February 6, 2012
The Levels in Action
The Mother of All Bureaucracy
A few years back, the New York Times ran a story about the company I was working for. The story, based on an interview with the president of my business unit, concerned a change in the company’s plans for developing a key product. Employees weren’t aware of the change before the story appeared, so someone working for me made sure to feature the article on our intranet. It was big news, and it was already public. Where was the harm in keeping employees informed?
As it turned out, the harm was hidden in the mind of the unit president who was interviewed. He contended we had always planned to pursue the development option he had “disclosed.” The Times had erred in hailing his comments as news, and he was upset my group had echoed this viewpoint. When I heard this, I was baffled. I knew nothing about the change the Times had reported, nor did senior leaders I queried on the matter.
I learned later that the president was right, in a technical sense. The company had, in fact, disclosed the option the Times had cited. But that disclosure amounted to a single word … in a table … in the company’s annual report … five years earlier. We had not discussed the option since, internally or publicly. That’s why the story was news to everyone but the president himself.
Aggressive-defensive managers mistrust the intentions and competence of others, and they also desire power and control. One way they achieve control is by building governance structures and processes that ensure little happens without their express approval. |
But no matter. An aggressive fellow at corporate HQ, aware of the president’s pique, devised a solution to ensure such an awful “mistake” wouldn’t happen again. He offered to form and chair a new committee to vet all the company’s intranet postings. Eight senior people, including myself, were appointed to this committee, giving all of us yet another hour-long conference call to clog our weekly schedules. The meetings weren’t useful, except to our chairman, who liked to confect the appearance that he was responsible for work he neither performed nor facilitated.
How Level 2 Cultures Generate Bureaucracy
There are two broad styles of management prone to embrace “solutions” like the one just described. The OCI Circumplex, a widely used tool for measuring corporate cultures, refers to them as aggressive-defensive and passive-defensive styles. One or both come to the fore in what Fr. Robert Spitzer calls a Level 2 culture, or one dominated by ego-driven, comparative behavior.
Aggressive-defensive managers mistrust the intentions and competence of others, and they also desire power and control. One way they achieve control is by building governance structures and processes that ensure little happens without their express approval.
Passive-defensive managers tend to lie low and protect themselves by conformity and strict adherence to rules. They prefer to work in committees and teams, but for much the same reason antelopes prefer herds: It helps them avoid standing out when the wolves come prowling.
(I’m not saying committees and rules are bad; they’re often indispensable, but only as a means to an end and not as an end in their own right. When they become an end, or a means divorced from the common good, you get bureaucracy.)
My old company admitted that it suffered from bureaucracy, although it preferred the term “low-value activities.” We were often exhorted to weed out such activities, but weeding involves attacking the roots, and the roots of the problem went deeper than we imagined.
Like most companies, we had a Level 2 culture – a culture defined by winners and losers. The winners used bureaucratic means to guard and expand their influence; the losers used them to camouflage mistakes and responsibility. I’m sure I did both myself at various times. I wasn’t above the culture, I was part of it.
For years, I thought bureaucracy was an artifact of our size, a consequence of getting very large. I thought it was unavoidable, but I see now I wasn’t correct. It wasn’t a question of size, but a matter of culture. We were trying to solve the problem with reorganizations and cuts, when the real solution was moving from Level 2 to Level 3.
– John Keenan, Editor
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Last changed: Jun 03 2009 at 12:36 PM