Blog Posts — Page 9

Changing the Paradigm of BS

When I first started researching the Elevator Pitch for publishing this week, I was amazed to find out it was a whole industry. People take this stuff seriously – there are even whole companies dedicated to help people and organizations perfect their Elevator Speech. Then I came across this one:

“We add value to our customers by maximizing the value of human capital to leverage their assets to change their paradigms in order to transform their business.”

Wow… that is just exquisite bullsh!t. If I were playing Buzzword Bingo, I would have won the grand prize with that single sentence.

I suppose a certain amount of BS jargon is inevitable in a knowledge-based economy. It not as easy to describe what we do, as when we were all making something tangible. So, as a public service to Wily Manager readers, I’d like to deconstruct this sentence. For the record, the irony of a having guy who makes a living chatting with his buddy about how managers should manage comment on this, is not lost on me.

We add value to our customers. This means you may or may not serve any useful purpose, so you have to make sure everyone thinks you “add value” by stating it explicitly. It’s quite possible that no one is more amazed than you that you’re getting paid to do whatever it is you do to “add value”.

Maximizing the Value of Human Capital. This necessarily means that most of the people you work with hate you. You’re either involved in reducing headcount, or annoying the crap out of people to get them to do more with less resources.

To Change Their Paradigms. Really? I didn’t know anyone still used the word “Paradigms” anymore. What this probably means is that you stand up in front of groups of employees and rant at them like one of those ethically-challenged Sunday morning televangelists who asks for money to refuel his personal challenger jet. You have about the same level of credibility, too.

To Transform Their Business. A transformation is when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. In the business world transformation means that you’ll recommend and initiate a corporate reorganization that will result in the good people quitting to go work somewhere else, and the poor performers promoted three levels past their threshold of competence. Then when it goes horribly wrong, you arrange to hire back the good people as consultants at three times what they were getting paid previously.

You should be able to describe what your business does in concise terms – just make sure it doesn’t set off the BS meter ever time you open your mouth.

5 Reasons Performance Reviews Suck

In the past fifteen years, I’ve been in and out of dozens of organizations, all of which had some process for conducting Performance Reviews. Of all of them, only one organization did them consistently, and did them well. The rest of them conducted performance reviews that ranged between ineffective, and highly offensive.

This got me to thinking what all these organizations have in common when it comes to Performance Reviews, so here are the top five (of several dozen) reasons why Performance Reviews usually suck:

1) Everybody wants more feedback – as long as it’s good. Yep… as much as your Gen Y types tell you they crave feedback, they really only want it if it confirms their worldview that they are beyond fantastic. Any suggestions for improvement are usually met with a thud. It is only the most elite of corporate cultures that have overcome this aspect of human nature. These organizations train and encourage people to constantly seek out feedback that will make them better – which sometimes requires facing up to the fact you don’t do some things well.

2) Performance Reviews are non-specific. They often contain broad sweeping statements about someone being “good with customers”, or “needing improvement on follow through”. These observations are about as useful as a chocolate teapot. If it’s not specific, don’t bother. Bring data or specific behavioral observations.

3) People are too polite. Most supervisors hate performance reviews more than the employees. So they try to get through them as quickly as possible, without hurting anyone’s feelings. Great organizations, and great leaders use performance appraisals as catalyst for improvement. This actually requires giving people feedback on how they can improve – rather than just trying to keep the peace.

4) Performance reviews are structured too much like report cards. If the performance review is simply “the year in review” without any mention of the future, or developmental opportunities, then it is a waste of time. Even more of a waste of time is a 4 or 5 point rating system that employees are graded on with little thought or explanation. No wonder people hate them.

5) They are disconnected with what people do every day. The big problem with performance reviews is that they are designed by HR people, or external consultants who have absolutely no idea what people in a particular role do everyday. Hence people are assessed on things they rarely or never do, and the bulk of their efforts are not captured by the criteria or format used.

Employees don’t have any accountability for the Performance Review process. OK… I said five reasons, so this one is a bonus. In most organizations, the employee merely shows up for a performance review meeting, having lent no thought or effort to outcome. Great organizations and great managers insist that employees complete some form of self-assessment in advance of the meeting so that the success of the process is shared.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Mick Jagger was right – you can’t always get what you want.

