Jared Sandberg has a nice little discussion of the problem of working for a "yes man" in his Cubicle Culture column today in the Wall Street Journal. He was kind enough to interview me for it, and I found him to be an unusually smart — and straightfoward — journalist. In his column,I talk about how one problem with working for someone who says "yes" to everything is that their subordinates end-up doing lots of things, but without the time to do anything well. Plus I describe some of the research on innovation reviewed in Weird Ideas That Work that shows how some of the most creative people in organizations routinely ignore and defy their bosses.
I talk about the problem that subordinates face when their bosses insist that they implement some program or plan that is clearly a bad idea. To expand on that point, if arguing the facts with your boss doesn’t work and you don’t want to quit your job or get fired, sometimes the lesser of multiple evils is to strategic incompetence.
As Jeff Pfeffer and I wrote in Hard Facts, “Unfortunately, as we’ve seen, many managers and other employees face pressures to do things that aren’t just untested, but are known to be ineffective. In such cases, a challenge, a genuine moral dilemma can arise because, if they follow orders from superiors, people can knowingly harm their organizations, colleagues, and customers. We hesitate to recommend what might be called “evidence-based misbehavior.” But a case can be made that when leaders are wrong – and people don’t have the power to reverse their commands – that ignoring orders, delaying action, or implementing programs incompletely may be best for all involved.”
We go on to show how people trapped in such predicaments sometimes feel as if there is no other alternative to such passive resistance. As we describe, I once spoke with the superintendents of two large school districts who were instructed to implement educational policies to “end social promotion”, policies that would result in flunking more kids. These policies that have been shown in numerous studies to undermine both educational achievement and student graduation rates.
As we say in Hard Facts about these two superintendents, “So, both felt forced to go ahead and implement the policy anyway. But they were both doing it as slowly and incompletely as they could in their schools. Indeed, both explained – in defensive and somewhat angry tones — that, in perfect world that was free of politics, they wouldn’t have to act that way, but that their subtle resistance would result in the least damage to their schools and students. The message was that either they resisted that way, or they would get fired and replaced with someone who loved social promotion and would do far more harm. In short, resistance and foot-dragging isn’t always futile. A case can be made that evidence-based misbehavior is the best that you can do for your organization at times.”
Of course, this is a massively flawed soloution, but I thought that they made an interesting and persuasive argument, albeit one that does not appeal to the idealistic part of me, but one that may do the least harm in a bad situation.
P.S. I was amused to see that the Wall Street Journal editors elected not to print my assertion that working for yes men “sucks,” they censored it by printing “s—s.” It didn’t even occur to me that “sucks” was an offensive word until I thought about it for awhile. Then I remembered that this isn’t the first time I have had that word censored by the Wall Street Journal. The first time that I was quoted in the Journal was in 1988, and the article (about how irrevlevant much management research is to real world problems) ended with me saying “I’ve been in the real world. It stinks.” I was misquoted; I actually said “It sucks.” I guess they won’t be printing the name of my next book, The No Asshole Rule!
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