Secrets of Effective Managers (Not) #25 – Understanding and Using the Emphasis/De-emphasis Problem

Natural barriers to flows of information can work to your advantage.  One of the most prevalent natural barriers to the flow of information in a large, bureaucratic organization is the “emphasis/de-emphasis problem.”  This concept describes how any issue reported up the chain of command will become less important at each higher level, and any direction reported down the chain of command will become more important at each level.  So how can you use this knowledge?  The emphasis side of the problem is probably best understood.  On the way up, nobody wants to report bad news, so the message will be toned down and otherwise modified until at some level it will not be reported at all.  Research into this syndrome has shown that even the worst kind of problem, a real corporation killer, will be minimized and is unlikely to be reported at all after it has risen through five levels of the organization.  If your organization has more than ten levels, as many big corporations do, the people who could do something about a problem will often not hear of it until it is too late, but actually may not hear of it at all.  That is a fact of life in bureaucracies, however, so it is prudent to stay aware of it and be on the lookout for opportunities to exploit it.

The emphasis problem works both ways.  Another fun aspect of the emphasis problem is the “de-emphasis” side in which a message traveling down the chain of command will become more urgent and important at each level.  In business school my organizational behavior professor gave the example of a corporate division that couldn’t figure out why they had purchased a McDonald’s franchise until someone discovered that the CEO, the week before, had said he wanted a burger for lunch.  Many times I have seen people working in a state of  panic on a task that was a response to an off-hand comment made some number of levels above.  On one assignment I actually heard a high level manager say “Geez .. I didn’t mean they should go tearing off and do that!”, realizing too late that the work was already half done and the new costs were rolling in, even though the project was never intended to be carried out in the first place.  This principle can also help cover your tracks when things go wrong as it is a systemic problem, and systemic issues and concepts are rarely well understood and even less often addressed.

Lessons learned from the emphasis/de-emphasis problem:
1. If you’re going to do something that might be personally risky, choose something that can’t be addressed at a low level.  That way, if you are found out or things go wrong, the matter is more likely to be passed upward again and again, and de-emphasized to the point that it either dies or changes into a great idea (which is much easier to report to one’s superiors).

2. Monitor the power of your words as a manager.  You can watch what goes on and use the urgency with which your offhand requests are carried out to gauge your standing in the company – increased urgency (the emphasis problem) indicates your directions are cascading down through more levels and your words are taken more seriously.  This can be a key measure of influence that you can keep to yourself, but work to optimize.

3. Manage your people’s work using your knowledge of the emphasis/de-emphasis problem.  Cultivate contacts at higher and lower levels of management, not only to help monitor your influence and the effectiveness of your strategies, but also to be able to find out just how serious a request from above or below really is.  If you find that direction from above was not actually reported to you as intended by the high level manager who originated it, you can delay putting high priority on it for your subordinates or possibly avoid it entirely by putting it on hold until either a countering direction is received from above, or you never hear of it again. 

4. Make points with upper management using this concept.  If you receive a report from below of a critical problem needing upper management intervention you can make sure it gets to the right executive with your name prominently attached.  Top management will remember you as the one who caught the problem and brought it to the right level for management attention.  Then make sure you park in a secure spot where the air is more likely to stay in your tires.  Also, a friend in upper management could come in handy if anyone finds out the death certificate that you used to justify that week-long “memorial and funeral” in Cozumel was faked, and you need a “get out of jail free” card.

Put yourself on the cutting edge of management knowhow.  While management science isn’t advanced enough yet to provide much research on the emphasis/de-emphasis problem, it is a fact of life in bureaucracies and you can learn to use it to your advantage.   Much work remains to be done, hopefully with the involvement of organizational behavior academics and social psychologists, and until research is carried out you have a free hand to use this knowledge for your own benefit.

As always, I welcome your comments.  -  Tim

Famous example of the emphasis problem:  the bucket of fertilizer (snafu principle)

Advertisement