Yes, there are advantages to getting older, among them the ability to spot patterns in human behavior. One of these is a top down establishment of social hierarchy on a job site and its consequences upon individuals and the organization. None of it is good. However, if you’re in it, you have to navigate it until you can extricate yourself. Below are some things to expect based on my experience.
Overt micromanagement is associated with excessive guidance on how to do your job, but it’s much more than that. An authoritative manager will attempt to control the social hierarchy of an organization. By this, I’m not referring to the formal organization chart, but establishing a class structure among employees. This will not only disrupt working relationships and friendships, but seriously impair productivity as well. Personnel decisions are based on maintaining the hierarchy rather than fulfilling the organization mission. This leads to mismatches of jobs to ability, but also ushers in a variety of repercussions that cascade throughout the workplace.
Regrettably, I once worked for a company where a manager categorized employees as weak or strong, riffing off Ayn Rand’s classification scheme. Workplace norms begin to change rapidly once employees are tiered like this. Those in the upper tier begin to take liberties on those in the lower tier. And those in the lower tier feel compelled, quite naturally, to demonstrate they deserve respect, leading to needless, time wasting conflict. This is one half of a fight or flight response, combined with excessive monitoring leads to the other half.
Keeping employees in line, another former employer once utilized coworkers for covert eavesdropping and monitoring. We jokingly referred to these people as Cryptomys Hottentotus. Under this type of regime, workers circle the wagons and retreat heavily into their inner circles with their most trusted friends aka cliques. This might seem trivial, but can be detrimental to productivity.
Productivity spillover was a key concern for the great economist Alfred Marshall, who in 1890 wrote that firms and people cluster in high density regions to take advantage of transmission both information and knowledge. This is why, pre-pandemic, 3 million people a day would pack into the 22 square miles of Manhattan, or high-tech flourishes in the Bay Area soaring costs notwithstanding. While Marshall wrote about cities, it does not take much imagination to apply this concept to a firm as well.
Removing productivity spillovers occurs under micromanagement of social hierarchy. Take a small department, say 10 people, where knowledge is shared freely among all members via a variety of manners. What happens when a department fragments into airtight cliques of say, four, three, two, and one individuals? One? It happens. Remember the movie Office Space where Stephen Root is moved into the basement? I’ve seen it with my own eyes – if not in the basement then banished to a different floor or area far removed from the department. In this scenario, information is hoarded, there is no productivity spillover effect, and even the most simple of tasks can become arduous.
Eventually, management will recognize the problem and force employees to attend team-building workshops hoping to rectify the situation. It doesn’t, but does has the extra benefit of wasting everyone’s time.
Predicting the coda to this is key to making the right decisions. What was the endgame to the two case-studies I am using here?
The first was a bank I worked for in the mid-90’s. The manager hired to handle a large expansion of operations projected confidence in an over the top manner, but in reality was very insecure. The new group leaders were hired based on youth and physical attractiveness. Remember Donald Trump and his hire people who look the part routine? It’s pretty common in business. I’m all for giving young people a chance. Hey, I was young back then! But not based on appearence, and certainly not without the benefit of more experienced people around for guidance. They attended a 90-day training program and were wholly unprepared for the job when they came back. In the end, they were glorified time sheet collectors.
And what happened to us?
As chaos descended someone had to take the blame and guess who that was. Hyper-monitoring ensued to “find the problem”. This included a consultant who stood by me with a stopwatch all day long. I was also instructed not to walk in front of the manager’s office but to walk all the way across the floor and work my way back to my area. That was a time saver. I ignored that one and probably not a coincidence I was let go the following month.
As it turned out, I was the lucky one.
I found a job with better pay shortly afterwards. Those who stayed behind stagnated in an environment of dysfunction and havoc. About three years later, people from corporate HQ flew in and solved the problem by removing the entire management team. The bank is still around, but the operations center where I worked is a shadow its former self and from what I’ve heard, to this day, has not really recovered from that experience.
The 2nd case study was a legal firm I worked for in the aughts. The department I was in was highly productive and often ranked 1st or 2nd in the nation by our largest client. There was a great sense of cohesion and we often socialized outside of work. Our manager was let go and replaced by a friend of the operations VP who promptly instilled a program of heavy monitoring. I was instructed not to speak to anyone during the day and my bathroom usage was recorded.
