Office Space and Coaching Leadership

Let’s imagine Bill Lumbergh as an amazing boss.

I was browsing through my Disney+ app yesterday and came across an old gem: Office Space. This is a legendary movie (made in 1999!) about three software engineers, Peter, Mike and Samir, working at a fictional company called Initech. Of course, I had to watch it. After all these years, it still makes me laugh.

Initech and its micromanaging boss, Bill Lumbergh, represent the hierarchical and demeaning office culture that still somehow passes for acceptable in a lot of places these days. That’s why memes about Office Space are so common.

After a downsizing consultant arrives on scene, Peter, Mike and Samir plot to steal money from the company with a computer virus. The motivation of the characters to get back at their company is not too far removed from reality when we pay attention to the likes of Gallup that has consistently found most people employed around the world are disengaged from their work and a significant number of people “actively disengaged”, meaning they either openly express their unhappiness and spread it to others or act against their company in subtle ways.

Things are improving for sure. The number of actively disengaged people seems to be on the decline, but there’s still a majority of people feeling disengaged. And now we’re hearing that “the great resignation” is coming because there is a correlation between engagement and retention and that engagement just isn't there. Could it be that there’s still a lot of Bill Lumberghs out there? And what is it about them that causes passive and active disengagement?

I’m in the middle of reading Coaching for Performance by Sir John Whitmore, in preparation for the Professional Coach Development programme I hope to join in December (waiting to hear if I’ve been accepted. Wish me luck). Widely regarded as the bible of the coaching business, Whitmore talks about his experience working with top management teams and organisations to develop coaching cultures. He developed the performance curve. In this curve, we could put Initech in the “dependent” bucket. Dependent organisations are characterised by following rules, focus on task completion and little to no autonomy, one-way communication from management and low levels of trust.

Source: Performance Consultants

This kind of environment leads to low performance because people feel afraid to take the initiative, to speak up or stand out and are concerned with fitting into the mould presented to them by their bosses and surroundings. This creates what Whitmore calls “interference”, getting in the way of people performing to their best. “The single universal internal block is unfailingly unanimous: fear,” he says.

Heavy stuff. So let’s have some fun. I’m going to imagine what the opposite of Bill Lumbergh looks like. Let’s say that the downsizing consultants thought he needed an executive coach and put him on the path to recovery before laying people off, as another way of creating efficiencies at Initech and driving high performance.

He picks up Coaching for Performance on the weekend to get up to speed. Reading it, he comes across a fascinating yet simple formula created by Timothy Gallwey, a Harvard educationalist and tennis expert. Gallwey flipped the model on sports coaching in a book, The Inner Game of Tennis. The book broadly argued that there is only so much someone can be told to do something, especially adults. The job of the coach, he believed, is more about reducing or, better yet, removing the inner obstacles to performance, “the opponent within one’s head”. He came up with a simple equation that has gone on to encapsulate the approach to modern executive coaching:

Performance = potential - interference

Whitmore argues, and so do I, that there is enormous, untapped potential within every person. What prevents them from high performance is their own lack of self-belief, but also the “interference” that people like Lumbergh have created: rules, dependence on his decisions and actions, one template of acting at the firm. Remove that cloud and great things happen.

After months of coaching, Lumbergh is thinking about how TPS reports should be done. Instead of sending Peter three memos to make sure he knows how to do it, he asks Peter how he thinks it should be done. Instead of giving Mike a hard time for making a mistake in his software, he asks him, “what do you think happened and how can we improve it for next time?”

Now we’re starting to move into the “independent” culture where “people believe they can make a difference with their own actions” and believe that they can perform beyond the guardrails they had before. Samir suggests a new software product. Lumbergh empowers him to take it forward and to put his hand up if he needs any support to make it happen.

We’ve moved from one-way communication to two-way communication that is characterised by encouragement, ownership and an achievement mentality.

Another six months later and Lumbergh has taken up meditation and has reached high awareness and responsibility of self. He even comes into work one day wearing a leather jacket.

Source: Wikipedia, Gary Cole, the actor who plays Lumbergh, in a leather jacket.

He no longer walks the halls with his coffee reminding people to do things. It’s 10am and he’s taken his managers out for a coffee to ask how they’re getting on. We’re now in the realm of "interdependence", which is characterised by authentic communication, a collective potential mentality and the idea that “we’re all successful together”. They laugh about the day the consultants came in and thought about firing a lot of people. Instead of that, the consultants suggested coaches for the top management team and realised that there was untapped potential across the board at Initech. As Peter told them back then, “it’s not that I’m lazy. It’s that I just don’t care”. They promoted Peter as planned, but instead of firing his friends, they became a team that now adds new product lines, actively seeks market intelligence and follows up with clients independently of the boss’s involvement to uncover new opportunities. Far from fearing Lumbergh, they now ask for his advice, his help and his support. They take his feedback and they give feedback to him. He asks questions that challenges their thinking and keeps them thinking and growing.

Initech is a different place. It didn’t burn down because nobody stole any money and now has great reviews on Glassdoor. Samir, Mike and Peter stuck around, curious about what the future might bring.