The Grand-Mal Resignation: Great Theatre, Bad Practice

I worked with a client, who confided in me that he was about to quit his job in a senior leadership role within the organization.  Mike was really smart, and hard working, but had a bit of a blind-spot when it came to political considerations within the workplace.  He always insisted that he didn’t play politics.  What he failed to realize is that you can’t choose whether to play workplace politics or not.  You play, or you get played.

Mike and I role-played his resignation conversation a bit, and it became clear to me very early that this was going to be a disaster of epic proportions.  Mike was determined to teach his boss, and the organization a lesson on his way out.  No one was safe – his boss, his peers, and his direct reports were all targets of his wrath.

In completely unrelated news, Mike was a smoker.  Putting the addictive nature of tobacco use aside, people smoke because the short-term consequences of smoking are immediate, certain and generally positive.  How else can you look cool, get a nicotine high and relax yourself?  It feels good.  The longer-term death and illness are problems for another day.

Mike’s choice in how he chose to leave the organization was parallel reasoning, and equally as stupid.  He had watched too many crap-TV shows that erroneously illustrate people quitting their jobs by sticking it to their boss and the organization, feeling a huge sense of relief and a temporary euphoria before moving on to bigger and better things.

The reality of a grand-mal resignation is more like the eventual cancer and emphysema that smokers get.  It feels good for a few minutes, but ultimately sabotages the quitter’s longer-term career prospects.

Before Mike chose to light his future with the glow of the bridges he’d burned behind him, he may have wanted to consider how and when he might run into some of these people again.

Mike didn’t know which one of the peers he burned on his way out might be a hiring manager at another organization five years from now.  He also had no way to know that the boss he called everything short of illegitimate would also be submitting his notice shortly because he was taking on a new role at the same firm Mike was moving to.

Oh, that’s going to be awkward.  But they never talk about that on the sitcoms.

 

 

Managing the Balding and Grey

How did this happen?  When you were a teenager, you were very clearly smarter than your parents.  Then you went on, and got yourself a whole bunch of education, worked hard, and are now leading a team of people.  Half of them are old enough to be your parents.

Managing your mom?  You didn’t sign up for this.

Oh to be a Baby Boomer — The single most important demographic cohort in the history of the planet.  The baby boomers have absolutely dominated the workplace since the 1960s, and are only slowly giving up their grip now.  If you were born after about 1965, then it is a good news/bad news story for you.

The bad news is the Boomers racked up your “societal credit card debt”, that will take several generations to pay off.  The good news is they’ve already cured erectile dysfunction, and they are bound and determined to stay youthful forever, which bodes well for all those that follow.

In the workplace, this has a number of ramifications.  If you’ve got a boomer working for you, you might have to put up with the occasional tardy arrival, if you are to believe the Cialis commercials.  It also means when you start talking about ISPs, ASPs and HTML, their eyes will glaze over faster than Paris Hilton’s would on Jeopardy.

Keep in mind that there is something to be learned from this generation.  Yes they were financially reckless with your future, and made the planet into an environmental disaster, but that doesn’t mean they don’t know a thing or two about whatever business you are in.

The Boomers have seen several business cycles come and go, and will tell you (with certain credibility) that they’ve seen it all previously.  Everything in business comes full circle – just the details are marginally different.  If you listen carefully to the Boomers working for you, you just might get a jump on whatever is going to happen next.

They can’t manage email to save their life, and they think microwaves and fax machines are high tech, but if you discount their input and feedback, it is at your peril.

A Zero Accountability Corporate Culture

Several years ago, I became involved in a finance audit with a public sector client.  These things are about as much fun as a boot in the butt with a frozen mukluk in any organization, but public sector organizations are even worse because of their inherent risk aversion.

It turns out the finance clerks were spending a ridiculous amount of time processing expense accounts for the considerable number of employees that were constantly travelling for business purposes.

