Manager or Cosmetician?

Sometimes being a manager appears to be a matter of making it look like something has been achieved, even when it hasn't. And that is one of the reasons why organisations  may appear to achieve their strategic plans and yet never actually improve in any meaningful way.

To begin with, there is cosmetic change rather than actual change. Where a change would disrupt the status quo that managers are happy with, they may massage the details of the change, water it down and put their own controls in place in such a way as to make it appear that they have embraced the change when in fact they have sabotaged it. And as a result, it may appear that a change has been ineffective when in fact it has been poorly implemented if at all. If a person has a skin cancer then you can treat it medically or you can conceal it with makeup. Sadly, in many cases, managers will take the latter course rather than deal with the reality of a situation that requires serious attention, giving the appearance that something has changed when things have remained fundamentally the same.

Paradoxically some of the most enthusiastic adopters of the change may do the most (unintentionally) to ensure it is ineffective. Like Procrustes with his bed, they stretch or amputate aspects of the change to suit their particular view of how things should be and in the process eliminate critical factors required for its success. Even this may be an application of the cosmetic art: their enthusiastic support of the change may be more about being seen to support it than about truly being committed to implementing it (in fact they may not even understand what the change entails.)

Cosmetic skills also come into play in evaluating whether efforts towards a particular goal have been effective. The goal posts may be shifted so that what was actually achieved is now within an acceptable range. Or what the result is compared to may be changed to present the best outcome: comparison with the last quarters figures, last years figures, segmenting results so that it can be claimed that failure only occurred in one area...there are any number of tools in a managers toolbox to make a bad result look good.

When it comes to the final evaluation of a project, the skills of a mortician may come into play: giving something that is actually dead the appearance of life. When there are a number of dimensions on which a program or project could be evaluated, even if it is a failure then there may have been success after a fashion on a couple of dimensions so those are elevated to being the important ones and publicized while the important dimensions on which failure occurred are downplayed.

Such tactics create dangers for the business and the only way to protect against them is to clearly define up front and unambiguously which outcomes are important and how they are going to be measured, and how comparisons will be made. And where changes are going to be made, to require managers to document how they have implemented those changes, why they have implemented them in that way and to justify their 'modifications' in terms of the intent of the change. It might even be the case that you need to ensure up front that managers really do understand what the intent of the change is and that satisfying that intent must take precedence over anything else (protecting turf, preserving pet ideas etc) and that in the end they will be judged by whether that intent has been met not by how much 'activity' they have put into it.

Cosmetics may be about concealing flaws, about making the ugly appear beautiful, or about making what is merely pretty appear beautiful. But it is always about making something appear to be other than it is, to hide reality.

And when you hide from reality, the risk is that sooner or later reality will sneak up on you and stab you in the back.