Blog Posts — Page 12

What Gets Measured, Gets Mismanaged

Well, that title should upset a few people – particularly the folks in finance that love their spreadsheets more than they do their children. Don’t get me wrong… I like the idea of measuring things so you know where you stand. My problem is the way in which some organizations execute their metrics.

Performance metrics often provide an excellent illustration of how a really good idea can be made difficult and useless by poor implementation. It’s a lot like watching your favourite sports franchise consistently snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.

Usually it goes down like this: someone in some position of authority will read the first fifteen pages of a book about measurement. Without reading the following 250 pages, he concludes that his organization needs to get everyone on the measurement bandwagon. Then he strikes a committee, or hires a consultant to go forth and make this happen.

Fast forward in time six months, and a significant portion of everyone’s work week becomes dedicated to counting the number of paper clips they have consumed since last week, and calculating the annual impact of that paper clip consumption. They then have a meeting to discuss how to reduce paper clip consumption, thereby reducing annual operating costs by $48.50, or roughly 1/100^th the cost of the first meeting about paper clip consumption.

OK… that might be a bit harsh. But here are some actual examples of performance metrics gone horribly wrong:

The technology company that measured sales success exclusively on dollar volume at the end of each quarter. THE RESULT: A whole bunch of clients went somewhere else because they were tired of being sold things they really didn’t need.
The grocery retailer that measured check-stand effectiveness by calculating the frequency of cashiers using customers’ names. THE RESULT: the customers went to stores where they measure how much time was spent waiting in line – something the customer actually cares about.
The restaurant owner that attempted to reduce cost by reducing the number of paper napkins provided to each customer. THE RESULT: I don’t know… probably sticky fingers and dirty tables – this one just seemed really silly to me
The lumber manufacturer that measured how much fibre it recovered from each log, as opposed to how much money they made on different dimensions of lumber. THE RESULT: Very few wood-chips, but a yard full of garden stakes that no one would buy (and a whole bunch of trees unnecessarily harvested)

Some people will tell you all that matters at the end of the day is how much money you make. Not true – if you focus exclusively on this, you are in a never-ending cycle of sub-optimized decisions that forbid any long term success. Most obviously, if you ignore safety while focusing exclusively on how much money is make, it is only a matter of time before you injure or kill someone, which beside being ethically reprehensible, is very expensive.

Here’s the bottom line about measurement: The great thing about measuring performance is that people will adjust their behaviours to affect the outcome of the measure. Unfortunately, the really scary thing about measuring performance is that people will adjust their behaviours to affect the outcome of the measure.

So measurement (like other recreational drugs) should be used cautiously and in moderation. Second, you should never have only one number you are tracking. And finally, you need to understand why numbers are trending the way they are, as opposed to (over)reacting to one data point.

Let’s be careful out there.

Can’t Decide? Flip a Coin

Part of what makes my job so much fun is being exposed to a variety of organizations in a wide variety of industries. The culture of these organizations vary widely, and is probably best manifested in how people make decisions. In some places, people gather as much information as they can, they discuss possible courses of action, and then they pull the trigger on a decision.

Other organizations have rambling, unfocused discussions, refer things to subcommittees, defer decisions seemingly indefinitely, and then wonder why their organizations consistently fail.

People can argue whether the greater evil is in making decisions to quickly or too slowly, and you can probably guess which side of equation I will argue for with the following list:

Things that delay decisions:

Needing perfect information before committing. It would be nice if you had all the available information at your disposal, but by the time you gather and process all that data, it’s possible your decision won’t matter anymore.
Being too risk adverse. When people are deathly afraid of making a mistake, they will hesitate to make decisions. What is not part of their calculations is that their delay carries a certain amount of risk too.
Trying to keep everybody happy all the time. Making decisions usually means having to make trade-offs of some sort. By saying yes to one course of action, you are saying no to another, and in the process, you are going to upset someone. This is a key reason why the public sector often fails to make timely, quality decisions.
A top-heavy or micro-managed business. In this case, only one person, or a small number of people are permitted to make any decisions, and as such become a bottleneck. Organizations that push decision making down the hierarchy to the most appropriate level are much more agile, and ultimately perform much better.
Poor decision-making process. Sometimes, people fail to recognize a decision point when it appears in front of them. If they don’t recognize the fork in the road, they certainly won’t know which turn to take.
Fear: Contrary to popular belief, it is sometimes better to make the wrong decision today, realize it tomorrow and then correct your course of action, than it is to delay a decision for weeks or months.