Without doing the necessary internal investigating first, I got the bright idea to check with the relevant tax authorities as to whether we could simply offer people a per diem and dispense with all the $10 lunch receipts that were clogging up the system.

The federal tax agency did indeed have a provision for this that I thought would solve a considerable problem, and make everyone’s lives easier.

I was incredibly wrong.  I hadn’t been this wrong since I predicted Whitney Houston’s big comeback.

After lobbying hard inside the Finance group for such a change to be implemented, I was told in no uncertain terms, that we couldn’t do this because the people who didn’t spend the entire amount would pocket the difference, and that would be unacceptable.  Never mind that the amount was only about $50/day for a person on the road to pay for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Further, this policy could not be adopted because two senior managers had been caught abusing their expense accounts while travelling for business.

The VP of Finance initiated a root cause analysis of this problem, and concluded they did not have adequate control measures, and poor policy on expenses accounts.

He got it wrong.  He was treating a symptom of a much greater problem.  The root cause of his problem was a corporate culture with zero accountability.  Had a similar expense account abuse taken place in the private sector, the offending employees would have been terminated with cause, and common sense on a per diem expense policy would have prevailed.

Instead the VP of Finance chose to treat a symptom of a far larger problem by adding more bureaucracy.  He also chose to disregard the thousands of hours of labor required to process lunch receipts.  It’s a good thing he didn’t have the burden of worrying about shareholder value.

So instead of addressing the root cause, the Finance Department spent months rewriting the expense account policies, and ultimately came up with a completely ridiculous 75 page document that all employees with expense accounts were expected to adhere to.

Another genius example of your tax dollars hard at work.

 

How Asking for a Raise is Like a First Date

You’re out on a limb when you ask for a raise.  It’s kind of like being a teenager again, and asking someone out on a date for the first time.  The stakes are high – if you’re successful, you’ll feel good, and look like a hero to your peers.  If you’re not successful, you’ll look and feel like an idiot.

The reactions to success and rejection are similar too.  If you get the raise (or the date), you become the cock of the walk.  If you get rejected, you try to keep it quiet, or if asked, you say you really didn’t want it anyway.

The outcome of a raise request is highly personal – people equate it with their personal value.  It’s a bad idea to attach your perception of personal value to someone else’s assessment of you.  It is a good idea, however to attach your professional value to the goals of the organization.

Several years ago I did quite a bit of work with a company that conducted employee satisfaction surveys.  In addition to many questions about their leadership and work environment, we asked employees about compensation.  We discovered that there is almost no way that compensation can be a driver of employee satisfaction.

People are either neutral or dissatisfied with their compensation level.  No one is ever actually satisfied with the money they make, presumably because more is always better.

People become dissatisfied with their compensation for a variety of reasons, but one of the most prevalent is because they find out someone else is making more than them.  This judgmental itch often extends beyond our immediate peers, causing anger because of how much the CEO makes, or others far removed from our own circle.

There seems to be a disproportionate amount of anger addressed at CEOs and politicians; while we have a collective blind spot for sports and movie stars.  The CEOs have successfully equated their action and leadership with value for the organization (or they bribed the Board of Directors), and politicians, for the most part are underpaid.

If we should be angry at anything, it should probably be at overpaid movie stars who have done little else than won the genetic lottery for meeting our narrowly defined societal version of what is good looking.  However, many movie stars have a good argument that if a movie is going to make $300 million dollars, then $20 million for a pretty face has certainly contributed to its success.

And that’s the lesson for the rest of us.  We should spent no time being angry or bitter about what other people are getting paid, and channeling our energy into clearly demonstrating the value that we add to our organizations.

Either that, or ask the boss’s daughter out on a date.

The Trophy Generation Invades the Workplace

OK… so I know I’m supposed to treat these ones differently.  They’ve never received anything but continually positive feedback, and their Mum’s and Dad’s loved them so much, they got a cake and a parade every time they didn’t wet the bed.