One of the dynamics that managers face is weighing off short-term objectives against longer term ones. This sometimes results in seemingly poor decisions being made.

Often, I get to hear people in organizations complain about the seemingly silly decisions that are made. It is so clear to them, that by investing $100,000, you can recover a $1m. They’ve done the cost benefit analysis, and the answer is clear. The only problem is that they haven’t figured whether there is $100,000 to spend in the first place.

Think of it like this: If you replace the windows in house with better insulated ones, install high efficiency furnaces and air conditioners, and put new insulation in your attic, you will undoubtedly save thousands over the lifetime of those renovations. However, you may not have the $25,000 required now to do those modifications. Further, you may not be sure you’ll be in the house long enough to recover the investment.

It is the same for organizations.

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve seen lots of examples of corporate stupidity, too. My favorite one is the company that decreed in blood that all travel occurring within an operating division must be by surface, and that air travel was restricted to those going across operating divisions. This made a lot of sense in Northern California, where the decree was issued. It didn’t make a lot of sense in British Columbia (about twice the size of Texas, and full of mountains). It turns out to drive from one side of this division to another was a four or five day exercise. Surely a plane ticket would be cheaper? Nope – the policy stands. Truly stupid.

The dynamic of measuring the short term and long term costs and benefits is not easy. Leaders need to do the math and figure out the right thing to do. But sometimes, the right thing to do is deferred to what can be done.

You might not get what want, but rather “get what you need”. Thanks Mick.

Laundry Lists and Diffused Focus

The fun part about our job is being exposed to a number of different industries and organizations. One of my favorite things to say is, “I’ve worked in Nuclear Power Stations, and in grocery stores, and 90% of the management issues are the same.” I usually get significant pushback from the Nuclear Engineers on this one, but it’s true.

Often the response I get from this statement is a question about the most common thread that weaves organizations and their performance together. The answer, quite simply, is “Focus”. The great performing organizations define and continually refine the limited number of things they need to do well, and then execute those things.

The reason people lose focus is because they get so busy managing tasks, they forget to look up every now and then and make sure they are doing the right things. Or, as I like to say, “They are so busy doing their jobs, they forget to do their jobs.”

As a busy manager, the next time you feel more overwhelmed with work than the bartender on the Kennedy Compound, spend a couple of minutes to review what your top 3 to 7 objectives for the year are. What are you doing to achieve those objectives this week? Better yet, review your top objectives every day before you start diving into tasks.

If you find yourself involved in meetings and activities that have nothing to do with those 3 to 7 objectives, then you need to question what you’re doing. Worse yet, if find yourself with 25 or 30 objectives, you need to go back to drawing board, and transform your laundry list into a more manageable, critical action list.

Achieving focus is conceptually very easy, but requires a lot of discipline to do well.

Bias for Action, Absence of Thinking

“A bias for action” – this has become a buzz-phrase I’ve noticed lately, and it makes my skin crawl the same way as when some one uses the word “irregardless”. This is the curse of several years of studying English at University.

I’ll be the first guy to encourage people to actually get things done, but if I’m going to have a bias for something, I’d prefer it be a bias for thinking. Simply put, any action you take that is not preceded by some thinking is a waste of time that will ultimately cost you much more time in the long run.

In many situations, the thinking involved need be brief. Unless you’re planning a moon landing, the amount of time writing and refining plans quickly hits diminishing returns. To spend even a few minutes thinking about something, and perhaps handwriting one page on what you are trying to achieve, the benefits, risks, and involvement required from others will save you a huge amount of time in the long run.

Here are some of my favorite business moments that demonstrated a bias for action, and an absence of thinking:

New Coke: Turns out people liked the old coke better, and the company spent millions to undo their action

Moving Jay Leno from the Tonight Show: NBC had a problem as to what to do with Conan O’Brien, but didn’t think too long about any of these decisions. Oh well… what’s $40 million between friends?

Ford Motor Company and the Pinto: It seems it was cheaper to pay wrongful death suits than it was to recall the exploding Pinto. Apparently the guys running Ford at the time had the Wizard of Oz trifecta: No brains, no heart, no courage.

