The Set-Up-to-Fail Syndrome (1998)
hbr.org
hbr.org
It went downhill from there. I became the target of a lot of bullying and harassment from the alpha jackass, leader of the coked up jackasses that worked there, and eventually he gave me a degrading nickname that implied that everything I touched broke.
I was constantly stressed out, felt like the worst employee in the world (at that age I didn't know I was the victim at this point) and this self-fulfilling prophecy just made things worse. Suddenly I'd become bad at my job. I couldn't fix 5 computers a day, and they often came back with problems.
Was this issue me? No. the issue was a highly toxic workplace where I was berated for my successes ("Oh look, he fixed one, must be a F****n miracle") and expected to fail.
I'd have quit, but I needed the work. The manager, a lowlife cokehead and strip club aficionado, mercy fired me 2 months in. He saw the problem but didn't care to fix it. Of course, I was better off. They were a crooked shop to begin with and my reputation was at risk for having worked there even 2 months.
Many years later I am a well respected manager who never treats employees like this. I am well aware that if my employee is failing me, then in some way I am failing them. I work on the relationship with the employee as much as I work on the issue. I encourage their successes, help them work through any issues, and show confidence in them until they start showing confidence in themselves.
I can honestly say this approach has worked wonders, and I've seen huge HUGE turnarounds in employees who thought they could never make it. Now they're rock stars.
> Many years later I am a well respected manager who never treats employees like this.
Sounds like it was effective to me.
I came to realize after it was all over that the shop had been selling used parts as new, overcharging customers for billable time, and who knows what else that I've forgotten by now.
The point of me sharing my experience was to corroborate the article. A bad environment can turn a good employee bad by eroding their self confidence and making them feel small. I experienced that to an extreme degree. I survived it, not unscathed. And I'm proud to have not propagated the atrocious way I was treated.
Indeed to be well respected by the incredible team of people that I work with means the world to me. But, my desire to help others has always extended to my coworkers, and then the people I managed either as a supervisor or a manager. Customer service is priority one, and my first customers are the people I work with. If I'm not giving them the best customer service possible, how can I expect them to reciprocate that to others, nevermind our paying customers.
School, and often our parents do not teach us that there are plenty of narcissistic greedy assholes that will eat you alive. Instead too often we find that the leaders of the organizations that should be teaching us what to look out for, ARE what to look out for.
This person learned that lesson and got out rather than many people I see trapped in situations like that.
I have had to fire people over the years, of course, but whenever it gets that far I feel terrible that it got to that point, that how this person was managed is a failure for the company and the departing employee. I hope it’s obvious that none of this is expressed to the person being fired — they are miserable enough about their situation and don’t care about the company any more, if they ever did.
Always there is a post mortem: did we hire the wrong person — if so what could we have done better? As for the management — again, what could we have done better?
BTW I’m sorry you had to deal with that horrible experience. At least it was only two months.
You won't find the answers you need by doing a post-mortem.
It's really the only opportunity since if you had the answers beforehand perhaps the person would not have been "let go".
If your point is that post mortems aren't that great, I agree. It's like debugging a crash dump rather than a live process. But sometimes the core dump is all you have.
Totally possible they were sabotaging your work. Good riddance!
But with 60+ students, this self-examination can be exhausting.
And if you begin to micro-manage/criticize students, you risk them making them feel stupid. I have found that you have to do the opposite: you have to give them more freedom, more personal responsibility, and you have to challenge them to succeed. They have to own it. They have to have the agency to figure things out and ask questions. It's the only solution. You can't coddle someone to success.
Of course if this fails, I look like a shitty teacher. Teaching is hard. Managing is hard too, I am sure.
I teach middle-school students to be clear. At certain ages, yes students need a lot of structure and they can't figure things out themselves.
The most succinct way I've heard this massive cultural problem explained.
So I treat everything as a learning experience. Recap anything and everything that went right or wrong and talk it out. What did we do well, what could have been done better. All of that.
The problem only comes when you run into someone who is a constant victim. Any negative feedback immediately becomes someone else's fault. Any perceived injustice is immediately a huge deal.
I do not know how to work with that type of person. If they do not see their faults, either professional or personal, it's hard for me to help. Any suggestions?
