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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

“Why can’t we all just get along?” is the battle cry of the hopelessly naïve. There are plenty of reasons, ranging from:

  • Different values (not better or worse values, just different ones).
  • Disagreements about subjects we think are vital.
  • We just have different styles, which aren’t entirely compatible with each other.

People who have to work together work together better if they get along with each other. The same is true of the departments within a business. To the extent they have different styles, getting along is harder. This, in fact, is an important reason companies put diversity programs into place … to help everyone understand that different styles aren’t better or worse styles.

They’re just different. The starting point for working together is to understand what those differences are.

Start with this: In a business of any size, there probably isn’t a “corporate style” that accurately describes every part of the organization. Like it or not, HR will have a different style than Accounting, which will have a different style than Sales and Marketing (we hope!), which will have a different style from manufacturing.

If the business is organized geographically, the Asian subsidiary will have a different style from the European subsidiary, which will have a different style from …

So from the perspective of IT’s need to manage relationships effectively, understanding the style of each group IT works with … and IT’s style, characterized in the same terms … matters a lot.

There’s no shortage of ways to characterize “style,” the most popular being to start with a blank sheet of paper and then to write whatever occurs to you. If you’d like something more structured try this:

Three important dimensions of organizational style are empowerment, formality, and communication.

Empowerment means how much freedom of action employees have in accomplishing what they’re supposed to accomplish. A key diagnostic is whether managers typically delegate goals or tasks … whether all that matters is the result, or managers involve themselves in how employees are to achieve their results.

Formality is what you think it means: Is everyone relaxed, calling everyone else at all levels by their first name? Or is there a lot of “mister”-ing and “Ms.”-ing going on? Does communication have to follow the chain of command, or does everyone talk with whoever they need to talk with, whenever they need to talk with them?

Is the dress code “Dress for your day,” or is it a twenty-seven-page document that tries to detail exactly what’s allowed in every possible circumstance, but mostly it means wear a business suit?

Communication is about listening, informing, persuading, and facilitating communication among others. In organizations with high levels of communication the key question is, who would benefit by knowing about this? In organizations with low levels the key question is, on a need-to-know basis, who absolutely needs to know about this?

In organizations with high levels of communication, the expectation is that the more people know the better … not just about such matters as the specifications of a piece of work they’re supposed to produce, but also about contextual matters such as what the work is for, what it’s going to directly connect to, and the larger context into which the work is going to fit.

The more everyone knows, that is, the more likely the work they produce will deliver maximum value. Very likely, “everyone” will include more than just employees, too, because very often employees find themselves working with contractors, consultants, suppliers, business partners, and customers.

That contrasts with low-communication organizations. In these, the expectation is that unnecessary communication is a distraction, and worse, it expands the likelihood that sensitive information might leak out of the business and fall into the wrong hands.

Again: While each of us has preferences in these three dimensions, none are better or worse in absolute terms. What matters is understanding that if you work on, say, an Agile-oriented IT applications team, with low levels of formality and high levels of empowerment and communication, and the time comes to bring in Information Security … a team that by its nature tends to be more formal, less empowered, and more limited in its levels of communication (see the figure) … you’d better expend some effort getting your team and the InfoSec team to understand how each other think about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What matters isn’t whether you use this particular framework, although I hope you find it helpful. It doesn’t matter whether you graph the result or use some other method to visualize it.

What matters is taking the time to understand how “they” view the world.

And not just how, but why.

 

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Let’s say you have a manager who makes all the decisions. Now let’s say you don’t find your job particularly rewarding. But (with apologies to Mark Twain), I repeat myself.

Now say you’d like to improve the situation through the art of managing up. Some background on organizational decision-making will help:

As with everything else that has to get done, decisions are subject to the six dimensions of optimization: Fixed cost, incremental cost, cycle time, throughput, quality, and excellence.

Authoritarian decisions have low fixed and incremental costs, short cycle times, and high throughput. That’s all good. Their quality, however, is spotty, and with them, excellence (the catch-all category for positive attributes like flexibility and creativity that aren’t easily measured), is in short supply. Excellence is where broad commitment and buy-in would be categorized, and with authoritarian decisions there’s none of it.

Unlike consensus, where this form of excellence is the major saving grace.

The accompanying table summarizes the comparison between authoritarian decision-making and the other available decision styles (note that delegation’s attributes depend on the decision style chosen by the assignee).

Fixed Cost

Incremental Cost

Cycle Time

Throughput

Quality (Absence of Defects)

Excellence (The Above and Beyond Stuff)
Authoritarian

Low

Low

Short

Very Good

Poor

Poor
Consensus

High

High

Long

Poor

Modest

Very Good
Consultation

Low

Modest

Modest

Good

High

Very Good
Delegation

Low

Modest

Depends

Very Good

Very Good

Very Good
Democracy

High

High

Modest

Modest

Poor

Poor

Why do many managers prefer authoritarian decision-making? It might be the aforementioned endorphin rush, but more likely it’s due to:

  • Simple impatience: All other forms of decision-making take more time and attention.
  • Cost and time: Even a patient person might not choose to invest significant amounts of staff time and attention to the decisions that have to get made.
  • The company they keep: Hear “We aren’t going to hold hands singing Kumbaya,” enough times and anyone, your boss included, will think twice about entertaining anyone else’s thoughts before making a decision.
  • Lack of awareness: They don’t realize there are alternatives other than authoritarianism and consensus.

So there you are, working for someone who excludes your entire team from all decisions. How do you get them to spread the joy?

The odds-on, risk-free course of action: You don’t. Most authoritarian decision-makers used this mode throughout their career. And as thus far they’ve done better in their career than the people who report to them have done in theirs (by definition), they have little reason to change.

Also … the problem is that they aren’t interested in your opinion, right? If they aren’t, they certainly aren’t interested in your opinion about the value of asking your opinion.

Odds are you won’t be able to do anything about it. So trying to change things means sticking your neck out –lot of chance for downside and not much for improvement.

Sorry.

But if you insist, here are two alternatives that might have at least some impact:

Open-door policy: Yes, most open-door policies have more in common with pressure-relief valves than with drive train components, but unless you think your boss’s boss is incapable of basic discretion (unlikely, as indiscretion is a career-limiting character trait), the only risk is your manager seeing you walking through the open door and asking you what that was all about. Have an unthreatening generic explanation ready, just in case.

The basic rules for using the open door are to (1) be calm and confident; and (2) make a business case, not a personal case.

Calm and confident matters. Sound upset and emotional and it’s about you, not your manager. You want to sound like you’re your manager’s social and business equal, where your roles could easily be reversed and nothing untoward would come of it.

As for making a business case rather than a personal case, this means focusing on how much better your manager’s decisions would be if the experts he/she hired were in a position to influence them (and be prepared with some examples). Don’t focus on exclusion’s impact on morale. This is business. The unimportant schmucks at the bottom have hurt feelings and morale that depends on managerial feel-good behavior. You don’t want to sound like one of them.

Confidant/protégé: Even the most autocratic managers have employees they confide in and (sometimes) help in their careers. There are so many reasons to want this role that using it to suggest more staff inclusion in decision-making is almost a waste.

If you can achieve confidant-hood or protégé-dom, you can use it to suggest more inclusion. But on the other hand: If you’re in this position, your manager already includes you in decisions. Are you sure you want to be so altruistic as to try to spread the wealth?

Suggestion: Don’t, other than suggesting something like, “You know, Jim, Angela knows a lot about this subject. Why not just delegate the decision to her?” if the opportunity presents itself.

That’s enough. It might even make the point.

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