Avoiding Unqualified Gatekeepers

19 points by sbarbarian 3 years ago | 9 comments

I've had a string of running across 'unqualified gatekeepers': people who have tremendous power over access to a certain resource, yet lack the knowledge to accurately discern how to grant such access. These bottlenecks are disturbing - and I pose the question to HN on what tactics you use to (i) circumvent these gatekeepers when you're attempting to gain access to a resource, as well as (ii) design organizations to prevent these from emerging.

In case its helpful, some examples of 'unqualified gatekeepers': 1. executive recruiters: a (young) recruiter at a prestigious headhunting firm recently told me how she dinged a candidate against all future consideration for a lack of 'executive presence' displayed in a 30 minute call 2. VCs in Specialty Fields: analysts with no work experience outside of VC screening complex enterprise startups 3. Admins / Chief of Staffs: Blocking access to calendars / agendas 4. Sales Teams: Account managers who zealously guard access to their customers from internal teams (e.g. product team needs feedback) 5. etc.

Worth noting that for the above roles there are dozens of people doing a great job for every one who's bad, but the bad ones are who I'm focused on.

LarsDu88 3 years ago |

Eric Schmidt talks about this phenomenon hapoening at one of his old companies Novell. Middle managers who gatekeep resources or communication between teams to make themselves indispensable. Ed Catmull also describes hiring a large number of middle managers when scalung Pixar up for Toy Story 2. Schmidts solution (he claims) is to simply identify and fire these people.

johngalt 3 years ago |

This anti-pattern is predicated by two underlying truths.

1. The gatekeeping behavior is individually beneficial even if they are globally detrimental.

Blocking access costs nothing, and may benefit them as people pay the toll to gain access to the resource. They may not be Machiavellian schemers. It could just be mismatched incentives or a departments only way to deal with the 'externalized costs' imposed by other departments. For example the account manager may guard their customers because an ambitious sales team is incentivized to aggressively cross sale, and the sales team does not get dinged for souring the customer relationship.

2. The gatekeeping behavior may be globally beneficial even if it is annoying to those who must go through it.

Raising the bar for access to a valuable resource keeps that resource from being squandered, even if it is more frustrating to use when needed. It is why we have to break the glass to get to the fire extinguisher. Anyone who's been in a position where they are the 'valuable resource' knows that there is a constant cacophony of poorly thought out requests, meetings, proposals, demands, etc... And without some means of filtering, or pushing requirements back to the requestor, valuable time is wasted.

Designing an organization to avoid T1 gatekeeping involves identifying why this behavior benefits the individuals involved, and following that thread to find the root cause. Directly discouraging T1 gatekeeping without changing incentives is the management strategy of Sisyphus.

Most organizations could benefit from an increased and more formal approach to T2 gatekeeping. It can go too far, but I've observed many teams held back because everyone is informally asking one or two experts for all the answers.

f1shy 3 years ago |

It really depends!

Some strategies I used:

- Get to be friend with them, chit-chat, so that they allow you in

- Cut the middle-man, just step over them, talk to the boss

- Don't do fair play. Just lie, or trick them to get what you want.

verdverm 3 years ago | |

These all seem underhanded and likely to create more problems and corporate culture issues

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3 years ago | | |

I can see that about 3, not really about 1, and not at all about 2. Ideally, 2 wouldn't be necessary but I don't see how that approach makes things worse, in particular when the "middle-man" mentioned is accurately described as "unqualified". There isn't any reason the person's conduct (opinion-forming ability?) couldn't be discussed constructively in such an instance.

Personally, 3 is a complete non-starter and I'd just spend my efforts elsewhere.

yellowapple 3 years ago | | |

If you're at the point where these are options worth considering, then chances are the corporate culture has already gone to shit. The ideal solution in such a scenario would be to find a new job, but not all of us are spherical cows in frictionless regions of spacetime.

quickthrower2 3 years ago |

You have described 80% of developer job interviews ;-)

ffwacom 3 years ago |

Raising interest rates will fix this.