supervisor / manager / superior / boss / direct report / subordinate / underling / junior

What language games are we playing when we say these words?

Status? Control? Authority? Power-over? Yes… but...

To us, this is actually the language of inaction, with those nasty side-effects.

A likely story… The person above tells the person below what to do. Then something goes wrong.

The person below “wins,” because they get to blame the person above for not being clear / not getting it / having unrealistic expectations / etc. Thus they take no responsibility. They learn to wait, to avoid action, to avoid initiative, to stay busy-looking, and to embrace status illegibility (i.e., “don’t get noticed”).

Meanwhile, the person above wins, because they get to blame the person below for not following their instructions / not being competent / being willful / etc. Thus they take no responsibility. They learn to blame, to say “come to me with solutions, not problems,” to use people as pawns in power games.

So everybody comes away “satisfied” (in a deeply unsatisfying way), and little gets accomplished. It’s bizarre theater, misery, and wage extraction, all within the bloated carcass of an organization that enables it.

Aside: We shouldn’t ignore the problems of oppressive power structures, but assume here that we speak of people with relative privilege in order to illustrate the dynamic. In our view, the person with more power must bear more responsibility, and yet… it takes two to play.

We got here through language.

As we work to revitalize historied, missioned organizations through aligned action, we have found that we dislike speaking in terms of “subordinate” and “boss” because it is permissive of the above “win-win” (lose-lose) theatrics.

But it was never about just labels or prettier words for us. It was about behavior.

To be clear, we don’t want just different words, to put a fresh coat of paint on something rotten. We want different behavior.

And that behavior is care.

Care can be mutual, but it can also be unequal. You can be in someone’s care, without them necessarily being in yours. (Imagine the relationship you might have with a doctor, for example.)

So, we see the existing structures of authority as a testbed for care-centered behaviors.

You may be in someone’s care. You may have people in your care. That is the relationship as we see it. Care displaces control. It could invite mutuality.

Perhaps this is too theoretical, sparse on “quick tips” for immediate action. What we suggest, however, is to read our posts through this lens. Look for care. Look for responsibility. Look for the possibility of mutuality.

We hint at it always, even if we don’t say “this is what to do.”

Ben and David
StrategyTeaming.com

P.S. One place to look for it is in the book-in-a-box we authored, Strategy Tactics (sample below).