Interview with Jean-François Manzoni

Citation

(2006), "Interview with Jean-François Manzoni", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 20 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/dlo.2006.08120caf.001

Interview with Jean-François Manzoni

Interview with Jean-François Manzoni

Jean-François Manzoni is Professor of Leadership and Organizational Development at IMD (Lausanne, Switzerland). His research, teaching and consulting activities are focused on the management of change at the individual and organizational levels. Jean-François Manzoni presented his research at HRD 2005 conference in April 2005. He recently co-authored the book The Set-up-to-Fail Syndrome: How Good Managers Cause Great People to Fail with Jean-Louis Barsoux (Harvard Business School Press). He can be communicated with through his site www.set-up-to-fail.net Here he talks to DLO about his latest research involving the “set-up-to-fail syndrome”.

What attracted you to working in this field?

Real life! This was not my original field of interest. After leaving college I trained as a chartered accountant. Accounting was my weakest field (and not what I enjoyed most) but as an immigrant in Canada, it looked like a safe route. After I qualified as a chartered accountant I was rapidly moved to the consulting side of the business. This was the early 1980s and we were starting to install medium-sized computers in small and medium-sized businesses.

I was in charge of computerizing some of these systems and noticed that the problem was not so much about the technical aspects, but due to fears at a human and organizational level.

Next I went to Harvard to do my doctorate. These were years where Kaplan and Cooper were developing activity-based costing and again it became clear that the challenges with activity based costing systems (and later with the balanced scorecard) were not as much technical difficulties as they were human beings not supporting the change.

So I developed this human interest simply because the work I was doing made it very clear that the so-called soft issues were in fact more difficult to deal with than the technical ones. Years later, as I was working on the pilot project of my doctoral dissertation, the managers I was studying confirmed that I needed to broaden my outlook. So I disappeared for eight months, read enormously, talked to a lot of other people and my focus of research evolved to become a lot more about leadership and people. That process has continued over the last 15 years.

Is this set-up-to-fail syndrome a continuing part of this research?

Yes – we are talking about exactly the same phenomenon. Previously we simply assumed that causality runs from the boss’s behavior to the subordinates. This is what 360-degree feedback is based on – giving feedback to the boss in order to change his or her behavior so that the team becomes more effective.

However, when working with these leaders I realized that they do not behave in the same way with everyone and there was something systematic about the way they were behaving towards people with whom they had less confidence. For example, I worked with a team in which one of the subordinates was telling me that their manager was a great guy – empowering, energetic, wonderful. Yet another subordinate described the same man as awful, micromanaging, vindictive and mean. Either this manager was completely schizophrenic or there was something else going on! When I began to investigate this I discovered that actually there is a vicious circle involved in certain types of manager behavior.

The next thing I asked myself was “Why am I seeing what these managers cannot see?” which leads to the realization that this behavior is very hard for managers to identify. Of course, when you explain it to them, they understand immediately. As you can see, this phenomenon has many layers. I investigated further and as I learned more, more questions appeared and, ten years later there is a book!

Could you broadly describe your book in one to two paragraphs?

We explore a particular dynamic that develops between bosses and subordinates. The set-up-to-fail syndrome describes how bosses start putting labels on people and developing “intuitions” and expectations about them. They start thinking that there is a certain group of people they can really rely on, and a certain group who are not so good. Most bosses then start behaving towards these “not so good” people in ways that are meant to help, coach and increase performance, but actually end up driving these people into the ground, causing great people to fail.

Bosses do not realize what they are doing because this process is self-fulfilling. If I expect somebody to be non-entrepreneurial, non-energetic, passive and resistant, then observes that very behavior from this person, I have no reason to question my behavior toward that person. I feared X, tried to avoid X but observed X, what can I say, this person is X. In addition, as humans we have cognitive blinders. We tend to see what we are looking for and interpret things in ways that confirm our labels. If necessary, we will even remember things that never happened. Bosses do not notice what is happening because their perceptual lenses exclude the disaffirming evidence so all they see is confirming evidence.

Last but not least, at some point, subordinates are going to start playing along. If a manager thinks that someone is not entrepreneurial, energetic or clever, it is likely that the subordinate will start to think that this person is not a good boss who is not open to their input. Consequently the subordinate will reflect this image back to the boss who will not like it. Based on this opinion the manager will develop a more controlling leadership style which is going to drive the person to behave exactly as the manager was concerned that they might.

