Treat Em’ Mean It Keeps Em’ Keen

Treat Em’ Mean It Keeps Em’ Keen

I have a Welsh friend and while I have never been to Wales, I imagine it as a hard place where life has to be worked for one inch at a time. This friend was a rugby-playing, bar-brawling intellectual that one would think was reasonably enlightened, but no so much. Don’t get me wrong, he is a great friend of mine and we are Godfathers to one of each other’s children. Since our kids are grown and self-sufficient bow, that means less from a pragmatic sense than it does as a symbol of the closeness we enjoyed as friends. I assure you he feels I am as naive as I think he is rough-edged. He is also an inveterate and unscrupulous ladies man who declares quite unabashedly that he can do nothing about his libidinous and downright misogynistic ways. When we were young and I was between marriages, he always advised me (funny since I am his senior by five or six years and his superior in our business setting) that in managing my affairs with women, I need to adhere more to the basic principle of “Treat em’ mean, it keeps em’ keen”. For any number of reasons that did not comport well with my approach to women and I could never bring myself to do it. In fact, I would suggest that I found myself more often on the other end of that stick with women. One in particular (not one I married, but not for lack of trying on my part) thrashed me regularly for two years and left scars that took another five years to fully heal. I did not like how it felt and that just added to my view that it was not a method of operation which I could invoke.

In business management there are much fancier ways of thinking about managerial styles. Probably the most basic of those is the Theory X and Theory Y approaches where X generally means the stick and Y means the carrot. I have always been partial to the carrot as opposed to the stick, so I have often declared myself as a Theory Y manager. This approach manifested itself in many positive ways, but many would say it also manifested itself in plenty of negative ways as well. I was, more than once, accused of thinking I could turn dross into gold when it came to people that were not cutting it. I preferred to think that all people have value and that it was a good manager’s responsibility not to waste the investment the firm had made into a person by taking the easy path of discarding them, but rather they had an obligation to the person and the firm of finding the best way to put their skills to use for the firm. Many managers find that a waste of time and effort and some might go so far as to say that it is also not helpful to the person themselves as well.

One of the biggest challenges for a manager is in knowing how best to manage other managers. If you are a Theory Y guy and your manager is a Theory X kind of guy, what do you do? Good management practice involves forcing accountability on people and that is especially true of your managers, but it is hard to force accountability on a manager if you do not give them the freedom to operate in a manner that they feel is best. But that simple approach is just not right. Your job as a manager is to breed managers of the highest caliber and if you feel that Theory Y is the most productive approach, it is your job to retrain your Theory X guys and turn them into Theory Y guys. And that is a difficult task since much of the managerial approach is a function of their own inherent nature as much as their managerial training. Turning a lion into a lamb is not always possible and you may e sub-optimizing or even ruining that manager’s productivity. That would be contrary to your mission and may be harmful to him or her because maybe in the grander scheme their future managers will be more Theory X than not.

Therefore, I always believed in leading by example and showing managers the alternative of taking a Theory Y approach, but leaving them to decide what approach worked best for them. Obviously, there are workplace standards that have to be maintained and one cannot tolerate any approach that is contrary to the rights of the employees, but Theory X and Y can both work within the constraints of sound management practice and I would suggest that a blend of Theory X and Y approaches taken within a given organization may be even more instructive than a more homogenous approach. There are lots of effective ways to motivate people to peak performance and keeping an open mind is truly the most enlightened way to capture and deploy them.

I am still a manager of a small company with about five people who report directly to me. We are all working remotely and most of us haven’t been in each other’s presence for a bout a year. Nevertheless, what I have learned is that organizational dynamics may be helped by collocation or they might be hurt by collocation, but they still very much exist in pretty much the same form they always did. People are just as unaware and insensitive as they always have been. Those who play well in the sandbox generally continue to play well. Those who throw sand keep doing that as well. It’s just as easy to treat someone with respect or too insensitively by phone, email or Zoom call. So, I continue to try to be the Theory Y manager I have always been and I generally feel that perhaps four of the five see that, understand that and appreciate that. The other one has what I would call a negative score on the emotional intelligence index and I almost feel like treating him mean may yield better results. He seems to fall into the category of responding better to the “thanks, I needed that” approach. However, despite that point of view, I always seem to default to my natural instinct of trying to be nice to him regardless. He does feel the back of my proverbial hand once in a while, but it is less planned and more reactive on my part. I do not feel my experience with him changes my view on managerial theory, I just choose to consider him an outlier, the exception that proves the rule.

The only other place where I have managerial need is in my workmen crew and there I will admit it is a very different beast. These are people I need in the moment, but could replace in an even quicker moment if needed. I neither must treat them mean to keep them keen nor treat them nice to keep them keen, In this instance I feel that money and work are the only motivators I need. Therefore, I make sure to pay them in cash every week like clockwork and buy them lunch most days. I use the lunch hour to do my managing, supplemented occasionally with an overnight text message or two. This seems to work fine for my downward management needs. What I am more ineffectual than not with is managing their interpersonal dealings. These are all three men of a certain age who are somewhat set in their ways. One is the exacting control freak who won’t say shit even if he has a mouthful of it, one is the professional who bends to control as needed, but has his limits and needs an occasional pat on the back and the last is your basic good guy who keeps getting in his own way and is thus not taken as seriously as he could be. The third guy is forever having his homework eaten by his dog and other popular excuses. The good news is that when called out on it he acknowledges it and moves on without missing a beat.

What I have decided it all boils down to is that nothing is gained but ill will if I try to treat people mean to keep them keen. That may work well for some, but it doesn’t wear well or suit me well. So now you know exactly my weakness and how to exploit it. Have at it…if you dare.