Impression Management

For a successful corporation, managers need to "manage" the physical, sociological, spiritual, and perceptual. However, many managers spend nearly all of their time managing only the perceptual - this is ImpressionManagement. Companies that practice this look quite good, but rot away internally. Enron, for example.

That's great, but how do you spot ImpressionManagement from the outside? -- BruceIde

Firstly, it is rather difficult. Impressions are managed from the inside as well - telling the employees what they want to hear instead of what is actually happening. I suppose that it really comes down to determining whether somebody is lying to you or going out of their way to meet your expectations. Part of "piercing the veil" is having a healthy cynical attitude, listening for intentions, and avoiding being conned, manipulated, or exploited. This is easier to determine when you deal with somebody face-to-face, but is nigh near impossible when you are, for example, reading the annual report.

"For a successful corporation, managers need to "manage" the physical, sociological, spiritual, and perceptual."

I don't know about you, but my boss is the last person I'd feel comfortable managing my spiritual issues - that sounds too much like Scientology and Zen Master Rama.....

No, no. Not your spiritual issues... the spiritual issues of the company. For example, the philanthropy that the company performs. How it celebrates achievements, professional and otherwise. Christmas party. You get the idea.

I see. Still, those appear more sociological than spiritual issues.

Spiritual to me means all the things that religions get right: appeal to your ego to get you to do good. In a company, it means motivating you by showing you a vision of where the company could go and how you can contribute. It makes you happy to do the sometimes-boring tasks because of the bigger picture.

Managers typically focus on the following, in decreasing order of importance:

how they appear to others,
how their department appears to others,
how their organization appears to others.

Innovators and engineers typically focus on the following in decreasing order of importance:

making things,
making things that work,
making things that are useful.

In both cases, being a good "X" means focusing more on the next level down in the sequence. In order to appear good to others, managers need engineers to make things. In order to make things, engineers need managers to get the finance. All this would be fine if both "sides" understood these differences and mutual interdependence. Unfortunately, things have got screwed at the moment and managers have more power than they know how to control. If they don't like what their engineer is telling them, they think they can just go an get another. And how do they go about choosing one? By assessing "people skills", which is what managers know best. People skills are nothing more than knowing how to appear good to others. While we have got into a spiral spending time and effort in acquiring people skills, we obviously focus less on learning science and making things well. The end point of this spiral hasn't been reached yet, but we can consider the flight of young people from science and mathematics courses as an indication of where we are heading. Can no one see this? Can anyone do anything to reverse the trend?

Ah, good. Another gratuitous stereotyping attack on managers. I don't think I'm that atypical as a manager. Do you have any evidence for this assertion of what managers typically do, or is it just from observation?

If some companies in an industry can avoid that spiral, they'll be in a good position when their competitors hit the end. So for an industry to be doomed, everyone has to fall into the trap.

Look at the motivation for managers vs. engineers.

The engineers and innovators seem to be motivated from inside; they focus directly on what motivates them: making things, especially when they work and are useful.

Managers seem to be motivated from outside; as a guess, money / power / influence / fame etc. (I don't really know, I'm more of an innovator myself, but it does fit my observations). These all depend on what other people think, so it naturally follows that a good appearance to others is necessary. The more directly the appearance influences others, the more these motivations are satisfied. Whether the appearance is just a hollow facade or real depends on the character of the manager and the economics of the situation (sometimes, it's easier to just do something well than to maintain a hollow facade).

Still sounds like sterotyping to me. As it happens, I'm an engineer and a manager, and became a manager to be able to make more of a difference making things (working through a team rather than just my own efforts). And if you think engineers don't care what other people think of them and what they produce, then you've obviously met a different set than I have

(MattHeusser adds - you might want to check out the book "The Management Myth"; it spells out the political and social history of the concept of corporate management. Yes, there can be good managers, cetainly. Still, the system of forces that manager swim in in corporate America creates a conflict of interest. All too often, 'Smart' managers advance by doing things that are questionable, and 'good' managers wash out because they are unwilling to. Managers aren't bad people; they are just people working in a system that rewards the wrong things.)

CategoryManagement