Now I’m really having a hard time deciding which video clip to include this week. One of the candidates is a Monty Python bit (People’s front of Judea) that contains foul language that might offend some. The other is a clip of George W. Bush talking about being a decision-maker, that may offend some American viewers.

I could ask everyone to weigh-in, and then make my decision, or I could just flip a coin, but I can’t decide which decision making process is better.

If HR Sucks, it’s Your Fault

Here’s a quiz: In my organization HR is/are:

a) A highly professional service provider that partners with managers to maximize shareholder value through effective people management practice.

b) The people who organize our Christmas parties and picnics

c) Where people who couldn’t make it in the core business go to be marginalized to the point where they do a minimum of damage.

OK – maybe HR’s an easy target in many organizations, but if beating up HR is a fun way to relieve some tension mid-day at the water cooler, you really won’t like what comes next:

If your HR group truly sucks, then your organization most likely sucks, too.

Yep, that’s right. I’m suggesting there is a direct correlation between highly effective HR, and a highly effective organization. Furthermore, I’d suggest that organizational managers get the HR departments they deserve. If your HR group is solely administrative in nature, and generally not very high performing, then that is exactly the quality of service you as a manager, or an organization has asked for.

You may like or hate Jack Welch, but it would pretty hard to argue that GE wasn’t a high performing organization when he was running it. Just about any time you heard Welch speak, he would talk about what he was doing, and he’d also talk about Bill Conaty – his HR guy. For GE, the HR portfolio was extremely important. Some other Jack Welch quotes about HR:

“A high quality senior HR person is as critical as the CFO”

HR should “get out of the picnic business”

And his advice to HR people: “Don’t be a victim”

Every organization has its version of the “People are our most important asset” speech, but Welch actually lived it. People will jump all over this, because Welch had an impressive record of firing people. But valuing people necessarily means that you remove barriers to a team’s success, and sometimes this means removing people.

The strongest organizations I have worked with have highly-competent, business-focused HR people. They also insist that every manager in the company is an HR manager. HR is not something that is delegated to a central group – it is actively managed by every leader, every day. The HR group’s role in these high-performing organizations is to set organizational leaders up to be outstanding managers of the human asset.

Picnics and Christmas parties need to be assigned elsewhere – perhaps the marketing department isn’t busy.

First Day on the Job? Check Your Zipper

The first day on a new job is a harrowing experience. It creates impressions on all those you work with, and sets the stage for your success (or failure) with that employer.

Probably my most memorable first day on the job was literally my first day on the job – any job. I was fifteen years old, and I got a job bagging groceries at the local supermarket. Ron Grant was the manager on duty, and he met me at the door. Ron was never one to smile much, but he was a good guy, and he knew his job very well.

What he didn’t do as well, was to remember people’s names. From my first day onwards, my name was always “Brad” – the curse of having a last name that is many others’ first name. In the months to come, I’d hear him paging Brad time after time, and then wonder why Brad (whoever that was) never answered.

Ron toured me through the whole store, stopping along the way to introduce me to everyone on staff that we met, and to point out the things I might need to know for my new career wrapping groceries. He also doled out advice that was very useful and well intentioned, but easily could have been included in the best-seller, “Sh*t My Dad Says.” Needless to say, I learned some new words and expressions that day, that came in very handy when I recycled them back at high school.

I learned in the months and years to come, that Ron oriented me to my new workplace completely of his own initiative. The organization really had no process for bringing people on besides the requisite signing of the official paperwork.

At the end of this orientation, he returned me to the front of the store, where I’d spend the next several years bagging groceries.

“Any questions?” asked Ron.

“Nope… I’m ready to go.” I replied.

“Great”, he said, as I turned to get started. “Hey Brad,”

“Yep?”

“Your fly’s open”, he said without cracking a smile.

