In the midst of this I read The e-Myth on the recommendation of a coworker, and in the middle of it there was this line about how effective managers are neither always high or low status, but change how they act based on the situation, and combined with a lot of other reading I was doing this caused a lot of things to click into place.
I’m interested in the object level of “what are some nuts and bolts of how the high/low status manager thing worked, and how it applied”, and maybe a bit more meta-but-still-object-ish level of how that insight integrated with the rest of your worldview. (or, if that second part seems wrongly phrased… idk substitute the better question you think I should have asked? lol)
Sure. I’ll do my best to give some more details. This is all from memory, and it’s been a while, so I may end up giving ahistorical answers that mix up the timeline. Appologies in advance for any confusion this causes. If you have more questions or I’m not really getting at what you want to know, please follow up and I’ll try again.
First, let me give a little extra context on the status thing. I had also not long before read Impro, which has a big section on status games, and that definitely informed how The e-Myth hit me.
So, there’s this way in which managers play high and low. When managers play high they project high confidence. Sometimes this is needed, like when you need to motivate an employee to work on something. Sometimes it’s counterproductive, like when you need to learn from an employee. Playing too high status can make it hard for you to listen and for the person you need to listen to to feel like you are listening to them and thus encourage them to tell you what you need to know. Think of the know-it-all manager who can do your job better than you, or the aloof manager uninterested in the details.
Playing low status is often a problem for managers, and not being able to play high is one thing that keeps some people out of management. No one wants to follow a low status leader. A manager doesn’t necessarily need to be high status in the wider world, but they at least need to be able to claim higher status than their employees if those employees are going to want to do what they say.
The trouble is, sometimes managers need to play high playing low, like when a manager listens to their employee to understand the problems they are facing in their work, and actually listen rather than immediately dismiss the concerns or round them off to something they’ve dealt with before. A key technique can be literally lowering oneself, like crouching down to be at eye level of someone sitting at a desk, as this non-verbally makes it clear that the employee is now in the driver seat and the manager is along for the ride.
Effective managers know how to adjust their status when needed. The bests are naturals who never had to be taught. Second best are those who figure out the mechanics and can deploy intentional status play changes to get desired outcomes. I’m definitely not in the first camp. To any extent I’m successful as a manger, it’s because I’m in the second.
Ineffective managers, by contrast, just don’t understand any of this. They typically play high all the time, even at inappropriate times. That will keep a manager employed, but they’ll likely be in the bottom quartile of manager quality, and will only succeed in organizations where little understanding and adaptation is needed. The worst is low playing high status (think Michael Scott in The Office). You only stay a manager if you are low playing high due to organizational disfunction.
Okay, so all that out of the way, the way this worked for me was mostly in figuring out how to play high straight. I grew up with the idea that I was a smart person (because I was in fact more intelligent than lots of people around me, even if I had less experience and made mistakes due to lack of knowledge and wisdom). The archetypal smart person that most closely matched who I seemed to be was the awkward professor type who is a genius but also struggles to function. So I leaned into being that type of person and eschewed feedback I should be different because it wasn’t in line with the type of person I was trying to be.
This meant my default status mode was high playing low playing high, by which I mean I saw myself as a high status person who played low, not because he wanted to, but because the world didn’t recognize his genius, but who was going to press ahead and precociously aim for high status anyway. Getting into leadership, this kind of worked. Like I had good ideas, and I could convince people to follow them because they’d go “well, I don’t like the vibe, but he’s smart and been right before so let’s try it”, but it didn’t always work and I found that frustrating.
At the time I didn’t really understand what I was doing, though. What I realized, in part, after this particular insight, was that I could just play the status I wanted to straightforwardly. Playing multilayer status games is a defense mechanism, because if any one layer of the status play is challenges, you can fall back one more layer and defend from there. If you play straight, you’re immediately up against a challenge to prove you really are what you say you are. So integration looked like peeling back the layers and untangling my behaviors to be more straightforward.
I can’t say I totally figured it out from just this one insight. There was more going on that later insights would help me untangle. And I still struggle with it despite having a thorough theory and lots of experience putting it into play. My model of myself is that my brain literally runs slow, in that messages seem to propagate across it less quickly than they do for other people, as suggested by my relatively poor reaction times (+2 sd), and this makes it difficult for me to do high-bandwidth real-time processing of information like is required in social settings like work. All this is to say that I’ve had to dramatically over-solve almost every problem in my life to achieve normalcy, but I expect most people wouldn’t need so much as I have. Make of this what you will when thinking about what this means for me to have integrated insights: I can’t rely on S2 thinking to help me in the moment; I have do things with S1 or not at all (or rather with a significant async time delay).
I don’t have a very substantive response, but wanted to say:
A key technique can be literally lowering oneself, like crouching down to be at eye level of someone sitting at a desk, as this non-verbally makes it clear that the employee is now in the driver seat and the manager is along for the ride.
