Dealing With an Authoritarian Management Style In IT?

A New Cog asks: "My software development group, including my manager, was moved recently under another bigger group with different style of management. The new objective for the group is to 'speak as one person', meaning that the reasons behind management decisions are well understood and technical information is well communicated. At first, it seemed to be a very good thing to do. In reality, it was just a disguised authoritarian method of imposing information censorship and making sure there is no opposition within. We used to cooperate openly with each other and people from other groups, exchanging opinions and ideas, but after few schooling sessions in front of the bigger group, everyone is now quietly doing what they are told. Now, there is less and less satisfaction from the work I do. Is this just a sign of maturing organization and transitional pain is a necessary side effect in order to have a better future, or is this a sign of things to come. I feel that no true creativity is going to happen in place where motivation and productivity are affected by frustration and threat of loosing one's job? I like my job, but what can I do now in order to keep my satisfaction with it?"

Comments

Re:You're not doomed..

[Aceticon]

I'd add the recomendation that you let it be known in circles outside your own group that:

• Decisions are wholy taken by one person without participation of the other members of the group. This also means that responsability for screwups due to those decisions fully rests with that one person
• Several members of the group (give no names) are (becoming) unsatisfied - ie moral is (becoming) low due to them not being in any way part of the decision process

The point of "spreading the word" is to prepare for the future:

• If the system being imposed in your group does not negativelly impact your group's productivity and some of the people you talked to still remember your words, then you can admit that your fears where unfounded after all. No harm done, nobody will care.
• If the system does NOT work and the productivity of your group is lower because of it (especially in comparisson with other groups), then your message will be remembered by others outside your group and quite possibly everybody in that group except the decisionmaker will be in the clear.

In this world a lot boils down to information control. Countless situations of bad leadership keep going on in perpetuity because the only source of information which those that have the power to stop those situations (higher level managers) have is the person responsible for the problem in the first place (for example, the group's manager/lead).
When confronted with the problem by someone higher in the hierarchy, the causer of the problem will commonly blame something/somebody else for it if he/she believes they can get away with it.

Thus the point of this technique is to make sure that, when the shit hits the fan, higher level decision makers get to know exactly how and why the shit got there in the first place.

When this is done really well, if indeed the decisionmaker is unqualified and/or a serial offender, it often results in said person being at the very least striped of said responsibilities, sometimes shelved and in some cases (i'm talking really incompetent here) even fired.

I've used this twice in the past to get rid of really bad managers, so i know for sure it works.

Also:

If in the meanwhile you get really frustrated with the way things are going i sugest you start looking internaly (within the company) for another group. If that doesn't work start looking outside the company.