I used to be a middle manager at Google, and I observed mazedom manifesting there in two main ways:
If you try to make your organization productive by focusing your time on intensively coaching the people under you to be better at their jobs, this will make your org productive but will not result in your career advancement. This is because nobody at the level above you will be able to tell that the productivity increase is due to your efforts—your reports’ testimony to this effect will not provide appropriate social proof because they are by definition less senior than you. To advance your career you must instead give priority to activities which call you to the attention of those who can provide that social proof. This is called “managing up and across.”
In order to ensure that the organization works in consistent, fair, legal, ethical, and legible ways, corporate policy in a multilayer organization tends to put more guardrails around the behavior of middle managers than on those either above or below them. This strips those middle managers of the feeling of agency and autonomy which might otherwise provide a non-ladder-climbing intrinsic motivation to do the work. Thus it strengthens the selection pressure for those whose main motivation is ladder-climbing.
I used to be a middle manager at Google, and I observed mazedom manifesting there in two main ways:
If you try to make your organization productive by focusing your time on intensively coaching the people under you to be better at their jobs, this will make your org productive but will not result in your career advancement. This is because nobody at the level above you will be able to tell that the productivity increase is due to your efforts—your reports’ testimony to this effect will not provide appropriate social proof because they are by definition less senior than you. To advance your career you must instead give priority to activities which call you to the attention of those who can provide that social proof. This is called “managing up and across.”
In order to ensure that the organization works in consistent, fair, legal, ethical, and legible ways, corporate policy in a multilayer organization tends to put more guardrails around the behavior of middle managers than on those either above or below them. This strips those middle managers of the feeling of agency and autonomy which might otherwise provide a non-ladder-climbing intrinsic motivation to do the work. Thus it strengthens the selection pressure for those whose main motivation is ladder-climbing.