One of the largest in the country. The core organization is less than a thousand, but they have state affiliate organizations and as of recently international ones as well.
It is exceedingly top-heavy; I want to say it was approaching 5% executives, not counting their immediate staff.
The organization is functionally in free-fall now; they are hemorrhaging people and money. I expect if it were for-profit this is the part where they would go bankrupt. The transition from well-functioning to free-fall took ~5 years.
If the core organization is a thousand, then that’s not very big, to be honest. Even if there are other affiliated, franchise organizations, the fact that the core is a thousand means that, organizationally, this nonprofit is probably closer to a just-past-startup corporation that it is to a Fortune 500 company.
The company my dad works for directly employs more than a million people. Microsoft employs roughly 90,000. Google employs, last I read, somewhere around 50,000. Amazon, if you don’t count warehouse workers, employs somewhere around 60,000 (if you do count warehouse workers, it’s roughly 500,000). This is roughly the order I’m talking about when I talk about a large organization.
The reason I’m so skeptical of the claims in the OP is that once an organization gets up these kinds of employee numbers, it’s statistically highly improbable for middle management to be as described in Moral Mazes. There just aren’t enough hyper-ambitious people to fill the roles. The vast majority of people don’t actually want to subsume everything into their job—they just want to do their work, get paid, and then go home to do whatever it is they do for fun.
I don’t doubt that senior management is like what’s described above. But there is a large difference between a Senior Vice President or Director angling for a C-level position and a middle manager who goes to work, puts in his 9-5 and then goes home and relaxes with the kids and goes fishing on weekends. My intuition is that the latter sort actually make up the majority of middle management.
I think I agree with your intuition, though I submit that size is really only a proxy here for levels of hierarchy. We expect more levels in a bigger organization, is all. I think this gets at the mechanisms for why the kinds of behaviors in Moral Mazes might appear. I have seen several of the Moral Mazes behaviors play out in the Army, which is one of the largest and most hierarchical organizations in existence.
I don’t see why being consumed by your job would predict any of the rest of it; programmers, lawyers, and salesmen are notorious for spending all of their time on work, and those aren’t management positions. Rather, I expect that all these behaviors exist on continua, and we should see more or less of them depending on how strongly people are responding to the incentives.
My intuition is that the results problem largely drives the description to which you are responding. Front line people and front line managers usually have something tangible by which to be measured, but once people enter the middle zone of not being directly connected to the top line or the bottom line results, there’s nothing left but signalling. So even a 9-5 guy who goes fishing is still likely to play politics, avoid rocking the boat, pass the blame downhill, and think that outcomes are determined by outside forces.
I would be shocked to my core if Moral Mazes behaviors rarely appeared under such conditions.
I was specifically referring to these two passages:
When asked who gets ahead, an executive vice-president at Weft Corporation says: The guys who want it [get ahead]. The guys who work. You can spot it in the first six months. They work hard, they come to work earlier, they leave later. They have suggestions at meetings. They come into a business and the business picks right up. They don’t go on coffee breaks down here [in the basement]. You see the parade of people going back and forth down here? There’s no reason for that. I never did that. If you need coffee, you can have it at your desk. Some people put in time and some people work.
For those in middle management who want to succeed, that’s not how things work. Everything you are is on the table. You’d better be all-in.
That hasn’t been my experience. In my experience, those who get ahead are not those who work hardest, but those who are most visible. You can “come in earlier, and leave later”, but it won’t matter if your project is not one that’s a priority for senior management. Moreover, that sort of “working harder” doesn’t seem to correlate with whether your project gets picked up as a priority or not.
So even a 9-5 guy who goes fishing is still likely to play politics, avoid rocking the boat, pass the blame downhill
To a first approximation, that’s true of every job role, whether it’s front line, middle management, senior management, or the C-suite. Nobody wants to look bad. Nobody wants to be blamed for a problem that they don’t perceive was their fault. My disagreement is not with the fact that people play politics at work. Of course people will play politics; it’s human nature to have politics when you have more than two people attempting to make a decision on which there’s meaningful disagreement.
