The White Collar Bad Boss Blues

I was reading Liz Ryan’s Businessweek column on the things crappy managers say via the MSNBC site the other day and reflecting that I’ve heard every one of these at one time or another, but I can’t recall ever saying any of them. I don’t mean to suggest that I’m some kind of world-class management savant; most of what I’ve learned about the practice of management came by trial and error (since business schools don’t teach the practice of management), and I initially took to it like a duck to investment banking. But if you stick with it, eventually it is possible to learn how to manage people without being a complete a-hole and doing things that will insult, annoy and de-motivate your people to the point where they spend more of their time daydreaming about pushing you into a giant septic tank than they do on their actual job duties. And the first step in this learning process is realizing that anything that would insult, annoy or outrage you will probably have the same effect on your employees…

Take, for example, such pithy demonstrations of wit as “If you don’t want this job, I’ll find someone who does” and “In these times, you’re lucky to have a job at all.” Ryan correctly points out that these are both annoying and stupid; threatening to fire someone for any suggestion that conditions are less than absolutely optimal is idiotic, and even in the worst possible economy (with 10% unemployment, for example) most people have jobs, and could get other ones if they really wanted or needed to. Not only do these statements not address the problem, concern or discontentment expressed by the original employee comment, they’re also things that any reasonable person would find annoying, if not arrogant, condescending and completely stupid. Telling someone that you don’t agree with their concern or that there is nothing that can be done about it is reasonable, but either of these responses just means that you’re slapping someone down for daring to challenge what you see as your authority…

Then there’s such control-freak favorites as “I don’t pay you to think” and “Who gave you permission to do that?” Ryan notes that the first of these usually means that the manager is either threatened by the idea or too lazy to think about it (let alone take action on it), or sometimes both, while the latter indicates a manager who is more concerned with maintaining a “proper” hierarchy than he or she is with using it to accomplish anything. A manager’s first duty is to accomplish whatever tasks are necessary, using as few resources (including employee time) as possible – and the task of maintaining efficiency, effectiveness, and morale in the workforce is always necessary. Any idea that helps you to complete that duty is worth having, no matter how unconventional it might, or how little you care for the source, and any hierarchical structure that interferes with that duty should be ignored, or at least minimized. Anything else is just egotistical crap…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that there is no such thing as a bad idea, or that employees should be allowed to just make up their own rules about everything; I’m not a “huggy-bear” type, and I’m not saying you should be, either. But the truth is, unless you’re employing someone as a piece of furniture, you are paying them to think, and if what they are doing is better for the company than the official procedure would be in the same circumstances, you are the one who gave them permission to do it – retroactively, perhaps, but I hope you did. The other side of the coin – telling someone that their conflict with another employee is their problem (not yours) is even worse; you’re the one who is being paid to run the unit and keep order, and failing to do so is just abandoning your job. But I think the worst one on Ryan’s list has to be telling someone that “I’ll take it under advisement…”

Stop and ask yourself how you feel when someone says that to you. Ryan points out that what this really means is “I am not going to do whatever you just suggested that I do, and I want you to know that I value your opinions less than I can tell you.” You don’t have to be a management savant to know that you should never say that to anyone, especially if it’s true. You just have to remember that any attempts at management that wouldn’t work on you are unlikely to work on anyone else, either…

Say Goodbye…

So, how did my exit interview at UCLA go, I hear some of you asking? Given my occasion critical comments about my recent employers, and my rather more common (and certainly more vicious) clashes with human resources personnel down through the years, I’m sure most of you were expecting me to take full advantage of this opportunity to “stick it to the Man.” If so, I’m probably about to disappoint you, and you may want to skip ahead to my rant scheduled for the 4th of July, which is a good bit and has fireworks in it. Because my final interview at Extension was an excellent example of how this exercise should be done, and what can come of it…

To begin with, I should note that most line managers have a traditional (and understandable) antipathy for all staff departments, especially human resources. There is an unfortunate tendency in all human activity to consider your own duties and tasks to be the most important of any, and line managers often fall into the (bad) habit of assuming that just because they need (or want) something to happen at once, that it CAN happen at once, and anyone who tells them it can’t is simply lazy, incompetent, or secretly plotting to destroy them. A line manager, upon being told that a critical position may take four to six weeks to fill (when the opening is costing their department money every day someone does not do that job) may well jump to all of these conclusions at once, thus making a difficult working relationship even harder…

Human resources people, in fairness, do often suffer from the same syndrome, believing that following their own written procedures and staying inside their usual routines are more important than actually running the company, or at least, any particular revenue-generating department, and refusing to expedite any request, no matter how much the customary 6-week delay will cost the company, how many jobs will be lost as a consequence, or what the long-term effects on the company’s survival might be. Thus, a lot of line managers come to loathe the Human Resources department, and the feelings are most assuredly mutual. But the fact is a GOOD human resources rep is worth his or her weight in any valuable substance you’d care to name – and some of the best in the business work for UCLA…

The HR rep assigned to my unit, for example, provided me with invaluable insights into some of the long-running management and leadership issues afflicting our department, helped me with a range of discipline, evaluation and benefit questions that came up, and advised me on how to deal with my one significant personality clash within the management team. When the time came for me to leave the organization, we arranged to meet for the last time and went over most of the issues I discussed in my last post. However, we also covered my observations of the department, my unit, the people in each, and my professional opinions on the unit’s organization and how functions and positions could be better arranged to complete our mission.

