The Sunny King

Some look at the glass and see it as half full. Others see it as half empty. He looks at the glass and sees it completely full. Even if it’s really only half full. Or half empty, depending on how you look at it.

He’s not an optimist, though. To be an optimist, you must first be cognizant, at some level, that things can go wrong. It’s your persistent belief that everything will be okay, in the face of your dark knowledge, that makes you an optimist. If instead you believe things will turn out alright because you have no idea that things could go wrong, you’re not an optimist. You’re just stupid.

But he’s not stupid. He’s actually very bright. A real achiever, a leader of men. And women. He’s accomplished a lot, made it high up the corporate ladder. So his mind must be capable of seeing the underside of an issue. Yet it doesn’t.

It’s a puzzle, this blind spot of his. When I first had a chance to observe him closely, I figured he was implementing one of those management fads, an extreme manifestation of the Power of Positive Thinking Approach to Life he had picked up from a business bestseller or a motivational speaker at an airport hotel. Ac-CEN-tuate the positive, e-LIM-inate the negative, and drive your sales through the roof!

But it’s not that. After further observations, I’m testing a new hypothesis based on the Subordinate Shun. It goes like this:

Like all senior managers, he works through subordinates, setting their performance goals, motivating them to achieve those goals and lowering the boom if they don’t. And like all subordinates, his subordinates spend their days doing the Subordinate Sandbag, scrambling to come up with all the extrinsic reasons his goals can’t possibly be met, despite the fact that he has the best subordinates in the world working themselves nearly to death to make him look good. That way if they fail to meet a goal, their Subordinate Sandbag has prepared him for the inevitability of failure – what else can he expect when he sets unattainable goals? – thereby deflecting at least some of the blowback.

And if they meet the goal, they’re heroes, having made the impossible possible.

When you factor in the Subordinate Shuffle, the universal tendency of those below to kick their problems upstairs, and the Subordinate CYA, which needs no explanation, you can begin to appreciate why a manager might develop a healthy skepticism of the negative. Spend twenty years managing your way around the Subordinate Sandbag, the Subordinate Shuffle and the Subordinate CYA, as he has, and your initial skepticism towards negativity can devolve into full-blown denial, your arsenal of negativity avoidance maneuvers (what I’m calling the Subordinate Shun) filtering out everything you don’t want to hear.

So like lots of managers practicing the Subordinate Shun, he refuses to accept “no” for an answer. That’s basic stuff, Subordinate Shun 101. But unlike any other manager I’ve ever encountered, he refuses to accept “no” for a word. It simply doesn’t register. That’s high-level Subordinate Shun. As a result, in his office never is heard a discouraging word. “Yes men” are simply called “men.”

I think three extra ingredients have propelled him to this extraordinary place.

First, he rules his division absolutely, as if by divine right – l’division, c’est moi. His unusual autonomy, a product of past performance, failed synergies, language barriers and geographic isolation, almost completely insulates him from corporate oversight. With his freedom and power he never finds himself in the sniveling subordinate mode, which mode, for all its shortcomings, does have the salutary effect of forcing one to actually analyze both the pros and the cons in order to withstand a grilling from skeptical superiors. He’s never grilled, so there’s no outside agent to leaven the effects of his Subordinate Shun, allowing his managerial predilection to dismiss the cons to metastasize over the years into complete ignorance of the cons.

Second, cocooned in his monarchical reporting structure, surrounded by servile subordinates whose only job is to please him, he’s managed to delegate everything, even delegating, which is handled for him by a cadre of expert delegators. In addition to delegating every task, they’ve figured out a way to delegate every worry so that nothing need ever furrow his brow, sort of a managerial Botox. Someday, they’ll figure out a way for him to delegate breathing. Until they do he can breathe easy, so free from worry that he can forget what it was.

Third, he suffers from a particularly virulent case of the Smartest Man in the Room Syndrome, a common affliction of the managerial class. In its mildest form, this Syndrome manifests itself in a smugly pedantic demeanor, manager as guru, subordinates as eager acolytes. In its more severe forms, this Syndrome becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as insecure managers systematically cull anyone with comparable intelligence from the herd, or those with comparable intelligence cull themselves, all too aware that their tendency to think for themselves is, for the Smartest Manager in the Room, the ultimate insubordination. So each year he gets smarter, if only because those who remain around him get stupider, the smart ones either leaving or learning to act stupid in his presence. So anything that contradicts his view must be wrong. And if his view is persistently positive, a bias bolstered by his Subordinate Shun, his absolute authority and his complete insulation from worry, that must mean that any bit of negativity that manages to penetrate his defenses must be wrong, no matter how right it is.

It’s amazing what he’s managed to do, creating his own reality, molding his world to his wishes. I think of him as the Sunny King, always on the sunny side of life, supported by small-minded minions toiling in the shadows on the dark side of his sun.

How long can he keep this up?