There is a management fashion that believes that by imposing layers of generic managers, public spending will become more efficient because they will control the professionals, who cannot be trusted. It is true that professionals often have objectives which are dismissive of fiscal considerations – objectives like the welfare of those they are working for – and that some cannot be trusted not to act in their commercial interests. But there is surprisingly little evidence that the layers of generic management have worked well – most managers are not very good at evaluating themselves – and there are numerous anecdotes of them adding to costs with bullshit jobs or those which actually reduce the effectiveness of the professionals on the front line.
For instance, one DHB had a team which set out ethics for medical personnel. The professionals were irate; they were not consulted and in any case, of all the professionals I have worked for, none have been more ethically concerned than medics.
I bet no teachers were consulted over the recent megapolytech, Te Pūkenga, thirty-page (‘patronising’) document with a list of words should and should not use; there is to be no ‘students’ but ‘ākonga’. (Māori are less than half its students and most do not speak Māori fluently.) Readers will recall that in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four the dictatorship tried to limit thinking with newspeak. (Not that I would accuse most generic managers of being literate enough to have read the novel.) One effect of newspeak is to isolate the organisation, and those inside it, from the rest of the world.
What precipitated this column was a harassed GP explaining to me that his local hospital had changed the way it deals with referrals of patients from GPs. It had made the task much more difficult. No doubt the designers are delighted with their ‘improved’ codification, with its multiple channels where, if the GP gets it wrong, the referral has to start all over again. The GP explained that often one did not know exactly what the patient’s problem was, so the correct ‘channel’ was not always obvious. He found himself wasting time trying to navigate the system, time which he could better spend with patients. The impression is that the new system was designed for management and had given no thought to doctors’ or patients’ actual situations. That we have a shortage of doctors and a surplus of managers did not influence their design.
Generic managers multiply. Retired chair of Health New Zealand (a.k.a. Te Whatu Ora) said that there was extensive waste in the healthcare system and that some of the duplicated administrative and managerial jobs could be shifted to the front line. That, he said, would address critical shortages, and shift ‘hundreds of millions of dollars’ away from the overheads towards primary care.
Really? If each generic manager costs, say, $100,000 p.a., Campbell is suggesting there are thousands of them in overheads doing bullshit jobs.* Mind you, while the reduction in waste would be welcome, one doubts the usefulness of shifting the medical know-nothings into medical jobs. I suppose some would be more productive as orderlies.
In any case, that does not address the problem of the shortage of medically trained personnel. It is partly a worldwide phenomenon. (I argued that insofar as Obamacare in the US would be successful it would create an international shortage of trained healthcare staff. But it is also partly because we have been casual with our medical-force planning. It takes years (and a bit of forward thinking) to train a doctor, nurse or medical technician.
The culture of generic management has little interest in training the professionals it manages, instead downgrading them. For instance, in recent years the chief archivist (at third level in the Department of Internal Affairs) rarely has had any knowledge or qualifications in the management of archives. Programs to develop professional archivists have been dropped. In contrast when a retiring Government Statistician, Len Cook who was both a professional statistician and a very good manager, was appointed to head the British statistical service for five years, his instructions were to develop its career structures including for his successor.
Frequently the role of professionals is downgraded in an organisation; apparently generic managers often have difficulties dealing with people possessing expertise. The danger is well illustrated by the senior management team running the 2018 Population Census which had no members with any expertise or experience in running a census. The result was a disaster from which we are still suffering.
One of the reasons for the wide use of consultants is that having downgraded professionals in their organisation, the managers have to turn to outsiders when expertise is required. Frequently they get screwed by the consultants providing over-expensive and poorly informed responses because the managers lack the skills to commission, supervise and evaluate consultants’ work.
Such is the culture of generic management that, having botched one job, the manager goes onto the next. They seem immune to the Peter Principle that one rises to one’s level of incompetence for in many cases they continue to rise. It seems that one’s position rather than one’s performance is the criterion of success. Apparently no one in the management team is ever responsible, in contrast to professionalism where personal responsibility is integral. This lack of responsibility may be the reason why there is so much inertia, as a problem is moved from desk to desk rather than dealt with. At best, things get lost in committees and garrulous do-nothing reports.
Dealing with this management culture will not be easy. A useful change would be to require all government agencies to have a professional development program which would be audited every year – by its outputs, not by aspirations (which generic managers are very good at articulating but not getting around to delivering). Perhaps the audit should also include an evaluation of the number of professionals and where they are located in the hierarchy. We should also insist there be sufficient numbers of people with a professional background in senior management and make sure there are people with professional expertise on selection panels for senior positions.
However, generic managers are dug into management and will resist any reduction in their jobs or power. Directions from the top – mainly generic managers themselves – will be thwarted by lower level generic managers when asked to implement them. (You may think this is a harsh judgement on generic managers, but consider the measures they take to avoid responding to requests under the Official Information Act.)
One is left with the uncomfortable feeling that the primary purpose of managerial ethos is to provide jobs for the manager class. It must be the biggest job creation program in the country – and the most expensive.
