The Hindu Business Line : Subordinates relentlessly copy bosses’ mannerisms

Visualise this: The top executives of Microsoft Corp. are in a meeting and Bill Gates is talking. “As he grows intense he starts rocking and bobbing back and forth in his chair, the rocking and bobbing speeding up as he continues. Seated around him, several of his lieutenants soon are rocking and bobbing. Gates periodically pushes his glasses up on his nose; his associates push their glasses up.”

Amusing stuff, but this is a snatch from Harvard Business Review that Anna Rowley cites in ‘Leadership Therapy’ ( www.landmarkonthenet.com ). Subordinates relentlessly copy their bosses’ mannerisms, gestures, and ways of speaking, she adds.

With the benefit of her experience as ‘consulting psychologist to Microsoft for over a decade’ the author goes ‘inside the mind’ of the company to offer ‘solutions to the top problems managers face’.

After the logging out by the iconic Gates, the new boss, Steve Ballmer has a whole lot of problems to be busy with, and I wonder if mimicking by subordinates may appeal to him. In all probability, he may work the way our netas do, with a penchant for slogans.

“At the 2000 Microsoft annual briefing he used narrative to get a crowd of over 30,000 demoralised employees to chant ‘Ali Bomaye, Ali Bomaye,’ the same chant that helped carry Muhammad Ali to one of his most famous victories, winning the World Heavyweight Championship against George Foreman,” recounts Rowley.

At that time, Microsoft was on the ropes, she reminisces. “The Department of Justice was investigating whether the company had abused its monopoly power, and many employees feared the company would be broken up. Anxiety at the company was high…”

What did Ballmer do at the dank auditorium, then? He showed ‘clips of the landmark fight in which Ali conquered his greatest nemesis’ and used the story to share his belief in what Microsoft was capable of: ‘courage, inspiration, commitment, daring.’ Employees left the meeting charged with a sense of invincibility, narrates Rowley. “From then on, ‘Ali Bomaye’ became the equivalent of a secret handshake. It’s clear that after this meeting you would have been hard-pressed to find a single employee who wasn’t giving 110 per cent to their job, and smiling about it.”

Wikipedia has a page titled ‘The Rumble in the Jungle,’ in which you can know more about the phrase, thus: “Ali was a very endearing figure to the people of Zaire, and his mind games played out well, turning the Congolese people in his favour and against Foreman. A popular chant of theirs leading up to, and during the fight was ‘Ali bomaye!’, which means ‘Ali, kill him!’” Eerie, isn’t it, that software staff required such hard messages.

Going back to the Gates part of the tale, Rowley informs that Billspeak pervades the organisation; his syntax has become part of the normal Microsoft vocabulary. “People don’t think, they ‘cycle’; going deep on a subject is ‘drilling down’; being analytical is ‘being granular’; being concise is ‘netting it out’; and ‘brainstorming’ is ‘riffing on an idea.’”

This type of contagion, she says, is healthy as it provides employees with a sense of identity and belonging. “There are, however, situations where this contagion can be damaging,” reads a meek note of caution, which may all the more be relevant in the post-Gates era at the Redmond colossus.

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Subordinates relentlessly copy bosses’ mannerisms