US IRS and tax evaders: The US Revenue Service has decided recently to go after tax evaders in Canada and the UK. Newsflash: people looking to evade taxes don’t move to higher tax jurisdictions that have comprehensive tax treaties with the United States. If any thought had been put into this, they would realize the housewife who moved to Canada as a child probably isn’t as promising a source of revenue as the corporate executive that moved to Grand Cayman.

Think, then act. You’d be surprised how well it works.

How to Make Sure People Don’t Care

There is so much stuff out there telling managers what they should do to be more effective, and how they can be better leaders of their people. This week, I thought I’d take a different approach, and suggest to managers how they might make sure that none of their people care.

It seems that many leaders will read an article or attend a seminar and them come back to the office and do the same thing they were doing before. They then find themselves stressed-out and miserable, as they can never seem to get a grip on their jobs or on leading their people. It seems something is lost in the transfer between reading or hearing something, and applying it to our own circumstances.

As for the people those managers are leading: they all start out with a different level of giving a crap, and they are then pushed towards the mean (or average) of “giving-a-crap-edness” of the culture around them. The great managers push that average line up, and inspire people to come along for the ride. Bad leaders, push the line down, and tacitly encourage people to give a crap about far fewer things, and at far lower a level.

So here are some things bad leaders do to ensure no one cares:

Enable unnecessary bureaucracy. This is why many public sector organizations suffer with poor morale.
Not dealing with performance issues. I’m not going to work all that hard for you if I know my peer is doing nothing, and not getting called on it.
Not administering consequences. People need to know that both good and poor performance will be recognized and “rewarded” as such.
Micro-managing. If you are going to redo all my work anyway, I’m not going to put much effort into it.
Playing favorites. OK… maybe a meritocracy only exists in a University Professor’s textbook, but you’ve got to at least try to give the appearance of fairness.
Reinforce a blame culture. People’s best work comes from taking risks, which they will not do, if they get crucified every time a small error is made.

There are lots of other ones, too, but leaders should start with these ones, and determine to what degree they do these things. The further away you are from these things, the more likely you are to be pushing that mean line of discretionary effort upwards.

Measure Your Measures

Last time I wrote about measurement in the workplace, I got quite a bit of hate mail. I could tell you the exact quantity and relative quality of that hate mail, but suffice it to say, that people seem to have very definite ideas about how things ought to be measured (or not measured) in their workplace.

So I’ve beefed up my security detail, and put on my protective cup, and I’ll tackle business metrics again – this time for service oriented businesses.

Let me describe the two opposite ends of the continuum on this silly debate. Way over on the far left hand side, are those people who say, “I’m a lawyer (graphic designer, LR negotiator, marketing specialist, etc.), you can’t measure what I do.” Sorry – I can, and I will.

On the extreme right hand side of the scale are those people (mostly consultants, who’ve never actually worked in any of these jobs), who say, “Measuring service businesses is exactly the same as measuring production-based businesses.” You should throw such people out of your office quickly, before any more of their ignorance wears off on your people.

As with many things, the truth lies somewhere between these extremes — in the less comfortable grey area. You can and should measure service business functions, but it often much harder than simply counting widgets.

In some cases, there are very repeatable and transactional things that occur within a service function, that should be counted like widgets. If you work as a recruiter, you should be prepared to disclose how many resumes were screened, how many people were shortlisted, how many interviewed, and your time to fill the position.

You should also have a quality ranking as to how well those positions were filled that will only become clear after some time has passed. For example, how many of your new recruits quit or are terminated within the first 18 months is a quality indicator of the recruiting process. So are the upward mobility of new hires, and their scores on performance appraisals, in the first couple of years after they come onboard

That wasn’t so hard, was it?

So rather than fire-bombing my office, perhaps you could measure the effectiveness of your current measurements – but we’ll leave that for another day.

The Myth of Work-Life Balance

I was out for lunch recently on a weekend with an old family friend. Our lunch, on a beautiful autumn afternoon, overlooking the ocean was repeatedly interrupted by a Blackberry – and not the thorny cane-fruit type. I finally asked if my friend’s wife was eleven months pregnant, and if he was waiting on the call to rush to the hospital.

“No”, he replied without looking up. “We’re well beyond our child-rearing days”.

Apparently, my attempt to diffuse the situation with some sarcastic humor had failed.

