Category: Corporate World (Page 5 of 14)

So, lots of workplaces create committees. They create them for all sorts of things. Anyone who works as university faculty knows this all too well. But lots of other companies do it, too. Especially large ones.

On the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with committee work. Let’s say you’re in a workplace that’s relatively democratic. And one that lacks a suffocating corporate structure. In those cases, it even has its uses. You can work with colleagues fairly and equally to get things done.

But that’s not how it works most of the time. Committees are a great way for a company to save face on some issue. Especially if and when the public perceives the company badly on the issue (e.g., racial justice, and so on). At other times, a middle manager really wants to feel important. So, he (it’s not always ‘he,’ but it usually is) organizes a committee.

When you find those latter forces at work, avoid it. No bullshit committee work, folks. It’s a waste of your time. It won’t do anything useful for the world, and it won’t get you anywhere.

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So, in the old days, companies built out huge, elaborate structures. They had tons of management layers. Why? In short, they wanted to prevent communication between leaders and workers. What better way to do that than force workers to go through 3 or 4 layers of bureaucrats before they get to anyone who could make a real decision?

But that got way too expensive for them. In the neoliberal era, companies started targeting middle managers (and other people who don’t work  – but don’t have the power to fight back) for layoffs. They did so mainly due to pressure to cut costs. Sure, companies can lay off their actual workers. But that has certain limits. You can’t lay off everyone who does real work. That would also eliminate profits!

We can’t have that now, can we?

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So, businesses love hosting events! But they often name those events ironically. Sometimes even in an Orwellian manner.

Anyone following the Starbucks union drive probably read about this. According to the coverage, Starbucks held mandatory ‘listening sessions.’ In theory, a company holds these sessions to hear feedback from its workers. In practice, and in the Starbucks case, companies use them for propaganda sessions.

That’s a slap in the face, but it’s hardly unusual. That’s how many companies play it. They hold propaganda sessions and call them ‘listening sessions.’ They hold lectures and call them ‘town halls.’ Normally a town hall implies some kind of back and forth between leaders (or politicians) and staff (or voters). Not so in corporate world!

Why does this happen? Sometimes, as in the case of Starbucks, it’s probably so a company can make itself look better. At least to the public, but perhaps to its employees. But often it comes from much more ‘ordinary’ forces in the corporate world. Companies create a (pseudo) intellectual veneer by giving their lectures fancy names like ‘town halls.’ And then there’s the fact that corporate HR is often full of people who simply have no idea what the words mean.

So they just use whichever word stands out as trendy.

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Welcome back to the Corporate Politics 101 series! In my previous post, I updated the infamous Peter Principle for the 2020s. Whereas employees used to rise to their level of incompetence, now they leave and perform the role badly for a different company! Project managers and middle managers unite…and become lateral hires.

In this post, I’ll look at a corollary to the previous one. Since lots of bad managers hop ship to a different company, competence tends to drop as one looks up the corporate hierarchy.

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