Unfortunately, some one has to break the news to the more entitled of this generation that:

Life is Just Not Fair.

If you are living and working in a society of more than one, sooner or later someone who is not as smart as you, not as hardworking as you, and maybe not even as good looking as you, is going to get something that you feel entitled to.  It’s horribly unfair.

It’s called “life”.

Prince Charles got himself into trouble a few years ago because he suggested that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to tell everyone they could do or be anything they wanted to.  On the surface, it is highly offensive to have a guy that was born into fame and riches lecturing people to accept their lot in life and make the best of it.  On reflection however, he is the perfect person to say so:  he never had a choice as to his vocation or ambition.  It was pre-determined for him, and few sane people would want to trade places with him.

In reality, people of all generations should try to reach beyond their grasp.  The folly is when achieving things beyond your humble origins becomes an entitlement, rather than a bonus.  There are lots of smart people out there who have worked very hard to exceed their natural circumstances, who only do marginally better than their parents or peers did.  Those that have risen above tremendous adversity go on to get their own television networks (good for you, Oprah), or have movies of the week made about their story are the exception, not the rule.

The rest of us need to be content with what fate conspires to deliver to us for our efforts.

I have a creepy feeling about a whole generation of trophy-kids entering the workplace, when their parents and society have failed to expose them to unbridled competition or at least some understanding of the harsh reality of life.  Far too many parents would storm into the principal’s office when Susie didn’t get an “A” in chemistry.

What’s going to happen when Susie’s dad wants to storm into the boss’s office when Susie gets fired?

All Employees are NOT Created Equal

OK… maybe they are created equal, but after their first day of work, they are no longer on an equal footing.

So before the letters start, let me be clear that I would never suggest inequality due to gender, race, sexual orientation or any of the other usual culprits.  I am a firm believer that once you take the time to get to know a person, there are so many other reasons to dislike them, that normally defined prejudices need not apply.

But I read in the business press that I need to install a hot tub in every other office at work to make sure that no one quits.  Here’s the thing:  I desperately want a few of them to quit.  I don’t exactly have grounds to fire them, but I know that if a vacancy comes up, I can do better.  So the last thing I want to do is make it too comfortable for them… then they’ll never quit.

The HR people hate this part: some people are simply more valuable to organizations than others.  It doesn’t mean that we don’t value all people, nor does it mean that we don’t treat all people with respect.  It does mean that we will work harder to keep some people on board than others.

Many of the employee retention programs out there are horribly misguided in this regard.  They are well intentioned in so far as wanting to create a positive working environment, but these programs miss the mark by not identifying and targeting those employees that we especially want to keep.

Yes, I know it’s problematic to only put the hot tubs in some offices, but not others.  However, the very best employee retention tactic is investing in, and developing high quality leadership within an organization.  Most people that leave a company actually “quit their boss”, rather than resign from the organization.

Interestingly, a high quality leader can also raise the performance of that employee I talked about earlier that I would rather part company with.  If the employee can’t be saved, then a high quality leader will steward the employee’s departure out of the organization in a professional and respectful manner.

The bottom line is that if organizations are serious about retaining high quality employees, they should save the investment in air-hockey tables, hot tubs, and concierge services, and funnel those resources into the attraction and development of high quality leadership throughout the organization.

You’ll get better returns, retain more high quality employees, and won’t have water damage from the steam of the hot tub.

 

 

Firing People as a Leading Indicator of Safety

Here’s an extreme example of the power of leading versus lagging indicators: plane crashes.  Every now and then, a plane might just fall out of the sky with no advance warning, but most often the cause was entirely predictable, and could have been caught by some leading indicator of trouble.  The tragic lagging indicator is when a plane hurls into the side of a mountain.

Now, to be fair, the airline industry has an outstanding safety record, and their ability to catch problems before they turn into catastrophe is something many other industries would be well-advised to study.

