50 shades of teal management: practical cases. Valera Razgulyaev

we come to management. In the general sense of the word, we’re always talking about a certain meaningful action that leads to a necessary and expected result. The simplest example: when we drive a car, obedient to every movement of the steering wheel in our hands and pedals under our feet, nobody has any reason to doubt that we’re not controlling it. That management has certain limitations related to the physical capabilities of the car, which can’t speed up past a certain point or stop instantaneously. But we can clearly distinguish this situation from another, where we might say that driver lost control of the car: when turning the wheel or any manipulations of the pedals don’t have any result, as the car is being carried in a direction where we have no desire to go. I believe that the exact same thing can happen in any other situation: when we get an undesirable result over some length of time and can’t do anything about it, we have to honestly admit to ourselves that we aren’t controlling that situation. There are two options here. Either we’re in a case like with the car, where we have lost control and can first formulate, then organize the necessary conditions for returning that control – or we never actually controlled the situation in the first place, and the fact that it was in some way advantageous in the past is in no way connected to any actions of our own.

      I stopped and devoted so much attention to these seemingly obvious things because right now, the majority of readers will face a serious battle with themselves. I’m going to assert things that are so sad, your subconscious will start trying to convince you of practically anything under the sun – anything to avoid believing these realities. Then mechanisms of self-deception, refined by all of your accumulated life experience, will come into play: well, of course you’re right, and not the author at all. What’s more, how could he possibly compare if he’s in a totally different job, or region, with different people, all in a different industry… And who is this author anyways, and why is it worth listening to him?! No matter what regalia and qualifications I might have, they won’t be weighty enough to warrant listening to; my experience won’t be suitable, and my education will seem insufficient. Therefore, I won’t even bother talking about them; instead, reader, I ask the following of you.

      Task 2

      For some time, turn off your inner critic and remember someone who held a great deal of authority in your eyes, whose words you always listened to, at the very least; imagine that that person is the one telling you all of these things, and then read the text in their voice.

      I think you’ll agree that over the entire course of the 20th century, the very best leaders on our planet tried to create a certain kind of autopilot within their individual companies, all in the hopes of achieving the optimal result. But a cursory overview of business statistics would show you that nobody ever found this "sorcerer’s stone": companies both large and small, from around the world continue to run themselves into the ground, which we can hardly call a desirable result of their management strategies. I’ll go on to bring in examples of negative phenomena in your organization: those that you know and don’t like, but can’t influence in any way, shape or form. How do I know about them? They’re everywhere! For me, this means one thing in particular: leaders in companies have lost control, just like in the aforementioned example with the driver and the car. I understand that this is really hard to accept: after all, others judge us by how well we manage, and you probably measure your own success by the very same criteria. We spend lots of time and energy on this, and if we’re not the owners of a company, then we even get paid for this management! But how can we admit here that we don’t do this? Still, I ask you to judge yourself not by the amount of time spent or how tired you are, but by the results of your actions. So let’s look at what we have in the following categories.

      Span of control: the average number of subordinates underneath a single manager.

      Management expenses

      A traditional system of management resembles a pyramid, where the chief executive is at the very top, and rank-and-file workers make up the foundation. Between them lie many layers of sub-managers. Their quantity depends on the size of the organization and its span of control: the average number of subordinates underneath a single manager.

      Once you know the number of employees in a company and its span of control, you can always count the number of levels and the number of managers on each of them. For example, with a span of control of 5 and 156 employees, we have:

      • 125 rank-and-file employees;

      • 25 middle managers;

      • 5 upper managers;

      • and one chief executive.

      What might the expenses of managing such a system be? In order to compare companies amongst themselves, it would be best to use the percentage of total expenditures on managers out of total payroll. For example, if a manager in our example company earn on average twice as much as their subordinates, then:

      • 125 rank-and-file employees receive 1 salary each = 125 base salaries;

      • 25 middle managers receive 2 base salaries = 50 base salaries;

      • 5 upper managers receive 4 base salaries = 20 base salaries;

      • 1 chief executive receives 8 base salaries = 8 base salaries.

      In total, all of the managers in this company receive a total of 50 +20 +8 = 78 base salaries, which makes up 78 / (78 +125) = 78 / 203 ≈ 38% of the company’s overall payroll – which is a considerable line item of expenses for any company! What’s more, the bigger the organization, the more levels of management and managers, which means a higher percentage that their salaries make up out of the overall payroll, even though they do not create any of the added value for the client. Doesn’t sound too inspiring, does it? But this is the most insignificant problem in a classical system of management.

      Constantly overloaded management

      In my consulting days, I thought that many managers didn’t want to start the projects that their companies obviously needed due to their insufficient competency and lack of desire to admit as much in order to start studying the topic at hand. The reality turned out to be far more banal: extremely competent, hard-working, knowledgeable and industrious managers are in constant time trouble: they don’t even have enough time to finish with the current routines being imposed upon them, like an avalanche in the mountains. All this happens, I’ll remind you, because of the classical management system, where problems are escalated from the bottom up. As a result, the higher a manager’s level, the more subordinates they have and the more problems end up on their plate.

      They physically don’t have time to solve all of them, which leads to overwork during the week, regular work during the weekends and a lack of relaxation, even on vacation. But none of this helps, and tasks start to get stuck on a waiting list, and some of them get lost from sight forever in favor of more urgent and important ones. Meanwhile, the manager understands that the problem they themselves don’t solve might result in serious losses both for the whole company and for themselves personally, leading to a state of constant stress that the manager or boss begins to project outwardly. This is especially true for those employees who inform them about new problems or are in any way, shape or form party to them. As a result, a confrontation between bosses and their subordinates begins, which only worsens the situation, since the manager must now spend their energy on that, too.

      Slow problem solving

      Meanwhile, the organization’s real problems begin to get solved more and more slowly. After experiencing an inappropriate reaction from their managers, subordinates share information about new problems less and less frequently with the higher-ups, while lacking the necessary privileges and resource to solve them at lower levels. What’s more, due to the fear of having the