The myth of ‘old school’ management

The myth of “old school” management

Marie Gervais, PhD. Director Global Leadership Associates Inc

www.global-leadership.ca

Manager yelling

It always irritates me when I hear people excuse a manager’s poor performance by saying “don’t worry about (insert name of bad manager here), he/she is ‘old school’”. What does that really mean when someone describes a decision maker as ‘old school’? My initial list isn’t very complimentary: general behaviors would be problems with anger management, poor communication skills, bullying, yelling, harassing employees, refusing to deal with issues such as prejudice, sexism and inequity (or even actively promoting them for kickback), ineffective conflict resolution, silencing messengers, and no allowance for input or feedback. Think about it – is there any “school” that would teach these vices?

Managers who can be characterized by these kinds of behaviors likely don’t have a management education or if they do, either they didn’t pay attention to the courses or it hasn’t been updated for a very long time. It isn’t just the ‘old school’ label I object to: it is the wry smile and other qualifiers that usually accompany such comments, things like: ‘boys will be boys’, ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’, and ‘that’s just the way some people are’.

Bad management is everywhere: In Ireland, ESRI research showed that bullying among managers in the public sector is more prevalent than in the private sector. See for example “Workplace bullying in nursing: towards a more critical organisational perspective” by Hutichinson, Vickers, Jackson & Wilkes (Nursing Inquiry, Volume 13, Issue 2, pages 118–126, June 2006).  In education here is the analysis of direct cost to one school district (http://www.workplacebullying.org/2009/04/06/northcutt/) from bullying by one administrator and three administrative support people who kept her bullying under wraps:

$119,957 — 2004 arbitration

$225,000 — 2005 settlement

$60,475 (est.) 10 years district contribution to her retirement

$35,200 (est.) 10 years health and welfare benefits

$104,956 — district legal expenses, all designed to enable bullying without consequences

$545,588 the total expense for ONE bully principal and 3 supportive district personnel – and that doesn’t even begin to tally the indirect costs to those employees working under this school principal.

An Australian study by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) did a survey of 478 HR professionals and 613 employees to determine the negative effects of various issues on worker productivity. The findings were as follows:

1. Effects of poor management were the highest at 58% negative impact on productivity.
2. Next was lack of motivation among employees at 38%.
3. Then there was the issue of ongoing organizational changes at 26%.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to see that lack of motivation and poor handling of organizational change are likely also linked to management.

Productivity issues aside, let’s look at some of the medical effects of this so-called ‘old school’ of management. Anna Nyberg of the Swedish Karolinska Institutet discovered during her doctoral research that bad bosses have an actual medical impact. Employees with poor managers were sick more often and missed more work than employees with skilled managers. But that isn’t the worst news: Based on 20,000 employees from Sweden, Finland, Germany, Poland and Italy and in a variety of fields and industries, this study showed that the longer an employee worked under a bad manager, the greater his or her increase of risk of heart attack. Employees working under bad managers have a higher rate of heart attack than other employees[1].

One of my manufacturing clients had no less than three of their maintenance long term employees die from heart attack over a period of 16 months. All three had worked for 10 years under immediate managers and upper managers who were bullies. Their plant manager while I was there was a gem and should be nominated for an award. He was able to turn the entire workplace climate around within two years. But he came too late to help the employees who died; two had their heart attacks at work.

So don’t excuse anyone in your organization by letting them off the behavior accountability hook. There is no ‘old school’ of management. It is a myth that allows us to avoid facing the reality that we are condoning upper level substandard behavior and making employees sick, less productive and in some cases dead, in the process.