Blog • Judith M. Bardwick

Out of Touch with Subordinates

Judith M. Bardwick, Ph.D.

We’ve always known that subordinates have to earn their bosses respect. One of the biggest changes impacting management over the last half century is that in increasing numbers of organizations, managers have to earn their subordinate’s respect and trust. Unless an organization is very hierarchical, respect is no longer tied to the position. In perhaps a majority of organizations today, the power to make decisions depends less on status and hierarchical position and more on trust, knowledge and influence.

But we have a problem. Many managers are out of touch with their subordinates. The power of education, especially that of advanced degrees has resulted in many managers and executives who went straight from school into decision making roles without ever having had experiences working with the people who do the work in the organization’s plants and offices. This is a form of class stratification in which people who are particularly good with abstract arguments or with information technology never have experiences working with and gaining respect for the people who actually accomplish the work.

This pattern of putting people in leadership roles based on their mastery of theory and language is in strong contrast to the experiences of earlier generations of managers and executives. Older executives often served in the military because service was mandatory. Many newly commissioned officers quickly learned that the success of their unit really depended on the decisions and actions of their very experienced non-commissioned officers. Experience with the astute decisions made by the people who reported to them taught the new graduate the critical importance of experiential knowledge, innate leadership abilities, and the astute decisions made by the people who reported to them. In this way, actual experience and common sense trumped abstract theory.

Similarly, in many corporations, entry level positions in management were in manufacturing facilities. Just as the brand new Second Lieutenant learned how expert the Master Sergeant was, the brand new manager quickly came to respect the foreman. Potential managers and executives swiftly learned that the DNA of the manufacturing processes was in the collective experience of the shop people who actually built the stuff. Newly hired “bosses” quickly learned that the people they were “to give orders to” were a tough audience that had a dazzling understanding of the work they did and everything that impacted them. The new “bosses” swiftly learned they couldn’t survive much less succeed if they didn’t earn the respect and support of their people. That necessarily involved demonstrating respect for their subordinates knowledge, intelligence, leadership and decision making astuteness.

Earlier routes to success almost always involved tests of whether you could successfully lead all kinds of people. This was a humbling process because new “bosses” swiftly learned how dependent they were on the knowledge, skills and leadership abilities of people who just lacked the opportunity to get the educational head start that would have positioned them to climb up the management ladder. In effect, it was a reversal of the standard mentoring process in which your boss educates you.

This was reverse mentoring as worker taught “the boss.” Reverse mentoring meant new managers learned the language of the people who created value and that made it certain that young managers would never underestimate the value or abilities of the people who reported to them.

Without reverse mentoring experience, too many contemporary managers and executives have no real respect for those who report to them. Without respect for subordinates they regard “Empower People” as the name of a training program whose goal is to thwart a union organizing effort. As they don’t have personal relationships with less educated people and they don’t really work with them, they tend to be as convinced of their indispensable contribution as they remain unimpressed by the contributions of people they’ve never known, respected or understood.

Psychologically, that makes it really easy to think of employees as an expense which has to be managed, controlled and “downsized.” When management is blind to the value of subordinates and are unaware of their dependence on them, they are also blind to the high cost of thinking of employees simply as costs.

It is expensive and dangerous to minimize management’s respect for the abilities and achievements of those who did not rise to their peer level. It is in an organization’s best interests to create opportunities in which subordinates either participate as colleagues or as mentors to new managers and executives because both groups need opportunities to earn the trust and respect of each other. When that is achieved it is possible for those positive feelings to be reciprocal.

The military seem to be the best institutions that are still committed to shaping “average” people into very successful performers. They invest in training and honing leadership skills at all levels of the organization. It is no accident that the success of the U.S. military is often the result of creative initiatives taken by non-commissioned officers who are committed to the survival of their people. In this sense, corporate America has a lot to learn from the armed forces.

Change Exhaustion

Judith M. Bardwick, Ph.D.

