Best/Worst Leader Series - Mr P

My friend Jared told me he checks for a new post from me every day, so I need to get on the stick and be productive.

A few years ago, a retired Marine and I talked about collaborating on a book about the best and worst leaders we had known. I made notes from my own personal experience and never went much further. Now that I have a blog with which to publish my observations, I will do so.

Today, I begin with Mr P, a mid-level executive in a large company I worked for. He tried to convert me to his way of thinking, which I increasingly resisted and ultimately rejected. Mr P came to represent for me a form of corrupt corporate "conventional wisdom" that I am afraid still prevails in too many organizations.

The company had an open door policy: i.e. any employee that had a legitimate need could approach anyone in the company at any leadership level with a concern or a business opportunity. Mr P told me that the open door policy was a sham. He used it as a way to identify "trouble-makers" and then eventually find a way to fire them.

He counseled me to stay in overhead support areas where the pay was pretty good and the heat was a lot less intense than the front lines where the real action was. He, of course, was a manager of overhead areas.

He made judgements about people based on perception instead of actual abilities. He would "blackball" people from promotion because of one thing that happened in one meeting. He would recommend people for promotion if he "liked" them - even though they were highly unqualified - I personally had to promote a person under me that he liked - who was not qualified and we all suffered for it. He, of course, would never admit that he was wrong. He blocked my attempt to promote a highly qualified and brilliant young woman that he thought "acted silly" in a meeting - fortunately I was able to get her promoted by another manager.

He advocated taking care of leaders first and people second.

Mr P did not think that an "executive" should even own a computer. He, of course, grew up prior to the age of PCs. He said "you have people working for you who work on computers".

His behavior in meeting was classic. He clearly tried to justify his own existence by criticizing the work of others. He felt that he was creating value by finding faults in the work of others - whether his comments had merit or not. Usually, I thought his criticism was without merit and solely intended to demonstrate that he had value because he had a position. In fact, he specifically told me that I should "bullshit" people in meetings - that I should take a strong position especially when I had no idea what I was talking about! Yes, he said that! In his experience, if you said it strongly enough, no one else would challenge you and it would make you be perceived as a strong and wise leader. He liked his own managers to be aggressive and challenge each other - even (especially) when they did not know what they were talking about. I assure you I am not making this up...

Mr P counseled me that diversity was an issue for someone else to worry about. I should only focus on hiring white males - let someone else worry about women and minorities.

The relationship with his peer executives was almost feudal. He expected his own people to be loyal to him in exchange for his protection. If you transferred to a rival, you became a "traitor". Several times, the execs over the groups were rotated. It was amazing to see him "purge the heretics" who were loyal to the former leader and see him transfer in his loyal followers and put them in postions of leadership.

Working with Mr P gave me a really good understanding of how middle managers are enemies of change and champions of the status quo when I later started doing reengineering as a consultant. Change is a bad thing for middle managers, because it causes more work, disruption, unhappiness among people, etc. The status quo is a good thing for the opposite reasons. Middle managers are incented to work hard to maintain the status quo because it means they will have less work, less pain, less unpleasant interaction with employees who are upset by the change. Change in an organization tends to open up all the closets and dredge up all the things that people don't like and puts them back on the table. It helped me see WHY it takes a senior exec who has vision and courage to overpower the laggard middle managers who just want an easy life.

And being an overhead manager, he counseled me to align myself with an operations person and to do whatever I could to ingratiate myself to him (yes, it would be a man....). Then I should do ANYTHING to support him, right or wrong. If it involved stretching the truth on the accounting records, then all the better. Just become a "whore" and do whatever the ops manager wants in exchange for good pay, good bonuses and a reasonably good life.

As I listened to all these things I was hearing, I came to the conclusion that I could not live this way. I decided to move from middle management into management consulting as an individual performer. For me, it was a really good decision.