However, a recent news article by the Detroit Free Press got me to thinking about leading indicators of airline disaster.  The article was about an Air Traffic Controller who was caught watching a movie (Cleaner, starring Samuel L. Jackson, if it matters), rather than tending to the airplanes he was supposed to be watching.  I am going to go out on the limb here and say that the number and amount of movies watched while on duty by Air Traffic Controllers is a pretty clear leading indicator of plane crashes.

Once this was made public, the United States Federal Aviation Authority naturally took steps to suspend the Controller in question and his boss (even though they should have fired them both), and has launched an investigation.  And the pundits have all started to weigh in on the impact of goofing off at work.

In November of 2010, Salary.com did a survey that revealed that 36% of us waste two or more hours at work every day.  If you think your organization has any significant number of people making up that 36%, then it should be a pretty clear leading indicator of your pending implosion as a viable organization.

But back to the Air Traffic Controllers.

Jonathan Spira, an analyst that has studied goofing off at work (sounds like a fun job) said about this situation: “Clearly, if someone is watching a movie, they are bored, tired, distracted or somehow unable to perform his job.”

What Mr. Spira missed is that the person goofing off might just be an idiot who needs a kick in the ass.  Such as is the case with this Air Traffic Controller.  If this problem is widespread (which the US FAA is investigating currently), then I am going to suggest another leading indicator for airline safety:

The number of Air Traffic Controllers disciplined or fired is a leading indicator of improved air traffic safety.

Who says Ronald Reagan is dead?

Now if you really want to know what happens in the control tower, click on this week’s video clip, below:

 

Blacksmiths and Wordsmiths

Have you been down to your local blacksmith’s lately?  Unless you’re reading this post through a hole in the space-time continuum, you probably haven’t.  Actually, blacksmiths still exist, but they are now a rare, highly-specialized group of skilled workers.

Compare this to the 15th through 19th centuries, when a blacksmith was one of the focal points of every community.  As our societies and technologies evolved, the skills of the blacksmith became less and less pervasive.

Now compare this to the wordsmith.  I couldn’t find any significant history on the wordsmith, so I’ll make something up, and then go post it on Wikipedia.  The wordsmith was also around in the 15th through 19th centuries, although they kept a low profile.  This is because as children, future wordsmiths were routinely beat up by future blacksmiths

This may explain why so many wordsmiths are able to rear their ugly heads (and ply their treacherous trade) today.  With the diminishing number of future blacksmiths, future wordsmiths don’t receive near as many beatings as they should to discourage them.

You probably know a wordsmith – although they set-up shoppe in the most unlikely places.  The wordsmith is the one who ensures that any meeting that could have been done in 30 minutes, goes for at least two-hours.  These are the people who will argue incessantly about subject-verb inversion, and how it may affect the organization’s vision statement.

If you find yourself organizing or facilitating the articulation of organizational goals, strategies, mission or vision statements, you need to root out the wordsmiths early.  Send them on a business trip, or tell them there’s a newspaper somewhere that needs to have a letter written to the editor because the sentence structure of a headline was inappropriate.

The bottom line is that missions, visions, goals and strategies are all useless documents, unless they move people to action of some sort.  If the wordsmith gets her way, these documents will all be grammatically and politically correct, but so general and generic to the point of being useless.

So… if you have any of these documents, that sit high on a shelf for 11 months of the year, until the dust is blown off them for the next planning cycle, you can blame the wordsmith.  To address this problem, you have two options:

  1. Distract the wordsmith long enough to rewrite the documents in a concise and meaningful way.
  2. Hire a blacksmith to take out the wordsmith.

 

I’m Not a Manager. I’m a Babysitter

Well, that’s kind of harsh – even if it is true for many leaders.  How did it come to this?  How did you manage your career so you could end up mediating between two employees who are applying death-threats to each other because one used the other’s Arthur Fonzarelli commemorative coffee mug, and never washed it?

