Rules to Rule: Gotcha Management Is Failed Leadership
By: Nicholas Wilbur
Tags: Innovation, Management, Productivity, Efficiency, Management And Leadership

Rules to Rule: Gotcha Management Is Failed Leadership

Image by Keith Johnston from Pixabay

Managers have a tendency to make up for their lack of experience by being sticklers for useless rules.

It’s understandable. Busting people — for a policy infraction, for being late or lazy or languid — is not only exciting, but it’s rewarding from a manager’s perspective. It’s also human nature. Understanding this helps you understand how to avoid it.

Don’t Confuse the Punitive With the Productive

Gotcha management doesn’t advance the mission, and if you’re not advancing the mission, you’re hurting not only your company but also your future role in it.

Unfortunately, being punitive is self-re-enforcing, because it justifies a manager’s position. It’s easy to feel useful when you bust someone for a rule violation. It’s a demonstration not of your knowledge but of your power (you know the rule and are in a position of authority to enforce it).

While there are rules that need to be enforced, being a stickler for minutia is not a productive path forward.

The Hard Swallow

The famous “marshmallow test” is a psychological study wherein children are given the choice between a small immediate treat or a larger treat if they wait. The theory posits that children who are able to delay gratification are more likely to be successful as adults.

It seems like most middle managers are marshmallow test dropouts — firing at will with passionate but poorly aimed impulses without a specific reason for any single directive, let alone a big-picture motivation for their overall management approach.

And here’s the hard swallow: if you don’t feel that way, you’re probably the middle manager marshmallow dropout. If your management style is still punitive, you definitely are.

The instant gratification that comes with barking directives may work when you’re a general in charge of an elite team of Navy Seals, but it doesn’t work when you’re a clown at a zoo.

This is the difference that offends most inexperienced managers. It’s the difference that offended me. It’s the difference between having and working toward a long-term strategy versus settling on a dopamine hit in the moment because you wielded your authority over an underling. It’s the difference between what old hands know and young hands ignore.

There are many overlaps between parenting and management (balancing safety with freedom, strictness and encouragement, play time and skill development) but there is no better metaphor than the change in parenting the first child compared to the fourth.

It is rare to find an experienced parent or manager who is as fastidious, finicky, and fussy as a new one.

Pennies and Bad Fruit

When I worked as a janitor in college, my boss would put pennies behind the doors of offices we would clean. At the end of each job, he would go through and pick up any pennies we didn’t vacuum up.

For those of us who either knew the tactic or did a good enough job to vacuum behind the doors regardless of the trap, it was a small tip we could hand back to him at the end of the night with a wink and a nod for a job well done. For those who didn’t know or didn’t bother, it was a tongue lashing from the boss.

When I worked at Albertson’s, the produce manager would plant a bad piece of fruit on a display to see if we properly rotated the product The goal was the same as the pennies behind the door, and the response from workers was also the same.

Traps like these are aimed at “keeping people honest.” They serve as checks and balances to ensure that they’re doing what you pay them to do. And it draws a line in the sand between your mediocre employees and those who care about what they do.

But it’s not productive.

Tricking people and catching them in the act of childish infractions is amateurish and counterproductive to the mission. An ignorant and ineffective approach begets ignorant and ineffective lessons.

Gotcha management tactics make good employees feel that they aren’t trusted to do their jobs and bad employees resentful at being tricked. And it doesn’t work. A lazy employee is not made unlazy by being nitpicked. They just get sneakier.

If you want a staff that you can trust, you have to trust them. If you want a staff that acts like adults, you have to lead by example.

Complete Ownership

Nobody wants to suck at their job. Even the laziest, least motivated employees still care about their reputation. I’ve met plenty of uninspired workers, but none wanted to pull down their team.

A good manager recognizes his or her weakest link and takes ownership of the problem. If your staff isn’t fast, that’s your problem. If they’re not productive, your problem. Poorly trained, unmotivated, bad attitude? If you want to solve any of these issues, you have to take ownership of them.

That starts with good training, consistent guidance, and honest conversations.

The best managers I’ve ever known dedicated countless hours teaching younger and first-time workers about their mistakes.

Not punishing, not reprimanding, not yelling. Teaching.

It’s unrealistic to expect a new employee to act exactly the right way in every situation. The best managers teach the mission and teach the process, and in time, as staff members gain experience, they learn how to apply the process to specific incidences in order to advance the mission.

The worst managers see every wrong decision as a problem rather than a stone in the foundation of a future company leader.

Hall of Fame basketball coach Morgan Wootten once said, “You learn more from losing than winning.”

Not only did Wooten never have a losing season — not one — but he definitely didn’t make his players lose by setting traps to highlight their shortcomings.

“It doesn’t take any intelligence to send a kid home with his head hanging between his knees. But to send him home with his head up every night might show a little coaching.” — Morgan Wootten

A good coach doesn’t have to cut down his team to show them who’s boss. He teaches them how to learn from their mistakes and improve on their shortcomings. Wootten carried his team to five national championships and 33 conference titles in 46 seasons. He was the first high school coach in history to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, and that part of the legend is particularly important.

Wootten wasn’t coaching Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen for a decade. He was coaching kids, and a completely new batch of them, at varying skill levels, every couple years. He made no excuses about the quality of his teams. In fact, he took complete responsibility over them.

Don’t Flex for Show

The hard reality of management is that some people aren’t a good fit for the job. If you’ve done everything possible to set up your employee for success and it just isn’t working out, you have to act on it.

A bad apple spoils the bunch, as the saying goes. A bad employee who isn’t reprimanded or fired is an example to others that they can act the same way without facing punishment.

Unfortunately, firing people is difficult. It’s personal, it’s emotional, and it’s awkward. So instead of terminations, weak managers will resort to the gotcha management tactics that created the problem in the first place.

Not only do you lose credibility when you flex only for show — when you “bust” someone for a penny behind the door but don’t take any official action — but you embolden the same behavior in the rest of the staff.

Firing people is a part of every every manager’s job. It’s necessary to keep the team running efficiently and to keep the company profitable. But too often managers flex about things that aren’t worthy of a reprimand and cower when a termination is actually called for.

A Philosophical Hiccup

Not every manager is an intellectual knuckle-dragger in a cheap suit. I say that because I was once a young manager who made these very same mistakes but did so from a place of elevated intellectual do-gooderism. I wore a cheap suit but held my knuckles, and chin, high.

I personally believe that you have to excel at the small stuff in order to be trusted with the big stuff. People who earn their seniority, master each rung of the ladder, are useful no matter what role they play on the team, and climb their way to the top are the best workers any company can ask for.

I believe that how you do anything is how you do everything, or as Heraclitus said, “Day by day, what you do is who you become.”

But not everything is black and white.

In business, it is not so easy to find motivated mail clerks. Not every team is the Dream Team. It is rare to find career-oriented baristas. Generally, your lower-level employment positions are filled with over-educated dreamers who are intellectually superior to the work they are paid to do. These are the situations that try manager’s souls.

It’s a two-sided maxim, this idea that you must be good at the small to take on the large. On the one hand, it’s true that if you can’t be bothered to do easy work well, why would you be elevated to a more important job? But when dealing with real people in the real world, the tedium of a task can be demotivating itself. Intelligent people can feel undervalued and underutilized, not to mention the more obvious: underpaid.

There is no single solution to every problem, but when it comes to the problem of staff making mistakes, the solution should be run through the mission-specific filter. Not all staff make mistakes because they need to be taught, and not all corrections serve the mission.

Knowing which is which is what makes a manager a leader.

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