You are a manager. So manage. Don’t hold court in your ivory tower. Don’t separate yourself from the very people who are looking to you to do your job properly so they can do theirs. Manage.

There is a culture of entitlement that shows up in management that makes some believe that they, by virtue of their title, are above the other employees. If you believe that, then you probably suck as a manager. The only difference between you and one of your employees is that you have a greater responsibility to your people than they have to each other. They are depending on you to help them do their work more effectively. And you can’t do that effectively from the boardroom hobnobbing with other managers or from your office.

You have an office – yes you do. But you should only be using it as a place to hang your coat and to place pictures of your kids. Your work needs to be done on the floor. You can handle your emails among your people on your Blackberry. Get away from your desk phone. There is no one else more important to talk to than the people who you work for (they don’t work for you – you work for them – remember that).

Inspire, teach, motivate, mentor, compliment, correct, coach and empower. That’s the job of the new manager. If you disagree, then you’re in the way. Step aside.

Well you had better get one. Survey results today show that’s exactly what is happening: 27% of Canadian workers are looking to change companies within the next 6 months. But if your organization has a wage-freeze on right now, that number jumps to 34%.

“Organizations caught in a tight race for survival can ill-afford wide-spread desertions, especially if the people who are lured away are their best performers,” notes Greg Leach, Senior Vice President and study author. “While the sudden departure of any single group would derail any organization, it appears that the greatest threat may be the potential loss of managerial talent. This could lead to a domino effect that could bring the organization to its knees”.

Asking your people to keep on doing more work for the same or less money is creating a Culture crash. Your people have had enough of same pay, lousy work-life balance and you asking them to show loyalty to you while you show a disregard for them.

Worse yet? 31% of managers are looking. Sorry, but that’s going to collapse your Culture if you lose 3 in every ten managers. It is true that an employee doesn’t quit the company – they quit their manager. But the converse is true as well: good managers keep good employees. You will likely only lose your good managers. Hey, who wants your crappy managers? Your competitors don’t want your lousy managers. They want the good ones so you will just lose the good ones others want. When that happens you will suffer the domino effect of employees leaving right after their managers do.

What’s your plan now?

Senior Management sends a new policy initiative downstairs with the expectation of implementation (or they would have consulted with their mid-managers and front-line workers prior to the decision). Notice that the policy decisions only travel one way: down. Mid-managers are expected to push the policy down onto front-line workers and have them buy into it.

But here’s where policy decisons inevitably hit their “Bounce” point. Employees will want to question the “why” of new policy decisions – change resistance makes people ask questions because they want to feel like they have some control over the “how” of their work. Employees will look at it from their own perspectives and then send the ball bouncing up through mid-management hoping that their suggestions will spark a re-think from senior management. But if the ball never gets back up to senior management, it forces mid-managers to make excuses or to put their foot down and force the initiative down their throats – thus creating a more fragmented Culture.

It’s “Bounce” that creates the Corporate Culture of Apathy. Feeling like there is no one listening to them or by feeling powerless, employees will begin to disrespect their workplaces and their bosses.

It’s at the point of the “Bounce” that employees test their superiors. If the “Bounce” won’t allow the ball to permeate the Executive floor, no matter how much you want to influence a positive Culture change, the old, existing Culture will swallow the new initiative.

If you want to have your policies be more readily accepted, you must eliminate the “Bounce.” Culture is NEVER created at the Executive level. Policies and influential direction may be created at the executive level but Culture is always created at mid-manager level and below. Culture is “how we do things” which is decided by employees – regardless of the processes.

Recognizing how the “Bounce” works will help you build a stronger Culture initiative.

You work for a good boss if he/she:

1. REALLY listens to what you say, doesn’t just pretend.

2. Is careful to give you as much — or even more — credit than you deserve.

3. Sticks-up for you behind your back.

4.  Takes care not to embarrass you.

5.  Apologizes sincerely and completely when he or she does something that upsets or hurts you.

6. Goes out of his or her way to make it easier for you to mesh the challenges in your personal life with your job.

7. Is respectful of your time.

8. Takes time to learn your quirks and idiosyncrasies — and accommodates them within in reason.

9. Goes the extra mile to make sure that you succeed at your job and keep developing skills.

10. Doesn’t bullshit you about your weaknesses or screw-ups — tells you the truth.

Go ahead, make a copy and leave this anonymously on your boss’s desk.

But it’s not just in safety that this is happening. Organizations are building processes and policies that are meant to be dummy-proof. Their employees don’t even have to think about what they are doing because all they have to do is follow the procedure – the thinking has already been done for them. What you end up with is a bunch of mindless workers who simply check their brains at the door and become living examples of the walking dead.

Yet, in the same breath, managers complain about Employee Engagement levels and how their people aren’t engaging as well anymore. On the one hand managers create foolproof procedures and policies by proactively doing the thinking for their people and in the same breath, managers complain that their people don’t seem to care about the work they do. Why don’t workers care? Because the work’s not challenging that’s why. They don’t have to think. You, as a manager, somehow don’t believe they are capable of thinking for themselves so you don’t even let them try.

Take away the need to use one’s brain and you take away the challenge of the work. Take away the challenge and people actively disengage.

