Dealing with Manic Managers

Where do they come from and how do they end up in such unsuitable roles? I have a couple of thoughts on this.

The first is that these people often interview really well: they are obsessive and driven so they prepare thoroughly and come over as keen and interested.

The second thought is, these people can be quite useful to the organisation initially because they are never off the job – they overwork, take on too much, push their staff and generally give good value over a short time period.

So what’s the downside? The downside is that obsessive people can be insecure and controlling: only by being sure of their immediate environment can they cope with the insecurity. This makes them very process oriented and they often lack people skills (I will talk more about process vs. people management in a future piece). It is much easier to try to control the process than deal with the people.

Ironically, given that we are talking about managers, these people actually do their best work, and feel most comfortable working on their own. This is where they have most control – the drawback is that they inevitably “overprocess” which means they are not happy with the outcome, take too long, and continue to fret about what they have handed over when they should be getting on with the next thing.

So we have a manager who is obsessive, lacks people skills and takes on too much to the detriment of their workload, time management and work-life balance. While there are some work areas which attract more than their share of these types - politics, for example - we have all come across colleagues like this. So how does the organisation manage them, and how do their team members deal with them?

As I said above the organisation may find them useful in the short term – but only in the short term. Staff turnover in their team will soon reach alarming proportions, because for team members often the only solution is to leave – working with an obsessive manager is a short term occupation – and the team’s work will suffer from lack of continuity, the loss of collective memory and intellectual property walking out with them. Also there is a limited pool of committed, bright, experienced and intellectually robust individuals available in most work areas so the high turnover is likely to lead to a dilution of the team capability.

Organisations find these managers difficult to deal with: they intimidate both their staff and their own managers with their obsessive, driven approach; they suck information and energy out of their team; their insecurity makes them unwilling to accept or acknowledge other views; and their lack of people skills disconcerts those around them.

Is this manager an example of the Peter Principle – promoted beyond their competency? Or is their competency in process management mistaken for wider capability? And how often do organisations leave the manager in place and try to manage around them?

In an organizational structure, the Peter Principle's practical application allows assessment of the potential of an employee for a promotion based on performance in the current job; i.e., members of a hierarchical organization eventually are promoted to their highest level of competence, after which further promotion raises them to incompetence. That level is the employee's "level of incompetence" where the employee has no chance of further promotion, thus reaching their career's ceiling in an organization.

The employee's incompetence is not necessarily exposed as a result of the higher-ranking position being more difficult — simply, that job is different from the job in which the employee previously excelled, and thus requires different work skills, which the employee may not possess. For example, a worker's excellence in their job can earn them promotion to manager, at which point the skills that earned them their promotion no longer apply to this job. Thus, "work is accomplished by those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence." In the case of our example manager, it is not necessarily a case of incompetence but lack of specific competencies that applies.

Modern HR systems seek to preclude such appointments but don't always manage to: decisions on appointments are still made by senior and experienced managers based on instinct and opinion: to be fair more are successful than not.

There are two common approaches adopted in organisational development to deal with this type of issue: re-location or re-education.

To take the first approach, some organisations will shift such a manager to a position where they have no staff to manage, only processes, as a project manager, researcher or similar role which draws on their obsessive nature and attention to detail. However, the staff member may see this as marginalising, leading to frustration and thwarted ambition and increasing the sense of insecurity. They may leave or just fester; either outcome is a negative for both the organisation and the manager.

The second approach is an acknowledgement that while the manager may have knowledge and capabilities that are useful and necessary for the organisation, their inability to work with other people outweighs the value of these. Professional development in the form of management training, coaching and mentoring can be used to provide them with a set of people management skills and role models. The expectation is that the manager will learn to work better with staff, team turnover will be reduced and the organisation will get the benefit. For some, work on areas such as prioritisation, delegation and time management may be used to help work-life balance.

This latter approach is more expensive and carries a degree of risk. The cost of professional development, especially one-on-one methods such as coaching or mentoring has to be set against the risk that, under pressure, the manager will revert to old, bad habits. The first issue this raises for the organisation is whether this manager can absorb new approaches that will stand up under pressure.  Also, whether the manager has any credibility left, regardless of potential for change. In other words, are they worth the investment in professional development. As the organisation has invested time, money and intellectual capital in the original appointment they are more likely to try to find a way of continuing this than not.