The Tyrannical Manager...like in The Great. You know, the TV Show about Catherine and Peter

Busy week with a new job and a long academic to-do list, but at least I watched an episode of The Great, which reminded me of....well, tyrannical management. Spoiler alert.

If you haven’t watched the first episode of Season 3 of The Great and you want to be surprised, it is probably best that you don’t read on.

First, he’s just f*cked your mother.

This happened at the end of previous season. Emperor Peter III (remember, this is satire…not history) had sex with Catherine’s mother, for some reason against an open window. In the process, she accidentally fell out the window and died.

This is a metaphor, obviously. Managers are too busy f*cking with everything we care about in our vocations to actually go around seducing our mothers. But they do it by undermining what we love.

Once I was teaching a class of students who were about to become teachers. One student, a passionate educator, stormed in from another class.

You know how assessment drives learning?

Yes, I replied while trying to get the powerpoint to display on the screen.

Do you know what is supposed to drive our design of assessment?

Student learning? I ventured, perhaps too hopefully.

No. He replied. How much the assessment costs. The purpose of assessment, I was just taught, is to keep the assessment cheap.

How many times have we entered a field of work, started a project, encountered a student, patient, client…only to have management undermine what we think we’re doing it for?

Image: Two managers, I mean aristocrats. Promotional Pic for The Great. See https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2235759/

Feels a bit like someone just f*cked your mother.

They keep a knife under their pillow.

The managerial class mostly focuses on what other managers think. That doesn’t make them friends.

Catherine and Peter are reunited. And yet, things are not great in the marriage. Peter finds a knife under Catherine’s pillow. He smiles, pulls his own knife out from under his pillow. See, he says, this is why we’re perfect together.

One of the things about the tyrannical manager is that they are often most preoccupied with stabbing other managers (metaphorically, usually).

Image: Peter III with two knives, in bed.

We might recall that time a certain sometimes-leader of the National Party (for those outside of Oz, this is the political party representing country areas) f*cked up a river (a really important one for the ecology and economy) just to ‘show the greenies’.

Would managers really be prepared to do damage to the organisation for which they are responsible because of (a) a petty feud with another manager (b) a petty feud with a key stakeholder whose influence they don’t like; (c) or, contradictorily, on behalf of a stakeholder who seems more important than making the organisation do what it is supposed to do; (d) because of an ideology they hold, like private (or public) organisations should be doing this instead of us so I will undermine our capacity to do it; (e) or perhaps most importantly, staff who they suspect might be doing work they enjoy or find meaningful.

They wouldn’t, would they?

They stab people. But usually only on a bad day

Catherine killed Peter, except it proved to be Peter’s body double, who he employed because he thought Catherine might try to kill him.

‘I had a bad day,’ Catherine explained.

‘You’re much stronger as a leader now’, promised Peter, ‘now they fear you’.

‘I don’t want them to fear me’, retorts Catherine.

‘You are as handy with a sharp knife as well as a sharp word…with a slightly unhinged quality that is truly arousing.’

I’m sure we’ve all encountered bosses who seem a bit unhinged, make decisions that seem fatal (if only to the organisation) and seem to find it all a little too….exciting.

But the other thing to note about this is that Catherine intended to stab Peter as part of a coup, arranged with senior administrative and military personnel. This was a kind of failure, actually. But she nevertheless claimed it as success.

No one would claim failure to be success in real life. Would they?

‘I did kill him’, she tells her co-conspirator, ‘it just wasn’t him’.

Managerial Solidarity

Even though Catherine and Peter are at odds, in the end they express solidarity with one another, over everyone else.

This is a bit of a pattern. Observe the way Elizabeth of Russia defends Peter.

‘He killed my mother!’ exclaims Catherine.

‘Overconfidence in window ledges killed your mother’, corrects Elizabeth.

I mean this is in part the genius of the character, who is beautifully played by Belinda Bromilow to be kind of naively pedantic. She’s absolutely my favourite. But as well as not letting Catherine blame Peter for something that was clearly an accident - albeit under non-ideal circumstances - Elizabeth is also doing the classic managerial-solidarity thing here of using pedantry to excuse managerial failure.

In the following exchange we think that their interests are divergent:

Peter: You apparently arrested all my friends, we need to let them go.

Catherine: Don’t tell me what to do.

But Peter reminds us all: ‘they are my friends and they love me. So they will love her too’.

Not quite how they see it. ‘We’re loyal to you. We hate that c*nt and want her dead’. Peter talks them around - it is good for them, he explains, to demonstrate their loyalty to Catherine. They quickly see that managerial solidarity between the warring Peter and Catherine means they must show it too. Possibly because they are about to be executed, so they have real motivation.