So what can you do? You can stop telling your people how to do it and ask them how they would do it. It forces them to think. When they think, they engage.

Stop operating like an over-protective parent who childproofs the house resulting a world free of dangers and consequences. (Yep, that’ll prepare a kid for the real world – sarcasm). Stop dummy-proofing your department. You want your people to mess up. People learn from messing up. Let them be who they are and then, as manager, help them get better by inspiring them to think for themselves.

Simplify
After he’s cleaned the bikers out of the bar and the moldy sausages out of the fridge, Gordon gets to work on the menu. Most of these dreadful places have a large and dreadful menu. It’s no wonder the kitchen can’t cook any of their 127 types of fish very well; they can’t remember the first 15. So Gordon tosses the whole frozen, dehydrated, reheated, reconstituted, microwaved mess out the window and creates a menu with four appetizers, six entrees and two desserts. With enough practice, even the moldy sausages could turn this thing out twice a day fairly reliably.

F-Words seek simplcity also. They want clearly defined roles and responsibilities. They want to understand the company strategy and be left alone to implement it. They want things that work and people who work too. Simple is good. Simple is easy. Simple that looks complicated is the best simple of all. Because simple that looks complicated is a form of job security. The C-Suite is secretly terrified an F-Word will F-off and they will, at least briefly, be stuck with some of the responsibility. The more complex something appears to be, the more likely they are to let the F-Word just get on with it.

Marketing this stuff is pretty simple. Speak the language of the F-Word and show them a simple, straightforward path from the manure heap they currently stand in to the lovely pastoral scene that is how they view their day. Demonstrate the simple, elegant way in which whatever you do gets them to the desired state. Give them the tools to sell this simple thing internally (remember, the C-Suite doesn’t buy anything, they just drink your booze, eat your cheese and play golf, that’s it).

F-Bomb: Help the F-Word craft the message they need to sell it up the food chain and to the P-Cube without requiring them to learn all sorts of confusing details someone might ask about.  Give them complicated-looking flow charts, diagrams, process flows and a very simple script to explain it all. Make them look smart.

Implement or Die Trying
After all the firing, cleaning and simplifying, Gordon slaps a coat of paint on the restaurant and a brassiere on the hostess and opens for business. No practice runs, no dress rehearsals, just a packed house with a new menu and a terrified staff. Mostly they are terrible, but they are an order of magnitude less terrible than the last time they cooked anything. The assembled patrons can do nothing but fawn over the lovely menu, gush over the cheery paint job and suck back whatever shows up on the plate.

In the kitchen, meantime, there are fires, tears, thrown pots, ruined sweetbreads and general mayhem. This is a typical day for an F-Word trying to get a project or a deliverable out the door. The closer it is to the deadline, the more people cry. F-Words, like Gordon, spend their time hovering at the line watching the kitchen almost make the food properly and the waiters almost get it to the right table and the owners almost seem charming. And when almost is about to screw things over, they throw on an apron and grab a spatula and shout a lot.

The P-Cube doesn’t do urgent. The C-Suite doesn’t care about urgent; they just want their meal. The F-Word lives urgent. So if your solution makes urgent less, well, urgent they will be all over it. If your solution means they can take off the apron and watch from the other side, they will sign on the dotted line. If your solution means they can go sit at the bar, comfortable that all is working as it should, they’ll tattoo your logo on their kids.

F-Bomb: Marketing to this urgency is your key. The process and the deliverable are rarely the real issues; what F-Words want vendors to solve is the stress of it all. Make the urgent things routine. Make the scary things friendly. Make the complicated stuff easy. That’s your value proposition for the F-Word. C-Suite wants track record and golf. P-Cube wants value and clean paperwork. F-Word wants it all to hurt a little bit less. Can you do that? Then you’re in.

Check Back in Six Months
The best part about Kitchen Nightmares is when Gordon comes back in six months to see how things are going.  I don’t know what the producers do if the entire thing has collapsed under the weight of a precious lobster foam since the episodes (admittedly few) that I’ve seen show a business transformed.

Gordon is greeted as the returning hero, the kitchen sparkles, the chef (formerly the cringing dishwasher) is sober and in charge, the owners are professional and resolute. Gordon preens, eats a little, preens some more and with a kiss on both cheeks he’s out of there.

F-Words secretly want to be that Gordon. The conquering hero who looks back with bemused pride on what seemed an impossible thing that is now elegantly routine. And they want someone to make a show about it because the C-Suite probably hasn’t noticed.

Going back to the customer in the months following implementation of your solution or completion of your project is a great way to nail down your F-Word as a long-term champion. While there is always the risk that the whole thing went horribly wrong and they have your company name on the hazardous substances list in the kitchen, a quick call to your sales or implementation teams should let you know how things went, more or less.

F-Bomb: Assuming all went well, you have a terrific opportunity to shine the light once again on your F-Word hero. Invite them to speak to your marketing team about their experience with the product, make them a member of your customer advisory board, write a case study, give them to your PR team as a reference for article pitches. Make them famous in their (or your) industry. And make them famous up in the C-Suite. The opposite of an end run is a ticker-tape parade you hold for your F-Word in the C-Suite. Make sure their Corporate Overlords understand the success your F-Word has wrought from your product or service. Praise their vision, cooperation, nerves of steel while ignoring their threats, substance abuse and paranoia.