The sources of stress that has already been identified are familiar, powerful and obvious. Another equally powerful source of stress that is less obvious though it’s familiar to many is the sense of exhaustion that arises from efforts to change which never stop and never succeed.

A borderless economy requires that businesses compete by being significantly more innovative, faster, and generally speaking, price competitive. That takes organizational flexibility, adaptability and agility. It requires setting a course and always being ready to change it. This is a change from old values and behaviors to very new ones. Since profound change is very hard to accomplish it is rarely totally successful.

There have been some major transformation successes: Ford Motor Company, General Electric, and Hewlett-Packard’s Test and Measurement Organization, now called Agilent come to mind. In each case, the need for core change was self-evident; the organization clearly had a dismal future at best if the status quo persisted. And in each case an appropriate, effective and committed leader had the helm and stayed the course. These successes have proved to be the exceptions. Most of the major change initiatives have not been successful: some never gained momentum and others that did, were replaced by a return to the old ways when good times followed crises.

Borderless organizations are different from stable organizations because they were born after 1980, after technology had created a borderless economy, and because they have IT genes and cutting-edge, entrepreneurial cultures. The biggest difference between borderless and stable organizations is the borderless organization was born in today’s turbulent reality and does not need a core transformation of its assumptions, values and practices. In contrast, stable organizations, especially those that had dominated their industry or had a monopoly, need an extraordinarily difficult and total transformation of their values, priorities and operations. These are the organizations that are most likely to experience change exhaustion.

While all organizations are affected by and use IT, IT is the heart of wartime organizations. In their initial stages, especially, there is a powerful sense of urgency! Wartime organizations are intellect-intensive and the intellectual leadership in technology has overwhelmingly come from young people in their teens, 20s and 30s instead of from more experienced senior people.

Characteristics of Borderless and Stable Organizations

Stable organizations are usually large and old. At some point they were either very successful or, like universities, many governments and still-regulated businesses, they never had any serious competition. Even today, there are still some stable organizations that act like they have all the time in the world. They’re cautious, experiencing objectively small changes as tumultuous. Studies, surveys and strategies can take years to formulate and if no action follows, that’s okay because there’s no sense of danger. While stable organizations do have layoffs, once the downsizing is completed the sense of crisis is replaced by complacency. Mentally, people are employees, expecting their salary and an annual increase no matter how poorly the organization is doing, comfortable being told what to do and how to achieve it. Many people prefer the relatively slow pace and aspects of security that stable organizations like The Container Store chain continue to provide.

In contrast, borderless organizations are always in a hurry, either because they want to grab a market or because they never forget competition comes out of anywhere. Employees are partners and colleagues, teammates who collaborate to ensure the success of the venture – which no one takes for granted. Because of stock options, many employees feel like owners. This leads them to think in terms of the good of the business – Will this make money? — Instead of the professional orientation, is this an effective solution? People who enjoy risk find borderless conditions, especially start-ups, risky and exciting.

Different behaviors are required in borderless organizations than in stable organizations and those behaviors reflect different values and priorities. Many behaviors or personal qualities that are common in stable organizations are barriers to success in a borderless economy. Stable organizations historically expected leaders, for example, to demonstrate authority by ordering subordinates. Subordinates, in turn, did what they were told and kept on saluting. That’s both slow and a waste of subordinates’ knowledge and talents. It is also counterproductive in that it precludes innovation and teamwork. In stable organizations which are typically hierarchical and competitive, hoarding knowledge, people or money is an expected behavior. In borderless organizations the rule is share! or you’re history. Note, too, that all borderless organizational behaviors require high levels of self-confidence.

For clarity, characteristics are depicted in terms of opposites. In reality, leaders must use their judgment about when to give orders and when to share decision-making power.

There are lots of reasons for the failure of basic transformation efforts: A change from a stable organization to a borderless organization is as fundamental as it gets. The more basic the change, the harder it is for people to grasp and accept. The more threatening the change the more push-back is inevitable. The more years the change takes, the harder it is to sustain people’s motivation to keep going. The more distant the external competitive threat, the harder it is to create a proactive change. The longer the organization was stable, and the bigger it is, the harder it is to achieve core change.

