The Creosote, this High-Performing Manager Who Destroys Your Organization

One of the major factors in the decline of organizations is the type of managers they hire and promote. Among them is what I call the “creosote manager,” the one who kills the life around him in order to thrive. Creosote people populate just about every organization I encounter that has so much trouble innovating. Wouldn’t there be a causal relationship?

Creosote is a little known shrub; its scientific name is Larrea tridentata. In fact, you know it; it is the bush that, when dry, is tossed by the wind and that you see rolling in the Hollywood westerns. This bush has a peculiarity: it contains creosote, hence its name, which is a poisonous substance. And evolution has done it a proud service: because it grows only in the desert, this poison kills any plant life around it. In a context where water and nutrients are scarce, this ability to kill any competition is a valuable asset for its survival.

A plant that lives in the desert and, in order to thrive, kills every form of life around it… it is the perfect metaphor for a certain type of manager that corporations love… at their expense, the creosote manager.

Like the shrub, the creosote manager thrives in the desert, that is, in organizations that have already passed the point of creative collapse and entered the phase of decline. But this decline is not yet visible in the numbers, on the contrary. They live on what they have achieved creatively in the past and try to make the best of it.

The Creosote Manager eliminates unnecessary dissent and chatter and focuses on operational performance. The Creosote Manager has no patience for nuance and procrastination. The Creosote Manager demands flawless execution as the key to the performance of an organization that has stopped being creative. The creosote manager knows that resources are scarce and is careful not to waste them. He hates costs. Ideally, he would prefer death because it costs nothing. That is why the Creosote Manager loves the desert: few resources, little waste, and those who waste resources die quickly. Unnecessary or unprofitable projects are quickly eliminated. The creosote manager likes KPIs: “If it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed,” he says, using the false evidence from business school that makes up his thinking – if there is any thinking at all.

Most importantly, the creosote manager is a poison. It was Jack Welch, then CEO of General Electric, who spoke about the dilemma he faced with such managers (although he did not use the expression): he explained that there were two dimensions he took into account when evaluating managers: their performance and their fit with the culture of the organization. Obviously, the ideal case is a high-performing manager who fits the culture. Another simple case is the one who is neither performing nor in phase with the culture. The one who is in phase but not performing can be trained and encouraged.

But the one who is performing but not in phase poses a real dilemma. What to do when that performance comes at the expense of the rest of the organization? Welch explained that he used to agonize over such cases: “A performing manager is so useful! But in the end, he always preferred that the manager leave, and we can understand why. Perhaps useful in the very short term, this manager destroys the culture of the organization and ultimately the organization itself. He creates a desert around him, and the results he can achieve eventually come at a high price: creative people, those with strong character and original views leave (or are pushed to leave), leaving only the obedient and compliant, the mediocre careerists, and the powerless who are too afraid to lose their jobs and have nowhere else to go. No one dares to question a decision, no one dares to say that the king is naked. Worse still, nuanced information no longer reaches the higher levels; all that remains is the smooth presentation of a few quantitative indicators which, as we know, so rarely represent operational reality and can easily support a lie. A culture of silence is established, in which the criterion of success is obedience.

If the company is riding on the success of its dominant activity and is not threatened by a disruption, the creosote manager can successfully fake it. He contributes directly to the success of the organization and its performance. He is praised for it and criticism is silenced. But by focusing on operations, he forgoes any options that might be useful in the event of a change in the environment. He is sowing the seeds of future failure. But this does not happen in the short term. What happens in the short term is the collapse of creative capacity, the effects of which are not yet visible. By the time they are, it will be too late. Besides, the creosote manager will be long gone by then, hailed as a hero for his achievements. Of course, the creosote manager is also a mercenary. Produce results quickly, sweep problems under the rug, and leave before the grenade explodes – that is the creosote signature. It is left to the lifers of the organization to clean up the mess, if that is still possible.

You’ve probably met creosote managers; they’re everywhere. They populate organizations that try so hard to innovate. The belief in their power is based on a misconception of what drives organizational performance: a notion that performance is individual when it is primarily collective; a notion based on “talent” that has become the obsession of HR departments who forget that talent is always contextual. The arrival of the creosotes is more a symptom of intellectual decay than of strategic strength, for they are a caricature of leadership. The true act of leadership is to get rid of them before it’s too late.

🇫🇷 Version of the article in French here.

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