Same as it ever was

Sucking up gets success

It Ain’t What You Do, It’s The Way That You Do It

I am indebted to Prof Maja Korica for bringing my attention to ‘The Moral Maze: Bureaucracy and Managerial Work’, an HBR article from 1983 by Robert Jackall. Despite being 40 years old, its coruscating analysis of what it takes to succeed in a corporation and is still on point today. I found it a great read, easy to follow and insightful, so I encourage you to read it yourself.

(I’d like to take this opportunity to draw your attention to Prof Korica’s project to share her knowledge and teaching through a series of videos, of which this is the first. I recommend that you follow her on LinkedIN, where she is posting the videos as she releases them.)

What Jackall observed was that in order to progress beyond a certain level of the hierarchy, to be successful (noting that society measures success not by accomplishments but by earnings, wealth and status), you no longer had to deliver results but to play the game. Whilst we were told that we were in a meritocracy and that hard work would lead to just rewards, there is a level where that no longer applies and what is more important is fealty to a patron and your ability to play the politics.

He describes corporations as hierarchies where the CEO is the King, and those who report in to him (usually divisional heads) are the Barons. Beneath them are those who rule over smaller fiefdoms and principalities. Your success is determined in large part by securing the favours of one of these, perhaps your boss or possibly someone higher up in the hierarchy, who will be your patron or mentor.

He makes the point that delivery becomes less important than playing the game, as a basic level of competence is assumed by the sifting out process of rising through the lower layers. If you fail to perform, to ‘hit your numbers’, then you will fail and be pushed out. If you regularly ‘hit your numbers’ but don’t play the game, you will not succeed but be left where you are (well, maybe not today…). However, if you sometimes miss your numbers but are good at playing the game, you will succeed.

This certainly describes my experience and observations in the organisations I experienced and I see little evidence that things have changed that much, although there have been attempts to give the appearance of change (which we’ll come back to).

A couple of observations arose from reading this.

The first is that because I wasn’t interested in the politics (I.e. playing the game), I unwittingly created a glass ceiling for myself. I had swallowed the whole meritocracy schtick, I was motivated to make things happen and I thought that would be enough for me to succeed. Dear reader, it was not.

Secondly, I had also potentially put a target on my back. As Jackall goes on to point out, one of the key strategies to progress up the hierarchy is to avoid blame for anything that goes wrong and make sure it falls on someone else. This will, at times, necessitate finding a scapegoat and it is those who do not enjoy the protection of a Patron or mentor that are the easiest targets (that would be me).

With a bit more luck I might have fallen under the protection of someone higher up in the organisation and been allowed to reach my ceiling and to stay there (at least until one of the regular management culls took me or my mentor out). Even if I had been lucky, the lesson to be learnt is that competence alone, or even high performance, is not enough to secure your position.

I meet a lot of people who have fallen into the same trap as me, motivated to make things happen and disinterested in the game playing. If this is your disposition then corporate life is never going to be a long-term bet for you.

With this knowledge in mind, however, there is a value in working your way up through the lower layers as an apprenticeship for doing something else later on. Ten years in corporate can give you a very good grounding in business and a network to enable you to strike out on your own, or find a new path in life.

Jackall also makes the point that corporate life is capricious and that even if you pay the game, your career can be upended when a new CEO or senior manager comes in and initiates the inevitable reorganisation. Additionally, you can be taken out by a a host of external factors that can hit profitability and just find yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time and taking the blame. You could even have to carry the can for the mistakes of your predecessor (who may now happen to be your boss and keen to cover them up with your head).

Bottom line is, there’s no way to be secure. You can’t control the cards you are dealt.

It’s All In The Game

There’s another side to this, of course. It means that those at the top of the organisation are the best game players. They are not the most empathetic, the most courageous, the best thinkers and strategists, the most innovative or the most adaptive, they are the best game players.

This means they excel in a narrow set of skills (as defined by Jackall) -

Looking the part - attractive, well-groomed and well-dressed.

Self-control - the ability to mask all emotions and intentions behind bland, smiling and agreeable public faces.

Perception as a team player - to appear to be interchangeable with other managers near one’s level; putting in long hours (in the office); participating in social rituals.

Style - being well organised; slick at presentation; giving the appearance of knowledge even in its absence; a subtle sophistication, marked by an urbane, witty graceful, engaging and friendly demeanour.

Patron power - having a patron, or mentor, who will provide their “client” with opportunities, political insight, support and protection.

This obviously leads to a lack of diversity at the top and a tendency towards groupthink.

Furthermore, as the game is not about achievement but about climbing the greasy pole, a key objective is to avoid getting blame for any failures. This means a key tactic for managers is to diffuse responsibility by involving as wide a range of people as possible. This is turns leads to risk-aversion, prioritisation of short-term benefits and slows down decision making and action taking. It also makes it impossible to assign responsibility for, well, almost anything.

All of this is terrible for organisations, making them slow, unimaginative and inefficient. I often look at organisations and wonder how, with all this going on, they manage to do anything at all. It seems unlikely to be due to the contribution of senior management, who are mostly engaged in organisational theatre and fighting for the leading roles.

Doesn’t Really Matter

One of the ‘qualities’ that is essential to succeeding is ‘as adeptness at inconsistency’. This is what Jackall is getting at when he refers to the corporation as ‘The Moral Maze’.

It means being able to use ‘an extraordinary and indirect linguistic framework’ and to be able to argue contrary positions with equal earnestness, your position guided not by values or morals but by the interests of the corporation, which are defined solely by the productive return (i.e. profitability) to the corporation.

The linguistic framework enables you to communicate certain meanings within specific contexts (i.e. to specific audiences) but to reframe them should the context (the audience) change. This means no-one is held to their word because it is always understand that their word is provisional.

The ability to say one thing whilst believing, and often doing, the opposite enables you to advance the action that is most profitable whilst avoiding objections. Jackall says that

‘Such adeptness at inconsistency, without moral uneasiness, is essential for executive success’.

We easily recognise this behaviour in corporate leaders and senior managers. What more stark example can we see than the rapid dumping of DEI policies that have been in place for more than a decade and the abandonment of diversity objectives and protections for minorities that were held to be key to company success. It turns out that was just all pretend, they were just saying that stuff to stop being sued and to con employees into believing they cared. Why the change? Because now it looks more profitable to conform with political agenda of the new administration rather than to stick with these policies.

It was not values or morals that drove these decisions, it was profitability. They never really believed in DEI, it was all window dressing but, boy, did they talk a good game. Now they don’t have to bother, they’ve turned on a dime.

I’m Only Human

The picture Jackall paints is still relevant today. On one hand, that’s remarkable but on another it’s not because this is really about humans and the psychology of hierarchies. That stuff hasn’t really changed since Shakespeare wrote about it and it was historical then!

Change, then, can only really come about by reducing the role of hierarchies in organisations. That brings us to networks of autonomous, self-organising teams connected through digital platforms, which is where I think we should be headed.

One final point. We’ve seen ‘adeptness at inconsistency’ happening in real time over the past couple of weeks. We’ve seen the false promise of the meritocracy laid bare. They’re not even bothering to pretend anymore. Take notice and beware. They do not deserve your trust, your loyalty, your emotional labour. Save those for the people you love and who deserve it.

And if you do decide to play the game, before you do, just ask if what you have to put on the table (your values, morals and integrity) are worth the odds you are getting. Because it looks to me like you’re playing against a loaded deck.