Yes very serious question, and very real (multiple orgs). And most times the team manager has zero control over hiring or firing. Nor any access to C level decision makers, who are buffered by layers of HR.
The orgs I have seen this in are 100% safe - highly profitable, and often funded by government or at least heavily subsidized.
So, if I understand your assessment...managers who see this reality should simply leave, instead of using skill and tools to deliver value in a difficult setting? That seems overly pessimistic to me.
I think this is a great call out. This is infact the very moment that skill and professionalism in team management is called to the front. A really good manager can do something about this; but it's a gradual process and a hard one.
Fundamentally you need to change the culture of the team. The first step is to establish a team - in the situation you are describing there is no real team - just a bunch of people waiting for a cheque every month, a new job or being told that this job no longer exists. You need to figure out if there is a core purpose that some or ideally most of the people in the team will sign up to (with you - if you aren't "in" then they can't be), which will deliver for your stakeholders. Then you have to orientate the team to deliver this, some of them won't come along, some of them can't. You will have to do a lot of coaching with some of the ones that would like to.
The big question : what is the core purpose that your team will adopt and which will change how they work and what they will do?
In my book if you don't have authority, including to hire and fire and affect compensation decisions, then you aren't a manager. In that situation you're half glorified babysitter and half scapegoat. And I agree this is how most organizations are designed, and why they're so anemic. I very much like flat hierarchies and consensus decision-making, but at the end of the day someone is in charge or they aren't. If they aren't, their capacity to effect cultural change is severely diminished.
I think the bottom line is this: Where do you want to spend your time?
Yes, you can use process and tools to make a low trust team “work”. This is in fact how most government works.
This isn’t horrible per say, it is just very ineffective. You will spend 2-3X the amount of time/money to produce the same result as a highly effective team. The multiple gets better with good process and tools, the multiplier gets worse if you have bad processes on top of having low trust.
If you want to change things, and don’t have support/the ear of leadership above you, then the alternative is to do what you can that is in your control. This is where great leadership shines (and leadership is much different than management, more on that another time).
A great leader doesn’t need formal lines of authority. They gain influence indirectly by “casting a vision” and enrolling others to pursue it. If you can do that, you can (over time) shift a culture. It is just very slow, and not straightforward to do.
The one bright spot is that in general, the more something is resistant to change, the more readily it will adopt/embrace it once changed. If you can shift the culture, they will never want to go back to how it was before.
But once again, you need to decide you WANT to do this, and in particular do it for this particular org. For most folks, that isn’t what they want to do, therefore they have to either learn to live with an ineffective organization, or move on.
Not OP, but I agree with both your assessments of the situation. I agree with you that most companies work this way. I'd even go a step further and would say that most companies are highly dysfunctional. But I also agree with OP that the only thing you can do in situations like this is to leave. Unfortunately changing the company from the inside is extremely difficult and in most cases a futile effort.
What follows for me is that one should be very careful in how they choose their employer. Unfortunately, I've found it often quite hard to judge this before starting to work there. Would love if someone could give their insight in how to figure this ought before even applying.
The orgs I have seen this in are 100% safe - highly profitable, and often funded by government or at least heavily subsidized.
So, if I understand your assessment...managers who see this reality should simply leave, instead of using skill and tools to deliver value in a difficult setting? That seems overly pessimistic to me.