In short, often people do not under perform in spite of their bosses’ behavior, they under perform, in part, because of their bosses’ behavior. Certain employees and managers do present a bad fit and cannot get along in this life time. But among the pairings who could potentially have gotten along, many get stuck in a vicious downwards spiral which ends in the breakdown of their relationship.

Once you pointed this phenomenon out to organizations, how easy did people find it to change their behavior?

There are two levels:

1. 1.

   interrupting the relationship that may be ongoing; and

2. 2.

   trying to prevent it next time.

I have rarely seen people recognize the phenomenon and say they do not care. Some people do decide that what they need to do is, rather than work at saving it, simply sever the relationship. Sometimes this is the right thing to do due to the time and energy that will go in to rectifying the situation. However, in this context, managers do not say “you failed” but are more prone to say “we failed and I now realize that I was not particularly helpful”.

We find a lot of receptivity from managers. However, what we have not yet found is an organization that really tries to eradicate this throughout the organization by launching a massive training effort across the organization. I know that there are a lot of consulting firms that have developed workshops around the set-up-to-fail syndrome so they may have had companies that have asked for organization-wide training but we have not yet seen this.

What obstacles did you face when carrying out this research?

With respect to the research itself there were very few obstacles. The only thing that did not work out as planned was when I asked individuals to discuss their peers’ relationship with their current boss. They were uncomfortable doing so, so I had to abandon this line of questioning. Other than that I found both individuals and organizations receptive.

At a practical level, however, this issue remains challenging – even for me. Because I am very sensitive to these dynamics I tend to diagnose them in my life more quickly than most, but I still have to work at it. Understanding the dynamic helps you deal with the illness but it does make you immune against it!

When you were looking into the set-up-to-fail syndrome, did you have an epiphany moment when you realized what was happening?

Yes absolutely. I remember distinctly being in a study room just under the roof and plotting some questionnaire answers using different colors. Suddenly I noticed a very distinct pattern.

What we are doing is not earth shattering, but it is a very closed dynamic. When we unpack it, it seems so simple. An enormous part of the battle is to understand the complex nature and the various mechanisms of this concept. Then again, it did take us ten years to make this concept simple!

What is the next step in this research?

Over the last two or three years we have realized that the set-up-to-fail syndrome occurs in a lot of other settings. For example, it occurs with “difficult personalities”. If you think that this person is volatile or resistant to change, your labeling of this individual will lead you to behave in ways that are bound to produce the very behavior you were suspecting.

We also find this syndrome across national cultural stereotypes and also between departments (front-office and back-office, marketing and production, HR and the rest of the world). Similarly, we are looking at how this syndrome could generate into gender discrimination.

If you take someone who is sensitive to potential discriminatory behavior and use the same mechanisms as the set-up-to-fail syndrome, you can see how this person is going to become hyper-vigilant, hyper-informed and from there risks over-intentionalizing behavior, i.e. sensing discrimination where none was present.

Another area in which this syndrome could be applied is with bullying. In France there was a survey carried out which said that 30 percent of people feel they had been bullied. However, when you look at the norms, it turns out that only 10 percent of people really have been bullied. I think that part of can be explained by the tail end of the set-up-to-fail syndrome. At this point, some of the behaviors displayed by bosses are, in fact, pretty close to bullying behavior. The intent is not there, but the behavior certainly is.

Therefore we are looking at bullying and discrimination (in particular gender discrimination) with the set-up-to-fail lens. Obviously we are not saying that there is no such thing as bullying or gender discrimination. There is. But we are trying to help both bosses and subordinates understand how some behavior, which was not meant to be discriminatory, can be perceived as such and to understand how poorly managed work relationships can degenerate into genuine discrimination. We also want subordinates to be wary that if they walk into a relationship with a hyper-sensitivity to what they define as discriminatory behavior then the likelihood of them provoking that type of behavior is pretty high.

Do you think the set-up-to-fail syndrome could have implications for employment law?

I am old enough to be humble about the implications about my research! However, I hope that in terms of understanding and training this will have implications.

It is not enough just to tell people not to bully or discriminate because it is not nice (or because it will get them in jail). They need to understand the behaviors that lead to bullying or discrimination, and understand how certain types of behavior can degenerate into something that could look like, or simply be perceived as, bullying or discrimination. They need to understand how to monitor themselves and others to detect early the development of vicious circles. Effective training will help employees develop this understanding.