Presumably, he’d noticed this before he’d toured me through the whole place, but had waited until now to share this news with me. It’s been a while since I’ve been teenage boy, but I’m assuming at the time I would have had checklist of basic hygiene items – such as making sure one’s zipper was properly secured. Apparently, first day job jitters successfully eclipsed basic personal maintenance items.

Walking around in a public place with your fly open — I suppose that’s one way to make a first impression on when starting a new job.

Meeting Survival Guide

I know it may be hard to believe (because I seem so delightful in these pages), but I can sometimes be difficult to get along with. I get particularly cranky when I’m working with a group that loves to have meetings. They have no idea why they have meetings, there are no outcomes, and no decisions are made, so it must be that there is some addictive quality in the coffee served at meetings.

Humourist Dave Barry once said that organizations have meetings because they are unable to masterbate. I prefer to look at it this way: there is an inverse correlation between the number and quality of meetings in an organization, and their overall success. In other words, I am suggesting that the fewer meetings that occur, the more successful the organization will be.

I know this is an argument I will lose in most companies, so as a service to Wily Manager readers, I’ll suggest ways to pass the time in one of your infinite number of meetings:

Buzzword Bingo – this is where you try to stay awake by identifying business catch phrases. You need to be discrete, though. You don’t want to carry in a BINGO marker, or jump out of your chair, screaming “BINGO” when the Director of IT utters the words “low-hanging fruit”. Download the Wily Manager Buzzword Bingo card here.
Meeting value calculator – it’s kind of like a telethon, where you keep adding up the total amount of shareholder value that is being sucked away. You can run the calculations privately, or put up a display board with changeable numbers that can be updated as the meeting goes on. It’s a bit like the national debt clock in Times Square.
Count the Meetings. Often you may be in a room and witnessing 12 individual meetings happening in rapid succession, as each person updates the boss with information that is completely irrelevant to everyone else in the room.
Count the Meetings (variation). In particularly undisciplined organizations, meetings will degenerate into multiple and simultaneous conversations. In this case there can be several separate meetings occurring at once, but they are much harder to count that the first variation of this game.
Spot the Participant Type: In this game, you tag each participant with the label most appropriate to them. Here are some thought starters:
- The Jeopardy game show contestant: this is a person constantly asking rhetorical questions, and communicates through Socratic code: “Do I like the idea of being in this meeting room for 8 hours? No, I don’t”
- Caffeine-Deprived: Spot the people in the room struggling just to maintain a minimum level of consciousness, so as not to appear asleep. Often identified by periodic head-bobbing, however the really good ones have perfected sleeping with the eyes open, while nodding every few moments to give the illusion of awareness
- The Rambler – A solution to this problem is like Book III of Gulliver’s Travels where an empty sheep’s bladder tied to stick is used to gently hit the Rambler in the head to keep him on track.
- The Evangelist – everything is a matter of life or death. If the colour of the toilet-paper is changed, it will negatively impact our very way of life.
- The thinker – they doodle, don’t look they’re paying attention, and then once per meeting the amaze everyone with their ability to put the entire issue into context. Be nice to them, they could be your next boss.

Finally, it seems that meetings and death are closely related. Even before Patrick Lencioni wrote Death By Meeting, I had a dream that I had died, and arrived in purgatory, and it was a meeting that never ended. I was desperate that someone would pray for my soul, until I realized all of them were too busy in meetings as well. I woke up realizing a violent death wasn’t as bad as it sounded – at least after a grizzly death, someone would pray for me.

Good Interviews Start With Semi-Intelligent Questions

“Tell me about your strengths and weaknesses”

If that is the opening line at an employment interview, you may want to run away so fast that there is a “you-shaped” hole in the door. If you hear those words come out of your own mouth as a hiring manager, you need to do some work to up your game for this important managerial function.

Let’s examine why this is a useless question that shows a startling lack of imagination:

First of all, this is a question that invites insincere answers. You might as well ask, “could you dust off some lies and embellishments, and trot them out now?”

Second, you are not really testing the validity of the match between the competencies required for a position, and the profile of a candidate. Your questions need to be far more specific than this.

