Lowrie Beacham didn't like confronting
people or making decisions that favored one staffer over another,
including the time two of his people were vying to be in charge of the
new fitness center.
"Instead of having one bad day and
getting over it, it went on for literally years," he recalls. "You just
kick the can a little farther down the road -- 'Let's have a meeting on
this next month' -- anything you can try to keep from having that
confrontation."
Anytime his employees bristled at his
gentle criticisms, he'd change the subject: "You're getting to work on
time; that's wonderful!" he'd say, "Never mind that your clients say
you're difficult to work with."
What resulted was a dysfunctional
department, he admits, "with no discipline, no confidence in where they
stood, lots of scheming and kvetching, backstabbing." He gave up his
management role. "I'm extremely happy not managing," he says.
The bad manager tends to conjure images of the
blood-vessel-bursting screamer looking for a handle to fly off. But
these types are increasingly rare. Far more common, and more insidious,
are the managers who won't say a critical word to the staffers who need
to hear it. In avoiding an unpleasant conversation, they allow
something worse to ferment in the delay. They achieve kindness in the
short term but heartlessness in the long run, dooming the problem
employee to nonimprovement. You can't fix what you can't say is broken.
"In a knowledge economy, where work is more complex
and interdependent, people need feedback more -- what they particularly
need feedback on are on things that are difficult to give: one's
interpersonal style," says David Bradford, a lecturer at Stanford's
Graduate School of Business.
John Hardcastle, formerly in financial reporting, was
one of the countless people who, surveys show, want to learn and
improve. But every time he had to submit a report and asked for
feedback, his boss couldn't say anything negative. "He would visibly
dance around the aspects of my reports that needed improvement," he
says. "I never really knew exactly where I stood."
Bosses who want to avoid any discomfort, "use
generalities so people really don't know what they're talking about,"
says Laura Collins, an HR consultant. Instead, they tend toward
one-size-fits-all comments: "pay a little more attention to detail" and
"improve the way you communicate" and "develop better organization
skills."
Those were the ones Ryan Broderick, formerly an
assistant account executive in advertising, heard from a boss. The
substanceless nature of his feedback stuck him with one of the worst
performance-related torments: Being left to your own imagination.
"Hearing nothing is worse than hearing something," he said.
It makes one pine for the boss who throws venomous
tirades. "Those kinds of people may not control their emotions but at
least they're honest about it," says James Fuller, an IT project
manager whose former boss didn't assign him any projects for six months
and never hashed out why.
Such avoidance is a recipe for an employee
blindsiding. During the year she worked for one such boss, Maxine
Erlwein got glowing 90-day and six-month reviews, and held daily
meetings with her boss to whom she'd tell her plans. Then, in the
annual review, her former boss "tried to claim my performance was not
meeting any of the minimum requirements of the position," she says. The
stress leveled her appetite, memory and sleep. "Nonconfrontational
people will nurse a grudge," she says.
No one appreciates the deceptive peace and quiet.
Lawrence Levine, program analyst, has witnessed a colleague spending
much of his day on eBay, among other online time-killers. There's no
doubt the supervisor saw it, too. It mystified the staff.
"We all pondered in the absence of any action why the
heck this person drawing a decent salary was allowed to do this stuff,"
he says. "The anger was that all the rest of us were evaluated on what
we produced."
But John Traylor, a chief engineer who once
experienced a similar frustration over a lazy colleague, sees a
different side now that he's a conflict-avoiding manager himself. He
hates to give an employee news that would "crush his spirit."
He even once quietly arranged to have an employee
transferred at the request of others. "He could leave with the dignity
of having been asked by higher levels to move to a more important
project -- and I didn't have to confront the real issue," he says.
He concedes that his handling didn't help the employee
improve. He also says that the management training he received from the
company didn't teach him how to deal with such conflict. "It would have
been helpful," he says.
One IT manager at an insurance company who didn't want
to be identified as the guy who confirmed our worst fears, also admits
to a tendency to avoid battles. But he blames a system in which such
clashes just cause HR headaches.
He wishes it were otherwise. "I'd rather be mean once to one person than cause this unrest across the team," he says.
As it stands, he adds, "it's a horrible cycle, because now I have even more work to keep everyone else happy."
• Email me at
Jared.Sandberg@wsj.com3. For a discussion on today's column, go to
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