Did you know that the words management and manipulation come from the same Latin word stem, man? You probably know that the Latin word manus means hand, but have you ever thought about how management and manipulation are related in the workplace?
When I think of the word management, I feel a sense of empowerment and control (but not necessarily in a bad way), and the words efficiency and effectiveness come to mind. When management is benevolent, things run smoothly. People trust each other. People communicate. When I think of the word manipulation, however, I feel a toxic soup of anger and resentment start to boil somewhere deep in my gut. I feel dis-empowered. I feel a lack of trust. I feel a reluctance to communicate. I haven’t been manipulated recently (that I am aware of, except maybe by my cat), but the idea has the power to invoke a righteous fury.
I was manipulated by an employer once. I worked at a career college, teaching business and computer applications classes to adult students seeking job skills. My immediate supervisor was the career college equivalent of an absent-minded professor—well-meaning but disorganized. His propensity for leaving sentences unfinished frustrated everyone, teachers and students alike. The college administrators decided something should be done. Their solution was to demote my supervisor and strong-arm me into taking his position.
It was a classic case of manipulation. Managers with the power to fire me cornered me in a small office, closed the door, and proceeded to bombard me with a combination of threats, enticements, and promises. When I protested about my supervisor (of whom I was fond and to whom I was loyal), they assured me he wanted to be demoted to adjunct. When I didn’t jump on the chance, they offered me a small increase in salary. When I asked for some time to think about it, they said I had 24 hours.
I left that meeting feeling bludgeoned, shocked, confused—manipulated. I reacted the way I usually do when I feel manipulated. I did whatever I could to regain my power.
First I went to my supervisor and told him exactly what had happened. As I suspected, he knew nothing about it. Management had never told him that his performance was less than acceptable, and further, he had never expressed a desire to be demoted to adjunct. Not surprisingly, he was furious. Not at me, but at management. He felt manipulated.
He told me later that he confronted the cabal of managers that had set this debacle in motion. Over the weekend, I got a peppy call from one of the managers. He didn’t apologize for manipulating me. He said, “We’ve turned back the hands of time.” In other words, this never happened.
How do you imagine this incident affected my loyalty, my commitment, my motivation, my satisfaction? My supervisor left the college for another job not long after, but I did not put my hat in the ring for the vacant position. I had learned my lesson: these managers are not to be trusted. The word manager and manipulator were now the same in my eyes, and although I think I would have done well in a managerial capacity, after that incident, I kept my head down and did my job. Eventually the college lost enrollments, closed the campus, and I was laid off. No loyalty on either side. Their loss, my loss, and ultimately, the ones who lost the most were the students.
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