The more things that occur that make no sense, the more cynical IT pros will become. Standard organizational politics often run afoul of this, so IT pros can come to be seen as whiny or as having a victim mentality. Presuming this is a trait that must be disciplined out of them is a huge management mistake. IT pros complain primarily about logic, and primarily to people they respect. If you are dismissive of complaints, fail to recognize an illogical event or behave in deceptive ways, IT pros will likely stop complaining to you. You might mistake this as a behavioral improvement, when it’s actually a show of disrespect. It means you are no longer worth talking to, which leads to insubordination.
.. What IT pros want in a manager is a technical sounding board and a source of general direction. Leadership and technical competence are qualities to look for in every member of the team. If you need someone to keep track of where projects are, file paperwork, produce reports and do customer relations, hire some assistants for a lot less money.
Why Are So Many Zappos Employees Leaving?
In fact, recent research seems to indicate that flattening workplace hierarchy is not only much more complicated than it seems, but that people prefer a pecking order.
.. Another Stanford paper, which looked at why hierarchical structures in the workplace have such staying power, concluded perhaps the obvious: Hierarchies work. They are practical and psychologically comforting.
How do exit interviews benefit the company?
The thing to remember is that the information they are going to act on is the information that supports a change that HR might have been unable to sell to senior management in the past. It is not likely to affect policies that no one in management is interested in changing, and unless the whole staff quits and cites the same manager, it is almost never going to get a bad manager replaced – unless HR was already looking for a justification to replace him.
.. Any company/management that would actually change given the result of an exit interview probably would have been a place people felt comfortable discussing and attempting to fix their concerns prior to leaving.
Rebuilding the Middle Class the Army Way
Interestingly, as laid out in what may be the single most important book of American business history, Alfred Chandler’s ‘‘The Visible Hand,’’ this military model was copied a century ago as the model for the hierarchical American corporation. In particular, these organizations borrowed the delineation between executives tasked with strategy — the corporate equivalent of colonels and generals — and tactical workers (enlisted soldiers) and midlevel managers, who played the role of captains, majors and lieutenant colonels.
.. But then came global trade, computers and the Internet, and we learned that the military-inspired corporate hierarchy didn’t work so well when information needed to flow far more quickly throughout an organization and decisions had to be made with haste. Many of the structural economic challenges we face today can be explained by the decline of this organizational form. Uber, Airbnb and Google are examples of new corporate forms that scramble the roles of managers and managed, strategy and tactics.
.. Put simply: The disappearance of middle management is a central part of the disappearance of the middle class. Without large corporations that have a place for people at many levels of skill and ability and a reasonably clear path of promotion, tens of millions of Americans are left underemployed and underpaid. For much of the 20th century, companies would employ young people with few skills and invest in them, knowing that they would most likely be paid back over the employees’ long tenure. Today, the United States military is one of the few employers in America that still makes this kind of investment in a demographically broad group of people.
.. The students were discussing a common frustration: the intransigence of supervising officers, even when presented with evidence that they were wrong about a decision. Then, one officer said something that seemed like a bizarre non sequitur: ‘‘We need to change the pensions.’’ Everybody — except me — began to nod and agree enthusiastically.
.. So, we have a military in which nearly everybody in their 30s has a huge financial incentive to keep his or her boss happy, no matter how wrong that boss might be.
.. Some of the reforms seem so obvious that it’s shocking they didn’t happen before. People will get a retirement plan even if they don’t stay in for 20 years. Some will be offered the chance to leave active duty for a year or two to go work and learn at Google or some other private company and then return. Also, the military hopes to design something a lot like LinkedIn, so that officers can apply for jobs and be selected for them based on their interests and abilities, not just their ranks.