Here is a diagram that is somewhat helpful in putting together the whole P-Cube, F-Word, C-Suite world. Maybe take this to your next planning session and see if you can identify your key messages for each of our friends.

Bizmarketer is Elizabeth Williams
escwilliams@gmail.com
follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/bizmkter

• 39% of all managers have been bullied in the past three years
• 49% of middle managers said they had been bullied, making them the most bullied among the UK management population
• 70% of respondents said misuse of power or position was the number one form of bullying
• 17% of bullying was through physical intimidation or violence, making it the least used form of harassment
• 54% of women said they had been victims of bullying compared to 35% of men
• Only 5% said they would talk to HR first if they were bullied

Add to that the fact that this year, women accounted for 51% of management positions in the workplace and you can see where the real threat is to see the numbers of upward bullying incidents rise.

To create positive corporate cultures, senior management needs to become aware that upward bullying is on the upswing and must take immediate action to do 2 things:

1. to initiate bullying awareness campaigns throughout their workplaces (remember bullying can run both upwards and downwards so managers also need to take the training), and
2. to institute tough guidelines that bullying, either up or down, are immediate grounds for dismissal – and to stick to it no matter what

The problem is when middle managers approach senior managers to discuss issues of being upward bullied, they may be seen as unfit to manage or, at least, not capable of reigning in their staff causing many issues of upward bullying to go unreported – allowing the bullying to continue. A senior manager turning a blind eye to a mid-manager’s cry for help could be interpreted as a misuse of power or position – another incident of bullying.

It’s these types of sensitive issues which can decide whether you have a strong corporate culture capable of attracting high-performers and top talent or whether yours is just another mediocre (possibly awful) place to work masquerading as a professional organization that cares about its people. Great thing is that you get to decide.

–

Consider Kevin to address this issue at your next meeting. Call us toll-free in North America 1-877-287-6711 or visit us at www.kevburns.com

Functional Groups (this is a noun, not an adjective) are the folks hired by the C-Suite to turn the stuff purchased by the P-Cube into value for the shareholders. In most cases this is more complicated than simply reselling stolen toner cartridges and office supplies on eBay and a good deal less transparent.

So if marketing to the C-Suite involves a lot of relationship stuff and marketing to the P-Cube means actually paying attention to detail and pricing, then how the heck do we talk to the F-Word? Why, with F-Bombs, of course.

Channel your Inner Gordon Ramsay
Not the Gordon who screams “piss off” to a startled crème caramel; the one who has a week to turnaround a fetid little bistro in Blackpool. This Gordon is about a more holistic result. Hell’s Kitchen Gordon is focused on the capricious torture of line cooks, but in Kitchen Nightmares, he has to work within the constraints of starry-eyed owners, sociopathic kitchen help, teary wait staff and a joint of beef that’s been mutating in the back of the cooler since Margaret Thatcher announced the Poll Tax.

Like Gordon, F-Words need to get stuff done. On time, on budget, first-time right and all that. Often under the relentless scrutiny of a motivational poster that seems to suggest if they just row harder things will get better.  And to do that they have developed some coping strategies that would make our foul-mouthed Mr. Ramsay rather proud.

Get Dirty but Don’t Stay Dirty
The first thing Gordon does is throw on an apron and start watching the hapless Nightmare people try to get a service out the door.  F-Words do the office version of this. They watch, mostly in horror, as things go off the rails, deadlines slip past, rubbish is produced and their teams arrive at the end of the week content merely to have survived and barely dreaming of what it might look like to actually succeed. So when F-Words go looking for a product or service to fix their nightmare, they’re often trying to solve a number of problems at once: people, process, expectations, roles and responsibilities, strategic misalignments and other really fun things.

F-Words, then, can claim to have a detailed understanding of needs, but don’t always clearly articulate (or even quite grasp) priorities, since there are usually a bunch.  Some F-Words keep their aprons on, either out of necessity or morbid fascination, and can in their own way be part of the problem or at least so close to it they aren’t necessarily seeing it properly.

F-Bomb: As a marketer, you need to ensure your messaging acknowledges the realities in the kitchen so that F-Words take you seriously, and you need to ensure that you offer a realistic view on the bit of the problem you are trying to solve. So if your software solution automates what is now a hideous manual thing, make sure the F-Word can appreciate its impact on process while understanding that software doesn’t fix people, strategy or bad motivational art. If your product, in fact, can solve all of these things then you should make sure the F-Word understands that too since the more of their plate they can scrape on to yours, the better.

This means communicating heavily on the benefits and using case studies and reference accounts to illustrate real results, particularly if there is risk that the expectations of your product are likely to be a little unrealistic on the part of the desperate F-Word.

In Part Two we’ll look at how simplicity, bikers and a six-month check up can help the F-Word.

Bizmarketer is Elizabeth Williams
escwilliams@gmail.com
follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/bizmkter

As with most of Patrick Lencioni’s books, Silos, Politics and Turf Wars is really a Harvard Business Review  article turned into a fable. Personally, I’d rather he just got to the point and not make me wade through a tedious storyline with too many characters and a predictable hero epic.