* One of the readers of a draft thought the $100,000 figure is too low. He cited Creative New Zealand whose 85 staff average a salary of $107,000 (more than double the income they recommend for those working in the arts). However layoffs tend to be at the lower remuneration end.
*Brian Easton, an independent scholar, is an economist, social statistician, public policy analyst and historian. He was the Listener economic columnist from 1978 to 2014. This is a re-post of an article originally published on pundit.co.nz. It is here with permission.
19 Comments
I would start with a definition. I'd call a 'generic policy analyst' as one who has no training in public policy and graduated with, say, a music degree or a BCom/LLB, as opposed to a 'professional' (in Easton's parlance) policy analyst who is trained in matters such as cost benefit analysis, comparative institutional analysis and logic.
I worked in health for many years. The vast majority of managers were actually health professionals, and quite different from the managerial professionals.
Give me a managerial professional any day, they were capable of working out something sensibly and honestly. The health professionals on the other hand, first judged the politics, and second and third judged the politics. (who was who). A nightmare in practice.
With notable exceptions of course.
I too have worked in Health at a management level although I am (or was) an engineer by trade. My experience was that within health the majority of health professionals who had risen to a management position were largely incompetent, and ego driven politicians, who did very little to earn their big pay packets. Dictatorships and bullying was a common tactic and they would accuse anyone who stood up to them of bullying. Pot calling some else black! But by no means assume that all health professionals are incompetent managers, because there certainly were a few good ones. I would suggest the defining characteristic was humility. The good ones were actually leaders before managers and were not afraid to admit they didn't know something and to enlist help to achieve what they needed. They built strong, high achieving teams where synergies were achieved through positive leadership.
BE's description would be largely true for most if not all government departments , but again the last three sentences of the above paragraph applies there too.
Couldn't agree more. These problems are being compounded by a tight labour market that has people being promoted into roles soon after arriving in an organisation. They barely have knowledge of the organisation and how it operates themselves and are then moving in to roles responsible for training and management. It is not necessarily their fault they dont know what they dont know but skills are being lost because of a kind of employee chinese whispers. In other cases poor decisions are also being made with regard to frontline requirements because of a blatant lack of desire to engage with the people who know what is actually required. Expenditure on poor equipment etc that ultimately make everyones role more difficult and could actually be more costly in the long run. Very frustrating times.
Great to read this. Increasingly there are budgets drawn up in the millions and when the work is done, we wonder where all the money went. I've heard of some government tv commercials costing astonishing amounts. At this point, it makes one wonder, is it similar to a cash laundering scheme? This article explains several examples very well.
I have looked at this again. Brian Easton really gets it wrong in his differentiation between generic managers and those trained in the relevant specialities. ie:. Health service. The 'health' people are worse.
But there is a problem of overeducated people making jobs for themselves, including health professionals.
This article helps.
To really simplify the problem, there are two ways to get ahead in society: making wealth, and taking wealth. The great macro problem facing society today is the ongoing triumph of takers over makers, which will eventually cause our systems to collapse in on themselves as production can no longer keep up with the consumption desires of the takers.
Taking wealth can occur in many forms: some are easily identified such as the traditional economic rent seeking via ownership of land or resources, or monopoly power; or the more direct stealing via cronyism and corruption. But the rise of the white collar superclass (PMC) is a major problem. The lines are very blurred here as much of the work contains elements of importance, it has simply been expanded to become much larger than needed, and paid much more than it is worth. And those "gains" for the taking class are largely enshrined in policy and even legislation. It will be hard for a government to reverse them without provoking mass revolt amongst the PMC, most of whom have convinced themselves that their jobs are genuinely important and their earnings fully merited.
I can give an example from a business transformation project I was on in government a few years ago.
I was ~27, with 5 years experience under my belt after uni but extroverted for a software engineer. Interviewed for a Lead Developer role, got it. It paid $140k plus 4% kiwisaver. Absolutely stoked right. Turns out salaries were always given at max band because the government pay freeze prevented wage increases. I was the 6th member of a team, including a system analyst who started the week before me, a change manager who started the same day as me, a solutions architect, a business analyst, project secretary and project manager.
I arrived on my first day to a prepared itinerary, a welcoming party with catering and a brief rundown on the circumstances of the project. The org had spent millions on a piece of COTS software which we were to implement and transition over to. There was one business analyst performing work to analyse one subsection of the work, who would be devoted explicitly to that for the entire project. No one had even scoped the work, mapped the processes, analysed if the processes made sense etc. The one system analyst devoted his time to trying to understand the core product. I was assigned nothing to do and it became very evident very quickly that I was hired far before I was needed.
Because of cyber security policy, I was not even able to access any cloud infrastructure to make quality of life improvements or do any out of project work. I even wrote a paper outlining the need for a timesheeting system working on mobile for our mobile workforce, justifying it in saying it would save huge amounts of admin time recording timesheets on paper and improve efficiency, MBA speak and all that. Payroll loved it, Management thought it would distract from my core work. Denied, but I still had no work.
