.
5. Never let those who aren’t doing something prevent you for doing something.
6. Never do on the road what you wouldn’t do at home.
7. Never trust anyone who never admits mistakes.
8. Never achieve greatness through negativity.
9. Never pretend you can do what you can’t.
10. Never let others fail before doing everything appropriate to help them succeed.
11. “An executive has never suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective.” Peter Drucker
12. Never find wisdom in excuses, defensiveness, or blame.
13. Never think of loyalty as a gift.
14. Never waffle when it comes to taking responsibility.
15. Never waver when it comes to giving credit.
16. Never make excuses. “Never make excuses. Your friends don’t need them and your foes won’t believe them.” JohnWooden

Bonus: Never create the future by recreating the past.

CONCLUSION

We can’t get away from having middle management, but companies need to vet who they let be in that position via a better method.  They should also give them better training and most of all, realistically set their expectations of the chances of moving up.  If they did this, it would weed out those who are only doing the job to move up or to get paid more.  Most however, are doomed to stay there and live with plumbers rules numbers 2 and 3.