If you’re in a hurry, try jumping to page 175 for the theory. Here you find Lencioni’s insight about fixing silos, which is essentially to pull the company into a siege mentality, which forces previously competitive groups to suck it up and play nicely. Lencioni offers up a hospital, a hotel, a fitness equipment company, a technology corporation and a church to illustrate his points.

Poor, insecure, Jude Cousins, having been rudely treated by the technology company, becomes a consultant and runs from one to the next attempting to pull its grumpy executives into line and lead their people to cooperative happiness.

The situations Lencioni presents should be more delicious. Anyone who has spent anytime in any organization has plenty of tales of ego, sneakiness, power plays, betrayals, nastiness and karmic redemption which could illustrate much of what he’s trying to do here. Instead, his situations are really quite civil and the passion he attempts to put into his characters doesn’t ring true since the worst they’ve done to one another is steal the odd paperclip or upset a customer. That’s not fun. What we need here is backstabbing, screaming, swearing internal sabotage and a few redemptive firings. Maybe even a perp walk.  Now that’s fun.

I’m most disappointed in the church scenario, since volunteer groups, in my experience, can deliver some of the snarkiest silos and turf wars ever. For some reason Lencioni lets Father Ralph off the hook and sends his hero after the other four.

So if you’re too lazy to read even the last 25 pages, here is what he prescribes for companies mired in political bullshit:

First come up with a thematic goal or rallying cry which is short-term but not tactical. He recommends it have a singular focus, be qualitative in nature, have a best before date and be something the leadership team backs unanimously.

Under that, we need a set of defining objectives that are the components each team will contribute to the goal. These, too, should be qualitative, shared and time-bound, but they should not be confused with the regular stuff people have to deliver, which are the Standard Operating Objectives.

That’s pretty much the whole shebang and Lencioni does an excellent job of illustrating each with some cases at the end of the book. He could do a better job of his last section on getting started, which presupposes that executives everywhere know they have a problem, care about it and are willing to be the champions of an ugly leadership effort at the top of the house. In fact, in the narrative bit of the book, Jude seems to have an unrealistic amount of luck finding willing internal champions who are at a level senior enough to impose a discussion among executives. I’m fairly certain that doesn’t happen in real life and would be interested in his take on how a less senior manager would push something like this up the ladder.

So as with all Lencioni books, there is good advice wrapped in tepid stories which you read because the book cost $27.00 and that should entitle you to at least a couple of hours out of the thing.  By the way, this isn’t a new book, it was published in 2006. I hadn’t seen it before and I stole it off a colleague’s desk I’m going to put it back now. He’ll never notice. It’s part of my plan.

Bizmarketer is Elizabeth Williams
escwilliams@gmail.com
follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/bizmkter

Culture, it could be argued, starts at the top. But at that point it is simply a vision, a direction.

Corporate culture is not a plan – it is the result of a plan (or the lack of one). It only becomes a culture once the front line people, the average everyday workers, start to act in accordance with the vision. If they do the opposite of the vision, then the vision becomes a nothing more than a daydream.

But get the middle-manager to see the benefit of the vision and you have one powerful ally in your strategy to make the culture vision a reality. Mid-managers are the people who touch the front-line worker every day. They are the people who either garner their respect or lose it (on senior management’s behalf). If you want to get something done (especially shifting your organization’s culture) then here are five reasons why you need your middle manager:

1. A strong culture attracts good people.
2. A strong culture reduces stress-induced sick days.
3. A strong culture increases employee engagement.
4. A strong culture silences the dissident voices.
5. A strong culture attracts better customers.

Now you tell me one of these things that a middle manager doesn’t do.

Middle managers create the culture you have. If you want to improve your culture, improve your management training. The rest follows.

In a number of organizations I’ve facilitated strategic planning sessions with this year,  the issue of managers getting pushed by strategy on both sides has come up. Mid-level managers say they are asked by senior management to implement strategy and then are also held accountable for strategies acted out in the levels below them. Hence, the strategy sandwich phenomenon. It’s characterized by a feeling of “I don’t have any control over strategy!”

In many organizations, it’s true that mid-level managers are required to execute strategies they have had little input on. Is this frustrating? Hell yes! What we need to realize though, is that managers in this position are still responsible for their strategies–the ones they are intentionally or unintentionally practicing based on how they allocate their resources (time, talent and budget). While you may not have control over “strategy from the top,” you certainly have a say in your strategy, whether it’s formally acknowledged or not. Instead of constantly pushing back on the bread, find the areas where you can leverage your strategy with the others and spread it on thick.

How have you handled being in the middle of the strategy sandwich? Speak up or forever hold your mustard.

If we drop the laugh track, Three’s Company has a lot in common with a good meeting. Stay with me; I do have a point. Whether you’re trying to grab a little time with a hiring executive, pitch an investor or connect with a colleague, try asking for 30 minutes instead of an hour. You’re more likely to get on the calendar and you’ll find the time much more productive once you’re in the door.

