Senior Management 101: The distraction strategy

Here’s a thought question for you to open this up: Why do you think a concept like “inclusion” would be owned by HR, when HR is also the department that polices you and is in the room when you get terminated? Doesn’t it seem like “inclusion” and “office cop” run counter to each other? And yet, most vendors purporting to have an “inclusion solution” — tech can’t solve that issue, FYI — try to sell to the CHRO. Why is this?

There are a lot of possible answers to this question. The answer you give will depend on your specific worldview and beliefs around work. Here would be my nominee:

It’s because executives do not care, so they house these projects in areas where they will run in circles and not much will happen.

That, to me, is the simplest answer. If you’re a world-builder senior leader concerned with financials and growth strategies, and someone keeps bothering you about inclusion, the play is very simple:

• Send it to HR.
• They will spend forever doing focus groups and researching.
• Then they will spend forever putting together a deck.
• Then it will take forever to get on your calendar to show the deck.
• Then they will show the deck, you will say it’s nice and important, and no action items will really be proposed.
• Then you will toss a fire on their plate — “Need to fire Jim ASAP” — so that they can’t remember no action items happened
• Go back to the first bullet

My friend Paul calls this the “kick the can down the road” strategy, or the “distraction” strategy. Basically, you get shit off your plate that you don’t care about, and hand it some department or individual where they think it’s a badge of honor to “own” it, even though everyone knows nothing will really happen. Execs do this all the time with projects.

Now peep this quote

It’s from an article based on research across Microsoft employees about impacts of the pandemic on work relationships, one year in:

In sum, a culture of kindness, fun, and cooperative collaboration is just as important to the bottom line as your daily to-do list. Organizations should understand that being nice to each other, chatting, and goofing around together is part of the work that we do. The spontaneous, informal interactions at risk in hybrid and remote work are not distractions or unproductive. They foster the employee connections that feed productivity and innovation — these interactions are the soil in which ideas grow.

Any logical person would agree with this quote. Thing is, though, executives are not logical people — they’re often sociopaths! — and they think about work a lot differently than an average person does. That’s why they rise up in these organizations and the rest of us don’t — because answering emails at 11pm is a badge of honor, despite how many articles we keep writing about “the burnout crisis.”

Kindness? What is this shit, kindergarten?

Fun? Money is fun.

Cooperative collaboration? Sounds like socialism.

Employee connections feed productivity and innovation? No, product road maps do that. Investors do that.

They want to focus in the areas they enjoy — while they kind of sort of understand that “belonging” and “engagement” are meaningful things, they also don’t enjoy hearing HR Cathy prattle on about that with a bunch of stats from McKinsey and SHRM. They want to do deals, corral investors, show growth, etc. So they distract and kick the can down the road.

The real goal of work to a lot of senior executives is this: they want things to change, but not for them. It’s OK if some peons get replaced. It’s great if we pivot on products or ideas, so long as the money and growth remain. But the key thing is … nothing can really change for them specifically, except for maybe their base or bonus going up. That’s the only acceptable change, writ large.

So it’s about kicking the can, creating distractions, and putting new projects and “ideas” in silos where they will die a slow, circular death over many months.

Takes?