During the conversation the tradition conflict become clearer than ever; with the frustrations of the HR people trying to help the line unit (which I was leaving) to function better, with fewer internal conflicts and fewer potential legal issues conflicting with the line unit’s desire to accomplish everything faster, cheaper, and with fewer intermediate steps. I don’t know if our HR rep will be able to use my insights into the department’s ongoing problems to resolve these conflicts, or to assist our Director in making our department more functional, more productive, or more efficient, but I know that I was able to get the right information into the right hands where it might do some good. Which is the difference between doing your last, most important duty to your employer, and just wasting a final hour of staff department time and making your exit...

If I Ran the Circus...

A long time ago, in an industry that no longer exists, I had the unusual problem of having been promoted far beyond anything I was prepared to do, and discovering that while the Peter Principle should have been in effect, it wasn't. I had a degree in English and a year plus on the job when I was promoted to be the manager of the work group of which I had been a part, responsible for 14 service locations in Metro Los Angeles and the rather eccentric men (there were no women at the time) who operated them. I had become the Regional Director of the Professional Resume and Writing Service...

I should have been terrified. In the cold light of a business degree and twenty additional years of experience, I can see that I was clearly being set up to take the blame for the failure (and ultimate dismantling) of the Los Angeles Region, which would in turn deflect the blame for this fiasco from the Executive whose marketing incompetence (I can not in good conscience call it anything else) had doomed the Region, the Division, and ultimately the company. The Executive in question being the President's son, of course...

Not realizing any of this, I set about running the Los Angeles Region the way I thought it SHOULD be run, based on nothing but a young man's romantic ideas about leadership. My predecessor in the role had been an alcoholic sexist bigot, whose parting advice to me was to never hire women or African Americans to be resume writers, because "They can't handle the job." Naturally my first two hires were D.L. Mackey, a woman, and Deborah Givins, an African American woman. Deborah did a fine job running one of my offices that had struggled previously, and D.L. broke all of the Region's performance records for sales, revenue and productivity that summer (the ones I had set the year before, it should be noted). I have always believed that racism and sexism are asinine (I could use stronger language, but I won't), and I have seldom seen a more resounding confirmation of that belief.

Buoyed by this success, my next move was to make sure that all of my people started getting paid on time. Each week in the resume business you sent your receipts to corporate headquarters at close of business on Thursday, and were supposed to get paid based on your performance (salary plus commission or straight commission, depending on your contract) the following Friday. Unfortunately, this rarely happened; all too often the receipts did not reach corporate until several working days later, and the payroll department tended to sit on the checks anyway. I put a stop to this problem by getting the payroll people to FedEx the previous week's paychecks to me on Thursday, and then driving around the Region picking up the receipts and dropping off the paychecks in person each Friday. I would also drop off any supplies the service offices had requested on the same visit.

As a result, all of my people got paid on time, every time, and none of them ever had to wait for their supplies. This made me extremely popular with my people, as you might imagine. When I instituted vacations and sick days (which had never existed in the Company before) my popularity shot up so high I had people from other regions (including some in other parts of the country!) trying to transfer into my unit, and all of the other Regional Directors began having to institute similar policies just to keep from losing all of their best people to me. Within three months, my Region, which had been 26th of the 36 Regions in the company, was rated 2nd overall and 1st in productivity, making me one of the top Regional Directors in the company.

They weren't sophisticated moves. I had no formal training in business, and very little in leadership; other than a few years in student government during college, I had never led or managed anything. But I had learned from an early age that most people will respond to loyalty and fairness, and everyone appreciates being treated well. That's how I thought a business should be run, and when they gave me the chance, that's how I ran this one -- never guessing that doing so would be the start of a 20-year odyssey that would lead me through Corporate America, an MBA, management consulting, higher education and (starting this summer) a doctoral program in Management. And yet, somehow it all worked. The truism I coined that first year as a manager is still true today: "Take care of your people, and they will take care of you..."

They Teach Leadership in Business School - Don't They?

Way back at the start of this blog I defined Leadership for anyone who might actually be reading it out there. For the record, no one actually complained about that post, and I later wrote another one about a manager I worked for once who appeared to have no grasp of leadership whatsoever, but was otherwise competent. Reaction to that story was a bit less subdued; I've had more than one person tell me that if a manager's duties include supervision of other personnel, then failing to lead them is as miserable a dereliction of duty as any other.

Part of the problem is that not enough of the people serving in management roles have ever received any formal training in management, and fewer still have studied the arcane art of leadership. The sad fact is that most business school programs do not emphasize managerial skills (e.g. MBA majors in Finance, Marketing, Information Technology, Economics, and so on), and even those students who major in Management will spent less than half of their time learning about this discipline -- and almost no time learning how to lead people. Too many experts in the field continue to underestimate the importance of leadership, simply because they feel that it's merely an "art" with no set rules or factors that can be quantified and mathematically modeled.

This is not quite true, however...

