But if you try to flatten all hierarchy entirely, you create a new sort of problem; an informal hierarchy where the only rule is to be popular: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
Maybe what we need is... internally elected leadership!
> I think flattening excessively pyramidal hierarchies are the only real solution for this problem, but that's not much comfort for those who find themselves derailed due to this dynamic.
maybe that wouldn't work for every industry, but its something i've thought about a lot
I think simple elections would go a long way towards worker happiness at least. Making the managers beholden to the people they manage would certainly shift dynamics.
But then, I'd also fear that a democratically ran company would struggle making hard decisions.
This really puts an emphasis on the “leadership” part of management.
What is it that management does that would lend itself to transferability and rotations? If leadership’s contribution is primarily to provide updates to others or to schedule meetings, sure that’s easily replaceable. If leadership is about being empathetic and resolving conflicts, everyone brings a different style of handling this to the table and not everyone wants that sort of work. That’s the start of politics. If leadership is about making tough decisions and being held accountable for those decisions and getting teams to buy in and coordinate work around that, then switching people every six months could destroy any accountability and stability entirely.
Politics is what happens when two sides disagree, and what happens next. You aren’t going to avoid it except without groupthink. Most people are reactive to “bad” politics, just like bad sales and bad management. When it is handled well, people don’t notice it or realize it.
I don’t think this is relegated to certain industries or certain team sizes. It’s a question of roles and responsibilities, and if changing a company’s M.O. from one thing to something quite radically something else. If you’ve ever tried to change a company culture (really, a collection of a bunch of individuals’ cultures), then you know this is a huge huge task and it’s often easier/lower cost/more effective to understand your current culture and how to be most effective within that than to come in and try to change everything.
Also, Chesterton’s Fence and the like. We’ve have great social experiments in rotating leadership and in practice, people bring whatever lens they view the world to the leadership table, which is great until it isn’t.
> Most people are reactive to “bad” politics, just like bad sales and bad management. When it is handled well, people don’t notice it or realize it.
> I don’t think this is relegated to certain industries or certain team sizes. It’s a question of roles and responsibilities
> We’ve have great social experiments in rotating leadership and in practice, people bring whatever lens they view the world to the leadership table, which is great until it isn’t.
It might play out differently in a workplace setting, but a rotational system works well in that religious context.
I don't see a problem. The SVP was correct to do what they did. IMO they should have fired this guy, not just threatened them.
This was a junior engineer posting about internal company work on social media. The junior engineer knew they were supposed to reach out to the public relations team (per the article); but the engineer kept posting anyway. The public relations point team was asking the guy to stop and he was refusing until directly threatened with termination.
How would you handle this? Imagine if someone in marketing started committing code and force pushing code to production? That's effectively what this junior engineer was doing with marketing.
> I was super excited I was actually getting an opportunity to pursue my engineering dreams. The word "engineer" was even in my job title!
He joined twitter and started sending his content to the PR team for approval:
> In fact, I was so prolific on social media that I got the attention of several industry analysts who asked how my company used social media for brand promotion and marketing. Of course, since I was in engineering, I sent these inquiries over to our PR department. ... I often tweeted about what we were doing, what the company was releasing, and what conferences I would attend. I understood the confidentiality policies at the company and never shared any confidential information. The company even gave me formal PR training so I would know what I could and couldn't say. ... After fielding several of my PR referrals, I eventually got the attention of a senior vice president at the company, let's call him Rick Dickerson. He then asked me if I could teach him how to use Twitter.
The author was clearly stepping out of their role and impacting public relations. The SVP asked them to explain what they were doing and be introduced to those the engineer was working with (in social media). Then they flagged future content and told them to stop.
The SVP was ensuring they had the information they needed to protect the company and then limit any future off-message content being produced. The SVP wanted this engineer out of the social media space and needed him stopped.
> At that moment, it became clear that the SVP didn't just want to get me away from anything social media related in the company; he wanted me out of the company entirely. He was trying to get me fired.
I'm not saying I would have done it this way, but this is what happened via the article.
His posts were being flagged by the PR team.
I suspect it's because he was discussing products without going through the PR team (because they would have told him to stop).
All my arguments are from the article itself.
> He was effectively self-grooming for the position, isn't that what you're supposed to do?
If someone from marketing came down and started force pushing code to production, would that be self-grooming? No, you'd expect a PR and some review process, which wasn't occurring here.
