Loyalist staff - Praetorians and Dependents

Loyalists are your Praetorian Guard, the devoted foot soldiers whose first duty is to their Emperor. They are bound to you in some way personally and identify your success with their own. Because of this they can be trusted to pursue your agenda (i.e. you) without the need for elaborate containment strategies. Moreover, you can be more open with Loyalists about the agenda. As Extensions replicate your actions, so Loyalists replicate your ego, image and attitudes.

Image has a far greater impact on your chances of getting ahead than mere substance, and so Loyalists are therefore extremely valuable, so valuable in fact, that it is worth spending significant effort on creating and maintaining Loyalists and loyalty. The next post looks at ways of achieving this.

A quick glance at a history book, however, will reveal that at least a quarter of Roman Emperors were actually murdered, or at least deposed, by their Praetorian Guard. What went wrong? The answer lies in a more careful study of the reasons for their disloyalty. In every case, the Emperors failed to distinguish clearly between two kinds of Loyalists, each motivated differently. These are Prateorians and Dependents.

Praetorians  are those who (correctly) perceive that by clinging on to your coat-tails, they will get ahead of the game themselves. Although they are loyal to you personally, this loyalty is motivated by self-interest. When you are no longer able to serve their interests, their loyalties are suspect and they should be treated as normal Extensions, Inferiors, Minions or Specialists accordingly.

Dependents need you personally, as parent-figure, proxy-object-of-desire, rock or some similar motivation. They are devoted to you for reasons not grounded rationally. Unless you openly betray their dependence, they are unquestioningly loyal, even when it is not necessarily in their interests to do so.

To return to our Roman Emperors for a moment, they too often failed to perceive that their Praetorians were mostly interested in the ability of the Emperor to deliver money and gifts, the ancient equivalents of workplace salary-rises and promotions, and/or failed to ensure that the Commanders of the Praetorian Guard were Dependents. The result: suspect loyalties.

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Specialist staff

Specialists have vital roles, which contribute to your success and image, but which you do not understand. They tend to be less obviously motivated by climbing the greasy pole, and to value their intellectual or moral independence. Often they have the additional possibility of screwing up like Minions, only in a much bigger way (crashing the entire corporate network for example). In short, they are a containment nightmare.

There is no avoiding it, these people will take some of your valuable time away from self-promotion. You can’t afford to take your eyes off them for too long. There are some silver linings, however.

Firstly, the opinions of Specialists are generally disregarded by anybody that counts. They are not only a containment nightmare for you, they are a containment nightmare for everybody else too, due to their unfortunate tendency to point out the truth in an indiscreet way. “Jill’s department could all be replaced by a voice-response system” may be true, but Jill is unlikely to agree with it in a meeting. Jill will henceforth seek to undermine the credibility of the Specialist with this opinion, usually by ensuring that the Specialist’s views are only taken seriously when confined strictly within his/her specialism ("should we accept “*” or “#” as the decline button on the new voice-response unit?"). 

The most important containment strategy for specialists is to support Jill when she expresses this opinion– a tactic known as the Jack and Jill gambit. Within specialism: they add value and are important. Outside specialism: “Jack has such a deep technical role that he doesn’t really have the breadth of vision to see the wider agenda”.

Secondly, they are frequently individuals whose personalities make them ideal material for turning into Dependents (see below). As Dependents are the perfect contained staff, your problem is solved. Specialists often seem to have gone into specialist roles as an escape from their own deficiencies. Typical examples include the Nerd, the Mad Professor, the Unfortunate Loser and the Poor Communicator. Prey on their own self-perception (which is often accurate anyway) of themselves as society’s victim, by becoming their friend and supporter. (See Creating Dependents).

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Minion staff

Minions carry out small, but necessary tasks within the team. Helpdesk support staff, incoming post sorting workers, ledger clerks are good examples. VERY IMPORTANT: if you are lucky enough to have a secretary or PA, he or she is not a Minion, he or she must be an Extension or better still a Dependent. Unless their role is confined to opening junkmail and booking hotel rooms, secretaries and PAs have real power over how you are perceived. Do not underestimate this by undervaluing their importance to you.

