Incremental Managers can kill your business

Posted by Jaan on December 10th, 2007 | 2 comments

It has happened to most of us. We work at places with good managers but sooner or later we end up with a new boss in charge. The old one is out, and the new one is in.

Or is he just barely sorta’ in? There’s a risk that the new boss is an Incremental Manager.

The Incremental Manager (IM) comes in to the job with less fanfare than one would expect. He – an IM is rarely a she – offers little apart from the obligatory mumbled “continue our hard work“, a lack luster “we have new and exciting opportunities ahead” and maybe a muted “my job is to help you do your jobs“.

No vision, no energy, no ability to get the team excited. For the IM this is a good thing; he doesn’t want to rock the boat. “Why fix it if it isn’t broken?” is his standard explanation. He might hint at a “vision” or even a strategy down the line, in fact he promises that the new vision will be his first big announcement. But for now he must focus on the shorter-term tasks and goals, getting to know everyone and “understand the business”.

After promising to deliver a new, big, bold plan at a future date, the IM gets to work. His first tasks usually include (in no particular order):

1) Making sure an under-performing, generally useless team manager, gets the IM’s full support in doing whatever it is that he does, because, you know, the IM doesn’t want to “rock the boat”, yet wants to be seen as a supportive leader.

2) Getting an ill conceived, often-unnecessary project of the ground. After the IM’s big project announcement (hey, wasn’t that supposed to be the vision announcement?), a hard working and competent team member is put in charge. And then summarily left without resources to finish the project.

3) Hiring a new person to do something that no one is really sure what it is, including the new team member.

And so on. In other words, he gets stuff done, but if life is a journey the IM only ever takes the same half a step every day. The Incremental Manager believes that as long as he gets involved and offers to stand behind bold new initiatives (or who ever yells the loudest) he will be seen as a great leader.

Despite all of this the IM is usually not a jerk. He is often a nice, sincere person who is trying to do his best in a job he suspects is out of his league. But as far as he is aware, he is still doing a pretty good job.

The IM’s problem is that he believes in being overly cautious. While taking incremental steps and adjusting, as one moves towards a goal is usually a good thing, the IM perverts this by not having a goal in the first place. Or the skills to reach it. Or both.

Despite this, the IM does deliver one thing – consistency.

He always moves things a long at snails pace, even if it is urgent. He never rushes a decision even if it costs the company money, talent or clients. He is the Incremental Manager. He has no goal, and he will never finish anything. And he will kill your company.

First the people around him loose the drive, then they loose focus, and then they start mimicking his approach. They go incremental in all the wrong ways. Wherever they look everyone at the company is doing it, including the managers. “So, how bad can it be?” When that mindset sets in, that’s when your business is dead, or on life support depending on what you are able to do about the situation.

By then the Incremental Manager is long gone, safely tucked in to a new job at a new company. He wanted to remove himself from the daily grind, “hand over more of the responsibilities to his managers”. Then he left. That was a big, bold “un-incremental” move, but one he had no problem making.

A note: This post was inspired by a few people I’ve worked close too in the past, but luckily never directly with (except one time; boy he was truly rubbish!), and the positive company-wide changes a friend told me about shortly after his IM was fired. My own life is devoid of Incremental Managers, and I intend to make sure it stays that way.