Controlling information has gotten
quite a bad reputation in the last few years. This reputation is well
earned and should be respected. No matter how clever the ploy is, if
it involves not devolving information internally to manipulate
someone, you are going to get hurt.
Let me tell you two cautionary stories
from my extensive vault of anecdotes. The first one is an example of
of information hoarding by a non manager. The second story of manager
that decided to outmaneuver another manager by not providing the
whole picture.
The story of Tom
Tom was a developer/system
administrator at a medium size company called XYZ Financial. Tom had
been with XYZ for over 20 years. Tom's network inside XYZ was
extensive. He was a good friend of the CIO. They started at about
the same time. He was also in good terms with two of the three VPs
reporting to the CIO. Tom had survived many layoffs. Tom felt secure.
The main reason why Tom was important,
was because he was the only one who knew how to modify, start,
shutdown and restore two critical legacy applications. He developed
those applications originally and today only he knew how they worked.
XYZ tried to update those two applications to newer platforms twice.
Both times the efforts failed. The talk in the grapevine was that Tom
was a main factor in those efforts failing. Tom never shared any
information. He did not teach anybody how to do anything to the
applications. His excuse always was: “I am too busy, these
application need to run and I don't have time for anything else.”
Whenever the heat got too intense for him to release information he
went to the CIO and VPs to complain. For old times sake, these
executives backed him.
This was the situation that I found
myself going into in a consulting engagement. My main function was to
create a technical plan to migrate the applications to a new
platform. The person in charge of the project was an enterprising
manager called Bob. Now, Bob was an interesting fellow. He had very
little technical knowledge, yet he managed to rise to a director
position in a technical organization. Nobody liked Bob, except the
consultants he hired. Bob was a smart guy, he hired good consultants
to help him in technical issues. Bob made sure that you got paid on
time and he always wanted honest and brutal advice. Bob specialty was
office politics. He was simply the master of it. One afternoon after
a series of though meetings, we went to a bar and Bob told me that he
found out on the Internet that there were Medici's of Florence among
his ancestors. I believed him.
Our problem with the project was Tom.
He was doing everything in his power to make the project fail. He
only answered very specific questions after two days of us asking
them. He refused to document anything about the system. He refused
and procrastinated to provide access to the system. He made us get
sign offs from at least two executives to get any kind of access. He
monitored our access of the applications and asked extensive
questions in front of other managers and executives about why we did
what did in the system. Then he hinted about problems we created that
he had to solve. In short, the project would have failed if Tom had
anything to with it. Yet, if Tom was not involved it would have been
impossible to finish the project.
This conundrum did not worry Bob at
all. He told me he had figured out how to deal with Tom. I was
expecting a few warnings, plus a serious talk and a formal reprimand.
Bob was simply too cunning to just do that. He told that he would
promote Tom to management. He created a small temporary team with
what he called “low performing” engineers for Tom to lead. I was
able to guess the rest. He would use the promotion to get all the
information out of Tom, promote him to an non performing group, then
when times got though he would layoff everyone in that group
including Tom. I was wrong on only one account, Bob already knew he
would have to do cuts next quarter and was planning to lay off all
these people, with the agreement of the VP that did not like Tom. Bob
was scary in that way.
Everything went according to plan, Tom
was elated with his promotion, gave up all the information, moved to
the lead a group and was not an impediment to the project at all. I
left after the architecture and project plan was finished. So, I did
not witness the demise of Tom. Later I heard that Tom's group was
laid off.
The moral of the story is, do not hoard
information, don't mess with people related to renaissance Florence
royalty, and the only way to get ahead is to make sure others can do
your job. Why do you think Tom was in the same position for over 20
years?
The story of Jennifer
Jennifer was a great manager at NN
Corporation. She delivered complex technical projects on time. She
understood the scope, time, cost trade offs. Her employees respected
her. She rose from an engineering position to a Director position in
five years. He was the youngest Director in NN. Jennifer's only
Achilles heel was her propensity to intrigue. She just loved to have
secrets. She used secrets to cement trust between her and other
managers. She would share some information to create relationships.
She did the same with her employees. She would tell employees she
wanted to build rapport with about future company plans, while she
kept other employees out of the loop. Secrets and information was how
she rewarded people. Information was her currency.
Jennifer lived in a “need to know
world.” Her question always was “What is the least amount of
information an employee needs to perform a job?” She actually
believed that an employee was better off in the dark, since he or she
“could not get the whole context in the current position.”
Jennifer managed by controlling the information flow.
Jennifer hated for other departments to
find out about her plans. She was clear on the relationship that her
engineers should have with the sales team, don't tell them anything.
She thought that outside opinions and interests will simply wreck her
tightly managed projects. What happened next was obvious, the
engineers she did not share her plans with, usually got mad and kept
everyone else in the company informed about the status of their work.
This irked Jennifer.
Jennifer did not like to stop ideas or
projects for lack of consensus or buy in. If she couldn't sell an
idea to her peers, she would still implement it and try to get what
she wanted with intrigue. That was the reason behind her obsession
with information control. She thought that if she could only control
who knew what when, and then present everyone with finished projects
she would be able to push her agenda. Instead all she got was leaky
engineers and peers that did not trust her.
