Piggy in the Middle

Take a well-respected, competent, and confident crisis management specialist. Put them in charge of an operational team. Give them a clear mandate to lead, and 6 months to make a positive impact on team cohesion and results. What would you expect the results to be?

I expected great results and a tight-knit team, but instead I found:

• A new leader who felt irrelevant and undervalued.

• The operational team feeling micromanaged and like they weren't trusted.

• A senior leader who was feeling overwhelmed with details that he thought the new team leader would have been taking care of.

• An increasingly toxic environment where trust was diminishing.

How could it go wrong so quickly - especially when everyone involved was technically good at their job, committed to the team, and the work they did together?

It’s a pattern I’ve seen often enough that I call it Hierarchy Hopping. If there are 3 (or more) layers, and middle layers get bypassed, chaos ensues. A senior leader bypasses their operational lead and directly tasks the team. People on the frontline bypass the operational lead and go to the senior leader to fix problems.

Hierarchy Hopping

Why would it happen? Clearly there is a need for the additional layer, otherwise the role wouldn’t exist. 

For the senior leader there’s often comfort and familiarity in the ‘tools’ of the layer one down from them. Plus, if the layer is new, they’ve previously been responsible for fixing the problems and tasking the team. Handing that to a new person can feel unsettling. The new person can do the job, but the newly leveled up leader feels disconnected from what is happening and so returns to what is familiar. The new person is unintentionally sidelined and the frontline people now have 2 direct bosses.

They’ll hesitate to act until the more senior person's view is clear. You’ll hear them saying, “We are supposed to work on X, but every time we get started, the boss comes down and the direction changes. Let's just hold for a while until they tell us which way to go.” Over time this reinforces itself. The new Ops leader is getting no traction or buy-in, so starts to second guess themselves or throw their hands up and say “what’s the point of my role?”. The frontline shows less and less initiative as they wait for clear direction from 2 bosses.  The senior person experiences even more load/stress than before the new ops manager was around. The person works hard at demonstrating their value, often overstepping all sorts of boundaries in an increasing effort to do the job they were hired for. The senior person feels that if they are not involved at the front line, it will all fall apart. 

Uninterrupted, it starts to get toxic. People play the 2 leaders off against each other, and start assigning blame to others. The team becomes less effective and more fractured. There’s lots of unhelpful talking behind each other's backs and factions forming. 

Over this series, we’ll look at ways people at all levels can avoid it, and/or fix it if Hierarchy Hopping starts.