IT#12 The Evil of Management by Fear: Prey or Predator?
This article talks about why so popular in the past methods of controlling workers by fear is bad not just ethically but for the company performance and productivity as well as bringing the lasting cultural and financial damage to the company working in the Knowledge Economy.
Management by fear is not new to the Human civilization. Treatment of slaves, medieval peasants, factory workers was normally based on fear. And it worked! Well, occasional cases of treating all those differently sometimes brought much more impressive results. For example, in the Ancient Rome some family slaves pretended to be their own owners and died for them, when the latter ones hit a proscription list. Villages in Russia have prospered and brought much higher income to the owners when they treated peasants well. Still these were exceptions, and in the majority of cases people were managed by fear.
We all (with rare exceptions) hate when we are managed by fear. So if this article would talk from a democratic-liberal point of view, it would not tell anything new. But it does not. What we are trying to understand is whether management by fear still works in the modern world, specifically in the Knowledge Economy like IT.
Most people would say, it worked for several millennia, why would it stop working now? The problem is that humans finally started to use their brains, especially in the last 50-70 years. And not as an exception, a lot of humans have to do so. Just check the scientific and technological advances of the last Century.
And muscles and brains are very different organs.
No one expected slaves, peasants or factory workers to think. In fact, that was highly undesirable and often punishable behavior on their side. Now, in the Knowledge Economy we force them to think. In fact, we force them them to think so hard, that they need breaks about every two hours to keep their brains alive since blood cannot bring to them enough glucose and oxygen to work in such extensive mode continuously, see the article “#4 Brain, glia cells...”
And fear affects the brain.
So, what does it mean for the business of your company? Naturally, that's more relevant to the top officers of corporations, but even front line managers can learn something that will help them to make their teams more efficient and productive, at the same time as making your people more happy (but who cares about the latter one?)
Effects of fear on the mammal brain
Direct costs of management by fear
I am talking about a mammal brain because everything in this chapter is applicable to any mammal, including a human, a horse, a wolf, a fox, a dog, a rabbit, even a mice. In fact, some of the examples below will be based on animals, specifically, mammal behavior.
I cannot say much about fish, reptile or bird brains, they are very different, and even though we know the anatomical difference, the science still does not understand the difference at how they work. But we don't really need that knowledge, since we are not fishes or reptiles or birds. Our primary focus is humans.
Technically, fears results in just one thing - stress. However stress is a very generic term hiding different things.
First of all, there is a short term stress, when you need to run from a jaguar. It results in release of adrenaline (epinephrine, C9H13NO3). It forces several things like higher heart beat, higher blood pressure, dilated pupils and higher blood sugar levels. Occasional short term stress may be even healthful, it makes your blood vessels to move breaking or preventing their calcification. Anyway, this is not what we are talking here.
Long term stress is very different. In a long term stress mammal body releases a special hormone called cortizol (C21H30O5) and its precursor cortisone (C21H28O5). Here is the short list of what they can do:
asthma,
hyperglycemia,
insulin resistance,
diabetes mellitus,
osteoporosis,
anxiety & irritability,
depression,
amenorrhoea,
cataracts,
glaucoma,
lower immunity,
increased risk of infections,
impaired wound healing,
skin infections…
Simply put, here is what happens if you manage by fear and create in your workers long term stress:
Depression (ever heard of Employee Assistance Programs including paid counseling sessions and prescribed tranquilizers?).
Obesity and diabetes (that's why companies like Google have to maintains gyms on premises).
Expanded sick time including rehabilitation.
In some countries financial responsibility for disabilities if proven.
Expensive efforts from HR and management side to support “flying pink ponies” culture in the company like morale events and offsites with freebies to list a few.
Is it enough for you to be convinced that management by fear is a bad idea? Don't forget, in the Ancient times slaves can be bought, factory workers can be easily replaced by those behind the gates, but good knowledge workers are very expensive to find.
Competitive team instead of collaborative
This is the most obvious indirect consequence of management by fear.
Two men are offered to run from a lion. If not, the lion would eat them. One started to cry, another started to check his snickers.
“Why are you doing that?” asks the first man, “We cannot outrun a lion!”
“I don't have to outrun the lion,” answered the second one, “I only have to outrun you.”
When you manage by fear everyone in the team is afraid to be the last one. So they have to compete. Sounds like a good thing, right? Yes, if your people produce hex nuts or mine coal. They work independently, so the more they compete with each other, the more hex nuts or coals you get.
Does it work in the Knowledge Economy? Imagine the team designing the left wing of a Boeing Dreamliner competing with the team designing its right wing. Funny? Yes. As long as you are not on board of the resulting aircraft.