Leadership can be graphed as the compromise or balance between two competing drives: the need to be liked, and the need to accomplish work. A leader's style (and to some extent effectiveness) depends greatly on the balance struck between these two imperatives; so does their approach to conflict resolution. For example, a manager who places very little importance on either the effectiveness of his/her work group or on how well his subordinates like him is often called a "turtle" because of his or her habit of resolving conflicts by going into his or her office and pretending he or she isn't there. A manager who is committed to high performance but does not care about being liked (or even tolerated) by the workers will sometimes be called a "shark," while someone with the opposite priorities (obsessed with being liked to the extent of ignoring performance) will usually be called a "teddy bear."

A leader who attempts to maximize both concerns is usually called an "owl," although this term has drifted a bit from its original meaning. The name was originally applied because of the folklore that owls are highly intelligent (and would therefore be concerned with maximizing anything that can be maximized), but in recent times these people are called "owls" because you'll never see one (e.g. they work much too hard). The leader who instead finds the perfect balance between these two concerns is usually called a "fox" (in the sense of being clever or sly, not crazy).

It should probably be noted that none of these leadership types is necessarily better than the others, although the fox is probably the most often successful. I've worked for sharks, and generally have no problem with them; they are results-oriented people who don't care if you like them or not, so long as you do your job well. Teddy bears can be hard to work with, since they will generally let everything else slide while they try to be everyone's friend, but in an industry where customer relations are critical (e.g. almost any service-sector company) they can be quite useful in the right role. I like working with owls (everyone does), although I've seen too many of them burn out much too young from working too hard. Even the humble turtle can be effective, if the work group can manage itself while the turtle gets out of the way and lets everyone else get on with things.

As you approach your own leadership challenges, you may want to consider what sort of animal you are -- and how that might be affecting your style (and your workgroup). If you're a shark, try to have a bit more consideration for people's feelings, and if you're a teddy bear, keep in mind that there's nothing wrong with asking people to actually do the work you're paying them to do. If you're a turtle, try coming out of your shell a little more often -- maybe there's a fox around who can help you to be a bit more effective. And if you're an owl please, for the sake of whatever's actually holy, GET SOME SLEEP ONCE IN A WHILE!

Management by Aphorisms

Let’s face it, unless you have been unusually lucky, you’ve probably had at least one boss in your career who made all of their decisions (and probably issued most of their directions) by quoting proverbs, aphorisms, and outright old wives’ tales – many of which had no bearing on the situation at hand. Or, worse yet, they miss-quote those old sayings, resulting in a regular feature for Scot Adams’ “Dilbert Newsletter.” This leads a lot of managers to dismiss all such quips as belonging to those who lack the wit to craft their own gems of wisdom. Unfortunately, some of these old saws actually have a kernel of truth in them, and I thought it might be fun to take a look at some of them.

Let’s begin by considering the saying that might actually apply to this topic itself, a meta-aphorism, if you will: “If it’s stupid, but it works, then it’s not really stupid.” Any large organization will have one or more entrenched procedures, methods, or operating styles that make no sense to someone viewing them from the outside. Some of these may, in fact, be adaptations to long-forgotten market or operating conditions, and no longer applicable or even useful to today’s company. Others may simply be counterintuitive to the observer’s experience in other industries, other locations, or even other business models. The key point here is that no matter how poorly conceived you may find a given procedure to be, if it works acceptably – if it generates profits, prevents losses, promotes the company, makes the customers happy, or whatever – then it serves its purpose. You may be able to design a superior method – and as a manager it is you duty to try – but you should not assume that the existing method is without merit.

One that comes up a lot in large organizations is: “No one is a villain in their own mind.” It’s important to remember that, outside of bad movies and even worse literature, very few people actually go around attempting to do bad things and cause harm just for the fun of it. No matter how heinous the act, it is highly probable that person who is doing it is convinced that it is all for the greater good – of the company, of the country, or in extreme cases, even for the good of the people he or she is screwing over in the first place. At the very least, the villain you are dealing with will believe that they have a right to do what they are doing, that they are entitled to whatever they are taking, or that you should be grateful to them for their leadership, no matter how badly they are screwing everything up. It helps to remember that as you consider your strategy for how you are going to get them to do what you want/need them to do, instead…

One of my personal favorites is a quote from American author David Drake: “Never second-guess the man on the ground – especially when that’s you.” In any management position, you will eventually have to deal with a situation where someone has made a decision with which you do not agree. If you were present at the time, voiced your objections to that decision, and were overruled, you may still have grounds for complaint – particularly if you are being expected to clean up the fallout from that decision. But if someone else was the manager on the spot, the person who had to make the decision right then and there, without support or input (from you or anyone else), then criticizing their decision is nothing more than Monday-morning quarterbacking. It is, in other words, crap, and pretentious, self-important crap, at that. Maybe you could have made a better decision if you had been the person called upon to make it, and maybe you would have made the same one, but we’ll never know, because you weren’t there.

That goes double for questioning your own decisions after the fact. You were the man (person) on the ground when the decision had to be made; never second-guess yourself now that you’ve had time to think it over. This saying is also a subtle comment on the futility of complaining about things that have already happened, rather like “crying over spilled milk.” Or like another of my favorites: “The three most useless things to a pilot are the sky above him, the runway behind him, and whatever happened a tenth of a second ago!”

