After many years of professional consulting — serving stakeholders from the server room to the board room — I moved into management and encountered fresh perspective. I learned things that I wished someone had told me early in my career. I learned things that I wish to share with you. While I understand that each individual must grow in their own time in their own journey, I hope these “secrets” resonate with someone (as I believe they would have resonated with me 20 years ago).
 

Leaders and managers in organizations wear many hats. While not an exhaustive list, they are the visionaries, facilitators, mentors, investigators, advocates, and of course, decision-makers. As a manager of consultants, one of my roles was to optimize the delivery of (consultant) value to stakeholders. For consultants, value and cost can become conflated. The cost side of the issue is all about measuring what you want to influence.  However, the value issue can be more challenging.  So I set out to explore why leaders and managers among my stakeholders were not more fully engaging our consultants.
 

The simplicity and candor of these secrets may surprise you...

Ogres can exist at any level in an organization.

Ogres come from many backgrounds and can be any color, gender, or orientation -- but they are easy to spot.  Whether you are an Ogre or the victim of an Ogre, here are five Ogre specific disruptors of performance:

1.  OGRES dominate the clock and calendar. Ogres do not trust in the maturity of adults to schedule their events. While they rabidly protect their own schedule, Ogres are monstrous to the priorities and deadlines of everyone around them -- often "appropriating" crisis, abusing meetings, and interrupting projects.

The people and processes the ogres disrupt must compensate to offset the dominating influence.

2.  OGRES demand superfluous reporting. Ogres lurch about and are basically stupid. Ogres will bash what they cannot observe.  So they require volumes of "activity" reports -- instead of focusing on reporting real "results." Ogres get lost in their own activity until it becomes more about form over function... presentation over substance.

People and processes must compensate for emerging dual standards of performance (real and perceived) and moral/ethical storms brewing about the ogre.

3.  OGRES tell you HOW to work. You will do the work the way work “has always been done” in the swamp. No ideas, no experience, and no knowledge will contribute to greater productivity. Ogres know best -- everything. Ogres dismiss ideas to be sure things are done the "right way.”

The people and processes must compensate to accommodate dynamic business conditions, staff retention becomes challenging, core competency declines, and innovation suffers.

4.  OGRES share responsibility, never authority. Ogres champion unnecessary approvals and layers of bureaucracy. They are the gatekeepers in any workflow; however, rarely are they the responsible party for process delays.

The people and processes must compensate in order to evolve and maintain the management of change and the service management lifecycle.

5.  OGRES wield raw power. Ogres fling power about casually -- "just because it suits them to do so." Ogres need to control others. Ogres struggle to subordinate themselves. At the same time, the power often consumes them; the power makes them very self-interested, uncompromising, and myopic.

This is at the heart of the ogre frame of mind. Ogres believe they have a sense of entitlement -- instead of having a sense of duty and teamwork. Ogres believe the organization (the people, processes, and/or technology) is there to serve their career and/or personal needs... and ogres will make every excuse to justify and defend selfish reasoning.

People and processes are forced to compensate for an ogre and expend organizational energy to transform "raw" power into something focused and meaningful.

With an ogre positioned comfortably behind a gate (any gate), the question you must ask yourself... when torch-bearing customers march, who is really guarding that gate?

Are you the Ogre? Ogress? Does your (inner) ogre serve the organization? Or is it the other way around?