I have had many jobs in my lifetime. I believe at this point it has been over 18 jobs since I was 13 years old. In this time I have met A LOT of different leaders. Some very bad and some pretty good, but what I want to talk about is a technique I have encountered when I worked my first supervisor position while working in a hotel.
So I was third in charge of a hotel the chain of command at the top was our General manager(GM), then our Assistant general manager(AGM), and then me the operations supervisor(Op Sup). As an Op Sup my job was to make my AGM’s life easier. This included taking shifts that needed to be covered, paperwork that was delegated to take things off of my AGM’s plate, and to supervise the evening shift to make sure everything was running smoothly. While working with my managers I noticed something, I was in the middle. If the GM and AGM did not agree on something I was typically thrown in the middle. An example would be if my GM wanted me to enforce a policy against guests drinking in our lobby I had to adhere by it. While the AGM would not completely agree with the policy the GM was enforcing I was then told to follow their way of enforcing a policy to allow guests drinking in our lobby. Also what came with middle management was becoming the scapegoat. If my managers directed me in a fashion that wasn’t exactly following corporate guidelines who do you think was to blame? You can imagine the stress I would experience.
What I want to focus on now that I have given you background is the tactic of fear mongering. Back to the drinking issue, my GM wanted guests to buy drinks at our bar instead of bringing in coolers of beer and liquor to enjoy with their groups in the lobby. Instead of being honest with what I thought was my teammate she told me that guests bringing outside alcohol in the lobby and consuming it was against the law and to tell guests that so they wouldn’t drink in our lobby and that if they really wanted to they had to buy an overpriced beer at our bar. I at the time didn’t finish my course on our states drinking law so I believed and trusted my manager. As you can guess this caused many future issues with guests, because this statement simply wasn’t true and the guests complained that we as the hotel were not honoring our amenities of usage of public spaces and that we were harassing them when asking them to leave the lobby. This caused multiple refunds and service recovery to fix.
When a high paying client complained of this treatment I was asked to see my AGM. They wanted to know why we were getting so many complaints and when I explained what my GM told me to say this made my AGM unhappy. What didn’t seem fair to me is that my AGM blamed me because I did not research our states drinking law and that my GM was only telling me this to take advantage of my lack of knowledge and hoped to up our bar sales. After this had happened to me I found that this situation had matched with a sign that my workplace culture was based on fear, and this sign was this: “A general lack of clarity and alignment about managing work. the lack of clarity and alignment around strategies, priorities, goals, measures and supporting expected values / behaviors drives uncertainty and “fear” at some level. This fear causes hesitation and holds back proactive action. A sign of an effective culture is that “people act on what they know” instead of having second thoughts, hesitation, and fears about action” (Kuppler et al., 2019).
I say that because after I had told my evening staff what our GM had told me about the drinking in the lobby people who had been aware and knew the drinking law had second thoughts and hesitated to follow this, but they still did because they were afraid of getting in trouble if they did not do as was told by their management. I don’t believe this technique is effective because this promotes lying, distrust, and can form hostility in the workplace.
Reference:
Kuppler, T., Wride, M., Jeffery, R., Johnson, R., Dennerline, D., & Senn, D. et al. (2019). The 8 Clear Signs of a Workplace Culture of Fear | TLNT. Retrieved from https://www.tlnt.com/the-8-clear-signs-of-a-workplace-culture-of-fear/