Why Managers Learn to Manage Negatively

Anyone who's ever been managed in a job knows that managers seem to default to a negative management style. We can count on the fingers of a single hand the number of people we've worked for who were different, who seemed to inspire us with their positive style. 

In looking at the business literature, one can find any number of theories as to why this is. The state of the country, the falling standards of American education, and the economy all rank up there as common explanations. However, if you read further back in history, no one has a different story. Managers seems to have always managed negatively. Managers have always seemed to believe that they'll get more with punishing bad behavior than rewarding good behavior.

Yet science, and anyone who owns a dog, will tell you that positive rewards work much better than a negative punishing style. In spite of science and in spite of a common experience with training a common domestic animal, managers seem to be the same as they were in ancient times.

The problem seemed inexplicable to me. I just couldn't understand the nature of the conflict. I couldn't define the problem. And when one can't define a problem, that is, according to Goldratt, one can't state a problem as a conflict between two necessary conditions, one needs to write a current reality tree.

So here is the current reality tree that I wrote to understand the situation with managers, both modern and ancient. I also placed it in the gallery for easier reading. It is read from left to right using sufficiency logic. So, for instance, you would read the first entity as "Because in any given series of tasks done by a human, there will be variability..., then in any given series of repeated tasks done by a human there will be times when they perform..." I hope it is of use to you.