When making the numbers is mistaken for making the grade, the only route is downwards

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‘Management by Making the Numbers’ — today’s fashionable choice amongst the macho and the greedy — produces a debased kind of leadership. We can only keep a working environment worthy of a civilized nation by valuing some things more highly than making the numbers. That means accepting ‘the numbers’ won’t be achieved — should not be achieved — if the price paid is the loss of honesty, dignity, integrity and humanity as guiding principles of corporate life.

People under pressure to deliver ‘the numbers’ will usually do so by whatever means are simplest and least risky. In time, that leads to using various unethical approaches, in the same way that it’s easier to get rich by cheating and theft than by working hard. If all top management care about is hitting or exceeding target, they’re likely to overlook little things such bending the rules. They’re especially likely to ignore management bullying, since they can re-interpret it as ’strong leadership’ or ’setting high standards’, and the victims as ‘losers’ and ‘weaklings’.

The road to legitimizing the bullying boss

Bullying by bosses is common in many companies because people are told to achieve virtually impossible goals, then driven towards them by a mixture of threats, derision and harassment. Those who fail are labeled ‘under-performers’ and removed at the next corporate downsizing. Those who succeed are given more of the same treatment to drive them to match still higher targets. Those who succeed best are promoted to be bosses and encouraged to apply the same tactics in their turn.

Perhaps some of the problem comes from the national obsession with sport: the idea that setting people an near-impossible goal produces champions. A quick look at the growth of drug use in sport reveals the result. Impossible goals can’t be met fairly. Yet the pressure to deliver on continually escalating targets — and the rewards for doing so — are so great that people keep on trying.

Athletes on steroids endanger their health and destroy their integrity. Companies on the steroids of Wall-Street adulation and vast executive rewards for making crazy numbers do exactly the same. They’re hell-bent on self-destruction, even as they are fêted as the darlings of Wall Street.

Bullies survive and prosper because their behavior is first ignored, then tolerated and finally encouraged. If getting there the right way or the wrong way leads to the same approval, the right way dies out. This is Gresham’s Law in action (Bad coinage always drives out good, if both are accepted at the same face value). Honest, supportive leadership takes much more effort. It’s less certain of meeting exaggerated targets. Bullying works, so long as the top guys look at the results and ignore the means used to achieve them. Great. Let’s all do it.

When all that matters to the upper echelons of the company is that the numbers are met, they’re as guilty of bullying as the miserable inadequates who seek to advance by bullying their subordinates. Over time, what was once viewed with concern becomes acceptable. It may even be tacitly encouraged. We’ve seen many similar cases where hitherto unacceptable business practices slowly become the norm, wherever top executives focus solely on Wall Street approval and their own stock options.

Time for a dose of reality

Making the numbers isn’t everything, even in economic terms. Sometimes we must recognize that what we want isn’t possible. To set subordinates an impossible target isn’t admirable, it’s foolish. To seek to meet that impossible target by browbeating others is the act of a management Nazi.

Being unethical has a price. You quickly come to rely on it and can’t let it go, since your honest abilities could never produce the results you obtained by acting unethically. The honest people — and they’re typically the ones who have some real talent — are quickly sickened by the sight of bullies and incompetents reaping the rewards other people have worked so hard to obtain. They quit. The bullies remain.

Amongst managers who have risen to their current positions by bullying, what do you think will be the preferred corporate leadership style? In time, the management team is mostly made up of the ones who stuck around — the bullies, the crooks and the racketeers.

If the past few years have taught us anything, it is this: You’re never too senior, too rich or too important for your greed and moral blindness to catch up with you and bring you down. In a world run by raw power, there’s always someone waiting to grab your place who will be even more ruthless and unethical that you are.

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