Why Managers Aren’t Really Listening to You
Managers
Managers.
Within the corporate world, there is a certain subset who aspire to be one, perhaps for the money or for the glory, but most of all for the power. In many cases, the power is rewarding because it enables a freedom of choice (prerogative) that is unusual within a hierarchical organizational structure simply if you report to someone (that someone being unfortunately termed your ‘superior’ – ugh).
In a parallel life, the one that is not the online consultancy director, blogger or Mum, I work in what they call Decision Support. It means modeling financial information in an business case to elucidate a manager’s choices as to whether to invest in various projects. It answers questions like:
How many customers will this initiative attract? Or how much money will this bring the company over 3 years?
Stuff like that. I have spent years of my life designing highly complex models in excel, figuring out revenue flows and cannibalized customers, deconstructing cost drivers for technological components… and as it turns out, never to help managers make decisions. Because their decisions have already been made.
Yes, some managers like power. And leaving a decision to a model built by a humble analyst is fundamentally at odds with the main driver people have to be managers: the power and prerogative to make decisions subjectively – based on gut feeling. Giving up control goes against very deep human instincts.
Nevertheless there is a school of thought which claims that there is a growing popularity in the use of decision support techniques directly due to the very nature of human control.
‘Managers realize that from an opportunistic perspective, the most successful way to keep the prestige of their managerial status is to adopt these decision support tools and to tweak the assumptions until the conclusion matches their own political agenda and/or gut feeling.
Of course the immediate benefit of adopting tools and processes from this perspective is that by tweaking the assumptions and subtly influencing the outcome, the conflict of going against one’s instincts is avoided. Furthermore, managers who embrace decision support tools can fulfil their human desire to deflect blame and attribute a face and a name to any failure.’
Alex Stania (Decision Logic Analytics)
'I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for my predecessors as well' George W. Bush, Washington D.C., Jan 29, 2001.
Indeed, if it is the case that the decision works out positively, the manager will reap his or her rewards, as the leader of the whole process – and the process itself will be more or less forgotten (human nature is fickle like that). However, in case of failure, one can always deflect the responsibility towards the decision support model, as “it was the best rational decision based on that moment’s information”
Sound familiar? 
Ironically therefore, the managers aka. politicians, whom aspire to power – for power’s sake – (and one assumes this may be a sizable proportion), are also by definition politically motivated, and those who may be interested in perverting completely objective analysis for their own Machiavellian purposes.