But that’s a post for another day…

The Ethics of Mediocrity

The subject of motivational theory came up at lunch the other day, when the comment was floated just before the entrees arrived that perhaps the reason so many people appear to be just barely passable at their jobs is that most people will only put forth the minimum effort necessary to avoid being fired, and no more than that. This led almost immediately to a brisk discussion of just what, exactly, that minimum level would be, and how you would determine it across the huge range of job and performance requirements in the workplace. This is going to vary quite a bit, depending on which employees we are discussing and what their job actually requires of them.

For example, a CEO’s job is technically to maximize stockholder value, and anything less than that will probably get him or her fired – except that what, exactly, the maximum possible value of a given stock actually is at any given time is a matter than can be (and usually is) endlessly debated by everyone who monitors the stock market, shareholder or not. By the same token, the hostess running the front desk at a restaurant has only one job function: greet incoming customers, make them feel welcome, and get them a table or other place to sit. What exactly constitutes “feeling welcome” will vary a bit, but if the hostess is scowling and unfriendly (like the one who had “greeted” us at lunch that day), she’s clearly not doing the only job function she has.

My question is this: suppose that you have completed all of the tasks assigned to you, and met every performance target your superiors wanted you to meet. Do you, at that point, have any ethical responsibility to work even harder, accomplish more tasks and exceed those performance targets? Some employers, as is so amply parodied in the Dilbert comic strip, believe that the employees owe them every waking second (and sometimes the contents of their dreams at night, as well), to the point that even having a personal life is like “stealing from the company.” Such organizations would be appalled at the very idea of an employee not working to the absolute utmost edge of their ability, punish anyone they feel is not in fact doing so, and thereby almost guarantee that everyone working for them will slack off whenever possible.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are companies where working more than you are assigned to work is frowned upon, because it makes everyone else look bad, rather like the legendary Post Office branches where coming back from your assigned 4-hour delivery route in less than four hours is considered at sin, even if your route only involved delivering two envelopes and a mail-order catalog. Such companies are unlikely to suffer heavy turnover, but they’re not likely to experience much growth, either. Some organizations will offer performance incentives, such as bonuses for doing more work, or else base raises and promotions on performance targets, but this doesn’t really apply to the question I’m asking; working more in order to get paid more isn’t a matter of ethics, just common sense.

Suppose your pay will be the same if you do 100% of your work, or 110% of the workload assigned, or 250% of your workload. Let us further assume that you can accomplish the extra work without unbalancing the rest of your life (working nights and never seeing your family, for example) or other extreme measures, and that no financial incentives will ever be offered and promotion will not come this side of the grave. Do you have a purely ethical responsibility to give your employer more than they have asked for? Or at least inform them that you are seriously underemployed? And if not, are you in any way to blame if the organization as a whole fails to meet its performance goals?

It’s worth thinking about…

The Ethics of Brown-Nosing

In any social group, whether it has a larger function or not, you are going to encounter some cross-section of suck-ups, lickspittles and brown-noses doing what they do best, which is curry favor with those more powerful than themselves on some dimension. It seems to be a hard-wired part of human behavior, and only the most principled of people are completely immune to it. But while the debate as to whether this behavior represents a defect of character or merely the ruthless drive to do whatever is necessary for personal success (and whether that sort of ruthlessness is itself a defect of character) may never be settled, it does seem clear that there is a line between working hard as a means of advancing one’s career and sucking up to the boss in order to avoid doing any hard work while still advancing one’s career – and that this line is sometimes finer than we realize.

Let me give you a scenario that my MBA instructor on human resources topics and ethics, Professor David Mathison gave our class in 1994. Let’s say you’ve just taken a new job, and you decide to put in a few extra hours of work each day, just to make the right impression. Everyone else goes home right at 5:00, but you stay until 6:30 or 7:00 every day, plugging away. Finally, one night, your boss comes back to the office to get something, and finds you still at your desk two hours after everyone else has left. Surprised to see you, he asks if anything is wrong.

This is your big moment. You smile and say, “Nothing’s wrong; I just wanted to get a few more things done before I left!”

And your boss frowns, and asks, “Are you having problems with your job? Everyone else seems able to finish all of their assignments by the end of business.”

And you realize that you’ve painted yourself into a corner. No, there’s no reason you couldn’t finish everything and go home on time. You’re actually doing more work than is necessary, either making the job more complicated than it has to be or taking on other people’s assignments, or both, simply because you wanted to look good. But there’s really no way to tell the boss that without looking like a complete suck-up, because that’s actually what you’ve been doing. You’re behaving in an unnatural or at least non-standard way in order to gain favor with those in power. It’s certainly more useful than complimenting the boss on his hideous fashion sense or offering to take his dry cleaning in for him, but it’s still currying favor. If your boss is the type who dislikes brown-nosing, you’ve probably generated the opposite result from the one you wanted.

Dr. Mathison’s point (and mine here, too) is that no matter how benign your sucking up behavior is, you are still doing something inherently unethical – lying about your actual work ethic and trying to make yourself look exceptional at the expense of your co-workers. You would never do these things openly or blatantly; the suggestion that you would lie to your boss or undermine your more experienced co-workers probably offends you – but that’s exactly what your apple-polishing behavior was doing, albeit more as lies of omission than anything else.