Third, this question invites the most rehearsed, least spontaneous answers. It is possible as the hiring manager, you hear something in the syndicated response that you can follow up on, but that would be pure good luck.

I know that many managers and recruiters will disagree with my viewpoint on this, so to encourage you to abandon this useless question, here are some typical responses, and the literal translation. You can cut and paste these ones into your interview notes, and spare the candidate the pain of the question:

What are your strengths?

I’m a hard worker. I don’t have any other interests or hobbies, and like to spend upwards to 80 hours a week at the office.
I’m a people person. I really like people, and even the few I don’t like I will treat with mock civility.
I’m detail oriented. I’d much rather lose myself in a spreadsheet than deal with people.

What are your weaknesses?

I’m a perfectionist. Not only am I perfect, but I demand the same of everyone around me. I’m a delight at the water-cooler.
I’m impatient. If my paycheque is an hour late, I will launch a class-action suit on behalf of everyone who works here.
I work too hard. I’m not quite sure what I’m doing, so I’ll compensate by being in the office at 6am, and not leave until 9pm. I’ll probably be on stress leave before the end of my first month.

In an interview, either as the hiring manager, or the candidate, you want some indication that the person you are dealing with is semi-intelligent. You also hope that you are portraying yourself similarly. Otherwise, you might as well audition for a reality-based TV show with the other mentally impaired contestants.

I had trouble choosing just one video clip this week, so I gave up, and embedded both of them.

Dealing With Manager Stress? Try Not Giving a Crap

When asked about manager stress, I am reminded of when I did my very first gig as a Management Consultant. The company I worked for paired me up with one of the wise old owls, whose job it was to show me the ropes, and make sure I didn’t say anything too stupid so as to jeopardize the relationship with the client.

His first bit of advice to me was, “never care more than the client.” It was incredibly cynical, and incredibly valuable. I am careful where, and to whom I repeat this advice, but many of the leaders suffering from manager stress I’ve coached over the years should heed this adage.

You can never be the only one who cares about something. In fact, a key survival skill as a leader in the modern organization is to selectively not give a crap about a whole bunch of stuff.

I am reminded of a public sector client I once had who lamented to me that if they only had more resources, they could get so much more done. I think she was genuinely shocked when I broke the ugly truth to her that she would never, ever have all the resources she wanted. It never happens in the private sector, or the public sector – nor should it.

One of the key functions of a manager is to allocate the scarce resources of time, money and talent appropriately. What separates great managers from the average and poor is their ability to manage the conversion of these resources to maximize the output of their group.

A great way to make yourself absolutely crazy as a manager in any organization is to try to get everything done that the company wants, as well as everything you want to do. You need to draw your own line in the sand, and figure out what you need to do to be successful, and forget about much of the other stuff. A great way to accelerate your journey to stress-leave, and make everyone around you hate your guts is to try to be all things to all people.

Of course, doing the above means you will spend a lot of time saying “no” to people, and risk not having anyone like you. It’s called the burden of leadership, and it’s what you signed-on for once you gave up your individual contributor’s role.

So, to recap:

1) Selectively don’t give a crap.

2) You’re never going to have enough resources

3) Don’t do much of the stuff you think you should be doing

4) Don’t even attempt to keep everyone happy

5) Your career as an organizational leader will result in you being in a constant state of marginal “pissed-off’edness”

Wow… that’s quite a bit different than the stuff they taught us in Business School. But then again, how many Biz School Profs have ever had any success in running an actual business?

Management Advice from Monty Python

Some of us love British humour, others not so much. Either way, there is always something to be learned. Earlier this week, Jeff Haden at BNET found some Python video clips with some instructional advice for managers. Happy viewing:

http://www.bnet.com/blog/small-biz-advice/the-monty-python-guide-to-being-a-better-boss

Middle Management Conflicts, and TV Sitcoms

If you’re a regular visitor to this site, you’ll know we like The Office, Seinfeld, Saturday Night Live, and 30 Rock. With only a few other exceptions, broadcast television is an incredible waste of time, and like other recreational drugs, should be used only occasionally and sparingly.