Marketing people depend on meetings to get stuff done and in my experience, there are three types of people when it comes to meetings: There’s the Chronic Canceller who accepts invitations but almost always finds something better to do, often at the last minute. Then we have the Afraid-to-Commit crowd who tentatively accept but insist on tons of information ahead of time and cancel if they don’t get it. My favourite, and the one for which there really should be a special place in Hell, is the Non Responder, who simply ignores invitations.

A growing number of people don’t bother listening to their voicemail messages or listen only to the first five seconds and blow it away. We all know (or maybe even are) people who read only a fraction of their email messages and respond to very few. But everyone has a calendar and most people, even the ones who don’t manage their messages, manage their time. One of the most beautiful things about Outlook is that if you have someone’s business email address, you almost always get your invite stuffed onto their calendar to be accepted or declined, but not very easily ignored.

Now to the half-hour thing: In my experience, people are much more willing to give up half an hour than a shorter or longer time period. I’m sure psychologists can shed some insight but I think the reason people will accept 30 minute meetings is this: An hour represents a significant portion of the day. A wasted hour is painful and annoying. For busy people, a clear hour is a welcome gift, as is a clear half hour. Such as, say, the one immediately following the meeting you just booked.  My most successful strategy is to book the first half of the hour. So 11 to 11:30 as opposed to 11:30 to 12.  That carves out a nice spot to chat but leaves a tiny hole in the other guy’s calendar where they can deal with email, grab a coffee or just have a few minutes of uninterrupted thought.

So if people are more willing to give 30 minutes than 60, are they more willing still to give 15 minutes? My experience is no. And my theory is this: asking for 15 minutes of someone’s time suggests that what you want to talk about is trivial. Fifteen minutes is for last night’s episode of Lost, comparing airport horror stories and sorting through the recycling in search of a receipt.  Another reason, I suspect, is that setting up 15-minute chunks in a calendar is messy and looks funny in Outlook.

Another reason I am in love with 30 minute meetings is how efficient we all become when time is tight. Many hour-long meetings, like hour-long TV shows, are really only using a fraction of the time productively. Attendees saunter in up to ten minutes late and begin packing up ten minutes early. By the time pleasantries have been exchanged and the white board marker found, the productive time is just 30 minutes anyway.

In a half-hour meeting, you can dispense with the pleasantries and dive right in.  In half-hour meetings, people may come late, but there’s no expectation you will wait for them before beginning. There’s an urgency and a collective, feeling that the time must be used to best advantage, so it’s necessary to make sure you have all your materal in order, a clear agenda and a reasonable expectation of what you can actually get done in half an hour.

So if you’re prepared, realistic and willing to break up a conversation into 30-minute chunks, you should find yourself better able to get in front of the people you need to see if you can think in terms of a sitcom.

Bizmarketer is Elizabeth Williams
Follow me on Twitter @bizmkter
or email escwilliams@gmail.com

1. Do an End Run: Is your contact a little slow in returning a call? Are you pretty sure your contact is actually just an influencer, not the decision maker? Are you resenting having to go through multiple layers of middle managers? Then what you need is an end run to the big guy.  It’s not too hard; a little Google searching or time on LinkedIn should produce at least the name and title of the big kahuna. You can probably work out their email from the syntax of your contact. So go ahead and send your proposal over the head of your contact to his or her boss. They’ll just love that! Because you’ve now made their decision much, much easier. They won’t ever want to do business with you. Not ever. So if things work out, they will be irritated and then they’ll scratch you off the list of things to read, respond to or deal with and quietly file you under Revenge – Future-Pending. If you’re lucky enough to actually get somewhere with your end run, your middle manager friend will be more than pleased to ensure you get little work, late payment, and tossed off the project just as soon as possible.

2. Stalk Your Champion: After you’ve received some encouraging sign like a promise to read a proposal or take a project to the next level, it’s important to ensure failure by relentlessly stalking the person you are counting on to get you the work. Start with two or three emails a day. Nice, curt ones that express how mystified you are that they haven’t set aside everything else to return your call. If they go unanswered or with vague responses, begin calling. See if you can find their cell phone and target them at 8am or 6pm when they are trapped in their car. If that doesn’t work, call their office, zero out to the operator and have them paged. Or try one-two punch of death which involves stalking for a week or two and then sending an end run email to your victim’s boss expressing your exasperation with the lack of response. For a great article on why someone may not be calling you back, I recommend this piece by Peter Bregman posted a while ago at Harvard Business Review.

3. Act Really, Really Desperate. Nothing succeeds in corporate life like a pity party!  Be sure to keep lowering your price as you raise the aggressive tone in your communications. Your contact will see that you will probably take a job at Arby’s if this contract doesn’t come through. And, being a good person, they will briefly consider laying their careers on the line to bring you onboard because you’re just that special. Then they’ll move on.

4. Play Hard-to-Get: If desperate isn’t your style, make it difficult to schedule meetings and presentations. Ask for extra time past the proposal deadline because you’re just too busy helping your customer in Singapore with a huge project. Make your assistant call every other day to change appointment times or set up and cancel conference calls. Your contact will be very impressed with how busy and successful your firm has become. They will never wonder if you have the resources or even the interest in their business, and they won’t mind a bit rescheduling you over and over with multiple people in their organization because hey, they’re all just sitting around waiting for you turn up to the party.