The team expanded to about 20 people over the next 6-8 months. I didn't write a single line of code for the project for that entire time. I showed up, was paid 10x the dole and essentially had no work. I spent my WFH days weightlifting after morning standup. Running in the morning alternating with lifting. My afternoons were practising programming languages, personal projects and playing video games. Clocked Diablo 1 & 2, Fallout 1 & 2 in that time.
By the time I had worked for 6 months into the project integrating data, I was tasked to hire a second developer to help with my "workload" which was coming up. He earned 130k. We got a few scraps of work integrating stuff, I wrote and deployed a few servers in Python, C# and Golang. No one turned up to the office on Fridays or Mondays because of work from home. Only two or three people in an office built for 15-20 people. We brought in Warhammer 40k armies (I have orks, he had chaos) and played a game of Warhammer 40k for our Sprint planning meeting on Fridays once per fortnight. We had a top floor office, with a door to a rooftop balcony where we would smoke rollies, drink the expensive office coffee and have "meetings" talking about stuff for hours at a time.
I quit because I felt my skillset rusting and the project was failing (gonna get the axe). No deadlines were hit at all, despite 2 change analysts, 1 change manager, a SCRUM master, three business analysts, two testing analysts with nothing to test, a test manager, two system analysts, a data analyst and two project managers under the main project manager. I maybe worked ~1 month worth of days in that entire period, denied the ability to do anything productive and completely bored.
The levels of waste for this project was astonishing. But no one ever took responsibility.
Project Manager had too much on his plate, 20+ staff and was running two projects at once. Poor delegation, one project manager under him had only two staff. Very little time to manage.
Project Governance was given extreme headroom due to two previous project failures. Project was published as taking two years but internally we expected it to take four or five.
I didn't care about the time wasted or staff time wasted personally, It was a great paycheck for easy work.
The actual problem was the complex execution. If I had been able to work on projects, or had the ability to make myself useful for non-project work, it would have been fine. But because of how funding works for these projects, work outside a project usually has to be charged back to the relevant team.
The scope of work to be integrated was enormous and lazy decision making dominated. Realistically many internal processes were manual and we needed to consult with the teams to find out their problems, understand their processes and rework them around what we could either use off the shelf or build. It actually needed cross purpose teams focused on work areas, one or two business analysts, a system analyst versed in the system and a software developer sent out to understand a work domain and implement a plan.
The project was funded around purchasing the cots, with a view to throwing more manpower at the problem rather than digesting on the problem.
I've always felt, as an example, that you need an engineer of the same discipline to manage outside consulting engineers of the same discipline.
I would equate this to the NZ Ministry of Works having engineers suitably qualified and experienced to manage outside consulting engineers and construction contractors.
Generic managers can have the wool pulled over their eyes.
The curse of bureaucracy.
In my experience, the moment an organization hires someone and calls them 'manager' is the point where they're simply hiring to have someone 'manage' rather than actually do anything. Sure, some places the 'manager' does everything, but in large companies/orgs typically it's the start of a process whereby that 'manager' delegates, eventually stays around long enough to become 'senior manager' and hires someone else to do what was his/her job.
Often this coincides with what is known as 'empire building' - whereby said senior will come up with reasons to have multiple managers for different purposes and teams beneath them to actually do stuff. Given time, this multiplies until you get a bloated bureaucracy that may have some competent people, but they get swamped by the sheer 'red tape' that is implemented to give the veneer of managers having something to 'sign off' on.
The other side of that is that competent folk don't last long because they get swamped by all the general incompetence around them, or simply frustrated by the lack of progress - or the time taken to actually get stuff done. Not to mention by that point they're typically off to other pastures that pay more...
At a point, said management literally do next to nothing productively - and instead start to complain about the number of people reporting to them (because they have to do HR type stuff...). And so they hire more people to do just that 'manage', and the problem compounds.
Queue re-orgs, because folks hired in above that structure look at it and have no idea what any of those people do and can see the layers of useless management... not to mention the nepotism of bringing their buddies along and appointing them, or just the egotism of needing to be seen to 'do something' and 'put their spin' on things...
Most NZ government orgs suffer badly from this - endless re-orgs whenever someone is appointed to a senior role, which just amount to 'shuffling the deckchairs' and the loss of some people (both good and bad) at the lower rungs. As pointed out, managers are cockroach-like in that they always seem to find another chair to sit in after a re-org, and if not, simply move to another organization and play the same game.
Startups, in their start up phase avoid this deliberately as they've come from places like that and want to avoid it - but inevitably they get to a size where the 'managers' infiltrate - and the process begins. Cue massive layoffs...
I was told recently by by manager friend that he is having trouble hiring because all the people at the level he's hiring have taken jobs the next band up. Employers are so desperate for that skillset that they're offering promotions (for the same work) so they can justify offering their new hires shedloads of money to take the job.
Unearned promotions because of a tight market = perverse outcomes. Given my friend works in government that's a sure sign the perverse outcome chickens of the government's asinine pay-freeze policy are coming home to roost.
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