What I disagree with is the notion of middle management as a sort of all-consuming lifestyle that totally snuffs out your ability to be yourself outside of work. Maybe it’s like that at some firms (like finance, or law), but my intuition is that most firms are not like that. Most firms are less American Psycho and more Dilbert.
I think the model here is intended to apply specifically to upper-senior-management (I think you touched on this elsethread. I think it was basically a mistake not to focus on that more specifically)
Yeah, I would agree with that. I was really confused when the OP kept referring to “middle management”.
(Is considering oneself “middle management” like considering oneself “middle-class”—i.e. everyone considers themselves that, even when they’re far above the actual median?)
I think an issue was that, in a 25 tier company, “middle management” (i.e. “tier 13?”) is above what one might colloquially refer to as “middle management.”
A 25-depth reporting chain, where each manager only has 2 reports, is 33 million employees. Do these companies have long segments of managing just one person, who then manages one who manages at most a few? I would like a specific example, please.
25 salary grades or titles is pretty common, and gives room for in-place promotions, where you are paid more without changing the reporting structure. And doesn’t really map to the pain described here.
That’s fair, though I do wonder how representative 25-person-deep reporting chains are. I’ve never worked in a company that had a reporting chain > 8 and my dad works in a company with a reporting chain of 12. 25 seems… incredibly painful.
I don’t know what a more representative company size was, mostly just guessing the causal factors leading to Zvi summarizing it as “middle management.”
I think the model requires 2 things:
being promoted far enough into the system that there’s a basic assumption of competency across all dimensions
being surrounded, in both directions, by at least 2 layers of management (separating you from anyone who’s got more direct contact with reality).
The second bit requires 5 levels (level 1 is in direct contact with object-level-workers, level 5 is in contact with the CEO who at least hopefully cares about the bigger picture. But level 3 is steps removed from either). I think it makes sense for this to cause epistemic warping, whether or not it comes with any pathologies relating to competition.
The first bit… probably depends on your industry and culture. My made-up-ass-pull-guess is that you need more like 4 levels of promotion before there’s a plausible assumption that “everyone is competent” (so, combined with #2, companies with around seven layers).
One of the largest in the country. The core organization is less than a thousand, but they have state affiliate organizations and as of recently international ones as well.
It is exceedingly top-heavy; I want to say it was approaching 5% executives, not counting their immediate staff.
The organization is functionally in free-fall now; they are hemorrhaging people and money. I expect if it were for-profit this is the part where they would go bankrupt. The transition from well-functioning to free-fall took ~5 years.
If the core organization is a thousand, then that’s not very big, to be honest. Even if there are other affiliated, franchise organizations, the fact that the core is a thousand means that, organizationally, this nonprofit is probably closer to a just-past-startup corporation that it is to a Fortune 500 company.
The company my dad works for directly employs more than a million people. Microsoft employs roughly 90,000. Google employs, last I read, somewhere around 50,000. Amazon, if you don’t count warehouse workers, employs somewhere around 60,000 (if you do count warehouse workers, it’s roughly 500,000). This is roughly the order I’m talking about when I talk about a large organization.
The reason I’m so skeptical of the claims in the OP is that once an organization gets up these kinds of employee numbers, it’s statistically highly improbable for middle management to be as described in Moral Mazes. There just aren’t enough hyper-ambitious people to fill the roles. The vast majority of people don’t actually want to subsume everything into their job—they just want to do their work, get paid, and then go home to do whatever it is they do for fun.
I don’t doubt that senior management is like what’s described above. But there is a large difference between a Senior Vice President or Director angling for a C-level position and a middle manager who goes to work, puts in his 9-5 and then goes home and relaxes with the kids and goes fishing on weekends. My intuition is that the latter sort actually make up the majority of middle management.
