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 supervision by someone who genuinely knows what is going on, 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.
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 around an empty carpark.
With an experienced hand, by contrast, line management is 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, occasionally getting squished — but hey, hose down the rockface and get a new one, you know? — and 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. 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.
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 absolutely nothing but what he is told: his reliance upon his manager for practical guidance and the dispensation of wisdom and experience is vital; 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 almost no need of guidance and instruction from the jammy sod who did get the big job. Thus note a shift that takes place in line management as we ascend into the Gods: substance drops off, and form takes over. Line management becomes progressively more about documenting that it happens, exhibiting good governance to those in the risk control universe that want to see it.
The more say you get over redundancy rounds: It is no less unflabbergasting that those dodging rockfall at the base of the pyramid have nil influence on when, whether and how the workforce should be rationalised, whereas those at the tome
Right, now where am I going with all of this?