50 shades of teal management: practical cases. Valera Razgulyaev

own losses as well. I conducted an analysis which showed that in transitioning from one level of management to another, around 30% of information gets lost. This means that if only 70% of information remains when an order gets to your direct subordinates, then in transmitting this order to the next level of management, you have to take 70% of these 70%: 0.7 × 0.7 = 0.49 = 49%, or less than half! Unfortunately, the information doesn’t merely get lost, but also gets twisted: this means that the remaining 51% is filled with something else, often contradictory to your thoughts, words and desires.

      Task 3

      Multiply this 0.7 by as many layers of hierarchy there are underneath you, and understand how little of what you say gets through to those who will have to directly carry out your orders, and how much distortion is introduced in the process.

      Is it clear now why nothing ever happens the way that you planned it?

      Now let’s look at the situation from the client’s side, who has encountered some insignificant, minor problem and lets your subordinate know about it. Your subordinate can’t solve the issue themselves and escalates it higher – what else can they do, when that’s always how they act? But the problem isn’t critical, you have more important and urgent tasks, and as a result, you put it off over and over again until at the end of the day you simply forget about it altogether. Then the exact same client runs into the exact same problem half a year later and understands that nobody even tried to take care of him. They tell the exact same employee, now with some surprise, that the problem could have been solved over all of this time. Your subordinate justifies their behavior, saying that they passed the client’s wishes along to their bosses and assures them that they’ll bring up the issue again. But even if they do exactly that, the result will be the same: you just won’t get around to it. And after some time, the exact same client will run into the aforementioned problem. Now put yourself in that client’s position: it’s not hard to imagine what they think about your company and its attitude toward its customers…

      Demotivation of rank-and-file employees

      All this time, your subordinates find themselves in a very unpleasant position of being wrongly accused. If they report up, then they can be turned into a sacrificial lamb; if they conceal the information, they can be asked at any moment why such a problem exists, but nobody knows about it. As a result, the poor fellow is in a constant state of stress, and even if their manager still had some power to influence the situation, then the subordinate will only lose motivation, stuck in a position of dependency.

      What happens as a result? We hire specialists to work on motivating our personnel and pay them salaries, but in actuality, everything that they concoct doesn’t work for long. There’s some mysterious important reason that demotivates people within the framework of a traditional management system. This reason is learned helplessness. We’ll talk in more detail about this reason in the fourth chapter. Now I’ll just say that the essence of this phenomenon comes down to the following: if we take an employee’s rights away, but nevertheless continue to ask as much of them as before, they will start fearing responsibility of any kind and begin to avoid it by any means necessary. This gives a person who is extremely demotivated and dodges responsibility as best they can, lacking any desire to make decisions. Meanwhile, it’s very important to understand that we are the ones who made them that way. After all, in everyday life outside the workplace, everything in this person’s life is the polar opposite: they take responsibility for where they live and what they eat – and if they have children, they’re responsible for their lives, too! So why in the world do they turn out to be "insufficiently responsible" to be worthy of the permissions necessary to make the simplest decisions for the company?

      Mass irresponsibility

      What’s going on inside the organization? Both managers and their subordinates are becoming hostages of a system of management under which it’s best not to be responsible for anything at all. This became the reason for an unbelievable dearth of good managers, despite a surfeit of qualified specialists. After all, who would be clamoring to take on additional responsibility for other people, too? In such a situation, those who are solely interested in career growth and power begin to flourish. As a result, the situation gets even more complicated: after all, such people consciously surround themselves with others who can’t compete with them and intentionally inflate their staff numbers to seem like more significant managers.

      Meanwhile, other employees initially protest at the sight of such phenomena but then, when they understand that their concerns are not being heard, they also begin to lose responsibility, asking themselves, “What, do we really need this? Why should the buck stop here?” They pass the requirement to figure problems out onto their supervisors, who ultimately have no time to do so, since they’re already so busy in the first place…

      “Wars” between divisions

      Twilight zone of rights and responsibilities — this is a zone between two or more divisions, where nobody in any division has the necessary rights to solve the problems that inevitably arise – and nobody wants to take on the responsibility for doing so.

      In a situation where nobody wants to take responsibility, “wars” unavoidably begin to brew between departments and divisions, which also has a negative influence on the overall results of the company’s work. For that matter, it is the divisions that have to work most closely together in order to achieve their common goals that fight the most often! It’s not hard to guess that the reason also lies in the management system.

      Everything usually begins with a problem that arises in the twilight zone of rights and responsibilities of two or more divisions – which is where nobody has the necessary rights to solve the problems that inevitably arise – and nobody wants to take on the responsibility for doing so. Otherwise, it would not have become a problem in the first place; it would simply be another task that each of the divisions successfully solves every day. By the way, the most common situation is when the problem at hand arises due to a lack of communication between these divisions: someone didn’t warn someone else, or else they didn’t hear or understand – or merely understood incorrectly. By itself, this is nothing to worry about. The issue is that when the problem arises, nobody is in any rush to solve it. Everyone thinks to themselves, “That’s not my responsibility. We have enough tasks on our own; we won’t have time to do everything otherwise!”

      But when nobody solves the problem, it begins to grow, and ultimately ends up becoming so enormous that the big boss at the top of the food chain can see it. Of course, any manager in such a situation has one universal solution: delegate the responsibility to someone. However, regardless of which of these divisions has its representative chosen as the responsible party, they will think that they were unfairly punished in favor of their colleagues from the other department (s). As a result, relationships between employees of these divisions grow worse; they begin to communicate less frequently, and the situation only continues to spin out of control. A vicious cycle is created, which I have drawn out in the diagram below.

      Problems begin to appear left and right out of this twilight zone between departments as though from a horn of plenty, even though everything was just fine not long ago. Management gradually begins to distribute responsibility in a decidedly random manner, "rewarding" choice employees without asking whether they have the necessary rights to carry out this responsibility. Alas, some tasks can only be completed in collaboration.

      Ultimately, the employees in these warring departments develop prejudices and they begin to assess the situation in a biased manner. It gets to the point that they begin to earnestly believe as though their colleagues really come to work every day and collect a salary in order to set them up and ruin their lives any way they can! This is a fundamentally incorrect conclusion,