Extensions exist to replicate you, and to actually do what the outside world perceives as your work. As such they are important. They will represent you in meetings, they will write your output, your reputation is directly in their hands.
The key containment strategy to apply to extension staff is relatively complex, and known as Censorship.
Usually, Extension staff are relatively high calibre individuals with significant skills and initiative, with whom a “do this do that” management style is unthinkable. In fact, you want them to be so. They are going to do your work for you, after all, so you need quality individuals.
To control such individuals, you need religion. Just as the company as a whole will have its full-time gods (e.g. cost control) or temporary gods (e.g. Quality Assurance Teams), you need to create a department or team god, for your Extension staff to worship. Obviously you can’t tell them that the team god is really yourself, so a proxy is needed. This is usually called “team spirit” and set up with care will neatly fill the role of Holy Ghost for you, watching their every move even when your back is turned.
There are a number of ways to create a team spirit, but the simplest and most effective is normally to rely on people’s need to feel “special”. Find a few adjectives which describe how your unit is, or could be, slightly different from those around it. “Free thinking and intellectual”, “non-politically correct”, “disciplined and efficient”, “calm and professional” for example. Amend or exploit the working environment just slightly to reinforce these. This is usually possible by changing desk layouts, relaxing or tightening flexi-working arrangements, bringing in a plant or two, adding a sofa, whatever. Keep reinforcing these.
Having established that the unit is special, you need to work on these individuals to feel like the elite, the high priests of this specialism. Again the need to feel special which exists in almost everyone, probably coupled with the urge to know limited-access information or to be trusted, gives you an easy route into this. Then, as with all cults, you initiate them into the secret rites or knowledge, which you call the Hidden Agenda.
The Hidden Agenda is what your team is “really” trying to achieve. Of course it is actually trying to achieve your personal glory, but you can dress that up. How? By identifying your success with the Hidden Agenda, and by simultaneously identifying the success of the Extension Staff with the Hidden Agenda.
This is not so difficult in practice. For example, you perceive you will gain credit or importance if Project X is successful. How do you represent this in terms of the Hidden Agenda? “Project X will allow us to grow the team, creating management development opportunities for all of you”. Project Y is not good news: “Project Y is in danger of relocating our unit to the northern office”. This latter may of course be too cynical for some Extension staff. In which case you need a more “corporate” opinion: “although Project Y looks on the surface like it improves efficiency and reduces costs, in practice it is bound to reduce customer service and consequently drive down sales in the longer term. I really think it is our duty to try and get it stopped before it does real damage to the company”.
Once you have set this up, Extension staff will act as Censors on your behalf, promoting your agenda because they perceive it as their agenda. Better still, they will develop the team spirit themselves, and the team or department as a whole will tend to drift towards your agenda, even if they don’t realise they are doing it.
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