Some people find themselves in jobs where they really are on call over a weekend. For the vast majority, however, they voluntarily place themselves on constant standby regardless of their position. They then have the nerve to whine about not getting any time to themselves.

Suck it up, Princess, you’re doing it to yourself.

My friend above is a public school teacher. I have great respect for the work that teachers do, but I’ve got to think that one of the perks of the job has got to be the fact that outside of the occasional basketball game, you are largely left alone on the weekends. Does a public school teacher really need to be monitoring email messages on a Saturday afternoon?

The honest answer is “No”. People, like my friend, end up doing so for a variety of reasons. First, it makes us feel important if we believe we are indispensible. Second is the addictive nature of being continually connected – what if we are the last ones on the block to know that the Joneses are having ice-cream with their apple pie for desert tonight? Third, it fits right in with what we’ve always been taught to do – not to hold your attention on anyone or anything for more than 30 seconds.

The myth of work-life balance is not that it doesn’t exist, but rather that most people do not allow it to exist. It is true that organizations need to reduce explicit and tacit pressure for employees to be connected at all times, but employees have some accountability here too.

The reality is that people love to complain that they work long hours, and never get a break, when in fact a large portion of the dysfunctional behavior is entirely self-imposed. If you want work-life balance, then turn off your phone, and be completely present with whomever or whatever you are dealing with at that moment. Unless you’re on call for the next space shuttle launch, nobody is going to notice anyway.

Improve Morale — Discipline People

So if I read all the management literature correctly, then to improve employee morale, I should hire a concierge, allow people to bring their pets to work, and every day at 3.00pm we should join hands in a circle and sing campfire songs. Personally, I can’t think of anything that would make me start looking for alternative employment faster.

So what does impact morale, and should managers care?

First of all, they should care – just not about concierges and employee sing-alongs. Morale is a key driver of attendance and retention both of which have a clear and immediate impact on costs. Morale also creates and maintains employee discretionary effort — which has a clear and immediate impact on productivity, quality and safety. Besides all of that, it’s just way more fun to work at a place where people are engaged.

There are several ways for leaders to impact morale. Perhaps one of the most important is a consistent, fair, and well thought out progressive discipline process. Yep, that’s right… I’m suggesting that progressive discipline and higher employee morale are highly correlated. Here’s why:

When one member of a team consistently doesn’t pull his weight, it is rarely the boss that feels the impact of this. Most often it is that laggard’s peers. By addressing one person’s poor performance, others are both relieved and validated. They are relieved that the discipline will either lead to the person beginning to pull their weight, or that the person will be replaced by someone who will. They are validated by the demonstration that their effort is superior to that of the person receiving the discipline.

The most highly effective workplaces have predictable and clear consequences for both good and poor performance, so it is not good enough for a leader simply to focus on discipline. However, many managers put off uncomfortable discussions about poor performance using the excuse that any intervention will harm morale. In fact, the opposite it true.

Oh No. Now you’ve got to go do it.

Go ahead… discipline someone for poor performance, and improve your team’s morale.

Here’s a Stupid Idea

Mistakes are remarkably underrated, and very few organizations are actually good at making them. When it comes to making mistakes, there are typically two types of organizations:

Those with little or no tolerance for mistakes, so in order to avoid making them, they either don’t make decisions, or they analyze decisions to such a degree that they become paralyzed. I would include most public sector organizations and big utilities in this category.
Those organizations where mistakes get made, and the most important thing is to assign blame. Of course, people in such organizations would not self-identify as being blame-seekers, but it is often cloaked in “holding people accountable”. Accountability is about people delivering on pre-agreed upon requirements. Making mistakes is about taking risks and doing something new

There is a third type of organization that encourages people to take risks in certain areas of the business. Many times those risks do not pan out, but from the ashes of failure a phoenix of innovation and performance rises. This type of organization is exceptionally rare. The best examples are well known: Apple, Virgin. There are others as well, but they are as difficult to find as a trace of dignity in a reality TV star.

I always know I’m in a well run and innovative business when I hear, “Here’s a stupid idea”. A high level of confidence is required is say such a thing, and a high level of trust in your peers to take such risks. So revel in your mistakes, and do so knowing you are in good company.