Now I’m certainly not advocating that you avoid extra work right after taking a new job, or at any other time, or for that matter, suggesting that you don’t let your superiors know what you are working on and how much you are accomplishing. I’m suggesting that the next time you do anything other than your regular duties at your normal pace during a standard-length day (standard for whatever job you do, that is) that you make sure you know where that line between normal conduct and brown-nosing is – and whether or not you’ve crossed it…

The Ethics of Loyalty

If you’re a Dodgers fan (and heaven knows I’m not suggesting anyone should be after this year), you’ve probably been hearing a lot lately about how the team’s veteran players are blaming this season’s collapse (from the best record in the Major Leagues two months ago to 4th place in their division today) on the younger players and the mistakes, poor cooperation, and attitude being given off by the younger players. Meanwhile, those same younger athletes are pointing out that the complaining veterans have all struggled this year, turning in lackluster performances while the team has tried to cope with injuries and other problems. It would be nice to dismiss all of this on a bunch of grown men making millions of dollars to play a kid’s game – and then whining about it. Unfortunately, the situation is all too similar to a problem every manager will face sooner or later.

Let’s suppose for a moment that you need to promote one of your people. The new position will offer more responsibility, more money, and generally be seen as an advancement of the person selected. You would think that this would be simple: just select the person best suited to perform these new duties and promote him or her. If there is one person who is clearly the best choice (e.g., most experienced, best leader, best at doing their job, best at teaching others how to do the job) this should in fact be relatively simple; if not, you will have to figure out which of your people is the best in which of these areas, and try to select the best of the lot. If it’s a very close decision, you might even want to “interview” these people, and ask them how they would handle the new position. Unless you’ve been living in a cave somewhere for the past thirty years, however, you already know better than to favor people of a specific race, gender, ethnicity, age, height, size, weight, sexual preference or style of dress, so we will assume that you don’t.

Where things become murky is when you attempt to factor length of service into the equation. Some companies actually do consider seniority as a factor in promotion, holding that a person’s years with the company indicate their stability, maturity and loyalty in addition to familiarity with company policy and experience on the job. Other companies have a strict policy of “merit only” promotions – promote the best person for the job, even if that person has been around for a few months and everyone else in the department has decades of experience on the job. A company-wide policy may take the heat off of you, or at least give you something to blame for the choice you are being forced to make, but it does nothing to solve the underlying ethical problem.

Does the company owe its long-term employees anything in particular? Assuming they have been paid fair wages and given decent working conditions (including reasonable hours and livable benefits), does management owe them special consideration when issuing promotions? Or, perhaps more to the point, does the company’s obligation to support, reward and advance its loyal employees supersede its obligation to promote the best possible managers, thus maximizing performance and shareholder value? Especially when you consider that if your senior people believe they are being deliberately passed over for promotion (because the younger people will require lower salaries, for example) they are likely to leave the company seeking advancement elsewhere?

Of course, this same issue by definition touches on problems such as recognition (people see promotion as a public acknowledgement of their performance and abilities), security (people believe – often quite incorrectly – that higher-level people are less likely to be laid off or fired), morale (it’s demoralizing at best to be passed over; it can easily be insulting, depressing or infuriating, depending on whom you were passed over for) and employee retention (if the only way to obtain promotion and the attendant increase in responsibility, power, reputation and money is to change employers, people certainly will), but those issues will exist no matter how carefully we select people for promotion, and we can almost guarantee that someone will feel unjustly passed over no matter what we do. The question we as managers have to ask is where to draw that line between rewarding loyalty to the company and doing what is best for the company, on those (hopefully rare) occasions when these are not one and the same…

Learning As You Go

In my last post, I mentioned that the single most important skill for any manager to develop is the ability to learn from other members of the company, even though this will inevitably require the manager to make greater efforts to expand his or her own knowledge and overcome his or her own biases than any subordinate worker. It seems a bit counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? Especially since I’m already on record admonishing managers to see things from their subordinates’ point of view, and reminding them that the people who work for them are really not that different. How can I square this contradiction, I hear some of you asking.

The truth is that managers, even those who obtain professional degrees in Business Administration and devote their lives to its practice, ARE just ordinary people, like any of those reporting to them. They are just as subject to flights of common fallacy, such as judging the entire world according to one’s own tastes and dislikes, or believing that anything they don’t understand can’t be that complicated. My point here is that people do not stop using “famous last words” phrases like “How hard can it be?” just because they are promoted into management. My point here is that they have to.

When you accept the promotion into any supervisory position, regardless of level, you have become part of the management team, and therefore at least partially responsible for the success or failure of the company. On your shoulders now rests at least some tiny amount of responsibility for the lives of the employees, the fortunes of the stockholders, the welfare of the customers, the economy of your community and your country, and the careers of all of the people who report to you. And this responsibility will only grow greater as you advance into higher and higher levels of management.

Assuming that anything you don’t understand must be simple – dismissing the complexity of the task, undervaluing the importance of the knowledge, and denigrating those who have the skills and knowledge that you lack – is merely stupid, arrogant and condescending in a line worker. Annoying personality traits, and not the sort of thing that will get you made captain of the department’s softball team, but hardly tragic. In a supervisor, however, these same character flaws could undermine the performance of an entire work group; in a CEO they could easily destroy the entire company. If the guy in the next cubicle believes that since he doesn’t like Country music it can’t be popular, that’s just insulting to anyone who likes the art form; if the Director of Marketing does it you could easily lose all of your customers who listen to Country and Western radio stations.