5. Waste Time. The middle managers who take you in front of their boss or even their boss’s boss will just love it when you show up late, spend twenty minutes getting your projector to work, and gush like a pre-teen girl about the opportunity to do business with your company. Don’t forget to name drop, run past your allotted time and ask questions that demonstrate a complete lack of knowledge about the company you are pitching.

Bizmarketer is Elizabeth Williams
Follow me on Twitter @bizmkter
or email escwilliams@gmail.com

The View from the Hill is primarily written from the viewpoint of the middle manager, largely because I happen to be a middle manager. It isn’t always easy because if the line staff are the ones responsible for carrying out the directives of upper management no matter how stupid they might be, it is the middle manager who has to enforce those directives, whether we agree with them or not.

All too often upper management goes off and makes some hare-brained decision, and it is the flunkies underneath who are stuck with the fallout. I see this enough in my job where I am the one stuck having to implement the very expensive automated systems that don’t do what we need them to do simply because the muckety mucks on high were sold a bill of goods by some other muckety mucks at the automated systems company.

Today, Monday September 7, is Labor Day and this column here is a tribute to the middle managers of America. If you have ever found yourself having to use a system that you had absolutely no say in the purchase of, if you have ever found yourself having to enforce a policy that you had no hand in writing and which you completely disagree with, if you have ever been overruled on a decision you made because the boss chose to listen to someone who was younger, prettier, thinner, [substitute your own adjective] than you, if you have ever found yourself stuck with an incompetent employee who you didn’t want to hire but who was foisted on you by upper management… this column is for you.

We can’t do anything about the jerks in the world, but we can darned well laugh at them.

And here, for your viewing pleasure, is a video from a guy who struck back at a company that made stupid policies and put its middle managers in the untenable position of having to enforce those stupid policies. Sometimes, vengeance is sweet!

Our hero sits at his desk, late into the night, working on complex theorems on his high-tech mechanical interface device, an astounding piece of technology that can connect with the world through a screen, and sits on a particle-board desk. On the wall of his cubicle flash dozens of brilliant emerald lights, each representing a section of the city, or as he refers to them as, his “projects”.

Suddenly, one changes to a deep orange, and then, a bright red, shining out of the sea of green like a chasm to hell in a fair farmer’s field. A look of bloodcurdling concentration washes across the face of our hero; he spins his chair to look out and up, out the window, and up at the night sky. There, silhouetted against the dark, troubled clouds, are the symbols of his office, imprinted on the top of the world; the ball-point pen and the clip-on tie.

A red phone on his desk begins to ring incessantly; the Middle Manager swivels ‘round once again to pick it up. One word greets his inquisitive ear, “help”. A plead from the very mayor of the city himself, a desperate sign of the city’s lugubriosity.

Grabbing his pen and clip-on tie off his desk, he attaches one to his collar, slips the other into his breast pocket, all while finishing the cold dregs of a stale cup of coffee he had left on his desk. He rushes out in front of an awed crowd of on-lookers and colleagues. Our hero goes to risk his life once again, desperately flinging himself into situations most mortal men would cringe to think of, but such is simply a day’s work for the Middle Manager.

Michael possesses the
manners of a man who
has been accepting small
treats from a doting
mother his entire life. His
portrait can be sketched entirely
with circles: kickball-sized
head, marble eyes, button
nose, swollen cherry
mouth.
Expensive lotions soothe his
clean-shaven chin giving
him the oily
appearance of men who speak with
accents, sell things nobody
wants.
Mostly he smells like imperfectly laundered shirts. In
his sleep he snores, in
his imagination he wins arguments.

On Thursday Michael leaves the
office early and boards an
uptown train. His marriage
counselor has pale, useless-looking legs
and wears tight-fitting suits. Tonight she’s
wearing lipstick the color of
Merlot.

His wife begins.
She tells the counselor that, when
Michael doesn’t get his
way, he appears to accept
defeat but always travels the road to
some form of underhanded
revenge in the end. The counselor
shifts in her seat. Momentarily
the leather makes a sucking
sound beneath her naked
legs. Carefully, Michael focuses on
the painting above
her head: an abstract cliche
in yellow and blue. Now
he defends himself, begins
a listless argument. After all:

His marriage is a habit he doesn’t care to improve.

Michael listens to
the counselor’s low voice, ignores
her words, the drip, drip, drip of
her analysis as
he remembers the first time

he met her, that first session
(really the afterward sex with
his wife). The sheets damp and warm,
the air conditioner broken. His mind
had returned to
the cool and quiet of
this room, those legs, that wet
mouth. Audibly
inhaling, he wakes to
this moment, he wakes to
now
glances at
his wife, remembers how
he climaxed effortlessly
that time when he broke from
his dream of someone
new and found himself
staring into
his wife’s familiar gray eyes.

Tidak hanya berhenti disekitar pembicaraan kami di situ, namun lebih dalam lagi yang menyangkut motivasi dan keinginan beliau untuk sukses. Karenanya dia bertekad untuk terus melanjutkan dan menorehkan hasil yang baik walaupun kondisi dan situasi perusahaannya tidak mendukung untuk melakukan terobosan-terobosan yang diharapkan.