It seems the SVP was in company representative in charge of PR / social media? If so, he was the party responsible for the team and thus "the team"?
> The SVP backchanneled unfounded complaints to my director in order to get me in trouble.
Seems like the SVP was going through the command chain to direct his complaints / concerns to you. That's the typical way corporate structures work.
The causality you're implying (if not explying) seems inverted.
The article specifically says that they were not.
He would have received warnings that he was violating company policy. The SVP would have addressed him directly and asked him to stop tweeting about the company instead of asking him to be taught. His manager wouldn't have been confused about the complaint.
None of your arguments are from the article. You're going way out of your way to assume the engineer is in the wrong and omitting information in the article.
are you reading something I'm not?
It says other companies were asking HIM how his company used socials for PR.
> I sent these inquiries over to our PR department
He directed these companies over to their PR department for an actual answer, he didn't send his posts over to the PR department.
> After fielding several of my PR referrals, I eventually got the attention of a senior vice president (...) He then asked me if I could teach him how to use Twitter.
This SVP noticed he was basically sending them free marketing and decided it would be great to learn how to use it himself.
Nothing in your quote says he was sending his posts over to PR for approval at all.
I’m not sure where you’re drawing your conclusion from.
From a company perspective, how do you handle someone who's gained a social media following and is posting about the company and acting as a company spokesman without being approved to do so.
You would collect all the information you can, then tell the guy to knock it off or be fired. That appears to be what happened.
And a lot of companies were really feeling their way into social media at that point (and by no means were their strategies necessarily broadly agreed to internally). I've seen first hand how many companies did not have well-articulated and specific policies and individuals were sort of on their own to do the "right thing" the interpretation of which was likely to differ depending upon what exec you asked.
It's hard to say what exactly happened in this case but in the mid- to late-2000s, it would have been very easy for an enthusiastic social media user posting about company matters to run afoul of someone used to company communications happening through tightly controlled channels.
Besides, unless I misunderstood, it doesn't seem like the "knock it off" was directly communicated to the employee by the svp at any point, which a good faith manager would probably do, unless they have a severe nonconfrontatiomality issue (some managers do)
(Speaking of which, if this was AMD -- I likely traded on this guys information lol I made a boat load off employees sharing information they shouldn't have publicly)
> There was enough suspicious stuff going on (being uninvited from internal group chats) that you can't chalk it up to one-off accidental miscommunications.
We have no idea what actually happened, what we can say is that from the author's own statement(s) they continued to post on social media and stopped sending it to the PR team. To me, this reads that the author was given repeated hints / directly told to stop and wasn't listening. My guess is the training was, "hey you're probably not supposed to be posting this, review the training please".
That said, we don't know. I'm not saying this was handled well, but this definitely wasn't being "bullied" out of a job. Their job was engineering, they were pushed out of social media, at best; after not being hired for it.
You're simply saying you believe the engineer is lying and dishonest. This is possible but there's nothing compelling about your assumption unless you provide evidence that supports it. Otherwise it's just sort of a random assumption.
I mean, Yeah sure for example, I could assume that he also has anger issue problems that he's unaware about, but that's a random assumption... Why would anyone care? In short I'm saying what compelling evidence do you have to make your assumption more relevant?
You'd think if he wasn't approved to do so then they would've actually told him to knock it off and not, you know, give him PR training and put him on a social media council.
You have no idea if the perspective presented it accurate.
Sure, but it's pretty hard to skew being included in the very part of an organization that presumably influences how said organization represents itself on social media. Are you insinuating that the author is outright lying about that?
Obviously we don't know the other side of the story but you are making a massive leap from what is presented and ignoring the completely reasonable alternatives to what the SVP is reported to have done.
This flat hierarchy works at the low level. It already does almost everywhere on the border of "production workers" and "low management".
But in the middle management, the incentive is promotion and control. You start out with a flattened hierarchy, and say 20 managers vying for promotion, well, you probably won't get promoted. Then why try hard? Uhoh, now most of your managers will either:
1) leave
2) fight over / jockey over being the "senior level" of the 20 underlings
3) stop trying
4) embezzle
5) gradually conspire to "unflatten" and add more levels, gain control (solid line or dotted line) to the territory of your peers
Sometimes people "badly" promoted don't even seek power, they just end up at that spot, and the heat makes them turn sour, or stiff, because there something in us that makes us want to keep appearances up (and also probably the financial benefits, but I'm not even sure, and some did say so to me, that it's worth the money)
For example >> https://eller.arizona.edu/departments-research/centers-labs/...
