A hessian bag, a brick, a moonless night & deep water

Why managers get the sack, and why it is that hardly any of them know the real reason in their own case

Adele Ferguson, Management Today, April 2000

If you are over 40 and in a senior management role, believe in command-and-controlleadership, shun technology and view your skills as complete, chances are youremployer will be sizing you up for the sack. Opportunities for promotion will disappear,until eventually you are told you are redundant. In the real world, most managers neverget told the truth about why they are being dismissed. The reason for the duplicity? Toavoid the threat of litigation through the Industrial Relations Commission or Anti-Discrimination Board.For this reason, when plays, novels and movies deal with job loss, they are far-fetchedbecause characters are told brutally and honestly why they are being dismissed. Aclassic example is Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, in which the long-servingmiddle-aged Willy Loman is fired from his position with the words: “I don’t want you torepresent us. Sit down, take five minutes, and pull yourself together, and then go home,will ya? I need the office.”If Loman were real, he would have been told his job was being made redundant, thesub-text of which is: “You don’t fit into the new culture, you have no strategic vision, yourstyle is out of date and you are too old.”So why do managers get the sack? According to a group of outplacement specialists,the reasons vary from performance issues to cultural issues to not keeping abreast oftechnology, new management styles and globalization.The following are the 10 top reasons why managers get the sack:1.

Atrophied skills

. John Banks, a director of the consultancy firm Morgan & Banks,says a study of his clients reveals that many of them are sacked because theirskills are “rusty”, and they have not kept up with management and companyissues.

Not meeting performance hurdles

. Gil Thew, vice-president of DAC Group,says one of the main reasons managers get sacked is that they do not meet theirrevenue targets four quarters in a row. And they do not meet their profit forecastsfor a year and a half.3.

Resistance to change.

Rosemary Foxcroft, chairwoman of DBM Australia, saysmanagers that are inflexible and unwilling to adapt to new processes andtechnology will not survive the new era.4.

Poor cultural fit.

Chris Hart, principal of Hart Consulting, says that one of themain factors in a sacking is when managers cannot fit into a new culture. “Cultureis important to the success of a team and a company. So, if someone obviouslydoesn’t fit in, they have to go.” This explains why many managers get sackedafter a merger or acquisition. In any merger, two cultures come together; andusually only the dominant culture survives. Managers that do not adapt to thenew culture are let go because they become disruptive and can have an adverseeffect on the performance of the new entity.5.

Philosophical disagreements

. Banks says that many managers leave when abusiness is going through a big downsizing or changing direction and they do notagree with the new direction.6.

Career plateau

. Foxcroft says that personal performance can be a factor intermination when managers stop learning new things. “How many managerscan’t turn on their computers? In the new information era, you need to be able toaccess information from many places and be open to learning new things. Manymanagers feel they know everything.”7.

Personality clashes and discrimination

. Hart says that factors such as ageism,sexism, racism, sexual harassment or plain old personality clashes will transmuteinto complaints about performance or politically incorrect behavior. “It is usually aperformance issue. I would say the top eight reasons why managers get sackedare performance related.”8.

Management style

. In the new management era of empowerment andcollaboration, which has displaced the command-and-control autocratic style,managers need to be able to communicate with staff. This is rarely taught informal education programs, and informal education is usually limited tointeracting with those who are similar to us: family and friends. So, because onlylimited opportunities exist for learning interpersonal skills, it is easy for managersto assume they are performing well in that area.With 360-degree management surveys, managers are now measured on howthey relate to staff. If they do not fit in, they are dismissed. J. Simonetti, in TheKey Pieces of the Career Survival and Success Puzzle, says that ignoring

personal development because it is “touchy-feely” only identifies a manager as apotential has-been.9.

The Sacrificial lamb.

Thew says that sacking subordinates gives incompetentsenior executives someone to blame and buys them time as they go through thetransition period until a new manager can be held accountable. The timetable is:three months to dismiss a subordinate, three months to recruit a new one, andsix months to let the new one settle in and fix up the mess. “That gives anincompetent senior executive a year’s grace where nothing can be expected ofthe subordinate in question and in which said senior executive can find a newrole in the organization and leave his problem behind (or take it with him). This isa common sacrifice.”The ignominy of the sack is reflected in Australian Bureau of Statistics studies of peoplenot in the labor force. Subjects are split into two self-explanatory categories: job leaversand job losers. One reason that the leavers cite for quitting their last job is“unsatisfactory work arrangements”. That is, they did not like the work, the conditions, orthe people. For some reason, the job was not for them. There is no correspondingreason in the job losers’ category.Job losers did not become unemployed because they were found to be unsatisfactory.They were all retrenched, or the job was transient, or they were injured, or the businessor division closed. It is hard to find people who admit to having been rejected, or thatsomeone in a position of authority over them had rejected them on personal grounds.They hide behind more acceptable reasons such as retrenchment.Getting behind the lies of why people are dismissed reveals a change in organizationsas they adapt to a competitive, global, technology-driven world. Simonetti argues that,although the worst of the downsizing boom may be over, there is a continuing threat ofDarwinian selection hanging over every manager:

organizations want the best.

All downsizing exercises ultimately come down to a choice between who stays and whogoes. The ones that are let go put it down to interpersonal issues rather thanperformance issues, according to Banks. He says that sometimes employers collude todisguise sackings, to gain them the tax benefits that go with redundancy, or out of fearthat rumors of poor executive performance will reflect on company performance.DBM Consulting Group’s annual survey of retrenched executives and managers revealsthat in 1999 most of the people it worked with in outplacement programs lost their jobsthrough no fault of their own. The past few years have brought record numbers of