The simple fact is that more IS expected of managers, at every level, than of the ordinary employees. Along with the power, the perks, and the higher salaries comes responsibility. It is sometimes said that in any company, any given employee can expect the CEO to be working even harder than he or she is, but this is not always the case. It only works that way in the companies that are being managed correctly…

Ignorance

“How can you possibly be expected to manage a group of people if you don’t understand how to do the jobs they are doing?” someone asked me the other day. It’s a good question. Ideally, of course, you would like to have every member of the management team learn how to do every job within the entire organization, or at least within the part of it that they manage, but the simple truth is that this won’t always be possible. Any large and complex organization is likely to have more individual jobs in it than any person could learn to do in one working lifetime, and as I noted in my post about Institutional Memory, just knowing how to do that type of job may not be enough to handle the specific requirements of a particular job.

In most cases, except for the foreman or team leader of a group who began as one of the workers in that group and has received promotion since, taking over any business unit is going to mean that there are people reporting to you who have jobs (or at least tasks) that you do not fully understand. If you are a senior manager, this will almost certainly be the case; the CEO of an oil company is probably not qualified as a research chemist, an IT manager, a CPA, a drilling team manager, a transportation unit foreman, or the captain of an oil tanker in addition to his or her expertise as a strategist and a businessperson, for example. The CEO may not even have experience in other aspects of business itself; he or she may not be a marketer, a finance expert, or even particularly good with numbers.

The key skill that our hypothetical CEO must have, and all of us who practice the profession of management should aspire to, is the ability to learn the essential issues of getting the job done. The CEO does not need to understand how to operate an 80,000 ton ship in dangerous waters, but he or she needs to understand how long it will take to get the ship where it needs to go, what the costs of doing so will be, and why the safety precautions required by corporate policy and Federal law are important. Similarly, the CEO doesn’t really need to know how to create a new computer system to handle order capture, inventory management and billing operations so much as what resources will be required to do so, how long it will take to properly test and de-bug the software, and how much time and effort (and money) it will take to re-train the product replenishment and billing personnel to use the new system.

The key to finding out these things – and therefore the cornerstone of this absolutely critical managerial skill – is to avoid the fallacy common to all too many people that anything you don’t understand must be simple. This simple logical disconnect, a combination of ignorance and arrogance, kills off more good companies and ideas than every other management blunder put together. And the worst part is, it is 100% preventable. As a very wise man once told me, “Stupidity is forever, but ignorance is curable.”

To avoid making this mistake, all you have to do is learn things. Make sure that you understand all of the requirements to achieve a specific goal, and if you don’t, keep having people break it down for you into simpler and simpler pieces until you do. This will require the commitment of time, and a significant amount of work on your part, which is why so many managers avoid doing it, but the long-term effects are worth the effort. In addition to curtailing stupid management mistakes, this procedure will help you to avoid resentment in your subordinates by not undervaluing their expertise or ordering them to do things that are stupid, wasteful or time consuming (as they see it). In fact, you can even use it to raise morale and make your people feel appreciated (thus appealing to their Security, Recognition and Self-Actualization needs).

Of course this does require more from the management team than most people realize – but that’s going to be my next topic…

Ethics in Conflict

Sometimes being a manager means having to deal with conflicting directives, whether that means orders from different superiors that contradict each other, or when your instructions are impossible under the budget, the company’s operating policies, the laws of the city, county, state or country, or in worst-case scenarios, the laws of physics. People have told me about supervisors who were unable to understand that a bank deposit can not be made on a bank holiday, and I once had a boss give me an assignment and order me to complete it by a deadline that had already passed. But sometimes it is our very responsibilities as managers that come into conflict.

Take, for example, the case of a large retail firm I used to work for. Our company’s policies stated that if anyone running a cash register – anyone, from a part-time seasonal temp hired yesterday to a store manager with 30 years on the job – was off by more than ¼ of 1 percent on their cash drawer at the end of a shift they received a written reprimand; three of these in your permanent record and you were fired. Even one would prevent your being promoted or even getting a raise for years to come. Keep in mind that this equates to 25 cents on every $100 of transactions. Unfortunately, almost no one can meet that standard on a consistent basis; certainly not in a high-volume general merchandise store during a busy time of the year.

If I’d obeyed that rule, I’d have been writing someone up every shift – and firing someone every week. There is no way our store could have kept up with hiring and training new personnel to replace those being fired; within a month or two we’d have been unable to operate at all. Which would, I imagine, have resulted in every member of our management team being fired. If every manager in every store in the chain had done this, the entire company would have been bankrupt in less than a year. What a lot of us did was fudge the system just enough; if someone was 26 cents off at the end of a shift when they could only be off by 25 and keep their job, I’d add a penny out of my own pocket to their total before I counted it into the safe. Cost me a penny, saved the company the cost of firing, recruiting, hiring and training a replacement (anywhere from $200 to $2,000 at the time, depending on a number of variables).