I saw the most extreme example of low competence bullying. A manager with less than 1 year of experience fired a contractor project manager who was a previous energy company CEO, turn-around CEO, and company board member/advisor. The guy was fixing some of the tangled bureaucratic work flows (which made everyone's lives better) when he got the axe.
(Also note that what organisations term a 'project' can vary a hell of a lot.)
2. Company health insurance + family member with chronic disease.
3. He was personal friends with the VP which made his firing potentially career ending for the new manager.
There are people you meet in your career that are a privilege to work with like this guy.
In fact, I've almost never worked with people who are proper charlatans, winging it and dreading exposure. They are dealt with by their peers. Most in the rank and file help each other out, confide and support, since we all suffer the same anxieties about trying to be good in a world that seldom recognises achievement.
But the higher one ascends, the more often we encounter people elevated by the Peter Principle to precarious standing, who then preempt being called-out by weaving an air of victimhood or even martyrdom around their position.
"Don't you dare question me" is implied in almost everything they do. These people at the "top" are very, very scared, can't quite understand how they got there, and imagine it will all unravel at any moment. They are also quite often frozen by fear, meaning that an eerie silence surrounds the levers of power which nobody dare touch.
I think "imposter syndrome" is a real thing. But it's much more complex and significant than we're currently understanding it. There are real imposters, who deserve to be ousted, and if we're not careful they will use "imposter syndrome" to entrench further.
This is not a good culture, either for leaders or those they lead.
1) they are loyal and take orders from above
2) they are not a threat to those that are above, or those that are going up the ladder (assuming they can be promoted somewhere else)
Also, people tend to go into management when they have kids/get married. These people are conservative/seek stability. They are liked by management because their family ensures compliance and loyalty.
But kids and life situations and advancing age can sap people of the energy to be good at the job they once did. Plus, people do hard work to get where they want to be, and then lay off when they get there, another way that people may appear incompetent: they stopped trying hard when they reached a level of satisfaction.
* People aren't good at everything.
* Jobs at different levels in the org hierarchy require different skills.
* If people are promoted based on skill/merit they eventually arrive at a role for which they are unsuited.
> The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to "a level of respective incompetence": employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.
>Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
>First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
>Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
>The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
These people don't care about the organization, and they don't care about producing things, or even doing their job. Their full time job is gaining power and climbing the ladder. Everyone is fighting for budget and headcount and appearances. And taking credit for things.
I would say that there are three phases:
1) the creators/doers: the company aligns to being productive and successful with these people focused on whatever does that.
2) as it increases in size, upper management transitions from industry skills to managerial people. Thus Pournelle's second class comes to dominate. Here the company still may grow and managerial tricks like acquisitions and financial cookbooking will continue growth, but nothing revolutionary. The company begins to plateau.
3) with people settling into a more fixed reporting structure, now the machiavellis will begin to fight over internal territory, and since the top managers are just sociopaths themselves, they let it happen. The company becomes a cesspool of battlegrounds, and will begin to slowly rot.
The only thing that saves companies these days is that the US economy is now structured around monopolies and cartels, so companies can obtain direct control and then establish barriers.
But the net effect of all markets being cartel/monopoly dominated is that the lack of competition means companies fall into stage 3 more easily, but can't be displaced. So the entirety of the US is now all these cartel/monopolies weighing down the country as a whole, and it becomes overall more and more corrupt.
What's the end state of this? Look at Russia.
A handful of motivated startup entrepreneurs will cobble something together in months that would've taken Microsoft or Google dozens of people years to accomplish
And in the current political climate, that startup will just get bought out or crushed by one of the megacorps instead of dethroning them
I think flattening excessively pyramidal hierarchies are the only real solution for this problem, but that's not much comfort for those who find themselves derailed due to this dynamic.
Practically, such people tend to be very concerned about their underlings also being their 'supporters' so if you can stomach it, presenting yourself as a fawning admirer and loyal henchperson is one route forward, although likely damaging to your own mental health and productivity. Jumping ship to another berth as soon as possible is the other option (of course, don't tell anyone this is your plan, as that will spark retaliatory efforts).