Reduction in force
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Office anthropology™
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Reduction in force
rɪˈdʌkʃən ɪn fɔːs (n.)
(Also “RIF”)
The permanent removal of headcount — mass redundancy — usually targeted at that sweet spot in the organisation whose own reports aren’t so useless they can’t get by without meaningful supervision, and who aren’t so senior that they get to make decisions about who should be subject to a RIF.
Usually, therefore, it is a means of taking out a swathe of mid-ranking subject matter experts. We of the guild of mid-ranking subject matter experts find this fact rather chafing, to say the least.
Line management
A modern corporation is organised like an inverted, multilayer family tree, tracing back to great, great, great, great grandfather Hank. In lieu of parents we have line managers. Everyone, bar Grandad Hank himself, has at least one line manager: fortunate staff have only one — it ought to be plenty — les miserables further up in the stratosphere may also acquire a “dotted line” responsibility into someone else altogether. To continue the family tree analogy, this is a bit like having an open relationship with a distant uncle, and just as uncomfortable at family gatherings.
But we digress.
The basic job of line management is to supervise direct reports. Employees all have things to do besides supervising their direct reports, though a given worker’s proportion of line management to other stuff depends on that employee’s seniority.
The peril of supervising depends an awful lot on who you are supervising: if it is a novice, you feel the same terror Grandma Contrarian did when teaching the young JC to drive: right leg braced and jammed in the floor-well where she wished a brake pedal would be; right hand loosely gripping the hand-brake and ready to yank; left hand feeling anxiously for the door-handle, ready to judo-roll to safety at any moment, while her cretinous lad bunny-hopped his way around an empty carpark.
With experienced staff, by contrast, line management is — well, should be — a dream; like sitting back with a cocktail under full spinnaker as a well-drilled crew of professional yacht racers nimbly clamber about minutely trimming hydrofoils. Line management should become more like the latter and less like the former the more senior your team.
Thus, roles change the higher up the multi-level marketing scheme you go:
You get paid more: The more senior you are, the more lolly you take home. This news should not rock anyone’s world. Nor should it that the rate of increase in lolly is not linear, but exponential, in an insane and impossible-to-rationalise kind of way.
There are fewer of you: This stands to reason: there are lots of fungible Belarusian minions at the bottom taking home 30,000 rubles a year for carting around huge hunks of stone and occasionally getting squished — but hey, hose down the rock-face and get a new one, you know? — but only one Hank, taking home twenty-five mill for the inconvenience of having to flit around the world in a corporate jet and moralise at Davos. Generally, the more units cost, the fewer you can justify, but the irresistibility of this logic runs into the immovability of fat birds who, having made it to the thin branches, find themselves disinclined to make way meaning that, over time the poor, old tree gets rather top-heavy. As a result, when you multiply take-home comp by rank title, it looks a bit like the snake who ate the elephant in Le Petit Prince.
You spend more time managing other people: We take this to be a trivial observation: the contractor at the call-centre in Belarus has no direct reports, so spends zero time-managing; the CEO ultimately has every direct report, so spends almost all her time line-managing. The gradations between are not inevitable — every firm has those grave, grand elders who float about sprinkling their ineffable magic on things without having any portfolio in particular or any direct reports — but, as a rule the further up the chain you go, the more time you spend managing. Especially given fat-bird syndrome: the porky tweeters on the upper branches don’t really have anything else to do but manage their lines (and dotted-lines!)
The more homogenous you become: Over the course of a working lifetime, cognitive diversity is systematically eliminated by means of natural selection. Life as a corporate grunt is not for everyone: a large portion of the population self-selects by avoiding it from the get go. A smaller portion fall into it — perhaps by inattention or cruel accident of fate — and these people make it their business to exit via the first available gift shop. Those who do not — who grasp the survival techniques quickly enough to hang on — start our being similar enough: that is before they are chiseled, sanded, polished and buffed to a high sheen that the organisation can best work with. The longer you stay, the smoother you become and the more a functional part of the organisation as it currently is: the fitter you become; the more perfectly adapted to the organisation’s prevailing ecosystem: just as one does not bite the hand that feeds, nor does one change conditions that brought so much success. Whereas your graduate intake might have all kinds of pink-haired, wild-eyed loons, most of them will be gone in a year or two: the class of senior administrators, by contrast, will be made thoroughly in the corporation’s image. Their magic trick is to persuade the market of their unique attributes whilst being fully interchangeable.
The people you manage need less management: It is equally trivial that the Belarusian contractor, fresh off the bus from the job-centre in Minsk, knows nothing but what he is told: his reliance upon his manager for practical guidance and the dispensation of wisdom and experience is total. By contrast, the forty-year industry veteran chief financial officer, who narrowly missed out on the CEO job herself, knows exactly what is expected of her, what to do, how to react to any crisis and has little need of guidance and instruction from the jammy sod who did get the big job. Thus, note a shift in line management content as we ascend into the Gods: substance drops off, and form takes over. Line management becomes progressively more about the appearance of good governance than its delivery: more performative. Were the CEO to be accidentally run over by his Lear Jet, the organisation would not skip a beat. Take out a section of associate directors, on the other hand, and it will grind to a halt. The challenge, therefore is selecting the right portion of associate directors to excise so that you trim mainly fat and do not “cut into the muscle”.
The more say you get over redundancy rounds: It should be no more flabbergasting to hear that those dodging rockfall at the base of the pyramid have zero influence on when, whether, how or by the removal of whose person the workforce should be rationalised, whereas those at the in the executive suite have total influence, if exercised through the medium of their immediate and indirect reports. Here, though, there is no straight-line extrapolation from 0 to 100 percent: A small cadre in the top three echelons are privy to these decisions, the vast majority of the rest of the workforce is not.
Right, now where am I going with all of this?