Aesop's fable, "The Dog in the Manger," concerns a barnyard dog who one afternoon lay down to sleep on top of the hay in the barn's manger.
On being awoken, he growled and barked. "Woof woof!"
He ferociously kept the animals from eating the hay in the manger, even though he couldn't eat the hay himself.
A frustrated ox offers the moral of the story: "people often begrudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves."
The modern discipline of Information Technology gives Aesop's centuries-old fable fresh relevance. Imagine that you're the technical person in charge of your company's newly installed state-of-the-art information system. It might be a complex software tool, like a big-deal Oracle database management system. it might be something simpler but just as important (and expensive), like EMC's latest and greatest networked disk drive array.
You may have helped your organization evaluate and select it. Perhaps you supervised its installation and initial configuration. You've gone over and over its manuals and technical notes for many weeks or months as you've mastered its elaborate ins and outs. You've updated its software and firmware, tweaked and tuned it to perfection, and demonstrated its cool features with pride to your colleagues and management. And, of course, you've upgraded your mental resume, and maybe its embodiment on paper as well, to reflect all of your wonderful new experience with it.
Then, one day, inevitably, others in your organization approach you to make use of it. They ask you for its administrative password, inform you that they plan to migrate some corporate division's data to it, advise you that they intend to connect it to some backup/restore system. In short, they announce their intention to take it from you.
How do you feel about this? After all, it's your system, isn't it? How do you act on those feelings? Do you look for ways to say "yes," or do you look for ways to justify saying "no?"
Thomas and Kilmann Conflict Modes
According to Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann (1974), conflict is a matter of perception rather than fact, and, as such, people can imagine it where it doesn't actually exist. Experience suggests that Information Technology professionals, who tend to entangle their subjective sense of personal self-worth with the objective details of the tools they master, are perhaps more likely to misinterepret as an attack on their ego the logical next-step of handing their beloved tools over to be applied in practice by others. I've known many a colleague who, after insisting that they wanted nothing to do with the day-to-day details of some subsystem they'd installed, nonetheless resisted stubbornly any others who dared try to assume responsibility for it themselves.
Come to think of it, I've been that colleague, and more than once. Was I rightly defending an important technical resource from possible misuse? Or, was I merely defending my own bruised ego? In hindsight, I can tell you that those weren't exactly my finest professional hours.
According to Thomas and Kilmann, people choose to respond to conflict, whether real or imagined, in one of five behavioral modes (see diagram above). There are two ways to cooperate: assertively, by working with the conflicting parties, or more passively, by simply accommodating their wishes.
Thirdly, there's the neutral middle-ground choice of seeking compromise.
And, finally, Thomas and Kilmann posit two ways of saying "No," of refusing cooperation: assertively, by competing, or passively, by avoiding conflict through uncooperative resistance.
Thinking back, as I reacted to the imagined threat my colleague posed when he asked me to hand over that storage subsystem, what choices did I imagine I had?
Active cooperation and passive accommodation would have meant sharing continuing praise and credit for a job well done, my job, with someone else. The middle ground of compromise would have meant surrendering it altogether.
On the other hand, I couldn't actively compete with my colleague for ongoing ownership of the new system, because management wouldn't have supported me, and, besides, I really didn't want that job myself.
So, I resisted. I chewed onto ownership for as long as I could. I snarled at requests for access to the subsystem's passwords. I dogged those last steps needed to make the subsystem operational. And, in doing all of this, I starved my organization of something it needed, delayed others' projects, frustrated others' goals.
What's another word for passive-aggressive behavior? How about "Woof woof."
Discussion Questions:
- In your experience, in the context described in this post, would a typical IT manager be more likely to support or change an IT practitioner's passive-aggressive behavior?
- What would be a manager's best strategy for dealing with this situation?
- How might a frustrated IT practitioner go about changing a passive-aggressive colleague's conflict-handling mode from competitive to cooperative?
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