Dari sharing tersebut, saya memperoleh beberapa hal bahwa sangat penting ketika kita memulai hari dengan semangat. Semangat di sini merupakan keniscayaan, apalagi Anda ketika dipercaya memangku jabatan sebagai middle management, karenanya penting bagi Anda untuk tetap terlihat professional, tenang, tajam dan dapat diperhitungkan.

Bangun pagi lebih awal untuk memulai hari kerja merupakan salah satu pemicu motivasi Anda untuk memulai hari. Ini berarti kita siap untuk memulai hari, merencanakan sebuah hari yang panjang dan penuh dengan peluang.

Sebaliknya apabila terlambat bangun pagi atau tiba di kantor yang terlampau siang katakanlah karena banyak hal, pada umumnya kita bisa menilai sesungguhnya motivasi, semangat untuk semua aktivitas yang ia lakukan.

Semoga refleksi singkat ini mampu membawa semangat yang baru bagi Anda.

Selamat mencoba bangun pagi lebih pagi lagi

Copyright © 2008 Jim Sizemore.

To purchase reprint rights for this cartoon, buy a print, or have it reproduced on T-shirts, mugs, aprons, etc., visit the CartoonStock website by clicking the sidebar link. If you would like to own the original of any of my selection of more than 500 gag cartoons, contact me for information about price and availability. My e-mail address is: jimscartoons@aol.com Copyright © 2008 Jim Sizemore.

Opposite:
Politically bankrupt; impotent; disadvantaged.

Scope:
As is obvious, this is primarily a political buzzword, although it is also used in some business circles.

Notes:
The term political capital exploded onto the buzzword scene in 2004, when the Bush Administration began popularizing it heavily. After returning to the Whitehouse for a second term, the term was bandied about as a metric of authority and credibility. To have political capital meant that you had leverage over other political players, which had been given to you by the people. The term was also used by some state politicians during that time, but abruptly fell out of use shortly after the Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006. The reason for this dramatic fall from grace probably had more to do with overuse than any political expediency. But with elections always common in the West, it’s always possible the term could reappear or migrate to other countries.

Buzzability:
Middle Manager (3 out of 5).

Sources:
+ Slate: America’s New Political Capital

Opposite:
Insourcing; handling a process internally.

Scope:
A business buzzword which has also seeped into technology, current affairs and politics.

Notes:
Also known by its acronym, BPO. This buzzword or phrase became fairly common in the early 2000s, following the “Dot Bomb” (itself a buzzword). As Western companies looked to cut costs in the face of a weakened economy, the lure of cheap outsourcing to countries like India and China became strong. Outsourcing had taken place before that time, but the repercussions of a big wave of off-shore outsourcing and native job losses turned the term into a buzzword. Since 2004 it has steadily fallen out of vogue, and now only gains strength during major political events, in which voter concerns over job losses gains more prominence.

Buzzability:
Middle Manager (3 out of 5).

Sources:
+ India Daily: The coming wave of Knowledge Process Outsourcing
+ Multichannel Merchant: BPO Adaptability

Fighting

Another common attribute of the Middle Manager is competitiveness. You have to enjoy a good fight. I certainly did and I did so from a very early age. Well, when your local newspaper says of your birth “Miracle Baby!”, what would you expect. An immaculate conception? I have been dining out on that particular headline for years.

It actually probably means that my mom was a fighter too. After all, it was she, not me, who lost all the blood. I just had to hang on in there and survive. I came out the wrong way up, back to front, choking myself with my own umbilical chord. But, I survived to be told the story of it.

I can remember with some clarity one of my early “lessons for life”. This time from my mom. I guess I must have been about 3 years old. Indeed, it may well have been prompted by the “Battle of Batman’s cape” at Playgroup back in Selly Oak. (See Early Education – an earlier posting). “If anyone hits you, ” mom said, “you just hit them back. Stick up for yourself!”

And so I did. And so I do. If anyone has ever hit me I have always hit them back. That is, with the exception of any women (and there have been a couple who have given me a slap or two over the years). Hitting a woman is a big taboo. Real men do not use their fists on women. But men, no matter how big or how many, I always hit back. Never show fear. Never back down. Sometimes I got my hitting in first – what Americans might call “pre-emptive” hitting. On occasions I would take a beating. But, mostly I won. I was pretty hard. I am still quite capable of aggression if called upon but I rarely play the hard man these days. And, I hope I won’t have to.

I learnt mom’s lesson quickly. Not long after this the “incident with the dog” happened. My aunt and uncle (he of the Marvel comic collection) had a boisterous boxer dog, Spicer, that was just about the same height as myself. On one particular visit the boxer dog apparently came whelping into the lounge, its bobble tail firmly between its legs, followed by yours truly with blood around my mouth, declaring: “Doggy bit me so I bit him back!” Sorry doggy. I guess I’ve always been more of a cat person. And, for those of you who are interested……..it DOES taste just like chicken! Sorry Spicer.