He first explains the process. Takes the blame on himself if the instructions were not clear. When the failure continues, he warns. And if it continues again, he punishes.
https://titusng.com/2013/03/04/the-test-of-sun-tzus-art-of-w...
Then I found out about OCEAN and realized the 4 factor tests were always avoiding the only one that mattered: Neuroticism.
(Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism)
https://www.thelifedoctor.org/the-narcissist-s-prayer
While it is unlikely that the uncoachable are full blown narcissists, those employees probably need a lot of counseling to overcome whatever life experiences that taught them corrective feedback is a personal attack.
I'm a bit wary of anything touching on narcissism, there was a big jump in people who loved talking about their narcissist ex the past 2-3 years. (the cousins of body language doctors via true crime YouTube)
Me too
> I'm a bit wary of anything touching on narcissism, there was a big jump in people who loved talking about their narcissist ex the past 2-3 years.
The term narcissist maybe overused, but a lot of us also learned to recognise it in recent years. It is a fairly common behaviour, and people can have narcissistic traits without having clinical NPD. Just because some people claim their ex was narcissistic without adequate justification, that does not mean there are not also many who are right when they say it.
I think being forced into being confined with people during lockdowns also made people realise what they were putting up with. Because it is so different from how reasonable people behave, and it is associated with abusive behaviour, it can be hard to figure out what is going on.
A bigger problem IMO is the overuse of "gaslighting" which dilutes its meaning and makes it harder to clearly describe the actual behaviour.
[Citation Needed]
What triggered this large-scale awakening?
Assuming we are avoiding extreme lack of conscientiousness, it is much easier to have the conversation with someone who has better emotional stability so that we can decide whether they can modify their natural inclinations.
But what's truly ironic is that some of this neuroticism is justified: we are in fact perceived negatively and organizations are in fact trying not to hire or get rid of us. And so our employment is only as good as our ability to mask. Which, as you might imagine, does not make it easier to not be neurotic.
However, there is research to suggest that neurotic people have more active amygdala than average. So yes, we can override our panic, and yes, we can learn to do it better, but there is a gotcha: all these overrides tend to fail at the most inopportune moment. And that is when already overwhelmed by stress.
If they are not an asset to the team/company, then I would be inclined to proceed down the 'improve or else' path, starting of course with informal but frank conversations / formal reviews about the specific shortcomings, with specific examples and specific ways similar situations should be handled in the future[0].
Otherwise it gets muddier, because there is conflicting interest between a 'happy' status quo where his/her growth is going to be kneecapped vs. potentially demoralizing them trying to force them to grow. Imo all you can really do there is be upfront at 1-on-1's and formal reviews.
A final point is that this behavior is not likely lost on the rest of the team: regardless of how the 'offender' is handled it is important to not let things fester. I've been part of more than one group where morale was wrecked because management was too concerned with being 'nice' to move on from problematic persons.
[0]Specifics are key here, not just for them but for you: if you can't distill down the desired corrections into actionables your subordinates aren't going to be able to either.
I do agree with the sentiment of addressing things head-on, but these employees can be very delicate. This is the only type of employee I handle with kid gloves.
1. Active listen to everything they say, even if it’s their unique perception of things. Do not challenge them, repeat what they said sometimes to make them feel smart, laugh at all the jokes, make them feel heard. You can acknowledge what they say and still not agree with them. Say “that must feel hard”, “that sounds disappointing”, “I can see you’re putting in a lot of effort” — acknowledge the feelings and generally true things (most people put effort into their work), not the minute facts if you think they could be wrong.
2. Give them a lot of praise and thanks, but be genuine. Don't make up praise, just turn up the positive feedback and turn down the negative. Basically, give this person 10% of the most important negative feedback only and 90% of the most important positive feedback.
3. Give them autonomy and trust. Take them off the critical path so they don’t have any real deadlines if you are worried about their performance, there is always backlog. Give them a simple project and trust them completely with the execution. Have 1:1s sometimes to give very very gentle guidance - “what do you think about X?” “What are some alternatives to Y?” “I read this article about Z, why don’t you have a look?”
4. Be friendly to them. Communicate a lot and informally, don’t be formal or involve many people in the communication. Focus on the frequency of the communication. There are some other tips in a book about building professional friendships called The Like Switch.
5. Increase bus factor, these people sometimes still leave unexpectedly. Someone might say something about them publicly or privately, or there will be some perceived slight against them and they will feel victimized.
