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Don't Kill the Bosses!: Escaping the Hierarchy Trap - Hardcover

Culbert, Samuel A.; Ullmen, John B.

 
9781576751619: Don't Kill the Bosses!: Escaping the Hierarchy Trap
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1576751619 ISBN 13: 9781576751619
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

The boss/subordinate relationship is an age-old problem cited in almost every management book and on-the-job survey as an area rife with dishonesty and inefficiency. All too often, subordinates spin the truth for those above while bosses fail to establish the conditions required for subordinates to tell it to them straight. The end result is warped communication, corrupt internal politics, illusionary teamwork, pass-the-buck accountability, and personal dispiriting-and the company is always the big loser.

Don't Kill the Bosses! reveals the "trap" created when people fail to differentiate between the positives of hierarchical structure and the negatives of hierarchical relationships. Far from being opposed to hierarchy, the authors believe strongly that an accurate and cleanly defined organization chart is vital. But they show how to implement an alternative model of hierarchy: two-sided accountability. Drawing on case studies from their consulting practice, Culbert and Ullmen show how this new model leads to a freer flow of information, more creative problem-solving, and quicker response to changing conditions.

Unlike other books that acknowledge boss/subordinate relationships as a systematic, continuing problem and offer skill development suggestions for dealing with it, Don't Kill the Bosses! tells how to think about the problem in a way that will enable readers to understand the steps they need to take to change things. It diagnoses what's missing in boss/subordinate relationships, connects what's wrong with them to personal and organizational outcomes, and defines the whole new mentality required to make them work successfully.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Samuel A. Culbert has developed a blunt yet sensitive way of framing situations so that all forces driving people’s opinions and actions, including the subjective, self-interested, and political, can be matter-of-factly considered and explicitly discussed. Throughout his career he has creatively welded three activities: consulting, teaching, and writing. Consulting is where he encounters work effectiveness problems in their contemporary forms, learns how they are being dealt with, and finds challenge in coming up with new ways of engaging them. Teaching provides forums for extrapolating from problems to issues and, through give-and-take interaction, for probing underlying dynamics to identify which assumptions and resulting practices need upgrading. Writing is where he brings it all together to package his understanding for public consumption.
John Ullmen is currently a senior manager for organizational effectiveness at Earthlink. He is in the dissertation process of a Ph.D. in management at UCLA with a study that focuses on cofounder relationships in entrepreneurial firms. Ullmen has broad independent consulting experience in teambuilding, management coaching, network analysis, organizational change, and business development. He has been a consultant in the Management Communication Program at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management for the last four years and a consultant for several Internet start-up businesses. He holds a B.S. degree in engineering mechanics from the Air Force Academy and an M.S. degree in public policy from Harvard University.

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Why Not Kill the Bosses?!

I don’t want any “yes-men” around me. I want everybody to tell me the truth even if it costs them their jobs.

Sam Goldwyn



You don’t have to read beyond Sam Goldwyn’s words to see what Don’t Kill the Bosses! is about. It’s certainly not about killing bosses per se; it’s about fixing companies by killing the reality-resistant idea of boss-dominated relationships so the virtues of hierarchy can be fully enjoyed. Operational effectiveness depends on people speaking their minds candidly, without fear that speaking the truth, as they know it, will cost them their job, pay, assignment, or career. Why would a decision maker not want to hear the truth from whomever was speaking it if, at the end of the day, that person knew the decision was his or hers to make and that he or she would actually be held accountable for its results? It’s a situation that defies rational logic. Yet it takes place almost all the time, every day at work.

The illogic of this dynamic offers a clue to the fix required. Bosses who want to hear the truth need to create the circumstances for subordinates to tell it to them straight. Another clue comes from noting the illogic of thinking that bosses or subordinates can ever be counted on to provide a version that’s totally objective. Despite the pretense of rationality, what is said and done at work is more subjective and self-interested than objective and exclusively company focused. People are self-interested; their self-interests are different than yours; and the only way to identify someone’s motives and self-interests—to determine how they align with company needs and what adjustments might improve that alignment—is to inquire about them, listening carefully to what you don’t hear as well as what you do.

2
But there’s an intermediary set of interests distorting all alignments. Standing between each individual’s relationship with the company is that individual’s relationship with the “the boss,” the person whose behavior he or she sees determining benefits and insecurities. Herein lies the perversion. Incorrectly, people place pleasing the boss above doing what’s right for the company. It’s a paradox. Though hierarchy provides a basic orientation and defines accountability, it also perverts relationships and ultimately damages both individual and organizational effectiveness.

