This is a follow-up to the pair of essays I wrote earlier this week. First, I amended the MacLeod organizational hierarchy to include a fourth category, the Technocrat. Secondly, I began to explore different workplace cultures. Now I’m going to extend the three-culture model to include a fourth. Before I do that, let me revisit the assumptions of the first two essays.
The MacLeod Model assigns unflattering labels to the three tiers of the modern corporation. Workers are Losers, managers are Clueless, and executives are Sociopaths. Examining the behaviors associated with each, we get three baseline traits that organizations use to evaluate the quality of its people: subordinacy, dedication, and strategic orientation. Call these traits the “3 S’s” that organizations use to evaluate the quality of its people. If we treat these traits as binary and look at them in combination, we get up to 8 categories of employees:
Subordinacy Dedication Strategy Category MacLeod destination
False False False Passive Fired or Lumpenloser
True False False Yes-Person Lumpenloser
False True False Loose Cannon Fired or Lumpenloser
True True False Workhorse Clueless (middle manager)
False False True Passive-Aggressive Highly variable!
True False True Team-Player Loser (subordinate)
False True True Self-Executive Sociopath (executive)
True True True Protege (unclear)
My original analysis focused on the team-players (MacLeod Losers), the workhorses (MacLeod Clueless), and the self-executives (MacLeod Sociopaths, whom I further divided between the “good Sociopath” Technocrats and the toxic Psychopaths). The assumption I held was that an employee with fewer than two of these three assets would not retain employment, while those with all three were a contradiction in terms. On further inspection, I’ve realized that neither is fully true. The other five possible employee types do exist, and they’re worthy of study.
The toxic categories (0 or 1 assets)
Passive employees are averse to discomfort, insubordinate, and indiscriminate in their uselessness. They aren’t very interesting, and they tend to be remarkably unsuccessful in any context. Related is the Passive-Aggressive, who is lazy and ornery, but strategic about how lazy to be. Passives almost never rise beyond the lowest levels, but the Passive-Aggressive’s destination is quite variable. In dysfunctional organizations, they can rise high. The Loose Cannon is insubordinate and not strategic, but dedicated. He will work hard toward something, but it may be detrimental. Ultimately, his complete lack of strategy means that his egotism and explosive nature are discovered early and he’ll rarely rise. Finally, the Yes-person is willingly subordinate, but neither strategic nor dedicated, the result of which is that he tends to support management verbally, but not follow through on account of incompetence.
The normal categories (2 assets)
The Team-Player is the MacLeod Loser. She’s strategic and optimizes for minimal discomfort. Because of this, she aims for social approval. She’d rather be well-liked and “cool” than rise in the organization. She’ll manage her performance to the middle and do what it takes to get along with the team and her boss, but she won’t stay after 5:00. The Workhorse (MacLeod Clueless) is subordinate and sacrificial, but not strategic. She doesn’t recognize a good idea from a bad one and, therefore, indiscriminately works hard on the project put in front of her. Finally, the Self-Executive (MacLeod Sociopath) employee is strategic and dedicated, but not especially subordinate. Self-executive employees tend to view themselves as already in authority over their own careers. In subordinate roles, they see themselves as CEOs of one-person operations.
The conditional category (3 assets)
As I originally set this model forward, I assumed it to be contradictory to be subordinate, strategic, and dedicated. Someone who is strategic will either maximize personal benefit (dedicated, not subordinate) or minimize discomfort (subordinate, not dedicated). What I missed is that it can sometimes be strategic to be subordinate and dedicated– if there’s a career benefit in doing so. This is the elusive and rare eighth category, the Protege. This is the Self-Executive employee who has decided that the best thing for her career is to be taken under the wing of someone more experienced, and to sacrifice some autonomy in exchange for mentorship. It’s a trade. She gets executive buy-in to her career advancement and, in return, the superiors get work with a set of qualities (loyalty, dedication, and strategic insight) that would otherwise be paradoxical.
The Protege category is conditional because if the manager stops investing in her career, she becomes an ordinary Self-Executive. She’s conditionally subordinate, and will seek her own interests if the mentor abandons her. It’s also the most politically tricky, because it requires management to abandon neutrality. Taking one self-executive employee as protege can be seen (correctly) as “playing favorites” by the rest of the team. Workhorses (Clueless) won’t know they’re being disfavored and Team-players (Losers) won’t care enough to do anything about it, but the other Self-executive employees will be alienated.
The organizational destination of Proteges is unclear because it’s often an unstable arrangement. While they are typically fast-tracked to important roles, they are also vulnerable to the political standing of their mentors. Additionally, I should note that the Self-Executive vs. Protege classification is orthogonal to my split of the MacLeod Sociopath into the beneficial (Technocrat) and toxic (Psychopath) categories. Technocrats and Psychopaths are both capable of being strategically subordinate– or strategically insubordinate.
More on work cultures
Originally, I set forth the supposition that there are three types of work cultures:
- rank cultures, which value subordinacy.
- tough cultures, which value sacrifice.
- self-executive (originally market) cultures, which value strategy.
I’m going to make a couple changes to this model. The first is to note that tough and self-executive cultures share some similarities and both deserve the name of “market culture”, which I originally assigned only to the latter. The second is to add a fourth culture. That’s a guild culture, which is driven by the Protege’s conditional subordination. Guild and rank cultures are command cultures. We can again separate these four cultures based on two dimensions. The first dimension is whether the culture is centrally planned (command) or organic (market). The second is whether it is functioning or pathological.