There have been other notable scraps through the years. At the Junior School I was once concussed enough to be sent to a doctor after being set upon by “Big Boys” from the local comprehensive. Apparently they had entered the playground, stolen our ball and dared us to go and get it. And so I did. And so I received a bit of a kicking until a teacher came and chased the gang away. I got the ball.

There was the time I hit LH around the head with a cricket bat. LH was one of the rare black kids at Junior School and was by far the hardest kid in school. But, at least he respected me after being knocked for six. He turned out to be a thoroughly nice guy once you got to know him, but, I admit that this was a rather extreme ice breaker. Sorry LH.

Then there was the time I made the boy in the year above me at the Junior School cry, and, apologise to my sister. I forget his name, but he was bullying my sister. He made her cry. I twisted his arm until he apologised. He didn‘t learn his lesson though for some years later, when I was about 15 or 16, my sister came home from school in tears. This same boy, who went to another all boys Grammar School and big rival of my own, recognised her on the bus on the way home. He hurled abuse at her all the way. Without a word to anyone, not to mom, not to my sister, I sought him out. I took a different route home. In the full uniform and regalia of my own school, alone, I got onto the number 40 bus which carried Erdingtonians home from Aston. He was sat right at the back, in the middle of the back seat, on the top deck of the bus, surrounded by his mates. When I stepped up it was like a scene from a Western bar-room gunfight. The whole bus went quiet as I walked the length of the bus. It seemed a very long way. As I neared him there was an instant of recognition. Calmly, I simply told him, “Don’t you ever make my sister cry again” and then pummelled him in the face. No-one intervened. And, when the 16 year old bully began to cry in front of all his mates, I simply turned on my heel, walked back down the bus, and got off at the next stop. I said not a word when I got home. He never made my sister cry again. I hope he has never made anyone else’s sister cry either. Bullying and cowardice often go hand-in-hand.

Grammar School itself was one big fight. Even the organised “sports” were violent, with punishments meted out by hard men. The gym teachers. Ex-Royal Marines and utter bullies. Most of the “games” organised by this pair involved cruelty, torture or pain of some kind. Never their own. Their behaviour would not be tolerated today – the kids would sue. But, it did help to make men out of most of the boys.

PE (Physical Education) consisted mainly of two games – “Pirates” and “British Bulldog“. Pirates was rarer because it involved getting every piece of gym equipment out, and we only had an hour. The “trial” consisted of being chased around the room by the two best athletes in class. If (i.e. when) you were caught, or, if you put a foot on the floor, you were sent to the Sacrificial Altar. You would be made to take off your PE vest (not as rare an occurrence as you may think in days when you played games in either “colours”, i.e. with vest on, or in “skins”). You would be made to lie face-down over a buck with arms by your side. And, then, the gym teacher would slap you hard in the middle of the back with the palm of his hand! The game would not end until an inspection proved that every boy wore “the mark”……

British Bulldog was much simpler. It involved all of the class except the two biggest boys standing at one end of the gym hall. The Bulldogs stood in the middle. The boys then had to run from one wall to the other without being “captured”. To be “captured” you had to be lifted physically off the floor. This was the job of the Bulldogs. These two twin brothers were very good at it. They were big, black, and proud. They were both giants from a family of giants. Just look up any history of British athletics and you will find a member of their family, famous for throwing something very heavy a lot further than anyone else. In these days that included me and my classmates. There was just one rule. Boys had to resist. If you were not considered to be resisting enough then the Sacrificial Altar would come into play. Once “captured” you joined the twins as a catcher until there were no more boys to catch.

I do not remember a single boy complaining about such treatment. They did not dare. To show such weakness was an unwritten taboo. I am sure that no parent was ever told, otherwise there would have been complaints, parents to see the Headmaster. I t never happened. The only complaint that I can remember being made against these two complete b*stards involved a boy in another class but in the same year as myself. He was the boy who smelled. Every school has one and he was ours. He was scruffy, he had no school blazer, his hair was long and unkempt, and, he smelled. Apparently after one particular PE lesson he refused to join his classmates in that other ritual humiliation which came with PE – the communal showers. This humiliation involved stripping naked in front of your classmates. You have to remember that this was a time before central heating and power showers, before boys discovered underarm deodorant. We were the talcum powder generation. The generation who bathed once on a Sunday or after football. We were also at an age when involuntary erections were common. Adolescence, what fun! Once naked you had to run the gauntlet of cold water jets.

This boy refused to strip. I don’t know what kind of home life the poor wretch may have had. I cannot imagine what lack of parental care produced such a feral child. And I did not care. None of us cared. We were young boys and all we knew was that he smelled. The gym teacher lost it. He stripped the boy himself. He produced a wire brush – often used to cajole slow gauntlet runners. He yanked the boy into the shower and he scrubbed him clean. This boy complained……

Such institutionalised violence was not without side effects of course. Violence often erupted in the Quadrangle and elsewhere. From time to time boys would organise mass contests of British Bulldog involving the whole school, and all ages. The other Quad favourite was Murder Ball. This involved two teams whose purpose was to score by throwing a tennis ball through the opponents goals (hitting the wall between two wall-mounted dustbins). That was rule one. Rule two (and there were only two) was that whoever held the tennis ball could be murdered – punched, kicked, wrestled, anything went…..