Now here’s the point: Clearly, I had a responsibility to the company to maintain discipline and enforce their internal regulations. But as a manager, I also had a responsibility to run my unit efficiently, bring in the highest possible gross and net profit, and provide the most value to our shareholders. One could certainly argue that I had a responsibility not to let the company be utterly destroyed by unrealistic, arbitrary (and stupid) performance standards written by people who had not the first clue as to what working conditions were like in the field. And I felt that I had a duty to my people; that it was my responsibility to reward their loyalty as much as to punish them for their infractions. I do not intend to lecture anyone on the subject of justice, but firing someone for a penny’s infraction did not seem just to me. It still doesn’t.

What makes this issue so complicated is that it is, without question, a slippery slope argument. Covering for an employee who misplaced a penny (or even 26 of them) won’t matter very much in the scheme of things, although as a manager it is also my responsibility to teach my people to carefully count back change so as to avoid the problem. But on the other side of the issue, if one of my employees is committing a series of major felonies (drug dealing, child molesting, torture and criminal conspiracy) there is no excuse for me or my company to cover up such crimes, even if sports leagues, major religions or Federal agencies do exactly the same thing every day. Where do we draw the line, and who gets to draw it? Can we take even the first step onto that slope and not effectively condone the worst crimes at its bottom? By the same token, if we blindly follow the rules and destroy the company, put thousands of people out of work, and bankrupt at least some of our shareholders, have we really fulfilled our obligations to our employers?

Of course, the simple answer would be to just enforce every rule, punish every violator to the fullest extent, and quit any position where you are not comfortable doing so. But there won’t be a lot of drug stores still operating if everybody does that…

Leadership and Self-Awareness

In one of my early posts, called “What is Management”, I define Leadership as the art of getting other people to do what you want them to do. I also noted that not all managers can do this successfully. For reasons that continue to elude me, even people who have studied the science of management seem to fall into the habit of thinking that the people who report to them are somehow different from management personnel. So different, in fact, that being treated abusively by their supervisors will improve their work performance, rather than lowering morale and propagating resentment. The technical term for this is “crap”, and it makes me very “irritated” because these people should know better. In fact, so should anyone; ask any six-year-old child at random what is wrong with this practice and see if he or she can’t explain it to you perfectly.

Of course, depending on their relative levels of experience, education, training and salary, the people who report to you probably ARE different from you, at least in some respects. Wages you would consider insulting might be a huge raise to some of your subordinates; working conditions you would never accept might be an enormous improvement from the ones they have labored under in the past; perks of the job or benefits that you consider routine might change their whole lives for the better. What far too many management personnel fail to consider is that these differences do not change the basic human needs, or the hierarchy in which they are arranged. Just because someone’s salary is a quarter of yours does not mean they can or will tolerate being paid late, any more than you can, and just because someone has assumed a certain level of risk in order to earn a living does not mean that they are oblivious to increased risk or unsafe working conditions.

Most importantly of all, the fact that they are lower-level personnel, doing jobs you would never take for wages you would never consider, does not mean that they are willing to tolerate abusive, offensive, hostile or demeaning working conditions. Too many supervisory personnel seem to believe that they can go around acting like petty tyrants and bullying their subordinates without any consequences whatsoever. In the long term, however, this is nothing but a blueprint for complete failure.

As management professionals, one of our most important duties will always be to examine the directions we are giving from the point of view found on the other side of the desk, and to remember that behavior that would anger or annoy us will probably anger and annoy the workers, as well. This goes for motivational techniques and team-building exercises too, by the way. If it wouldn’t work on you, don’t assume that it would work on your subordinates. On the other hand, if you read the description of a program or activity and think about how great that would have been for you, when you were just one of the line workers, there’s a good chance there might be something to it.

Of course, when all else fails, there’s an easy way to find out if the people reporting to you would like to take part in an activity, receive a new (or different) benefit, or change the flow of work to include a new procedure: ask them. Just the way you would like your superiors to ask you before instituting a change in your work environment, in fact. And where the change is being driven down from higher management and you have no choice but to accept it, you can always call your people together and explain to them why this is happening, what higher-level idiot is behind it, and how you intend to keep the effects from making their lives any more difficult.

Just the way you would want your supervisor to do…

Respect

Don’t worry; I’m not going to break into song. It’s just that over the weekend I remembered something an old boss of mine had said, just before I decided he was a complete nincompoop and quit the company. One of my co-workers was a fairly serious martial artist, and the Boss had introduced him to an acquaintance who was a high-level master of some martial arts form or other; it might even have been the same one my co-worker practiced. My co-worker (who had been studying the martial arts all of his life and had a fairly high ranking of his own) was polite and respectful during the meeting, but when pressed about it later, had told our Boss that he intended to continue with his own studies and the teachers who had gotten him this far. When pressured, he said that despite the “master’s” qualifications, he didn’t think it was a good fit for him; he could learn more the way he was going.

Well, needless to say, the Boss was outraged. This was The Master of Whatever (I’m sorry; I can’t remember the name 17 years later) and my co-worker was just some pissant who could not understand the honor he was being offered. The Boss ranted (to me – and I was not in management in this company, I was just another pissant) about how disrespectful this was, of this friend, The Master of Whatever, and of the Boss himself. From then on, my co-worker was unable to do anything right, at least as far as the Boss was concerned, and soon left the company, despite having been one of our best producers for the three previous years.

