The United Kingdom’s (UK) new Prime Minister has been having a very tough month. In the latest move, she had to sack her Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Kwasi Kwarteng, after 38-days on the job. The move comes merely a few weeks after Mr Kwarteng announced a “mini-budget,” which included things like a tax cut on the very wealthy and the removal of caps on bonuses for bankers. The move promptly tanked the pound and earned the UK a rebuke from the IMF, something which one associates with third-world backwaters rather than a G7 economy.
You could say that Ms Truss was doing what any sensible manager does when dealing with an incompetent subordinate. However, given that Mr Kwarteng had been seen close to Ms Truss, nobody believed that this was a case of sacking an incompetent subordinate but finding a scapegoat for one’s own incompetence.
In a way, Ms Truss was demonstrating a leadership style that is described in East Asia, as “Playing Tai Chi,” where she had gently pushed the blame for a fiasco onto someone else. Like it or not, “playing Tai Chi,” is a management style that is far more common than the style of “falling on your sword,” that most management gurus like to espouse. It’s particularly common when bosses push the blame onto subordinates.
One of my earliest encounters with “Tai Chi Management,” was in the army. I was the Guard Commander on duty when my Battalion Orderly Sergeant (BOS) found that the live rounds that were under my care had been dented (implying they were damaged or someone had tried to use them). During the inquiry, the Regimental Police (RP) Sergeant said to me, “Too bad your BOS found this, otherwise you could have pushed it onto your men.” It never occurred to me to push this onto the men because at the end of the day, I was the commander responsible for taking things over and the issue ended up becoming between me and the previous Guard Commander, who was from a different unit.
However, while it had never occurred to me that “pushing it to the men,” was an option, it was clear that the practice of pushing the blame onto subordinates was not new and seemed to be the practised doctrine of leadership rather than the things about the leader being responsible as was taught in the command schools of OCS and SISPEC (now rebranded SCS).
When I went out into the “real world,” this became even more prevalent. It was not uncommon for bosses and supervisors to tell the client that things could not be delivered because the subordinate in charge of the item had screwed up. In one of the most prominent cases, I was actually involved in a liquidation of a restaurant where the CEO blamed everything on a “Managing Director,” he hired.
When I think of all the incidents of “Tai Chi Management Style,” that I’ve encountered, there’s one question that comes to mind, which is “If this subordinate was so incompetent, what does it say about the boss?”
As a rule of thumb, people get hired because they can do things for the boss. The value of an employee comes from freeing up the boss’s time. Look at it this way, business functions can be divided into two – you are either “getting the business,” or “doing the business.” The boss is more often than not the one responsible for “getting the business,” and so he or she needs to hire good people to “do the business,” so that they can focus on bringing in the business. The less a boss has to focus on the doing part, the more they can focus on getting the business.
However, while it may be relatively easy to tell if a “seasoned” employee is any good, it’s a different story when it comes to juniors who do not know anything. Hence, it takes time for companies to “train” their employees so that they can reach a certain level of competence.
Now, there is such a thing as employees who don’t get it. I remember dealing with an employee at the Bistrot who proceeded to annoy everyone from the boss down to the customers. There was one night when we were so crowded that Raffy and I were running ourselves ragged. A customer asked what happened to the staff, then said “Oh, that Indian chap, he’s no good, so you two are better off without him.”
Tried to counsel the poor guy, but in the end, it was clear he wasn’t going to fit in, and I became the only part-time worker who had the authority to fire people.
Like it or not, there are employees who don’t perform. There are employees who cause dissent in the ranks. In such cases, firing them becomes like an act of amputation, where you cut off cancer to stop it from spreading.
However, until the point where the employee is removed, his or her competence actually speaks volumes about the organisation and the boss. The two usual questions would be, how did the employee get hired in the first place if there were early warning signs, and what did the boss do to ensure that the employee reached a level of competence?
So, when bosses bitch about their employees, you got to ask, what’s wrong with them. Surely, they would have screened properly and tried to train them. If not, why do they keep an employee who is incompetent, unless it is to cover for their own inadequacies?
A version of this article first appeared at beautifullyincoherent.blogspot.com