Office cliques: Management bears a lot of responsibility

Everybody has an opinion. After I raised the issue several weeks ago of office cliques and their effect on performance and morale, a lot of people wrote in to give me their experiences and offer advice for the person who had originally written to raise the issue (see “Office cliques: unethical or just natural?” /articles/op/xml/02/11/15/021115opethics.xml) .

In the previous column, the reader seeking advice was a 49-year-old worker, who said he was overweight and had self-esteem problems. He complained that his peers, mostly younger females, had developed a clique that included one manager. The reader felt that he was excluded from the group and consequently received less than desirable work assignments. He wanted to know whether this was ethical.

I haven’t tabulated the results of the reader responses, mostly because each offering had such a unique character, often from the reader’s own experience. However, some themes did manage to come through. A fair number of readers thought that the burden fell entirely on the original writer.

“The person whom you write about in this week’s column should get over it,” wrote one anonymous reader. “He certainly comes across as someone who thinks ‘The world is out to get me.’ His problem is, at age 49, [that] his peers have moved on to bigger and better things. By now he should either be rising through the ranks of management or the resident guru in a particular technology. I’ve had female bosses who ‘pal around’ with women on the team. It didn’t bother me. I got my work done on time. Thus I let my work speak for me. We don’t go to work to make friends.”

Perhaps we don’t go to work to make friends, but it really makes things more pleasant if you feel as if you’re part of the group. The original writer wasn’t complaining about not socializing outside of work with his peers, but was concerned about feeling marginalized within the work environment — and I think that is at the crux of the problem.

Reader Paul Guzzardo Jr. addressed this very issue, writing to say that “you made great points about people with similar interests flocking together. This, in my opinion, is natural and not the problem. The problem lies with the alienation of people who don’t share the particular interest of the group.”

“We’ve somehow come to the point in this country where inappropriate behavior justifies inappropriate behavior in return,” wrote Guzzardo. “If I am alienated by a group in power, then when I’m in power it is culturally acceptable to disregard the pain that I felt during my alienation and, instead, alienate the group that had previously alienated me. It’s a vicious circle, and it is ridiculous.”

“In my opinion, it boils down to empathy and self-discipline. It seems to me that a group that ostracizes people from other groups lacks one or both of these characteristics,” he added.

My feeling is that the original writer felt his work assignments were suffering because of the in-office clique and wanted to know how to deal with it in a productive way. One option, according to some readers, was to make himself more valuable.

Jim in Andover, Mass., suggested that “the guy needs to work on more than weight and self-esteem issues. He needs to work on his skill set. He needs to figure out what the office needs most that it does not have (or is weak in) and gain that skill. He needs to volunteer his services to lighten the workload of his boss. He needs to ‘go the extra mile.”

“In short, he needs to make himself indispensable,” added Jim. “If he does that, then the position of the clique becomes irrelevant.”

That’s a great suggestion: The more valuable you are to the organization, then the harder it is to overlook you and exclude you — at least in theory. However, I’ve known managers in my career who not only made a habit of shooting themselves in the foot, they would stop to reload. Very often, people were promoted even after they had proven their incompetence, while more capable employees languished in the shadows.

A reader named Sheila sees this in her organization, too. “The office I work in is no exception. The manager has succeeded in making all of the slightly older, average-looking women who worked in the department quit, except for me. He has had me close to the point of quitting a couple of times but I decided I had nothing to lose at that point by going over his head and filing a complaint.”

“Through the whole process, I learned several lessons,” wrote Sheila. “First, even if you have excellent self esteem it is possible for your supervisor to erode it over time and you don’t notice it until someone else points it out to you. Second is that being a ‘team player’ and taking the jobs that no one else wants so that they have time for ‘lunch meetings,’ etc. and putting in long hours to do it only gets you more work with no rewards if you are not in the clique with your manager.”

“When you do finally stand up for yourself, be prepared for the fallout,” she added. “As long as I work in this department I now have less than zero chance for advancement.”

As for me, I’m still going with my original position: The manager is responsible for the interaction and morale within the office. I’m staying on this course, despite an objection from a reader:

“I would like to ask you what world you live in that you believe: ‘My feeling has always been that the manager is responsible for fostering a cooperative attitude among employees and for creating and maintaining diversity in the workplace.’ That’s straight textbook, but I’ve yet to see it.”

Here’s why I disagree with the idea that the manager is off the hook: The manager is paid to get the best results out of his/her team and to contribute as much as possible to the mission of the company. If anyone — especially someone who is a potentially good performer — is being marginalized, it is the manager’s responsibility to ensure that office politics don’t adversely affect the company.

There are many ways to achieve these goals. I know diversity has gotten a bad reputation lately, but it is a worthwhile endeavor. It shouldn’t be a slavish, cartoon version of itself, nor even a goal in itself; however, diversity can be a tool to create a better and more productive workplace. Any organization, especially one that relies on creativity and “thinking outside the box,” would do well to have more than an army of clones sitting around echoing each other’s thoughts.

Once you have a diverse workplace, it often takes some managerial expertise to be sure that the people work together. Younger workers may have new ideas and more energy. Older workers have a sense of history and bring the caution necessary to temper ideas with possible pitfalls.

At least one reader agrees with me. Kurt Parks writes, “I lay the responsibility for fair treatment in the business arena of any human being, squarely on the shoulders of the individual manager. Isn’t that what the name ‘manager’ is supposed to mean? That they understand their company, their product or service and their responsibilities to it … which includes managing their people in the best fashion to effectively accomplish their company responsibilities?”

“The best and most effective fashion I have seen is where the manager is fair, consistent and understanding … and the definition of that doesn’t change from day to day or situation to situation,” he noted.

So I guess the bottom line for the original writer facing an office clique is that if your manager is encouraging a situation in which you are marginalized, she isn’t doing what she needs to do to be an efficient manager. The practical solution is to try to take some steps to either reach out to the clique and earn respect, if not necessarily become part of the clique.

If that fails, then the other choice is to remain in this situation and remain unhappy, or seek out a position in which you’d be more comfortable.