Passive-Aggressive Organization

"Everyone Agrees but nothing changes"

Passive-aggressive organizations are friendly places to work: People are congenial, conflict is rare, and consensus is easy to reach. But, at the end of the day, even the best proposals fail to gain traction, and a company can go nowhere so imperturbably that it's easy to pretend everything is fine. Such companies are not necessarily saddled with mulishly passive-aggressive employees. Rather, they are filled with mostly well-intentioned people who are the victims of flawed processes and policies.

Commonly, a growing company's halfhearted or poorly thought-out attempts to decentralize give rise to multiple layers of managers, whose authority for making decisions becomes increasingly unclear. Some managers, as a result, hang back, while others won't own up to the calls they've made, inviting colleagues to second-guess or overturn the decisions. In such organizations, information does not circulate freely, and that makes it difficult for workers to understand the impact of their actions on company performance and for managers to appraise employees' value to the organization correctly. A failure to match incentives to performance accurately stifles initiative, and people do just enough to get by. Breaking free from this pattern is hard; a long history of seeing corporate initiatives ignored and then fade away tends to make people cynical. 

I've experienced passive-aggressive behavior in corporate settings, but it's an entirely different experience depending on your view of the playing field: employee, supply partner or consultant.

At first blush, team members looked to be one big, happy family. No one disagreed during meetings and members never directly discussed concerns or asserted their needs. Instead, they would come at you from behind or attack in pairs like nimble. If I asked the right question in just the right way (and the stars were aligned), I would get the needed answer. If I asked some data and give some deadlines, they will commit that they will give it on time. But when the deadlines comes they will give you many reasons and ask for extension.

Although we successfully launched the project but I'll always remember what the company was leaving on the table by embedding this passive-aggressive behavior into its culture. It doesn't take a math wizard to see how this experience multiplied hundreds of times could negatively impact the business.