None of us stood up in the first grade and announced to the world that we wanted to be a middle manager.  Yet, there are far more middle managers than there are police officers, fire-fighters and ballerinas combined.  And here you are a generation later with the title, “Manager” which entitles you to:

  • 10% more pay than the two idiots arguing over the coffee mug
  • longer working hours
  • hypertension.

I remember being the manager of a supermarket, where I’d have to mediate such disputes as who had to check through the groceries.  Yep, that’s right – we had hired over 100 people into the job description, “cashier”, and I was constantly involved in battles over who had to check.  Weren’t we paying all of you to perform that function?

Or another employee who made a career out of torturing other people with comments such as:

  • “I think you’ve put on weight”
  • “You’ll probably be bald in another couple of years”
  • “Why do you think it is that people don’t like you”

Of course, he always phrased these in such a way that he couldn’t be taken to task for harassment, but that didn’t stop the line-up of complaints about his behaviour.

I finally developed a coping strategy for these petty complaints that made me tremendously unpopular with everyone, but I enjoyed my job much more, and had way more time on my hands.  Unless I deemed the complaint to be something that would effect the viability of the business, or lead to an unacceptable amount of risk, I would tell people, “You need to sort this out on your own, because if you try to involve me, I guarantee no one is going to like the result”.

A threat?  Probably.

A survival strategy?  Definitely.

I’ve spoken in this space before about “the burden of leadership” that some managers have thought is a bit harsh.  I won’t back away from those comments, but I will say that petty complaints and conflicts are not part of any manager’s job – it’s a baby-sitter’s job.

The Manager’s job is often a thankless one, but it doesn’t have to be trivial, unless you allow it to be so.  This aspect of the manager’s job is timeless.

 

 

Dispelling Guru Myths

Part of my job is to read the latest management books, and scan the media for important literature that could be of some use to managers.  Some stuff is certainly better written than others, but lately I’m getting downright cranky with some of the “wisdom” the alleged management gurus and pumping out to maintain their publishing revenue.  As a result, this week we’ll address some of these guru-myths.

Myth #1:  You need to treat everybody the same.

Treating everybody the same is a management slogan that gets trotted out as good leadership behaviour when exactly the opposite is true.  People are individuals and need to be treated as such.  Here’s something else the management gurus won’t tell you – sometimes, some of your people will desperately need a kick in the ass.

The reason management gurus won’t tell you this, is because they don’t know.  They don’t know, because they’ve never actually been a manager.  Yes, they may have sold enough books to own their very own Caribbean island, but many of them have never actually had direct reports.

I won’t disagree that people should be always treated with equal amounts of respect.  But respect necessarily means that a good leader will deal with a poor performing team member (sometimes via that kick in the ass, mentioned above) out of respect for the higher performing team members.

Myth #2:  Managers need to delegate everything

Another guru-myth is that every manager needs to, “delegate, delegate, delegate!” There is no doubt that effective delegation can help a leader push some teams to outstanding performance.  But there are other teams, where relentless delegation can be a catastrophic mistake.

In teams with members that are lower skilled for the tasks they are performing, the last thing you want to do is delegate.  These people need to be carefully directed and managed – some people might even call it micro-managing.  Delegating too much, too soon is probably a larger management issue than failing to delegate.

Myth #3:  Training solves all performance problems

More than once we’ve gotten a call from someone who asks us to come in and do some change management training with his people.  Our very first question is, “why do you think they need training?”

Sometimes, they do.  In other cases, people are fully capable of making the change being asked of them, they just don’t want to do so.  (See:  ass-kicking, above)

Myth #4:  People don’t resist change.  You just need to give them all the information

This myth is particularly offensive.  People DO resist change even when they know the benefits, and have all the information required.  Case in point:  the metric system.  It’s vastly superior, and far easier to understand.  Nearly 7 billion people use it every day, yet the few who still choose not to use it hang on to the old imperial system like Linus protects his blanket.

 

I could go on and on, but I’m working on a change-management training course for managers who want to better delegate to the people they want to treat all the same.

 

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