And, the more the change is conceptual rather than concrete, the more difficult it is to pull off. It’s easier, for example, to get people to use a new performance appraisal form than it is to get them to be performance-driven. Change agents always talk about changing an organization’s culture. The term “culture” is itself conceptual; culture is the sum of an organization’s history, assumptions and expectations. Culture involves the formal and informal values and assumptions that drive decisions and the nature of relationships. It is, therefore, not surprising that while stable organizations may change in their parts, I’ve never seen one become a nimble borderless organization in its whole. That’s why the change process rarely has a definitive end.

Some people feel that people and organizations have a finite capacity to absorb and adapt to change. If that’s true, there may well be some limit to how much basic change can be achieved at any point in time. That’s a warning to beware of introducing more fundamental change than people can cope with. But I don’t think the amount of change that’s being called for is the critical problem.

Most major organizational change efforts accomplish only partial or little success. As a result, many people in mature organizations are suffering from change exhaustion; the depleted outcome of successive change efforts to achieve a significant difference that either achieved only partial success or failed outright. Change exhaustion, therefore, is most likely the result of repetitive failure.

When a change initiative fails to achieve a transformation that’s clearly needed, the response is usually yet another major push for change. Leaders cry out, “Let’s Re-engineer! Re-structure! Re-strategize!” But the more previous efforts to change have failed, the more difficult it is for the new change process to gain credibility and champions. Success is the natural motivator and failure is the reverse. Failure reinforces failure. Repetitive failure leads to cynicism, depression and exhaustion and that’s exactly what you find in organizations that keep trying to adapt to the new conditions of competition, turbulence and unpredictability but never make it.

High Stress Became Normal

Judith M. Bardwick, Ph.D.

Conditions of peacetime—of little and moderate change, relatively low risk and low volatility, reasonable security, dependability and predictability, and promotions and raises tied to seniority are being replaced by swift and major change, high risk and volatility, insecurity and unpredictability. In other words, peacetime conditions are being replaced by those of wartime.

During the 1980s, IBM, that stalwart of capitalism, fell on hard times. Powerful competitors, including upstarts from Silicon Valley like Apple Computers or Sun Microsystems, were replacing IBM’s mainframes with smaller, powerful machines while global competition was displacing IBM from the top of the computer heap. IBM’s core principle of “Respect for the Individual,” which really meant job security for life, was in the process of becoming unsupportable. The first efforts to increase flexibility and get costs down were early retirement packages; the corporation tried to be kind.

For many years I lectured in a large auditorium at IBM’s Management School in Armonk, New York. The architecture and the setting of the school were designed to express the corporation’s commitment to its employees. The grounds were idyllic with paths through the woods; buildings were modern, built of field stone, simple and elegant at the same time. Even I, an outsider, felt enormous pride as a sort of IBMer, as I joined with management to teach in the school.

As the new problems weren’t solved in one year or three, and market share and profits continued to fall, retirement packages were followed by layoffs. Employee confidence in the corporation was replaced by uncertainty and a view of a rock-solid world gave way to doubts and anxiety. As the large auditorium in Armonk filled with employees, I could almost see a cloud of brown funk arise from the bodies of the people in the audience and it stayed there, hovering and discoloring the mood, throughout the four hours of the session.

In the 1980s I had the same experience at Hewlett-Packard and AT&T and many other famed bastions of job and life security. During the ‘80s and through the 1990s, what had been unthinkable was becoming commonplace: layoffs, job insecurity, rising performance requirements with fewer people to do the work—became ordinary.

The source of good news and bad news is the same: technology has made a lot of work easier and more interesting and we can communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere in the world. It is ironic that at the same time, that same technology created levels of competition and speed and performance that contribute to chronic anxiety and continuous stress.

