Sometimes your boss will be a true Extension (or maybe a Praetorian) of the Superior. You can generally spot this because there will appear to be a natural relationship between the two, without any of the curious or artificial giveaway-behaviours of the other types. Again, Maos, Thatchers and Saddams are most likely to have Lieutenants. This can be very good news. If you are nicely ensconced as a Praetorian of your boss, and that same or similar relationship applies up the chain, you are likely to find yourself brought into contact with the Superior in a positive way, and possibly even begin to be treated as an Extension of the Superior instead of just your boss: promotion is just a stratagem away
Showing posts with label praetorians. Show all posts
Showing posts with label praetorians. Show all posts
Dealing with your immediate Boss
Your relationship with respect to your own boss is of paramount importance, as it is likely that he or she will be involved in almost any decision process which determines whether you acquire the plums or the prunes. A key question then, is what role you should play in this relationship.
The answer to this should be apparent from the previous section on staff. You need to
a) benefit from your own boss landing desirable work which he or she will delegate down. So the second best option is that you want to be an Extension staff member of your boss
b) benefit from your boss treating you as a confidant, and providing you with confidential information. So the better option is that you want to try to be a Loyalist. It goes without saying that you should want to be a Praetorian, not a Dependent.
The Praetorian role is the key. It is essential to remember that you are not there to be useful to your boss; your boss is there to be useful to you. If he or she can no longer deliver (to you) then it is time to dispose of them.
Disposing of your boss is covered in the next post.
Disposing of your boss is covered in the next post.
Assuming your boss is actually useful to you, so you prefer not to go for immediate disposal, how do you exploit his/her usefulness? Proxy-trade agreements are the usual method. They work like this as follows. Frequently your boss will need particular information, or will need certain actions carrying out, but cannot be seen do be doing their own dirty work. Meetings can present great opportunities for this – see the whole sections on meetings in later posts, particularly the sections on using meetings to block things. The method by which the information is obtained, or the meeting role taken on, will require you to be appointed by your boss to a position or task which will be useful to you on an ongoing basis: secretary to a certain decision making committee for example.
The more effective you are in performing the dirty work required by your boss, and equally important, the more efficient you are in returning with useful information (e.g. that Peter sat next to Flopsy and Mopsy in a particular meeting), the more trusted you will become. This will tend to lead on to higher status assignments, where it eventually becomes anomalous that someone as junior as you has a position in such a senior group or project. This is easily resolved: you have to be made more senior.
Another area of boss-exploitation to be managed carefully is your Loyalist role. Be very careful that you really are a Praetorian and not a Dependent. Why? Because the whip-hand swaps hands between these two roles. If you are useful enough, your boss will be keen to retain you. If he/she thinks you are a Dependent, your retention will be managed via intangibles: love, attention, listening and similar useless baggage. You need your retention to be managed via salary, promotions, listening (to you hint about needing a company car). Tactically, imply that your loyalty is of course never in doubt, but continuing not to bite the hand depends on the hand feeding. Avoid your boss on Monday mornings and Friday afternoons, as this is when bosses look for Dependents to most betray their dependence. If you start to feel you need his/her attention frequently, you need to take a long hard look at your motivations: who exactly is the boss here? It should be you: if it isn’t, you need to make some changes.
Assuming your are confident of your Praetorian status, and furthermore confident that it is your boss that it is dependent on you, you need to frequently hint that your loyalty is in question. No full-blown “if you don’t gimme loadsamoney I’m off” threats of course. Just gentle blackmail. Read the trade press regularly and visibly (assuming it contains job adverts). Refer occasionally to being happy about being paid the market-rate for the job (doesn’t matter if you are or not, bosses always worry that they are unable to pay the market rate for the job. This extends right up to the board-room: just look at the stories in the press about executive pay, which really boil down to the chairman’s paranoia that he/she needs to pay the chief-executive the market-rate). Note not “unhappy”, but “happy”. Keep it subtle but reasonable. Refer to your grade a lot - phrases such as “the group of us on grade 7” are appropriate – but try and include comparisons which imply your grade is too low. The phrase to try for is “the group of us on grade 7, even including old Bill”. Everyone knows old Bill is a four-star plank, so it is ridiculous that you are rated as lowly as him. But don’t say that. Just leave that judgement to your boss. He/she has to buy in to the premise of regarding “grade 7” as a group to follow the conversation through. That in itself guarantees that your boss will evaluate this group in his/her mind, and make the comparisons. All this is designed to reinforce your “keep feeding me” message, without overdoing it, a strategy known as Retention Blackmail.
