The Mind Of A Destroyer
by Miki Saxon
Dan Erwin has a great guest post about delegation over at Slacker Manager. I strongly urge you to take a moment and click over, read it, print out his Three Keys to Effective Delegating and use them.
Dan accurately touched on one kind of control issue in his post, but my reference is in terms of politics, MAP and abuse.
Political power stems from control.
The only two things worth controlling are money (obvious) or information (not so obvious).
Managers frequently control both, whereas non-managers are limited to information.
It’s pretty obvious how controlling of money gives someone power, but what about information? These stories are true—
The new engineering VP didn’t like a top performing manager. He cut the manager’s budget, but didn’t reduce his objectives. The manager was forced to lay-off, couldn’t meet his objectives and was fired for poor performance at his next review.
The damage from controlling information is more insidious and in some ways worse. It’s the ultimate micromanagement and destroys people a little at a time by undermining and tearing them down.
A VP of Marketing forced his marcom manager to come to him each time she needed competitive or marketing information, but worse, he berated her constantly for being over budget—but wouldn’t tell her what the budget was. He also complained to the rest of the senior staff about her “neediness” and how she couldn’t manage her budget to the point that they all lost confidence in her. She finally resigned, but not before a lot of damage had been done.
Although it’s more common for managers to use to on their people, I’ve seen non-managerial people wield it against their colleagues, often with devastating effect.
X has information that Y, or even the whole team, needs to do their share of a project. Y asks for the info, but rather than giving it all X gives as little as possible forcing Y to return over and over. Often when responding X uses the opportunity to make subtle comments about Y’s ability, undermining his confidence; X might even start rumors about Y’s competency to do the work.
Over the years I’ve used these and other examples with managers guilty of their own version of information control; some were horrified and worked hard to change their own action—and usually succeeded, but others saw nothing wrong.
It didn’t happen often, but it happened enough that it made me realize information control isn’t always an overt political move or even subconscious insecurities coming to the fore.
Sometimes information control is based in a malicious attitude that permeates the person’s MAP.
MAP can change, but the individual has to desire it and they don’t.
The fact that they spread pain and destruction every place they work doesn’t preclude them from promotions and if they find a position in a dysfunctional culture they thrive.
I call them destroyers.
Image credit: flickr
