Blog — Page 16

When Your Buddy Becomes Your Boss

I spent much of my early adult years working the graveyard shift in a grocery store to work my way through University. I’m not really sure why any thinking employer would leave four or five twenty-year-olds unattended in the middle of the night with several hundred thousand dollars worth of inventory, but they did. It’s a good thing we didn’t sell booze.

There was a camaraderie on the Night Crew that comes when a group of like-minded individuals works closely together. All was fine until one of the guys figured out he was in charge. I suspect the store manager worked night crew once himself, and knew it was a debacle, and figured out how to solve the problem: make someone accountable.

This was fine, except that because he was accountable, he, in turn, wanted all of us to be accountable. I didn’t want to be accountable, I wanted to be at home, in my bed, asleep. This guy took us to task on the length of our breaks, and how many bananas we consumed in the middle of the night without ringing them through the register.

In short, he did exactly what he should have, as our boss. The problem was, this guy was our buddy a short time ago, and all of sudden he was the boss. What happened to all those drunken stoopers where we’d backstab the management bozos? Now he was one of those management bozos.

In some cases, when two highly-professional people decide to make it work, a new boss and his/her former peers can make it work. Most of the time, however, you have to choose between being a buddy or being a boss.

If you are doing your job well as a manager, you’re not there to make friends. You’re there to do your job to the best of your ability, which occasionally may mean pissing off former peers.

The bottom line is if your friendships at work are really important to you, you may want to think long and hard about how badly you want that promotion to becoming the boss.

Gen X is a lot Like Jan Brady

This Generation X cohort is a real piece of work, isn’t it? Is it possible to have a whole generation stuck in a massive inferiority complex? It’s kind of like meeting a Canadian backpacking across Europe. Yeah we get it – those 500 Maple Leafs you’re wearing mean you come from Canada. The rest of us don’t really care that much, but you go ahead and dress up like a Mountie.

Gen X is not unlike when Jan Brady got completely bent out of shape because everything was “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha.” (You have to be a Gen Xer to get that reference). Grow up Jan, and stop being so annoying.

Actually all this generation talk is getting a bit boring.

In 1994, I suffered through a breakfast seminar where the guest speaker was telling us how this new generation of worker was completely different than anything that had every come before it. These Generation X types were not loyal to any employer, didn’t care too much about their jobs, and were just generally hard to get along with.

Remembering back on this particular breakfast seminar now, it was particularly offensive on at least three levels:

About 2500 years ago, some guy named “Socrates” made the same observation. I’m more familiar with the published works of Socrates than I am with the guest speaker (whose name I’ve forgotten) that morning, so I’m going to assume it wasn’t an original talk. Although the flashy Powerpoint slides were something that Socrates never pulled off.
Those entering the workforce in the early 1990s had just watched their parents be laid-off en masse after a lifetime of loyalty to their companies to take on a new role as an unemployed middle-aged former corporate drone with no real marketable skills. Add to this, the fact that Generation X – to date the most educated generation in history – walked into a job market with very few prospects, and you may begin to understand some of their crankiness.
These Gen Xers did finally manage to find jobs — though not the cool, self-fulfilling ones they were promised. Fast forward in time twenty years and these Gen Xers are now lamenting the fact that the generation that came after them has no loyalty to their organizations, and don’t care too much about their jobs. It really does come fully circle, doesn’t it?

We need to quit trying to rationalize and explain the fact it is each generations’ express mission to drive the generation immediately preceding it crazy. How else can you explain the music of the devil (also known as Jazz) that today’s older retirees used to make their parents foam at the mouth with anger.

Your job as a leader is to get other people to do what you want them to do, because they want to do it (with credit to Dwight Eisenhower). Spending a whole bunch of time trying to label and define different generations won’t help you with that.

Finally, just to prove there’s no hard feelings about the crack about Canadians above, this week’s video is dedicated to those viewing from Canada:

Your Mentor and Captain Marvel

What the hell is a mentor anyway? I hear the word, and I always think of Captain Marvel’s alter ego, Billy Batson, and his nameless Mentor. As best I can tell, Mentor’s job was to drive a Winnebago around the United States with no particular destination in mind, and to give clichéd advice to Billy, all while giving any casual observers the creepy feeling they might be witnesses some form of pedophilia in progress.

