Fides M. - Middle Management Moans

Copyright 2017 by M. Fontes & M. Fidus

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the Netherlands
First Printing, 2017

ISBN print: 978 90 8759 725 2
ISBN ebook: 978 8759 726 9
Publisher: U2pi BV
Carolina van Nassaustraat 161
2595 SX The Hague
The Netherlands

www.jouwboek.nl

Managers positions are as incomprehensible as the English class system: Are you lower, middle (class), upper (middle class) or higher management?

One thing is for sure: You are not top management because if you were, you wouldnt be reading this. Top managers dont want to hear or read about middle managers moans.

This book is about the managers, or those aspiring to be, sandwiched between their bosses and their own direct reports. Trying to connect the impossible demands and desires from those at higher levels with the expectations and hopes of those at the lower levels is often a desperate job that leads to heavy moaning. We will give you management survival tips and show you how to make the best of it.

To show you how to survive we use real situations from our own management lives (any of our victims may have gotten bruised but as far as we know there were no dead bodies). The survival tips, tricks, and real-life cases are presented as cold cases and cold cuts; pick from the dish as you wish and we trust these cuts will fill your hunger for management knowledge.

Our experience comes from many years of management and, of course, we believe that we are higher management, but it seems that our bosses have quite a different perception of the matter. For many years, we have been hovering at the middlemanagement level, hitting the occasional air pocket, drifting lower and then finding warm air and going up again; all the time building up our experience as to how to stay up in the air. Over the years, we have shared our moans; blaming our bosses, cursing peers, and doubting the capabilities of our direct reports. We found ourselves the only ones in the company with any semblance of sanity; a feeling that we discovered, interestingly enough, was shared by many colleagues. We can also tell you that our companies are very different, but we are both struck by the similarities in our middle-management experiences. While doing our networkingmeaning having a beer in the bar after work many of our friends in different companies told us similar tales. But overall, we enjoy working in big companies. Big companies might have many disadvantages, but they are big enough for one to find or create a management place for oneself.

Who we are or what companies we work for is not relevant. We have both worked across the world for big, international, stock-market listed companies for more than fifty years combined and have seen all the game strategies and plays. We have used a number of them ourselves, but we discovered a lot of them too late or simply did not want to use them, otherwise, we would have become top managers ourselves!

For those readers wondering about management survival strategies and believing us to be cynical managers with our suggestions, go and read Il Principe by Machiavelli. He has been blamed for writing down horrible and harsh strategies to keep on top of a kingdom, but realize that Machiavelli never invented anything; he just described what was happening and what the norm was in his time:

I have not found among my possessions anything which I hold more dear than, or value so much as, the knowledge of the actions of great men, acquired by long experience in contemporary affairs, and in a continual study of antiquity; which, having reflected upon it with great and prolonged diligence, I now send, digested into a little volume, to your Magnificence.

Knives, swords, and poison are out of fashion these days but there is still a lot to know and to learn. What we describe and present to you, our Magnificent Reader, in our little volume, has no other aspiration than to present a picture of the big companies middle managers worlds, what instruments are used to navigate hot and cold air, when to use your ejection seat, and to help you manage your own management moans. Our knowledge has been acquired through long experience and while we dont claim to have studied antiquity like Machiavelli, we had enough experience with the great men and women of large companies.

So, if you are looking for new, all-encompassing theories about what one would need to run a big multinational, stop reading right now. If you are, however, interested in learning about real-life management struggles, then just read and enjoy; there is (almost) always another day or another company, and who knows, maybe it will help you to become a Top Manager, a real Big Boss!

The graduate looking up
You made it, or at least you think you did: You have been hired as a Management Trainee or whatever fancy title your company gives to graduate juniors starting at the bottom of the corporate ladder.

Note the capital M and T. One of the first truths that you will learn is that capital letters can be very important. The big boss is not the ceo, but the CEO, or not the executive vice president but the Executive Vice President, and, of course, the boss is the Boss!

Interestingly enough, one is not an Employee, but an employee (or associate, co-worker, or whatever title they invented for the lower level). We have never understood why this is the case, but its there and you better get used to it. It seems to send a message!

Maybe you outsmarted many contenders in getting the job by sheer competence or perhaps it was because your father had the right connections and persuaded the CEO of your company. Anyway, you left many of your student competitors behind; they will have to start in a mediocre job while you get the grand tour of the company for a year or more.

Watch out though, if you are in a Management Trainee program it is one of the first trappings of the corporate ladder! While you spend that year or more moving from department to department, spending a few weeks or months between colleagues who do not particularly like you and have seen too many of these arrogant youngsters pass, your unknown competitor will be busy working in a real job and contributing to the profit of the company, showing how hard he or she works.

Unfortunately, you as Management Trainee are just cost.

You didnt realize it, but actually, in many companies, the Management Trainee thing can be deadly and you dont learn anything at all. In the departments you visit, you are rarely put at work in a real position because you are there for too short a time. Instead, chances are that local management will give you a project they dreamed up the day before you got there. That project is, of course, doomed to result in mediocre achievements at best. At the end of the Management Trainee program, you will have a string of dead dog projects to show for and few managers thankful for your stay there. You must be really good to get through this program unharmed. So why do companies have these programs?

Human Resources (commonly referred to as HR), tells Bosses they need to have those programs to attract good people.

Bosses themselves come from such a program and naively enough believe that the program is a good thing.

Some Bosses actually really believe that you learn something by seeing all corners of the company. Unfortunately, they tend to overlook the fact that the world and companies change constantly and that those departments where you have spent your precious time, have changed as will have the staff in those departments. Imagine you spent time in the sales department learning how to cold-call clients and chat them up. The internet has killed all this, so what did you learn, how to pick up a telephone?