Management Cheapskates

What other profession praises those who skimp on resources, compromise quality, and show disrespect for others?

What happens when you try to manage people "on the cheap?" You get shoddy goods, poor customer service, a frustrated workforce, and a recipe for decline and failure. So why is Hamburger Management—the epitome of management on the cheap—so prevalent? Because the culprits are rarely around when the sh*t hits the fan.

Lisa Haneberg's article “Management on the Cheap“ caught my eye earlier in the week. She lists a series of ways in which managers short-change their staff and their consciences, including:

• Claiming that you value relationships, and then leaving people are out of the decision-making process.


• Saying you reward for excellence and then avoiding dealing with people who are not making the grade.


• Telling your employees that ongoing development is important and then failing to ensure that you keep learning and developing.


• Saying you value managers and then designing their jobs such that no one wants to do that work (or worse, takes the promotion and then checks his/her brain at the door).

I’d like to add some more examples of my own:

• Hounding people to increase short-term profits by every means available—then paying them as little as possible for their work.


• Talking about ethics and integrity—then expecting staff to cheat customers to make more money, and lie to cover up the organization’s mistakes.


• Talking about building value—then expecting people to work far more than their set hours for no extra payment.


• Demanding commitment and loyalty to the organization—then laying off people if you can find someone elsewhere willing to do the same work for less money.

We all know that doing anything on the cheap is only going to produce low-quality, shoddy work. How do Hamburger Managers get away with it?

The great advantage of being a high-flier is never having to say that you’re sorry.

Few of them expect to be in the same job when the problems that they have caused start to become apparent. The great advantage of being a high-flier is never having to say that you’re sorry. By the time it’s clear what lay behind your “success,” you’ve been promoted or moved on to bigger and better things. If anyone tries to pin the problems on you, you can simply say that your successor was the one who messed up.

In fact, your successor is almost certain to have changed everything anyway, in an attempt to stamp his or her mark on the new job. Nothing is more annoying to a newly-appointed manager than to see success attributed to the previous manager’s decisions. Nothing is more pleasant than to be able to point to that person’s errors and suggest you are exactly the right person to correct them.

By moving or promoting people every few years, organizations have institutionalized short-term thinking.

Why do you get cheapskates in management? Because that is the behavior that most organizations today reward. We’re told that the average tenure for a new CEO is less than two years. Don’t feel sorry for them. For many, that’s already too long. Their mistakes have already started to catch up with them. What they really wanted was to jump out with the golden parachute earlier, so they could keep the undeserved reputation of leadership genius as the basis for getting the next job. But then . . . even failed CEOs seem to find little difficulty in being hired again.

Managers don’t take the long view because they don’t need to. The short-term will see their time out in the job. By moving or promoting people every few years, organizations have institutionalized short-term thinking. By equating managerial performance with short-term results, they have solidified the link. In the end, organizations get what they reward. The people to feel sorry for are those who have to go on working in that kind of culture.

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Technorati tags: Hamburger Management corporate culture short-termism short-term viewpoint leadership slow leadership