There is usually only one containment strategy necessary with Minions: make sure they don’t screw up. This is a consequence of their roles, which are rather like telephones. Everyone takes telephones for granted, and assumes they will always be functioning. Have you ever had yours fail? Suddenly you are cut off, and it is maddening. A more common and similar experience occurs with mobiles when the reception goes bad. “Hello, hello?….. Hellooooo? Are you still there? …. F***ing thing. Bloody useless technology.” The activities of Minions are usually like this. You absolutely do NOT want to be the manager responsible for the Chief Exec’s post containing that contract not arriving this morning do you? The Chief Exec doesn’t even notice when his post is on time the other 364 days.

So Containment is simple. Put an Extension in charge of the Minions, and make sure he or she establishes two things. One, some basic checks e.g. always sending an item of mail to him/herself every day and verifying that it arrives. Two, create a perception amongst the Minions that they are always being watched. Take a couple of random minutes each month to appear silently in the post-sorting room, look around briefly, and depart. Make sure your Extension does the same thing a little more often. Then appear occasionally (once a quarter is often enough to leave the impression) checking the Chief Exec’s post out of the sorting room and upstairs to the Exec’s corridor. Once again, you will succeed in creating the impression of the Holy Ghost continuously checking the Minions for sin.

As a slight digression, a very effective technique for dealing with Minions (and others for that matter) who appear to stray a little too often is to tail them. Pick a time when you would naturally want to be networking or generally loose in the building, and keep appearing in the same office as the Minion. It is surprising how intimidating it can be to find your boss continually behind you.

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Inferior staff

Inferior staff are what you were before you were promoted to be the team boss. You can do their jobs better than them, that’s one of the ways you got promoted.

Happily, the containment strategy for Inferior staff is a much more straightforward task than containing Extension staff. There are four reasons for this.

First of all, you will have created a team spirit. This will usually be based on the peculiarities of the Inferior staff, as these will generally be the bulk of your staff. So they will already be, to some extent anyway, “bought in” to you and what you are trying to achieve on the surface.

Secondly, you can do their jobs. This means you know what they are up to, and they are going to find it difficult to slip anything past you that you won’t find out about, probably beforehand.

Thirdly, one of them is probably someone who was one of your close peers not long ago. He or she will tend to want to retain that special relationship with you, and part of his/her strategy for doing so will be to tell you what is going on. This is called “keeping you in the loop”, not “sneaking to the boss”, by the way. The street-credibility of the Inferior in question is best maintained by referring to it as “keeping the boss’s feet on the ground before he/she disappears into the management ivory tower”.

Fourthly, they all believe they were better than you, are still better than you, and therefore they will be next in line for your job after your next promotion. As it is clear that you are likely to have considerable say in who gets promoted under you as your replacement, they will tend to want to stay in line and better still, to emulate you.

All of these considerations will tend to ensure that Inferior staff contain themselves, with little effort on your part. If they ever step off-message, you will know about it immediately, if not before, and be able to address it quickly with minimum damage in any case.

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Extension staff

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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The big problem with staff and what to do about it - containment

A working definition of “line management”: letting people screw things up on your behalf.

Think about it. Why are you the team boss? Because you are superior to them, obviously. So are they going to do the job as well as you would? Well maybe, possibly better actually. Are they going to do the job in such as way as to ensure your success lies at the heart of their work? It ain’t necessarily so. Because they don’t, in general, understand that this is the main objective of their activities. And apart from exceptionally valuable staff (see “dependents”), you can hardly explain this to them.

Therein lies the problem. These people are dangerous and need to be contained. Staff can be divided into a number of types and each requires a different containment strategy.

The objective of each containment strategy is twofold:

A. maximise the time your staff spend on promoting your image and generally looking after number one (i.e. you)
B. minimise the chances of your staff doing anything that would reflect negatively on your image

Since it is usually the latter that causes the problems, some effort has to go into limiting their potential to cause damage. We'll now have a look at each type of staff and consider how to best contain them:

• Extension staff
• Inferior staff
• Minion staff
• Specialist staff
• Loyalist staff (who come in two subtypes):
• Praetorians
• Dependents

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