Everybody has them: examples of situations from their own workplace that resemble a Dilbert© cartoon more than what you expect from reality. I can think of examples from nearly every major organization I have every been a part of, in University, in the museums and government organizations I have worked for and in the commercial businesses I have worked for, not least of which is the one I currently work for.
Dealing with managers who only vaguely understand how the business they run works is a phenomenon that is as old as human organizations. It has gone by many different names and has been expressed in many different ways, depending on the nature and complexity of the particular organization under examination. In recent history, two contributing phenomena have been identified under the names "The Peter Principle" (see, for example, the 1969 book of that name by Lawrence J Peter and Raymond Hull) and the "Dilbert Principle." (see, for example, the 1996 book of that name by Scott Adams).
There are reams of analyses of these principles as they relate to the management of organizations, so I will not venture into any such now, in this forum. I will simply re-state, for those not already familiar with the terms, what, in general terms, they refer to. The Peter Principle refers to the phenomenon by which people in an organization tend to be promoted to their own 'level of incompetence'. In other words, if a person was found to be competant in his position he would be promoted to a more demanding position and, if he did well at that position he would be promoted to a yet more demanding position. Eventually this person would reach a position (perhaps middle management, perhaps upper management) at which he proved himself to be at best uninspired and at worst incompetant. There he would stay, as people are only seldom demoted to a lower position on the command chain, By this means the corporation would eventually become filled with uninspired or even incompetant managers, with understandably deleterious results. In the 1970's it was suggested by many who study the functioning of organizations that this principle describes a very real, very common and very great danger to the successful operation of our various institutions.
The Dilbert Principle is a somewhat satirical variation of the Peter Principle which observes that, in modern organizations, the least capable people tend to be promoted to management because companies need their smartest people to do the useful work. In the humourist Scott Adams' words: "It's hard to design software, but relatively easy to run staff meetings. This creates a situation where you have more geniuses reporting to morons than at any time in history." (see www.dilbert.com).
Having studied organizational psychology at university and having lived my life, I can personally attest to the fact that these principles describe very real human situations; that, although similar, they are separate phenomena and that both can be in operation in any given organization at the same time. To these, however, I would add one other simultaneously operating factor which is also well known to anyone who has studied the operation of organizations. In any organization in which a manager's position is not absolutely secure, said manager will tend to surround himself with sycophants and will tend to actively avoid promoting more competent persons that himself to positions from which that competent underling can threaten his managerial position (through replacement).
Let all three of these principles run rampant in a single mid-sized organization, and you get something resembling the company I currently work for. In this company, the producers of profit are skilled and licensed professionals who, traditionally, required something of a mix of science and art in practicing their trade. Much of the work requires reasoned selection of target persons to focus on, from a very large database of company files, and the ability to convince those target persons within a very short time frame, to deal financially with the company. Skill also came to play in deciding precisely when and how to follow-up with customers in order to preserve or even expand their business with the company. Individual employees tended to produce easily measurable profit in direct relation with their skill level and would be financially rewarded with salary and commission accordingly.
The geniuses or idiots (you decide which) running my company have decided to modernize using a software program which randomly selects files to focus on and arbitrarily limits discussions with customers to no more than five minutes. Even more disconcertingly, they now refuse to allow any of the afore mentioned professional employees to decide when or how to follow up with a customer to make sure they continue to pay the company or to convince the customer to expand their financial business with the company. Once a customer is paying the company there is to be no more contact with the customer unless the customer calls in or they stop paying the company all together, at which point that customer's file would go back into the pool from which random selection for contact would be made by the software package. Moreover, the software now running the show makes up-to-the-minute reports on each employee so that the CEO can tell at a glance how many minutes an employee has been working and how many contacts they have made, as well as how many minutes each has paused the program to go to the washroom, lunch or for any other reason. Additionally, compensation for producing employees, as opposed to support employees, will soon no longer be based on how much money we bring in. Rather, it will be based on how many calls each producer completes. In other words, the employee who brings in very little money to the company, but who completes many contacts with potential customers, will receive greater compensation that the employee who brings in more money with fewer contacts.
The software package controlling all of this, and client support from the software-owning company in the United States, was purchased for our company at a cost of millions of dollars by two cronies of our relatively new CEO. These two have been placed in controlling positions immediately below and answering only to the CEO. These three, in February of this year, placed all of our branches across the country on this system simultaneously, without prior testing. How much intelligence would it take, even if you thought all of this was a good idea, to try the system out first in one branch, or even in one department of one branch, to test its efficacy and to work out solutions to any problems that developed, before committing all sectors of the company nation-wide and irreversibly to its control. And problems there have been. For the first several months we had huge amounts of down-time because one portion or another of the software was simply not functioning properly. Anyone at any managerial level who complained too much was labelled an obstacle rather than an enabler and has been threatened with being fired. Anyone who placed greater importance on pride in their work, as opposed to fear of loss of their income, has either been fired or has chosen to leave the company voluntarily. These include people at every level from support staff to executive vice-presidents. Our production (profitability) has dropped considerably but all remaining managers are on-board with the explanation that this must be the fault, somehow, of the licensed producers at the bottom of the command structure. No explanation for how we could be at fault is ever proffered.
So why do I continue to work for this company? For me it is just a retirement job, a continuing source of mortgage money. The work has become, especially of late, exceedingly mindless and boring but leaves me lots of time, including holiday time, for more intellectually stimulating pursuits. So long as my income and holiday time stay high enough to accomplish that, I will stay. In truth, I see a distinctly humourous side to it all, as would Scott Adams and his readers. Something compels me to stay, if only to see what will come next. I do wonder constantly, however, if that is likely to be much longer. The current management, it seems to me, is likely only to make things worse, not better. Each day when I go to work, I am truly in Dilbertville.
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