This is something I’ve intentionally done more of lately (not in a management capacity, but in other contexts), inspired by making yourself small. It’s seemed to work reasonably well but it’s hard to get a clear feedback signal on how it’s coming across.
I’m interested in the object level of “what are some nuts and bolts of how the high/low status manager thing worked, and how it applied”, and maybe a bit more meta-but-still-object-ish level of how that insight integrated with the rest of your worldview. (or, if that second part seems wrongly phrased… idk substitute the better question you think I should have asked? lol)
Sure. I’ll do my best to give some more details. This is all from memory, and it’s been a while, so I may end up giving ahistorical answers that mix up the timeline. Appologies in advance for any confusion this causes. If you have more questions or I’m not really getting at what you want to know, please follow up and I’ll try again.
First, let me give a little extra context on the status thing. I had also not long before read Impro, which has a big section on status games, and that definitely informed how The e-Myth hit me.
So, there’s this way in which managers play high and low. When managers play high they project high confidence. Sometimes this is needed, like when you need to motivate an employee to work on something. Sometimes it’s counterproductive, like when you need to learn from an employee. Playing too high status can make it hard for you to listen and for the person you need to listen to to feel like you are listening to them and thus encourage them to tell you what you need to know. Think of the know-it-all manager who can do your job better than you, or the aloof manager uninterested in the details.
Playing low status is often a problem for managers, and not being able to play high is one thing that keeps some people out of management. No one wants to follow a low status leader. A manager doesn’t necessarily need to be high status in the wider world, but they at least need to be able to claim higher status than their employees if those employees are going to want to do what they say.
The trouble is, sometimes managers need to play high playing low, like when a manager listens to their employee to understand the problems they are facing in their work, and actually listen rather than immediately dismiss the concerns or round them off to something they’ve dealt with before. A key technique can be literally lowering oneself, like crouching down to be at eye level of someone sitting at a desk, as this non-verbally makes it clear that the employee is now in the driver seat and the manager is along for the ride.
Effective managers know how to adjust their status when needed. The bests are naturals who never had to be taught. Second best are those who figure out the mechanics and can deploy intentional status play changes to get desired outcomes. I’m definitely not in the first camp. To any extent I’m successful as a manger, it’s because I’m in the second.
Ineffective managers, by contrast, just don’t understand any of this. They typically play high all the time, even at inappropriate times. That will keep a manager employed, but they’ll likely be in the bottom quartile of manager quality, and will only succeed in organizations where little understanding and adaptation is needed. The worst is low playing high status (think Michael Scott in The Office). You only stay a manager if you are low playing high due to organizational disfunction.
Okay, so all that out of the way, the way this worked for me was mostly in figuring out how to play high straight. I grew up with the idea that I was a smart person (because I was in fact more intelligent than lots of people around me, even if I had less experience and made mistakes due to lack of knowledge and wisdom). The archetypal smart person that most closely matched who I seemed to be was the awkward professor type who is a genius but also struggles to function. So I leaned into being that type of person and eschewed feedback I should be different because it wasn’t in line with the type of person I was trying to be.
This meant my default status mode was high playing low playing high, by which I mean I saw myself as a high status person who played low, not because he wanted to, but because the world didn’t recognize his genius, but who was going to press ahead and precociously aim for high status anyway. Getting into leadership, this kind of worked. Like I had good ideas, and I could convince people to follow them because they’d go “well, I don’t like the vibe, but he’s smart and been right before so let’s try it”, but it didn’t always work and I found that frustrating.
At the time I didn’t really understand what I was doing, though. What I realized, in part, after this particular insight, was that I could just play the status I wanted to straightforwardly. Playing multilayer status games is a defense mechanism, because if any one layer of the status play is challenges, you can fall back one more layer and defend from there. If you play straight, you’re immediately up against a challenge to prove you really are what you say you are. So integration looked like peeling back the layers and untangling my behaviors to be more straightforward.
I can’t say I totally figured it out from just this one insight. There was more going on that later insights would help me untangle. And I still struggle with it despite having a thorough theory and lots of experience putting it into play. My model of myself is that my brain literally runs slow, in that messages seem to propagate across it less quickly than they do for other people, as suggested by my relatively poor reaction times (+2 sd), and this makes it difficult for me to do high-bandwidth real-time processing of information like is required in social settings like work. All this is to say that I’ve had to dramatically over-solve almost every problem in my life to achieve normalcy, but I expect most people wouldn’t need so much as I have. Make of this what you will when thinking about what this means for me to have integrated insights: I can’t rely on S2 thinking to help me in the moment; I have do things with S1 or not at all (or rather with a significant async time delay).
Thanks!
I don’t have a very substantive response, but wanted to say:
This is something I’ve intentionally done more of lately (not in a management capacity, but in other contexts), inspired by making yourself small. It’s seemed to work reasonably well but it’s hard to get a clear feedback signal on how it’s coming across.