Interestingly, life on the corporate food-chain is not unlike a poorly written sitcom. Perhaps that is why so many of them are set in the workplace. Both the workplace and the crappy sitcoms have protagonists, antagonists, and usually some version of the mentally unbalanced. Bad writing and poor acting are part of both as well. Perhaps the only significant difference is that on a sitcom, big problems can neatly be wrapped up in 22 minutes, so there’s time to sell soap and give you a preview to next week’s silliness.

I decided to do some research for this post, so I sat for an evening to watch some sitcoms to make sure I hadn’t misplaced my contempt, and to bring myself up to date on some of the blubber being offered up on TV.

Apparently prime-time comedy is getting worse. It is also apparent that one doesn’t need an abundance of talent to write this stuff, so Wily Manager proudly presents:

Manager in the Middle

Manager in the Middle is an innovative new sitcom from the people who bring you the Wily Manager weekly podcasts. The primary character (yet to be named, pending focus group results) is a smart, but cheeky manager constantly being offset by his sadistic immediate supervisor.

The supervisor, Cruela (played by Jane Lynch) loves to pit one manager off against another believing this “healthy” competition will better help her run her business. Our protagonist is also matrix-managed by a kind, cautious human-resource manager who always knows the right thing to do, but is unwilling to make a decision, and is incredibly conflict-adverse.

Our hero (played by Frankie Muniz (he’s all grown up now)) has four peer managers who all report to Cruella. Rounding out the cast is:

Vlad: The hard-working, smart, reliable foreigner who is easily pushed around for fear of losing his work visa (played by Fez from That 70s Show)
Dianne: The single mom who is just trying to make it through the day, but is in constant conflict with Cruela, as she struggles to make it to the daycare on time to pick up her two kids. Cruela would like to fire her for not working insane hours, but unfortunately (for Cruela) the work she does is outstanding.
Don: The smarmy, but oddly likeable young single guy who doesn’t know near as much as he thinks he does. He also loves to take credit for other people’s work.
Vera: The jaded, cynical, sharp-tongued middle aged woman who has over ten years until retirement, but can tell you how many days are left in her working career.

Join us in the first episode when Cruela asks her team to stay late to meet a useless last minute request that everyone knows will go nowhere… and hilarity ensues.

Think we could get Fox to air it after Glee?

The Most Effective Interpersonal Communication? Don’t be an A$$hole

OK… we’ll start this week by talking in code. Even though the inappropriate word above is now widely used on network television, and even Bill Cosby has uttered it from his lips, I’m pretty sure if I repeat the word several times in one post, a number of firewalls will catch it, and I won’t be able to spread the gospel this week.

For our purposes, the code word will be “O-ring”.

I was once told that in this world there are two types of people: Idiots and O-rings. Your label is determined by your behaviour, and everyone has acted as both an idiot and an O-ring at various points in their lives. Some particularly talented people have managed to be both simultaneously, earning the title “idiot-hole”.

When asked if I thought I was an idiot or an O-ring, I struggled for which term I found less offensive, and more importantly what sort of behaviour qualifies one for membership in each category. The definition of “idiot” is reasonably clear. Anytime you’ve made an unbelievably stupid choice, you qualify as an idiot. In my case, I was clearly an idiot when I agreed to sit through a “short video presentation” (with a complementary cocktail) when I was on vacation in Mexico many years ago.

The definition of O-ring is somewhat more illusive. I canvassed a number of people to try to determine exactly what would qualify someone to be labeled an O-ring. As it turns out whenever someone else does something we don’t like, they are an O-ring. Case in point: traffic. Of all the people driving within a 100km radius of your vehicle, there is you, and all the other O-rings on the road.

This revelation naturally led me to examine my own behaviour when I was an Operations Manager with many direct reports. I arrived at the unmistakable conclusion that I was a tremendous O-ring. I’m not talking about an occasional O-ring maneuver, but rather a full-time job of simply being an O-ring. My entire work world was an infinite series of actions and decisions that at other people didn’t like. If I could go back in time, I’d change my title to AC (O-ring in charge).

So, is it possible to be a manager without being an O-ring? Probably not. Would you want to be a manager that’s not an O-ring? Only if you want to be an idiot.

This week we talk about how improving your ability to communicate constructively, you might avoid being labeled an O-ring.