Needless to say, these rules did not apply to the tier favored by management.
As the department cleaved into higher and lower castes, conflict ensued, various cliques sought to undermine each other, behavior by higher ranked employees slipped badly. In their own small way, they pitched in to what came to be the financial crash of 2008. Thankfully, I walked out a few years earlier.
Management tried to rectify this by having “movie day” where we would watch a movie together as a department. They asked for suggestions and someone offered Caligula. I won’t lie, that was funny. However, that marked the end of movie day.
Eventually the whole department was eliminated. The situation had become such a cancer it was like removing a tumor.
Ok, so what do you do if you find yourself in this situation?
This type of management style tends to flourish in economically stagnant regions such as Upstate New York. In that case, finding another job might be problematic. Still, it should be your highest priority. Changing jobs can have high transaction costs (loss of friends, moving expenses, etc), but the situation will hit rock bottom before anything changes. And don’t count on the work culture reverting back to what it was beforehand.
It’s not happening. Once that egg is dropped on the floor it’s not being put back in the shell.
Always remember, first ones out are the luckiest. The cost is front-ended compared to career stagnation in a dysfunctional situation.
If you’re stuck, understand if the work culture is fragmented by a social hierarchy, you’re going to be disappointed by some in the upper tier. An unfortunate fact of human nature that behavior slips in this situation…and you’ll be on the business end of it. Some won’t go that far, but they look the other way rather than risk their paycheck.
You’ll be lied to and others will lie to ingratiate themselves with management. Sorry, it comes with the territory.
Sexual transgressions committed by those in the higher rung against those of lowest status are a mathematical certainty in these situations. Women especially, have to be on guard here. For sheer volume, most of the other transgressions will be of death by a thousand small cuts variety. This usually involves the suspension of workplace rules and guidelines for those in the upper rung. By themselves, not much, but it adds up eventually to create an acrimonious culture.
You can, in the short term, try to keep the dysfunction out of your cube, but eventually the dam breaks and you’ll be affected by it one way or another.
When the workplace fragments into cliques, you’ll need to keep your ear to the ground to access information that used to come by readily. An oddity here, if you are considered to be on the lowest rung, some on a higher rung will talk freely around you as if you are invisible. You’ll be amazed at what you can learn this way. It’s insulting, but you may as well use it for your benefit.
Otherwise, you’ll need to rely heavily picking up on body language cues. This can include the side eye look, lowering of voices when in your presence, and looking at watches when you arrive to work even on time. This allows you to sort out where everyone stands here.
If you do not exit quickly, there will be an exodus of talent and with it the job knowledge that managers let walk out the door. This will make your job more difficult and demands will be placed on you to make up the slack – It was once exhorted to me that “Stress is Good!”. It’s not. As the hall of fame football coach Bill Walsh noted, if you run on adrenaline all the time, you’ll have nothing in reserve when a true emergency comes along. Don’t fall for it.
The replacements who come in will often be young and inexperienced. Social proof is a concept where those inexperienced in certain situations will emulate others around them. This is key to normalize behavior that was previously thought to be deviant or abhorrent. In reality, some inexperienced people can be molded this way, some cannot. And I’ve seen older, more experienced workers throw away a lifetime of experience down the drain in this process.
The normalization of deviant behavior is key to disaster theory. I personally saw it in the run up to the 2008 financial crash. Like the proverbial snowball rolling downhill, it gains too much momentum in an organization for any one person to stop. It only stops when disaster occurs and recovery (reestablishing norms) begin. Do you want to go through this process? Let me put it this way, would you rather experience a tornado first hand or avoid it all together?
Does anything good come out of an experience like this? Only one that I can think of.
As the workplace fragments into dysfunction and hierarchy, there will be those few people who don’t change or look the other way. They won’t exploit the grapevine that is leveraged against you. In some cases, they’ll be people you barely knew before, but they recognize the bind you are in and reach out to you.
Once you leave, the foulness of the situation will recede from memory and those are the people you’ll remember once you’ve been long gone. This is truly one thing you can take away from these situations and value for a lifetime.