
The flagship store of the Market Basket supermarket chain, in Chelsea, Massachusetts. The privately held chain, which serves Eastern New England, was embroiled in a decades-long family feud between the descendants of Telemachus DeMoulas and George DeMoulas, who had purchased the business from their father in 1954. The two brothers each owned 50% of the business, and the arrangement worked well. But when ownership passed to their survivors, trouble began. The first lawsuit was filed in 1990, setting off a chain of hostile legal actions that finally ended on August 27, 2014, following a strike by most employees in support of the re-hiring of the then-recently-fired President of the company, Arthur T. DeMoulas, son of Telemachus. The final settlement was achieved when Arthur T.'s buyout offer was accepted by the opposing side of the family. More about the history of Market Basket
This tale is a family tragedy, of course. One cannot know for certain, but one possible cause is the 50/50 ownership structure the DeMoulas brothers created. It is one form of the technique of having "overlapping or ambiguous job descriptions" listed in this essay.
Photo by Cybah courtesy Wikimedia.
Working for a bad manager is frustrating, but working for a truly bad manager drives you absolutely insane. Almost daily, truly bad managers shock their subordinates with unexpectedly breathtaking examples of incompetence, stupidity, and malice. Being a truly bad manager requires energy, devotion, and limitless creativity. Managers aspiring to be truly bad need a comprehensive resource of tools and techniques for driving subordinates insane.
This short essay can't possibly be a comprehensive resource, but it does outline methods for achieving one of the truly bad manager's strategic objectives: creating toxic conflict. Here is Part I of a catalog of techniques for setting subordinates against one another, written as advice for the truly bad manager.
- Have overlapping or ambiguous job descriptions
- Ensure that the job descriptions of subordinates are written explicitly enough or ambiguously enough that several of them can be read so as to cover some of the same responsibilities. For extra zing, overlap those responsibilities that are most valued, and most likely to be regarded as bases for self-esteem or career advancement.
- Set ambiguous, immeasurable performance objectives
- To motivate your subordinates to do whatever they can to destroy each other, you want them to be anxious about their own performance. In performance reviews, set objectives that are unclear, ambiguous, and immeasurable. If they also aren't achievable, so much the better.
- Play favorites
- Show favoritism in making assignments, allocating resources, and distributing credit and praise. Be consistent about confiding in some people, and not others. If you have a small circle of favorites, those outside it will quickly learn to resent those inside it.
- Communicate ineffectively
- Whenever you communicate anything important, do it ineffectively, and hurriedly depart for an important meeting, off-site, or vacation. Leave them wondering what you really meant. Let them argue it out amongst themselves.
- Use harassment, blaming, and scapegoating…judiciously
- Repeatedly harassing, blaming, and scapegoating a few specific individuals provides a means of shifting responsibility for failures from yourself or from your favorites onto a few people. Their careers are already in ruins, so it does them no real harm. But it does provide a pattern for other subordinates to use when they need to evade responsibility.
- Deny having made previous commitments
- When someone Being a truly bad manager
requires energy, devotion,
and limitless creativityclaims that you agreed to do or not do something, and you later didn't do or did do it, deny having agreed to do or not do it. Claim confidently that you thought you were just discussing doing or not doing it. And make sure one of your favorites backs you up. - Overload some people and underload others
- Distribute work unevenly. Make sure some people have to work, well, not 24/7, but maybe 19/6 or something like that, while others can just kick back. Keep stress levels at maximum.
We'll continue next time with many more ideas for creating toxic conflict. Next issue in this series
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Are you fed up with tense, explosive meetings? Are you or a colleague the target of a bully? Destructive conflict can ruin organizations. But if we believe that all conflict is destructive, and that we can somehow eliminate conflict, or that conflict is an enemy of productivity, then we're in conflict with Conflict itself. Read 101 Tips for Managing Conflict to learn how to make peace with conflict and make it an organizational asset. Order Now!
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Related articles
More articles on Conflict Management:
What Haven't I Told You?
- When a project team hits a speed bump, it often learns that it had all the information it needed to
avoid the problem, sometimes months in advance of uncovering it. Here's a technique for discovering
this kind of knowledge more systematically.
Unintended Consequences
- Sometimes, when we solve problems, the solutions create new problems that can be worse than the problems
we solve. Why does this happen? How can we limit this effect?
On the Appearance of Impropriety
- Avoiding the appearance of impropriety is a frequent basis of business decisions. What does this mean,
what are the consequences of such avoiding, and when is it an appropriate choice?
Significance Messages
- Communications about important matters must provide both the facts of a situation and the significance
of those facts. The facts often receive adequate attention, but at times the significance of the facts
is worthy of more attention than the facts.
Toxic Disrupters: Tactics
- Some people tend to disrupt meetings. Their motives vary, but they use techniques drawn from a limited
collection. Examples: they violate norms, demand attention, mess with the agenda, and sow distrust.
Response begins with recognizing their tactics.
See also Conflict Management and Conflict Management for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming March 12: Embedded Technology Groups and the Dunning-Kruger Effect
- Groups of technical specialists in fields that differ markedly from the main business of the enterprise that hosts them must sometimes deal with wrong-headed decisions made by people who think they know more about the technology than they actually do. Available here and by RSS on March 12.
And on March 19: On Lying by Omission
- Of the many devious strategies of workplace politics, deception is among the most commonly used. And perhaps the most commonly used tactic of deception is lying. Since getting caught in a lie can be costly, people try to lie without lying. Available here and by RSS on March 19.
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