You might have heard the Red Green line, “If the women don’t find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.” If you can’t be successful, you can still be a cynical organization. Cynics are made by leaders who consistently disappoint and frustrate people’s reasonable expectations. The basic formula is big promises, tiny rewards, and shunning complainers as unworthy of working for you.
Organization leaders can follow these time-tested proven strategies:
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Make gigantic promises about the future. It’s not “Shoot for the moon,” it’s “Shoot for Pluto.” Never articulate intermediate goals, and certainly never promise any rewards for hitting intermediate goals. Respond with “Soon” or “Next Quarter” if anyone asks “When?” Delegate any requests for a Gannt chart to a junior person far from headquarters.
Never acknowledge a mistake. Blame-shifting, ignoring the topic, introducing a crisis as a distraction, and revisionist history are your friends. This only applies to you and the people you favor – every other employee gets no mercy.
Emphasize appearances and posturing over measurable results and deliverables. Insist that everyone be ‘strategic’ but don’t demand competence. Favor good talkers over good doers. Praise people who ask “smart-sounding” questions that don’t lead to decisions or change.
Create change initiatives to address symptoms. Keep anyone talented away from addressing root causes by putting them on ‘special projects.’
Reorganize frequently. Reorganize in lieu of solving real problems. Describe reorganizations as a “solution” to give problem-solving energy time to evaporate.
Spend large amounts of money and time on issues which have zero relationship to the products and services provided by your company. This will make a few employees happy and quadruple the cynicism of the rest, a big win!
Hire reliable sycophants. Only promote people who will always agree with you and never outshine you.
Aim to bring up everyone’s performance by no more than 1% and expect all your employees to do this on their time off. If someone asks for training, adopt a puzzled expression, and ask “Why?” It will probably be necessary to hold back your top performers to keep lousy performers on the payroll, and especially to keep them in positions of authority. Find plausible reasons to retain everyone in the spirit of “compassion.”
Never allow one group to celebrate their accomplishments unless every group has delivered remarkable results in the same month. Repeat this mantra: “We’re one team and unless everyone wins big, nobody gets a win.”
Pay new hires significantly more than your long-time employees. Give all the interesting and new projects to new hires. There is plenty of routine and maintenance work for your old employees because they have more experience.
Distribute 95% of a tiny fraction of your profits for friendly executives and 5% for everyone else. Pay bonuses many months after a fiscal year closing; you might need that money for something else that could come up in the meantime.
Choose the best time to change IT, Finance, Regulatory, and HR systems: Three months before the current system might start delivering its value proposition.
Consider all status reporting and standing meetings a perpetual requirement. It was important once so it must still be important. Insist reports be compiled and sent to you. Delete them without reading them.
Schedule update meetings, promising new information, then cancel with a cryptic comment like “To be rescheduled another time.”
Assume that the right answer to any major problem must be found in an external consulting firm or outside supplier. Heavily discount internal expertise as “outdated” and “not how the best organizations do things these days.” When your internal people complain that they’re doing most of the heavy lifting for the consulting firm, respond with “Give them whatever they need because they’re the experts.”
Use inefficient and drawn-out processes for all budget work, especially requests for increases. Give everyone ambiguous hope for big increases and then trim back to nearly nothing at the last hour. Follow the same practices for promotions and raises.
Fuel speculation and uncertainty by withholding detailed information. You’ll find opportunities to do this every week with only a little effort. Give ambiguous teasers about mergers, acquisitions, and layoffs to people incapable of keeping secrets. You can be confident that 14 variations of your comments will be spread within two days. Then follow-through with wordy memos that begin with “You might have heard that… but it isn’t true. Not now, anyway.”
Your weakest leaders, with the smallest track-record, need the most development. Therefore, give them new strategic assignments every two years and position a few competent people to make them look better.
When a big decision is needed, invite some of your leaders to review the options and make a recommendation based on an elaborate scoring system. Ignore their recommendation.
Abandon the past convention that we don’t talk about religion, politics, and sex in the workplace. Foster religious fervor about social issues, political alignment, and sex. Shame or expel employees who say things like “can’t we just do our work” in the name of diversity and inclusion. Encourage everyone to be “authentic” even if they’re disrespectful jerks and nincompoops. Bonus points when you celebrate victimhood instead of people overcoming challenges!
Ask for suggestions and aim to ignore them. You already know what’s best. If a suggestion comes up from one of your sycophants, delay acting on it because of “budget concerns.”
Repeatedly mention your “core values” but ignore violations unless it’s a convenient excuse to get rid of someone.
Say “Employees are our most important asset” in the weeks leading up to Board of Director meetings, hiring a new HR VP, and deciding on promotions and raises.
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You might be feeling overwhelmed with such a long list of strategies but take heart! Nearly all these can be done passively without conscious effort. Just follow the path of least resistance and what feels less confrontational. Don’t even bother to survey employees to quantify their cynicism. That’s unnecessary work!
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Written in the spirit of The Screwtape Letters and The 13 Step Plan to Run a World-Class Bad Meeting.
HT to M.W. for suggesting this.