On the surface most bosses ignore, and even deny, hierarchical domination, treating it as if it were a secret, business profitability expedient. If it’s a secret then it’s an open secret that subordinates readily discuss. They grouse about it at lunch, they complain about it in the corridors, and they seldom go in a group for an after-work drink without raising it as a topic of disdain. Every once in a while an extreme situation is sensationalized in the press like reports of intimidation and moral corruption wrecked on Sunbeam’s managers when “Chainsaw” Al Dunlap was CEO. Intellectually it’s a background topic in all the management and leadership books, especially those focused on participation and effective teamwork. Nevertheless, despite all the notoriety and theoretical arguments to abate it, boss domination is a relentless dynamic that doesn’t go away. Bosses shamelessly exercise their “right” to dominate while subordinates manipulatively submit, putting a self-interested spin on all upwardly directed communications.

Of course, almost every boss is also a subordinate with firsthand knowledge of the double-think and truth slanting that goes into conversations with uppers. But a type of schizophrenia sets in that shields these “sometimes subordinates” from thinking that the sincere accounts their subordinates give might be infused with a devious or a self-interested spin. In fact, almost everyone, boss or subordinate, speaks as if his or her thoughts are objective and thinks likewise about the thoughts of those who agree. Spin, bias, and self-interested motives only become active suspects after disagreement is sensed.

3
We’ve done the fieldwork, analyzed the structure, and figured out what causes people to form boss-dominating relationships in which subordinates feel they better tell it the way the boss wants to hear it, depriving bosses of the version that will do them and the company the most good. What’s more we know what needs to be fixed and we’re ready to tell you how to produce better outcomes. But most people won’t have an easy time changing. That’s because what’s off can’t be fixed using the conventional hierarchical paradigm. Basic assumptions about people and the politics of team play need to be changed. The paradigm needs transforming.

Don’t Kill the Bosses! is aimed at having transformational impact for people who are willing to spend the time in an honest, self-reflecting, cover-to-cover read. Getting these ideas into your emotions, so that your understanding of them actually influences your behavior, requires vicarious, personal learning. That’s what we’re hoping you’ll accomplish relating to the true-life cases, stories, and dilemmas interspersed throughout this book. Each was selected for its ability to stimulate reflection about like situations that you have experienced in your own life at work. We invite you to rerun “the tapes,” apply our analysis to how you felt and reasoned when you were in those situations dissatisfied, and decide for yourself whether our recommended ways of proceeding would have gotten you and your company more desirable results.

Chapter 1 begins with a broad-ranging discussion of hierarchy to help you differentiate between the positives of hierarchical structure and the negatives of hierarchical relationships. It’s a distinction that most people haven’t thought through sufficiently well to realize why it is so critical to make. We call not distinguishing between hierarchical structure and hierarchical relationships the hierarchy trap and immediately roll out five categories of negative consequences that predictably follow: warped communication, corrupt internal politics, illusionary teamwork, personal dispiriting, and pass-the-buck accountability.

4
Simply put, hierarchical structure is the organizational chain-of-command. It’s the road map for seeing who is responsible for taking what action, who has the authority to make decisions and direct, and who is supposed to oversee and insist on corrective actions when specified results are not forthcoming. Its essentiality to effective organization is without question.

In contrast, hierarchical relationships are the top-down, power-deferential ways people think, talk, and behave with one another when hierarchical, chain-of-command authorities are imported into problem-solving discussions. By hierarchical relationships, we’re talking most centrally about boss/subordinate interactions, but we’re talking about other nonparity relationships as well. We’re also talking about relationships contracting firms have with their suppliers, relationships between joint venture partners with unequal resources, and relationships firms have with independent contractors such as specialty lawyers, auditors, consultants, and even travel agents. In every instance, when a relationship is engaged hierarchically, the company loses out. Thus, hierarchical thinking poses a burning ember threat to any business’s bottom line.

Hierarchical relationships cause higher-ups to self-inflate on rank and stature, believing that they know more than they do and that people lower down the chain know less than they do. They have some basis for thinking...

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1576751619
ISBN 13 
9781576751619
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
200
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Berrett-Koehler
https://www.dc.com/tv

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