This has a totally different connotation in archery and is a form of banter/abuse towards compound shooters!
Reading Cruickshank (2015) made me think of the various senior managers I have worked under who made great use of the dark arts in managing their staff. The trouble was that after a while we saw through what they were doing and it ceased to be effective.
My first head would call you into his room and rant at you in what would now be regarded as workplace bullying.
My second would call very long meetings where we discussed everything at length only to be told at the end "He had decided…"
My third head was fantastic to work for if you were open to change. He would give you a task, let you get on with it with light touch monitoring to make sure you were on task and would meet the deadline. If you achieved the objective you got lots of praise and usually a small reward. If you were not on task he would privately and calmly tell you of his disappointment.
He completely restructured the senior management so that it was horizontal rather than hierarchical and got rid of several senior managers in the restructuring who were resistant to the process. He also brought in change agents to departments that needed shaking up.
My fourth, fifth, seventh and eighth loved to pit staff against each other under the divide and rule principle. They also liked to instil fear for the future, mid-year, by raising the spectre of job losses, redundancies, falling pupil numbers and impending inspections. It was their way of moving staff on. The trouble was we often lost the staff we did not want to lose.
My sixth head was a nightmare, he micromanaged everything, was constantly checking up on minutia, drafting and redrafting the work of others, so that staff often said “if he was going to put that much work into it, why did he waste my time by asking me to do it?”
It also brings to mind Lipman (2013) The Disturbing Link Between Psychopathy and Leadership
“But troubling research indicates that in the ranks of senior management, psychopathic behaviour may be more common than we think – more prevalent in fact than the amount such seriously aberrant behaviour occurs in the general population.”
Cruickshank, A &Collins, D. (2015) Illuminating and Applying “The Dark Side”: Insights from Elite Team Leaders, Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 27:3, 249-267,
Lipman, V. (2013). The Disturbing Link Between Psychopathy and Leadership. Available: http://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2013/04/25/the-disturbing-link-between-psychopathy-and-leadership. Last accessed 2 December 2015.