Information Technology, Information Systems, the Internet and the Web—all the drivers of the racing-speed, ultra-competitive borderless economy—are new. But people are old. Human beings have been around for an enormously long time. Over the millennia, our species developed basic human needs.

There are core needs that people need to satisfy in order for them to operate at their best. People want to belong; they want a sense of community and trust. They need some sense of stability and security. They want to be loved in intimate relationships and they want to work in organizations that are responsive to their needs. People want to be able to earn enough respect so that their opinion is sought on issues they know about and which impact them. Most people want to be recognized when they’ve done something significant and most people want their work to matter. We’re wired to learn so it’s not surprising that most adults want to keep on “growing.” And people want a level playing field; they want their world to be understandable, just and fair.

It is human nature for people to want some sense of predictability, of certainty and control. In order to thrive, the great majority of people need to feel they have considerable control over what’s happening to them. Predictability, certainty and control are exactly what are lost in the borderless economy. In addition to the stresses generated by ever-increasing performance requirements, wartime is inherently stressful because the human need for control is continuously assaulted by escalating change. For most people, that’s exhausting. Prolonged exhaustion is not conducive to high performance or innovation and its hell on wheels to relationships, physical health and psychological well-being.

In the new reality, the human need for control is continuously assaulted by escalating change. Many people are experiencing chronic high levels of performance pressure along with sustained uncertainty. That’s exhausting. Prolonged exhaustion is not conducive to high performance or innovation and its hell on wheels to relationships, physical health and psychological well-being.
In two books, Danger in the Comfort Zone and In Praise of Good Business, I explained why each person has a range of risk and pressure that is comfortable for him or her. Yerkes-Dodson is a simple and powerful psychological law that states that performance levels rise as fear and pressure increase from zero up to their optimal levels. If fear and pressure climb higher than what is comfortable for that person, in that situation, performance declines.

In other words, when fear and pressure are either too low or too high for that person, performance is poor. People work best and are most productive when external pressures are within their Comfort Zone.

ACT and Take Control

Dr. Judith M. Bardwick, Ph.D.

For some people the bad news keeps raining down. Other people are full of energy and hope. For them it’s always winter of many discontents. How does that make people feel?

The most debilitating emotions are those of anxiety and fear coupled with the feeling of being powerless. That makes people passive observers, without the energy or will to act.

Anxiety is a shapeless and amorphous feeling of dread that envelops us like a dark fog, creating threats that are too vague for us to take arms against them. It’s when we’re filled with anxiety that we huddle in the corner of our bed, cuddling our blanket, sucking our thumb.

Anxiety is effectively countered when the amorphous threat is converted into specific concerns because specificity lends itself to problem solving. That converts passivity into an active act with a good chance of being successful. It is not hard to transform amorphous threats into specific problems and goals; it merely requires knowing that’s the task.

Initiate and Succeed
Identify no more than three specific tasks that are important to achieve and accomplish them. Success is what really matters so it is fine if these initial efforts at problem solving involve baby steps, reasonably easy changes in your routine like only responding to email at the beginning and end of the work day, or exercising for 30 minutes four times a week.

Learn to break larger projects into separate parts or steps and prioritize which need to be done swiftly and unusually well. Do not sweat the smaller stuff which are not critical.

As you actively solve problems you will discover your anxiety level declines and you feel more competent and in control.

Get Out of Your Box
Find a new goal that is significant to you and make a commitment to it. In other words, break your comfortable habits in some way so you start fresh in something new that you think might be worthwhile. You might, for example, volunteer to help teach children or adults to read…or you could enroll in a class on ancient history…or you could decide to join a three day march to raise money to fight breast cancer…

In itself, deciding to do something you have never done before and actually doing it, will increase your general confidence and sense of competence.

Know Your Self
Nobody is good at everything.

I love Peter Drucker’s advice in which he says Work on what you do well and don’t put much effort into what you don’t do well. If you pursue improving what you don’t do well, at best you’ll become an average performer. But if you hone what comes naturally, you’ll be outstanding.