The Management Gurus will tell you that when mentoring works well, it is a relationship of high trust, where the Mentor knows and understands the technical, political and social ramifications of a particular organization, but does not have organizational power or control over a person. Some organizations even assign two people to each other for a mentor-mentee arrangement.

I don’t think this type of relationship is really possible in most organizations, and here’s why:

We fired most of the middle-managers that could have served in such a role several years ago. Now, outside of the occasional peer, there is no one to act in this capacity.
Mentoring relationships take time – years in some cases. Most people don’t stay in one job, or at one location that long anymore.
Workplaces are generally lower trust environments than they were a decade or two ago. Employees don’t trust the employer to act in their individual best interests, and employers see their people as disloyal.

Many organizations start these well-intentioned, but misguided attempts at mentorship programs. Mentoring relationships, by definition, must occur organically, so drawing up a schedule to pair one person with another is a waste of paper. Not to mention the awkward situation this puts the participants in:

“I’d like to introduce you to your new mentor! Now run along and share your deepest fears and aspirations with this person.”

So here’s my alternative: a personal Board of Directors. Don’t be put-off by how badly publically traded companies have bastardized this good idea. It is their implementation that is suspect, not the idea. There are a variety of aspects of your professional life (and maybe your personal life, too) that could benefit from the external feedback of a Board of Directors.

If you’ve found a great mentor, then that person, may provide adequate direction for all axes of your professional life. If you don’t have a mentoring relationship in place, you may want to consider a different person for each of the following areas:

Technical – how can you better execute the core skills of your job?
Political – how do you negotiate the politics?
Organizational/Social — who are the true leaders of the organization, and who defers to whom?
Networking – Who do you need to know? Who knows them?
Community involvement — What causes or initiatives should you be involved in.
Self-promotion – How do you raise your profile, without coming across as a bootlicker?

There are undoubtedly other categories unique to your situation too. Perhaps you have people who can serve in more than one role, or maybe you have someone for each different aspect.

Just make sure you use their real name, and don’t address them as “Political Director”, otherwise you may leave people with that creepy impression like Billy Batson and Mentor did.

Optimizing Your Business Process Can Be a Really Bad Idea

Before the industrial revolution, most of us were connected to the outputs of our labor. We were either farmers or craftsmen in cottage industries where we worked on something for some period of time, and then either harvested, used, or sold the output of all our hard work.

In the 21^st century the link between what we toil on daily, and the output of that toil is much more illusive – particularly so in information based jobs and industries. We behave like some really minor cog, in some great big organizational wheel always feeling at least slightly nervous that if we got hit by a truck, it might take some time before anyone noticed.

As a result, we become focused on a series of tasks, rather than how those tasks contribute to some greater goal. Several years ago I did a job at a sawmill. This was before the forest sector in North America got completely spanked, and prior to Americans and Canadians sparring each other, and failing to recognize the much greater threat was coming from outside NAFTA.

Turning a raw log into a two-by-four is a much more complicated process than you might think. There are lots of moving parts and many people involved before you can go down to the Home Depot and buy some boards to build that eyesore treehouse for the kids in your backyard. As a result, you’ve got several groups of people that optimize their little part of much larger process without ever putting their head up to see if what they’re doing makes any sense.

Raw logs are scanned by laser on their way into the mill to optimize the use of fibre, and reduce the amount of waste (also known as chips). The problem is as the timber got smaller and smaller over the course of many years, optimizing the amount of fibre meant that sawmills were producing a whole bunch of lumber with a dimension of 1” X 1” – about the size of a garden stake.

So you can imagine my surprise walking into the lumberyard of a sawmill, and learning that 80% of the space was taken up by garden stakes and bean poles. Somewhere I had missed the bulletin about the fall of society, and our return to an agrarian economy. Apparently, the larger lumber dimensions (like the wood you use to actually build things) were no longer required.

This is what happens when people optimize their little part of the business without any regard for the larger organizational goals. This sawmill was indeed maximizing the amount of fibre recovered from each log – they just weren’t producing anything that anyone needed or wanted.

It would be easy to think this is an isolated case, but there are examples everywhere of people optimizing a piece of the business to the sub-optimization of the whole enterprise. Ironically, this is often encouraged by well-meaning business improvement people, or high-paid consultants.

The bottom line is to draw a clear path between what each person does every day, and the higher-level goals of the organization. If this path of vision is obstructed, you may end up with a yard full of garden stakes.

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.