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.

 

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 1/100th 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.

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