Rarely are the stakes quite so high at work, though often enough it feels that way.

Note too that solidarity was linked to the tough decisions that needed to be made, even in relation to one another.

‘She doesn’t really want me dead. I fucked her mother. If she didn’t try to kill me I’d not respect or love her’.

Catherine is frustrated by managerial solidarity in the same moment that she needs it. ‘You don’t have any ideological position’, she says to Elizabeth and Archbishop Samsa. Instead she suggests that they only care about winning.

Image: Archie, from The Great promotional material.

She was completely right.

‘It is warming to be seen, isn’t it’, says Archbishop Samsa (Archie) to Elizabeth, who agrees.

Catherine decides to embrace this political realism and asks for their help. Here is where managerial solidarity becomes crucial.

Elizabeth is explicit about the need for solidarity:

‘One thing you must promise us is that when we are in play you must hold the line and trust us’.

Even when they disagree, those in charge see that they need a united front. That is because the only thing that really threatens them is…well, that they might not stay in control, or power.

Shoot the peasants

Which makes the peasants the real enemy. Catherine, who often thinks she’s building Russia for them, calls them ‘fucking savages’.

Random violence is the key characteristic of Imperial rule, which enlightenment-obsessed Catherine is trying to overcome. And yet, solidarity pulls her into violence nevertheless.

As Peter’s friends are awaiting their fate under what may or may not have been a Catherine-led coup, the peasants throw vegetables at them. ‘Stop it, you animals’, yells one of Peter’s friends, a non-managerial aristocrat.

If you are of the managerial class with a tendency to tyranny, just because the workers, I mean peasants, I mean workers, might oppose a manager presently trying to kill you, does not make those workers your friends. Enemy of your enemy is still your enemy.

Peter arrives and points a gun at the peasants. Their demeanour changes from rampant, frustrated and violent throwing of organic matter and is turned to patriotic cheering. This means Peter doesn’t need to shoot them. For now.

Being a tyrannical boss is violent, though not usually lethal, these days. Retaining the right to control all the decisions requires the peasants fear what might be a random application of managerial power.

Wave your managerial gun in their direction and they will quickly tell you just how good a manager you are. They might even say what a good idea it was for you to f*ck someone’s mother.

Friends are not safe either

Catherine: What is the bullet or the bear?

Peter: Oh, they choose. Shot by a firing squad or mauled by a bear. If they walk away they live. I invented it.

The rulers’ friends are also never safe. Random violence is offset by capricious violence, often enough directed at friends. In this case, in a play on the stock exchange (bull and bear), unlike the peasants, Peter’s friends have a choice. They are shown discussing whether the bear really might leave them alive, but everyone knows. Well, the privilege of choice is not real.

One of Peter’s friends was not arrested. In a show of loyalty to Catherine, this friend dutifully shoots one of those who were. The person she shot, of course, was also her friend. Management often demands things like this - shoot your friends, usually more metaphorically.

Exercising managerial power therefore includes:

• Constant watching of what other managers think of you, because they might plan to stab you (likely metaphorically), so you should keep a knife under your pillow (also metaphorically, probably) just in case you need to stab them first.

• Contradictorily, the knife generally stays hidden because one must maintain solidarity with others in management, not only because that is how things get done, but mostly because it keeps you collectively safe from the real enemy, the workers.

• Ensure anyone not in management is frightened, insecure and knows to flip-flop their stance on anything in accordance with signals from management (you). This includes anyone slightly below management as well as the larger body of workers.

• Eliminating workers, at random if possible, but otherwise in accordance with rules you made up that gives them the illusion of choice. That not only helps reduce the threat that they might start making actual decisions on their own, supplanting managerial power, but also helps keep those not yet eliminated anxious and compliant (though probably not very productive, which ought to have reduced the influence of tyrannical management, but hasn’t…yet).

• Being unsentimental about friends, who also might need to be eliminated in order to keep control over decisions. This can be achieved by involving and implicating friends in managerial violence. In time, if you haven’t already shot them, friends will likely come around to managerial solidarity, as above.

Autonomy at work and moral deskilling

All this is relevant to the topic on my mind this week, which is professional autonomy.

Being able to control the decisions we make at work is a crucial quality of being a good doctor, social worker, lawyer, teacher, nurse or accountant. Constraining those choices was a way for (good) management to find ways around the self-interest and hierarchical inequality that the professions enabled and for (bad) management to get around that annoying virtue in the interest of naked profit.

But…