The guild culture is a functioning command culture. There are masters and apprentices, and the relationship is one of mutual benefit. The one with more knowledge and experience is the mentor, and the less experienced inferior is the protege. This is the rarest of the four cultures, being associated with protectionism and pre-capitalistic intent, but the ideas behind it are still seen: most notably, in education. A guild culture’s purpose is to create value through the sharing of knowledge, and to capture it through loyalty in the well-taught. In 2013, with corporate loyalty seen as anachronistic, it’s a dying way of doing things. Companies are not likely to invest in employees when they live under the constant fear of them departing.
Rank culture, on the other hand, is a pathological command culture. Your manager is just your boss. He’s not expected to teach you anything or help you rise in the organization. He gives you orders and you follow them. Rank cultures are extortionate economies in which managers leverage their authority to unilaterally terminate an employee or, at the least, reduce her credibility to zero. In rank cultures, employees don’t work for the company, but for their immediate managers.
Self-executive culture is a functioning market culture. Employees are trusted with their own time and resources and form teams organically, and they’re responsible for delivering value to the business. In software, this is the open allocation methodology, which is sometimes mischaracterized as “work on whatever you want” when it is better described as “work directly for the firm”. This is a great arrangement for intermediate-level employees (who can direct their own progress) and experts, although it’s often not the best at mentoring beginners.
Finally, tough culture is a dysfunctional market culture. Like self-executive cultures, they emphasize individual accountability. However, they don’t trust the employee far enough to create a reasonable market for innovation. Employees must demonstrate value on a daily rather than yearly basis. Autonomy is reduced, deadlines are tighter, and performance and status assessments become so intrusive that they often cause underperformance.
Common transitions
Among these four types of work cultures, there seem to be four common transitions, two in which a functioning culture turns into its dysfunctional counterpart (guild into rank, self-executive into tough) and two in which a dysfunctional culture type evolves into the other (rank into tough, tough into rank). I’ll assess each of these, and what drives them.
Guild cultures turn into rank cultures when the organization either ceases to reward mentorship, or grows too fast to coach people along toward better capabilities. Managers are forced to balance the interests of their superiors against those of their subordinates, and are often required to side with those that sign their checks. If the organization doesn’t maintain a culture of mentorship, that goes away as psychopathic managers who “manage up” get promoted over those who favor their subordinates’ career interests. In the hyperfluid modern economy, most organizations are too paranoid about departing talent to make the long-term investment in their people that a guild culture requires. As the culture of the company’s management becomes increasingly psychopathic, the guild culture disappears and rank culture– serve your boss– is what’s left. Masters and mentors are replaced with rent-seeking position-holders.
Self-executive cultures devolve into tough cultures through a similar managerial devolution in which trust for lower level employees decays. Market cultures hold employees individually accountable for delivering something of value the organization, but the time interval (audit cycle) could be anything from minutes to years. What is the greatest amount of time with which the individual employee is implicitly trusted? Executives with itchy trigger-fingers tend to reduce that time interval and, as it goes to zero, what emerges is tough culture as deadlines become increasingly unreasonable.
Rank cultures are not stable because they tend to harbor underperformers. The best people leave, while those who commit mediocre work but keep their bosses happy are able to stay. Ultimately, this can only go so long before the top executives notice the problem and decide to intervene. Instead of firing being a rare thing that happens to the obviously toxic, some percentage of people will be fired “for performance” each year. Middle managers are not only unsafe, but targeted at higher rates than subordinate employees since they, for tolerating underperformance, are held responsible for the problem. The certainty and stability of the loyalist strategy disappear and people fight for visible work and to make their dedication and sacrifice visible. This turns the rank culture into a tough culture, a reinvention it must undergo because the long-term path of a rank culture is underperformance, lethargy, and death.
Tough cultures, similarly, are unstable. Normal people just can’t stand to work in them for longer than a few months, and very few companies will accept the constant turnover that tough culture induces. For the sake of personal and corporate stability, people start cutting deals, and the people who control the performance assessments become the new rank-holders, first informally, but with their status increasingly formalized over time as they win promotions through deal-making and extortion. One who can guarantee a positive review (which may not be the immediate manager) becomes one’s real boss. Thus, tough cultures return to rank cultures and, the tougher the culture is, the faster this occurs.
Are other transitions possible? Certainly they are, but I contend that they’re uncommon. Pathological work cultures rarely reinvent themselves as functional ones, so regeneracy seems rare. Moving from one pattern of dysfunction to another is easy and can be accomplished with top-down HR initiatives, but executives of large companies don’t really have the tools or incentives to bring a broken culture to fix itself. This seems to induce an “arrow of time” where the entropic direction is cultural failure.
We can model this as a Markov process. Let’s say that, each time step, 10% of self-executive cultures become tough cultures, 10% of guild cultures become rank cultures, 10% of rank cultures become tough cultures, and 40% of tough cultures become rank cultures. The healthy cultures have no in-flow, while there’s a shuffling back between tough and rank cultures. The long-term outcome is that an organization, left to its own devices, will spend four-fifths of its time as a rank culture, and one-fifth of its time as a tough (“crackdown”) culture. That seems about right. The process seems to be punctuated by upper management changes. The new bosses are chagrined by the inefficiency and underperformance they observe (or, perhaps, they were brought in because of underperformance). They kick the organization a few times and it becomes a tough culture. Toughness being unsustainable and deal-making surrounding credibility being inevitable, the best traders of credibility (or extortionists, for the black hat) congeal into the new definition of “rank”. Soon, they themselves become complacent and entitled… and the cycle repeats.