OK, you’ve made sure the emotion is ironed out and you are a Praetorian. Now how about the opposite balance? Are you sure you are a Praetorian and not just an Extension. An Extension is a good thing to be (are you sure you are not a Minion or Inferior for heaven’s sake? Just checking!), but not as good as a Praetorian. Why? Because Extensions are unable to indulge in the Retention Blackmail strategy with anywhere near the same effectiveness.
Extensions are just that: Extensions. They perform a role that the boss could perform just as well, if not better, if he/she did not have better things to do. If an Extension departs then a) the boss can do it themselves for a while and b) replacement is a relatively straightforward task. Praetorians, on the other hand, have access to areas the boss cannot reach, or more relevantly be seen to reach. And that access is hard to replace. Extensions often have another disadvantage: they tend to meet the boss in more formal and/or professional encounters. Loyalists are expected to chat, that’s what they’re there for after all. If the chat turns to matters that interest the Loyalist occasionally instead of the boss, well that’s just natural isn’t it?
What kind of people do you need?
You will doubtless, at some point, come across literature on the subject of team-roles and team-building. The Belbin model makes a frequent appearance, as well as related academic items such as Myers-Briggs, PI and so on. They are all very well up within reason, but they miss the point. You are not trying to build a balanced team, or necessarily an effective team – you are trying to build a team which is useful to you.
This means the individuals in it need to complement you in the right way, and do not necessarily need to complement each other at all. In more detail:
Extension staff – these are meant to do your work for you. So obviously they should be like you (although not as good of course).
Specialists and Inferiors – these should complement you, especially if your Extension staff are going to be like you. If you have poor attention to detail, your Specialists and Inferiors need loads of it, and so on. In this way they will function effectively in tandem with you and your Extensions.
Minions – well who cares? Actually it’s best if these people are opposite to you in one key way. You are looking after number one; they should look after everyone else. Look for displaced nurses, infant school teachers, social workers and the like, people with a conscience about both individual duties and infantile trivia.
Loyalists – only one quality really matters: the skill of getting people to talk to them. If they are going to Spy for you, in any kind of workplace environment they are going to do most of it by listening. It is hardly realistic (well most of the time) for them to secretly photograph documents or observe other managers through infra-red binoculars. Having said that, it is surprising (well perhaps not) how many technical support staff spend Friday afternoons reading the company email records for amusement.
A final thought: Loyalists are invariably better in this regard if they are smokers. There is a camaraderie of moaning and indiscretion in smoking rooms and in those wet porches outside the back entrance of companies without special internal smoking areas, which often transcends rank or status.
A final thought: Loyalists are invariably better in this regard if they are smokers. There is a camaraderie of moaning and indiscretion in smoking rooms and in those wet porches outside the back entrance of companies without special internal smoking areas, which often transcends rank or status.
Creating and Maintaining Loyalists and Loyalty
OK, so Loyalist staff are particularly valuable. Where do they come from, and how do you set about ensuring that they remain loyal?
Firstly, where to find them? The answer is to look around for individuals who perceive themselves as failures, or at least less successful than they could, or better still should, be. A lack of self-worth is fundamental to creating loyalty. Their failure must, however, be of quite specific kinds: straightforward lack of experience, inability to conform to norms, career change following failure on a previous career track (preferably vocational), lack of communication skills, and low self-confidence are all ideal material. An underlying native wit and ability is of course, useful, as you would like these people to become amongst your most trusted lieutenants.