6. Over time, you can gradually bring such a person back to the critical path and show them “the way” of being secure in the workplace by example.
7. Don’t talk negatively about this person behind their back, even if you usually share your work frustrations with work friends and even the small stuff (“X never washes his mug in the sink, I’m constantly washing up after him” — not even benign remarks like that). If it comes out, that will undo all of your hard work building up this employee. If it doesn’t, but other people learn about this person’s traits, then they might say something and that could turn into a significant problem, even leading to this person leaving because of a perceived slight.
Also, protect yourself. Speak to your own manager (but only them) about this person candidly when you are asked. Say that they tend to view themselves as a victim and they’re not very responsive to feedback, but that you are taking steps A, B, C and D, and that hopefully you’re seeing progress, like that they are less timid with you, they have fewer conflicts in the team, etc. Such a person may go to your manager and stir things up if they feel like they’re victimized by you. While it may be true that this person is victimized by basically everyone from time to time, some headaches can still come to you. So make sure your manager can back you up. The truth and a little bit of time is the best antidote to this type of person if they mean harm to you.
Anyways, they are not bad people, they just slipped into the victim mentality or maybe were raised that way. You can help them rebuild their self-esteem and stop seeing themselves as a victim if you must or want to. It’s probably the most challenging employee to manage though, so expect turbulence. But sometimes we don’t choose who we manage, and also, this person probably has many other great qualities which may make them very successful if they can overcome the victimhood.
This works in my own practice, but it’s definitely a delicate situation.
If the situation isn't working, either the thing itself needs to change (rarely possible in many situations), or the person needs to change, or there needs to be a different person there.
It is a fault at that point, even if it's just a personal difference and entirely reasonable for them to be doing whatever it is they are doing. Regardless, it still isn't working.
And at the end of the day, the managers perceptions (and their superiors perceptions) are what matters. It's literally why they are there, and their job.
Is it fair? Often, no it is not.
Is it life? Yes.
Only one person on the team has the ability to fire anyone. Everyone can quit.
So, when push comes to shove who’s perception of if things are working matters?
If the other party quit, there is no shove or pushing.
All of that is the same at any and every company (barring union rules or other contracts), no need to put it in the ad.
And yes, ultimately every company gets what the consequences of its actions results in - and managers are agents of the company.
The hardest part is often those consequences are a lot more pleasant for them then it is for labor/employees. That is also life.
No good manager is going to abuse it either.
They aren’t fundamentally the bad guy, anymore than you’re fundamentally the good guy. They do have a job to do. Plenty of folks on either side are abusive and shitty.
The manager has the majority of the power though, most of the time. Unless labor is willing and able to walk, of course.
No need to put it in the ad, because it’s literally ‘the deal’. It’s the whole point of the ad!
Do you similarly complain if you get dumped by someone you’re dating because ‘they didn’t put it in the ad’?
They have a job they need someone to do, and they’ll pay money for someone to do it the way they think it needs to be done. If you want their money and think you can do that, you respond.
If you don’t like the deal and how it’s shaping up, you can walk. If they don’t like the deal, they can fire you.
How else do you think it would work?
The people who always sleep well at night will just tell you the comfortable lie while stabbing you in the back, or other you into being the bad guy and them the good guy no matter what.
The reality is, bad things sometimes happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people. And sometimes people do smart things that don’t work, and dumb things that do.
Sometimes, because it is what needs to happen. Othertimes, just because someone thought it was. Or by chance.
And at the end of the day, someone has to make that call or break that tie, or the world stops.
And as nice as that would be sometimes, it rarely is possible.
Often, the better alternative (long term) for everyone is ripping off the band-aid sooner rather than later. But, sometimes, people won’t let you.
If you’re lucky, they’ll take ownership for their part and do what they can to make sure it’s as clean as possible, eh?
Words to live by: Hire fast, fire fast. Yep, as the article mentions, that has costs. What has a much higher cost is hiring the wrong person and hanging on to them, hoping to manage them into a great fit.
I've been in such situation before and I accepted that it was mine and only fault for being a bad person.
This sounds like a game theoretic setup.
I'm annoyed that, in this scenario, the boss gets all the upside of good results, and none of the downside of bad results. In such a context, every IC should aim to become a manager immediately.