Wise people draw to their strengths and as much as possible and avoid their weaknesses. My late husband Allen was dyslexic and created a very successful career in the Coast Guard and as a Master Mariner based on seamanship and leadership rather than writing policy analyses. He was a very wise man.

Stand Out
If you’ve ever been in a position to select the successful candidates from a large pool, you will have learned how very difficult that can be. The quality of almost all groups of candidates will usually fall into a normal bell-shaped curve which means there are relatively few people in either tail. In other words, almost no one falls into either the-walk-on-water or the why-did-they-apply?! groups. Very simply, the great majority of people fall into the he or she-could do it population.

As the differences between most candidates are pretty small, judges hunt for anything that makes a person really special or anything that could disqualify someone. That’s why your #1 job is to be more notable than anyone else. How might you do that?

First, read, ask, and listen so you have a good idea of the direction your field is more likely to take in the near future and the implications of that for your company’s future growth and investment. Become an expert in those areas through school, a new job, or projects at work.

Increase your value to management: by communicating the results of your research; by utilizing your new expertise; by demonstrating your entrepreneurial go-getting and collaborative spirit; by leading effective change efforts; and by demonstrating the depth and integrity of your commitment and engagement to the organization and its’ work.

Perhaps the most important advice about becoming invaluable is, do not accept a job that doesn’t contribute to the core business or to its’ profitability if it’s a for-profit organization.
The reason why staff functions are often seen as necessary but are held in low esteem, is staff is a help to – but not a direct contributor to – the business of the business and its success. If, for example, you are a trainer in a manufacturing company, you are seen as staff and a cost. On the other hand, if you are a trainer in a business that develops, sells and offers training, you are part of the core business and a potential profit center. There is a world of difference in these seemingly similar situations.

Become visible to the decision-makers
Many years ago a writer and I became good enough friends so we exchanged drafts of manuscripts with each other. He was writing a novel and I thought it was already pretty good, except for two chapters that I thought slowed the action way too much. Tell me, I asked, what are these chapters about and why did you go into so much detail about the relationship of your primary character and this other guy. Judy, he wrote back, those pages are all about the hero and his mentor. That had never occurred to me because in those days there were no mentors (or coaches or supporters) for women.

Sometime after that, I was an Associate Dean at the University of Michigan and the Dean, Billy Frye, became my informal mentor. What an extraordinary experience that turned out to be! He was a model of a modern leader, a man who listened as well as he told, and I tried to emulate his style. He encouraged me to be a leader of innovation and in doing that I discovered that just because I had access to him, every door was now open to me. He taught me to be shrewd as well as smart because from him I learned about strategy and how to gain and use power. He was my teacher, my supporter, and a very good friend. Relationships at work don’t get better than that.

The best relationships involve mutual respect and trust as well as liking and ease. While I was overwhelmed by Billy’s kindness to me he assured me that he was learning from me while I was learning from him. We had worked together for a year before he became my mentor and we both knew we could trust each other, that in this relationship it was very easy to be truthful, and we were both deeply committed to the university and its’ mission.

70 percent of the Fortune 500 companies have formal mentoring programs as well as training and coaching. I don’t know if those relationships are as effective as an informal mentoring arrangement that develops naturally as people work together, but they are certainly assets in terms of improving yourself and becoming visible to those who make decisions about you. Even in a meritocracy, a really big asset is a boss who blocks and tackles…and toots your horn.

Mutual Trust and Communication

Judith M. Bardwick, Ph.D.

Without mutual trust very little can be accomplished. Gaining trust necessarily involves real communication, a process in which everyone involved really listens as well as speaks. Listening simply means focusing on what the other person is saying. It involves not interrupting and not mentally reloading your gun with new arguments.

Listening also involves checking, making sure you did hear the message the other person sent. After the other person has finished speaking, checking involves saying, “This is what I think you said. Did I get that right?” The process of checking assures accurate communication while it also slows things down and defuses emotion because checking is unemotional fact-finding.