Creating the Loyalist from the individual is a simple matter, if you have the right raw material.
Individuals lacking in experience are the best raw material to become Praetorians, although certain career changes can be effective too (retired sports-people for example). Your approach is simply to pluck them from the obscurity or inferiority in which they perceive themselves as trapped, and “give them a chance in life”. You reward success with trust and responsibility. In more venal Praetorians, you follow through with higher than average appraisal grades, pay, steps up the promotional ladder or whatever other material or semi-material rewards are within your gift.
Poor communication skills and low self-confidence make the individual ideal as a candidate for Dependent. This can work in one of two ways. Their weakness may manifest itself directly in the workplace, or it may be more a more general life-issue.
If the former you simply become the confident and champion of the individual, arguing their case for them in public, appearing to champion their causes on their behalf so that their channel to the world of work becomes you and you alone. They cannot advance their cause without routing it through you, and they know it and see you as an asset.
In the latter case, of a general life-problem, you will need to play a role for them. It is rarely difficult to identify the correct role: forgiving and/or approving parent, proxy-partner/object of unrequited sexual-desire are the standards with a very occasionally side order of proxy-child (although such individuals usually have cats or dogs filling this gap in their lives). Ask a few questions about their home-life or childhood. The right role will become obvious.
Inability to conform to norms is a viable characteristic to transform into loyalty only if your team has scope for back-room jobs or contains Specialists (and importantly, is known to contain them, so you can use the Jack and Jill gambit described above whenever they have to be allowed out in public). Frequently such individuals are continuing their unresolved teenage rebellion against authority. With care, you can harness this by representing everyone outside your tight-knit team or inner sanctum as “them/authority” and create the illusion of a good versus evil fight in the mind of the Loyalist. Of course you cannot participate in this yourself, since this is exactly one of the characteristics that has prevented the candidate-Loyalist from getting ahead by themself, so you will have to maintain double-standards. You explain this to the Loyalist as doing what is necessary to beat “them” at their own game, or what is necessary to get the resources, political support or whatever, to move forwards. If you can carry it off with a straight face, represent yourself to the Loyalist as a kind of Judge Dredd, stepping outside the law yourself in order to enforce it on others. This kind of imagery often appeals to their student mindset. Develop a passing knowledge of Minority Rights issues, Real Ale, or Civil War Re-enactment. It will be useful as a bonding and communication tool with these individuals.
Having acquired your prospective Loyalists, you need to maintain their dependency. Here the strategies for Praetorians and Dependents diverge, although the approaches are complementary and in ideal cases you can use both methods.
Praetorians need to see themselves as reaping additional rewards from their loyalty to you. It is important that you keep providing the reality, or better still (because you will be able to represent yourself to more important audiences elsewhere as thrifty or tough) a suitable substitute for reality, of rewards. Excellent substitutes are items which can be described as “c.v./resume enhancing” or “career lifetime value-adding” such as representation on or management of prestige projects. It does not matter that their career lifetime would have to be several hundred years before the value was actually added; it’s the perception that counts.
Dependents are easier. Their dependence on you should be like dependence on any other addiction. Just keep giving them occasional hits, spaced out and never quite sufficient to remove the craving for any significant period. Friday afternoon is a good time for you to play parent/object of desire/rebellion-leader as required, since the positive effects leave an afterglow which persists undimmed by other events through the weekend while by Monday morning the craving should have returned again. In many companies responsiveness to such emotional hits on a Friday afternoon may be enhanced by the effects of lunchtime alcohol. While generally lunchtime drinking is to be deplored as detrimental to performance (in your own staff of course, in other people’s it should be encouraged so you can deplore it aloud to a suitable audience), in these particular individuals it should be tolerated or even encouraged.
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.
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.
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:
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):
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)