In the Knowledge Economy there is a reason why we have teams of engineers. If you read my previous articles you know that the main reason of a Knowledge Economy is that knowledge to build the products (aircraft, warship, search engine, OS, social network) does not fit into one head.
Remember Conway's law?
Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.[2][3]
— Melvin E. Conway
The people in your team have to fit together like the parts of your products will fit together. What does it mean? Your team has to collaborate, that is to be collaborative, and by managing by fear you kill it and make the team competitive.
Do you want the left wing of your aircraft compete with its right wing? Go ahead. Manage by fear.
Ignoring customers
Another result of managing by fear is that you are the main person for all your people. You tell them what to do, and they obey. Feels good? Oh, yes! But IS it good?
Imagine a medieval town. You come to the mayor office with some need of yours. Clerks there are very loyal to mayor and would do anything to make him happy. But helping you does not make mayor happy. So you are nobody for them. See the problem?
And that's not all. The problem is that in the Knowledge Economy you, as a manager, don't know what to do. Remember? The very definition of the Knowledge Economy is that knowledge to produce the product does not fit into a single head (unless you are Steve Jobs).
And that's not all. To understand what to do your people have to listen to customers. But what happens if customers cry out loud that they need X, and you casually mention that X is not that important. The connection of your people to you, if you manage by fear, orders of magnitude stronger than a connection to even important customers. And rightfully so. Because if they ignore your passing comment, they may be fired or at least their career will be stalled for years. I've seen that. The company, I worked for, was about to lose hundreds of millions dollars, and the employee, who prevented that, had to look for another position.
So what your company will produce? Will the warship, for which you wrote software, leave the harbor? Or get stuck there because the engines won't start? And, by the way, yes, that also happened in the real life.
Fuzzy communications - rabbit and fox
Management by fear is generally a bad idea in the Knowledge Society, but here is the last juicy piece of evidence I will provide in this article.
Have you ever thought why rabbits runs from a fox in a zig-zag pattern? You'd be surprised what scientists are getting paid for, but thanks for that we know the answer. They run away in a zig-zag pattern because it increases their chances to get away1. You see, a rabbit cannot get away from a fox running in a straight line. The maximum speed of European rabbit is 40 km/h (since the rabbit is European it runs in km/h, but this is about 25 mph). Red fox can run as fast as 50 km/h (31 mph), and Grey fox up to 68 km/h (~42 mph). The bottom line: a rabbit cannot run away from a fox in a straight line. Hence, zig zag pattern.
But there is one important detail. The direction of the next jump must be unpredictable. Otherwise a predator can guess that direction in advance and that would seriously decrease rabbit chances for survival. How is it done?
It so happens that all mammal brains are equipped with a sort of a random number generator. In fact, it's much better than a random number generator in most of our computers. And when a rabbit, or other mammal like a human, is in stress, it takes over conscious and rational decision making. To put it simply, rabbit does not know itself, where it will jump in the next moment, and so it cannot betray its next move. It simply cannot do this, it does not know. Because it is controlled by that embedded random number generator.
By the way, a fox may also add some randomness to the pursuit to confuse the prey and make it harder for it to predict the path, a fox will hunt it.
It's rare for a human to run from a predator, but in any case, we are talking about the office environment. And they we talk. How does this impacts how we talk?
Have you ever heard as a child explain to an unhappy mom why a vase was broken?
“Bobby, who broke the vase?”
“You see, mom, little Peter from the next street cam to play together. You know, the one from my class. You've seen his mom and said could use less makeup, but you always smile at her and talk to her for hours. Like yesterday, when you talked about a girl from our class called Clarissa and here parents. You know her dad works in UPS…”
What do you think, how soon little Bobby will come to the broken vase?
That's an example when that random number generator takes control over human behavior under stress.
Have you ever been in an office meeting where one of the participants takes over it and speaks non-stop without bringing any value? Maybe you thought they are trying to bloat impressions of their influence? May be. But more likely, they are under stress and their random number generator took over their behavior.
Management by fear trigger stress, stress triggers random number generator, random number generators that took over a human behavior results in fuzzy valueless communications.
You pay for management by fear by making sensible communications in your team impossible. Again, it does not matter if you people produce hex nuts or mines coal. But for designing an aircraft, that's not acceptable.
Also, when someone starts to talk to you in a fuzzy convoluted verbose language, beware. You are considered either a predator or, more likely, a prey.
1 Firestone, C. Z Warren, W. H (2010). Why does the rabbit escape the fox on a zig-zag path? Predator-prey dynamics and the constant bearing strategy [Abstract]. Journal of Vision, 10(7):1049, 1049a, http://www.journalofvision.org/content/10/7/1049, doi:10.1167/10.7.1049.
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