But style counts: subordinates need to know what bosses and team members are comfortable with. Every organization has an unwritten norm about confrontation and disagreement and every employee needs to know what it is. And every boss has a very personal response to input, especially criticism.

When I was an Associate Dean at the University of Michigan, my boss, Dean Billy Frye, Ph.D., was intrinsically a humble man who really wanted input – confirming or challenging – from everyone before he made a decision. But the great majority of Executives that I have worked with see agreement as loyalty and have a built-in push-back mechanism any time they’re disagreed with, especially in public. A good rule is to make suggestions to them in public and disagree in private.

The reason trust is a huge asset and mistrust is a huge liability is that when people trust they’re not using a lot of energy protecting themselves because they anticipate being abused and manipulated. Without trust people are defensive, cynical and suspicious so there is no possibility of collaboration. Mistrust, therefore, makes it almost impossible to achieve important change, a shared focus and any sense of commitment and engagement. Success requires widespread trust because people, who trust the organization, its leadership and their boss are psychologically free to concentrate, collaborate and commit.

Interdependent and mutual relationships between people in an organization are based on trust. When the organization trusts its employees and employees reciprocate, everyone is psychologically free to fully engage their work. Without trust people are not preoccupied with their work; instead they’re obsessed with how to avoid the next betrayal.

Trust is created when people feel that someone’s word is their bond and when they’re told something will happen, it does. But the very rate of change in today’s world makes it hard to predict and be consistent. Trust, therefore, depends on unusual levels of candor – an open book culture – and on powerful values that support it which everyone buys into. Now retired CarMax’s CEO, Austin Ligon, started his Q&A sessions with employees by asking them to tell him anything the company is doing that is stupid or unnecessary, or just doesn’t make sense. That’s a clear invitation for employees to speak out and they do.

Many managers are not comfortable managing people and prefer to view their responsibility as limited to hitting the numbers. But achieving the numbers requires the enthusiasm and on-board enthusiasm of subordinates and that depends on positive relationships between subordinates and managers and between team members.

While forthright communication is very high on the list of Must-Happen, speaking out and telling the truth are not common behaviors in most organizations. Fortunately these are pretty easy skills to learn if you want to be good at it. Candor needs to be rewarded and evasion needs to become a behavior that people reject. In order to make this happen, managers need to use peer pressure from employee’s colleagues, and they must be models of the behavior they need from everyone.

Managers need, for example, to speak out about an important problem such as losing a major customer. The tone of the communication needs to express concern and curiosity about what’s going on. Bosses should ask questions and not volunteer opinions, especially those that that start with, “This is what I think.” That sets the stage for required agreement and the boss won’t learn anything from the people who actually interact with that customer and who might even be in touch with the competition.

After describing the problem management should ask for comments about why it happened and what the next steps might be. If there are no volunteers, the manager must call on people, for example: “Marilyn, you’ve been with us a long time. What do you think?” “Ron, you’re new and might see things differently. What would you say?” “Irene, you’ve heard from Marilyn and Ron. Do you agree with them or would you say something different?”

The goal is to have everyone willing to put their views out on the table. When I was a Dean and created an Executive Committee it took six months of hard work to get every member to really listen and speak up. But it’s worth the work. Silence is destructive because it simply masks disagreements. Disagreements that are expressed have a good chance of being resolved. Unexpressed disagreements usually end up as heated conflicts. In fact, when people disagree they don’t speak out to the boss, but they do speak out in anger and frustration to their friends and allies. That usually leads to employees taking sides and political in-fighting. It’s hard to imagine a worse outcome.

Especially in today’s fast-moving and extremely competitive environment, an organization’s culture has to reinforce the necessity of speaking out in order to solve problems while really listening to the opinions of others. An open culture of speaking up and respectful listening invites participation and discussion. Then disagreement has a chance of becoming a situation in which different views are explored which often creates synergy and innovation as well as compromise and trust.

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