We have this administrator whom everybody loves with a swoony, salivating passion. Everybody, that is, except me. I don’t respond positively to his attempts to ingratiate himself with the people by pretending he’s one of us, the man of the people, somebody who recognizes no hierarchies. This is something manipulators do, and I have no use for it.
This administrator is all smiles, jokes, and popularity chasing but work has stopped since we’ve been cursed with his presence. First, he was appointed interim dean. As a result, the college stopped funding travel to scholarly conferences (and by stopped I mean refused to give even a crooked dime to show some good will), started pretending that scholarship doesn’t exist at all, but instead started organizing bizarre parties for our completely useless, overpampered, and endlessly mushrooming bureaucratic personnel where every paper-pusher would get fresh flowers in a vase courtesy of the college.
This administrator distanced himself from any responsibility for the budget cuts by taking the position of, “This is them, not me, I’m one of you, folks, I hate it as much as you do” while sneaking in one destructive measure after another.
Now this tiresome fellow has been appointed interim chancellor. And everybody is happy because people’s endlessly suppurating egos appreciate fake friendliness over any actual work. What nobody wants to understand is that a good administrator (manager, etc.) is not supposed to be your best buddy.
Workers always pay through the nose for the pretense that there’s no hierarchical distance between them and their supervisor. An honest environment of strictly articulated roles is always less oppressive than the one where the boss pretends to be your friend and disarms any resistance with appeals to this fake friendship.
Clarissa's Blog 
Workers always pay through the nose for the pretense that there’s no hierarchical distance between them and their supervisor. An honest environment of strictly articulated roles is always less oppressive than the one where the boss pretends to be your friend and disarms any resistance with appeals to this fake friendship.
Yep. This was explored in season 3 of Orange Is The New Black.
And on a related note, even though this involves equals rather than supervisors, there are few things creepier than a department where everyone seems to be close personal friends outside of work.
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I agree! My husband decided not to go into academia because he was afraid of ending up in such a close, family-like structure. Plus, he hates teaching.
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Absolutely! One of the worst things about our current Head of Department is that he is a nice person who wants to be liked. When he started, my colleagues asked what I thought (he was an outside appointment but is in my field, so I’ve known him for about 20 years through the conference circuit etc.), and I said he was going to be someone who said the right things but didn’t do stuff, and that he would unintentionally create a lot of trouble by being relentlessly optimistic in the face of contradictory evidence.
“Oh you are so cynical” they all said when he arrived and was really friendly, praised everyone, instigated better snacks at meetings, began a ‘listening programme’ of one to ones where people got to tell him all their little niggles for a couple of hours.
Eighteen months in, HE is proud of his success as a people person. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that he is facing a grass-roots revolt (as in, open discussions in the corridor don’t-care-who-hears-it planning to systematically undermine some of his policies, collective reporting of issues to the Dean directly etc.), that the department is united in fury at his last-minute and ‘my views are the only right views’ actions (he cannot imagine that other people are not like him! This is a big problem…) and continual ‘when I worked at famous, well-funded R1 we did this so we should do that here’ and relentless, non-evidence-based optimism (we have classes which start September and are to be taught by new academic staff. It takes 3 months minimum to appoint a new colleague (there are laws about advertising, interviewing, giving notice in ones current job) and often 6-8 months. The advertisements have not gone out yet, it is August, and he is still insisting that we do not need to have a plan to cope with these classes with existing staff come the middle of September.
He said we must trust him to protect our interests in the negotiation of some building work. We now have building work making all the research and teaching labs for one section of the department unusable which is running for three months until week 4 or 5 of classes. He doesn’t see how this is a problem, even though the dust and noise is making it very hard to even spend an hour in ones office in most of the building, never mind use the technically still accessible teaching rooms.
Some colleagues are now hailing me as a prophet… (it must be one of the gloomy ones who met a Bad End) but all I did was see that people who want to be liked are not going to be good leaders, managers or decision makers, because taking action and making decisions always causes upsets, and because acting nice to those below whilst pleasing those above means SOMEONE is getting SHAFTED (those below, 99.999% of the time).
trust your instincts around this person!
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Thank you for sharing this story! I feel like the grumpiest grinch in the universe, spoiling everybody’s joy with my gloomy and doomy predictions about this fellow. And I’m normally quite a positive person. But I’ve had previous experience with these mellifluous smiley people and those experiences weren’t good.
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Trying to pretend the hierarchies aren’t there just makes for a big muddle that collapses at the first sign of stress into a round of recriminations and bad feelings.
The irony of course is that if the hierarchy is made clear at the beginning and respected by all involved then it is possible to have very friendly relations and achieve real rapport without having to fawn all over each other and it’s much easier to weather crises as well.
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Absolutely. I prefer clearly articulated rules where everybody does their job and nobody needs to fake a buddy – buddy relationship.
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Also, while I’m here this points to a big, big, big difference between Europe and the US (I assume Canada’s on the US side of the division).
In Europe (even Britain) politeness means keeping your distance and not imposing on other people and getting in their space. In the US politeness is equated with friendliness which leads to all kinds of misunderstandings.
I remember an early Spanish class when one young American woman offended a middle aged French lady in the class by using ‘tu’ instead of ‘usted’ with her. The American meant no offense but had assumed that a form associated with friendship must be more polite than the stuffy standoffish ‘usted’.
It’s possible to maintain polite friendliness and keep chain of command questions clear but many people dont have the knack.
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