I think I agree with your intuition, though I submit that size is really only a proxy here for levels of hierarchy. We expect more levels in a bigger organization, is all. I think this gets at the mechanisms for why the kinds of behaviors in Moral Mazes might appear. I have seen several of the Moral Mazes behaviors play out in the Army, which is one of the largest and most hierarchical organizations in existence.
I don’t see why being consumed by your job would predict any of the rest of it; programmers, lawyers, and salesmen are notorious for spending all of their time on work, and those aren’t management positions. Rather, I expect that all these behaviors exist on continua, and we should see more or less of them depending on how strongly people are responding to the incentives.
My intuition is that the results problem largely drives the description to which you are responding. Front line people and front line managers usually have something tangible by which to be measured, but once people enter the middle zone of not being directly connected to the top line or the bottom line results, there’s nothing left but signalling. So even a 9-5 guy who goes fishing is still likely to play politics, avoid rocking the boat, pass the blame downhill, and think that outcomes are determined by outside forces.
I would be shocked to my core if Moral Mazes behaviors rarely appeared under such conditions.
I was specifically referring to these two passages:
That hasn’t been my experience. In my experience, those who get ahead are not those who work hardest, but those who are most visible. You can “come in earlier, and leave later”, but it won’t matter if your project is not one that’s a priority for senior management. Moreover, that sort of “working harder” doesn’t seem to correlate with whether your project gets picked up as a priority or not.
To a first approximation, that’s true of every job role, whether it’s front line, middle management, senior management, or the C-suite. Nobody wants to look bad. Nobody wants to be blamed for a problem that they don’t perceive was their fault. My disagreement is not with the fact that people play politics at work. Of course people will play politics; it’s human nature to have politics when you have more than two people attempting to make a decision on which there’s meaningful disagreement.
What I disagree with is the notion of middle management as a sort of all-consuming lifestyle that totally snuffs out your ability to be yourself outside of work. Maybe it’s like that at some firms (like finance, or law), but my intuition is that most firms are not like that. Most firms are less American Psycho and more Dilbert.
I think the model here is intended to apply specifically to upper-senior-management (I think you touched on this elsethread. I think it was basically a mistake not to focus on that more specifically)
Yeah, I would agree with that. I was really confused when the OP kept referring to “middle management”.
(Is considering oneself “middle management” like considering oneself “middle-class”—i.e. everyone considers themselves that, even when they’re far above the actual median?)
I think an issue was that, in a 25 tier company, “middle management” (i.e. “tier 13?”) is above what one might colloquially refer to as “middle management.”
A 25-depth reporting chain, where each manager only has 2 reports, is 33 million employees. Do these companies have long segments of managing just one person, who then manages one who manages at most a few? I would like a specific example, please.
25 salary grades or titles is pretty common, and gives room for in-place promotions, where you are paid more without changing the reporting structure. And doesn’t really map to the pain described here.
That’s fair, though I do wonder how representative 25-person-deep reporting chains are. I’ve never worked in a company that had a reporting chain > 8 and my dad works in a company with a reporting chain of 12. 25 seems… incredibly painful.
I don’t know what a more representative company size was, mostly just guessing the causal factors leading to Zvi summarizing it as “middle management.”
I think the model requires 2 things:
being promoted far enough into the system that there’s a basic assumption of competency across all dimensions
being surrounded, in both directions, by at least 2 layers of management (separating you from anyone who’s got more direct contact with reality).
The second bit requires 5 levels (level 1 is in direct contact with object-level-workers, level 5 is in contact with the CEO who at least hopefully cares about the bigger picture. But level 3 is steps removed from either). I think it makes sense for this to cause epistemic warping, whether or not it comes with any pathologies relating to competition.
The first bit… probably depends on your industry and culture. My made-up-ass-pull-guess is that you need more like 4 levels of promotion before there’s a plausible assumption that “everyone is competent” (so, combined with #2, companies with around seven layers).