I call this to your attention for two reasons. One, of course, is the old line about “Respect is not given; it is earned.” You can earn respect from your employees in many ways, but yelling at them, belittling them in front of their co-workers, or finding fault with their work because they refuse to kiss your ass (or that of someone you designate) are all so counterproductive that I can’t even think of a bad metaphor for how counterproductive they are. Stupid isn’t even the word. It was bad enough that the Boss couldn’t grasp that one of his employees might have a different view of the world from his own; the fact that said employee was an expert in this subject (a 3rd degree black belt, if I remember correctly) and the Boss was not (he was a big, fat, overdeveloped man who had been a professional baseball player twenty years and eighty pounds earlier. I could have taken him with a Q-tip) just made it worse.

But the fact that he then decided to make management decisions based on this difference of opinion was infinitely worse. In the end, his insistence that my co-worker kiss ass on command cost our company between $350,000 and $500,000 per year – and back then, that was a lot of money. In the long run, in fact, this same behavior cost the company a lot more – since I left shortly thereafter, as did most of the unit’s best people. Basically, everyone who had an ounce of self-respect and/or integrity packed it in and left, costing the company of at least a few million dollars per year, and shortly thereafter costing the Boss his job, as well.

The problem in this situation wasn’t that our Boss needed to be a better manager – he knew the profession quite well, in fact. The problem was that he needed to be a better man – and they don’t teach you how to do that in business school…

Tactical Offense

Almost any discussion of tactics and tactical operations is probably going to start with a bad analogy, so let me offer the reader one of mine. Consider, if you will, the blade of a saw. It can be a huge lumberjack saw, or a tiny diamond-toothed saw, but it will almost by definition have a number of small, sharp extensions (teeth) that do the actual cutting. By the same token, any military formation, whether it’s a division of thousands or a squad of ten, is made up of individual soldiers who do the actual fighting. This is a key concept to the American Airborne divisions, for example, who refer to it as “Little Groups of Paratroopers” or the rule of LGOPS.

After the D-Day invasion, most of the paratroopers who had been dumped into Normandy were scattered, cut off from their battalions and often even from their squads. Most military units would have been utterly disrupted, unable to function, and would have spent all of their time trying to find their officers and re-form their units. What the Airborne troops did was to form ad hoc groups of whoever they encountered, regardless of their comrades’ unit of origin, engage the enemy, and fight. It drove the Germans to distraction, and the very fact that no one ever knew where or when a little group of American paratroopers might suddenly appear and attack definitely contributed to the success of the landings.

What sometimes gets overlooked in these historical discussions is that all human endeavors come down to the same factor. A company may consist of a dozen different divisions, employ hundreds of thousands of people on five continents, and own more property than some developing countries, but ultimately all of the work is going to be accomplished by individual workers, and the key directives that will accomplish that work will come from the team leaders, foremen, supervisors and group managers on the spot, not from the Executive Offices in some other time zone. If we consider that the function of Army corps, divisions, brigades and so on is to get the individual troops into the position where they can do the fighting, then by logical extension, the purpose of the Management team, the Forward Planning shop, the Human Resources department, the Marketing personnel and the entire Finance section is to get the organization’s line personnel into the right position to do what they do.

Of course, by the same token, the line manager’s job is to determine the requirements of the actual tasks at hand, and direct his or her people to do them (just as the unit commander’s traditional “first duty” is to engage the enemy and fight). In viewing our company operations, it is critical that we as managers remember that for all of our grand strategic planning for the missions we wish to accomplish, the goals we intend to fulfill, and the objectives we want to meet, our “offense” is also inherently tactical in nature, and all of the work will eventually be accomplished by those individual workers on the line…

A Couple Days Off

The question came up a couple of days ago after a death in our family about why so many employers are as rigid about bereavement leave as they are. My wife works for an organization that allows time off in the event of the death of a family member, including parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, children, and step- and in-law versions of all of the above; however, many (perhaps most) employers will only recognize the original versions of these people (not in-laws or step-relatives), and some limit this benefit to “immediate family” – e.g. parents, children, or spouses. Why on Earth would anyone be such a hard case as to deny someone who has just lost a grandparent – or a step-parent – time off of work?

It’s tempting to assume that this sort of policy is the result of managers who are either too lazy to work out a more enlightened method or too mean-spirited to try to work with their people instead of treating employees as the enemy. Some people would point out that given a liberal bereavement leave policy, there are workers who would experience a loss every Monday before work – or at least claim to have done so, in order to gain more paid time off.

As usual, this issue is a bit more complicated than it initially appears to be. What is really at the heart of the matter is the question of whether employees are inherently lazy (and will avoid work if they can), or whether employees may also be ambitious and self-motivated. In management science, these two concepts are called Theory X and Theory Y, and were first suggested by Douglas McGregor at MIT in 1960. Theory Y is often considered to be the practical application of the Humanistic School of Psychology developed by our old friend Abraham Maslow (see my prior ramblings about the Hierarchy of Needs).

It’s worth noting that McGregor himself did not claim that either Theory X or Theory Y were in any way “correct” descriptions of humanity in general; indeed, he believed that both of them were merely generalizations applicable to SOME employees, and hoped that managers would investigate both sets of beliefs as a means of developing new and better management strategies. The fact is that some people will take advantage of any system and abuse any benefits offered to them, while others will attempt to work within the system and take only those benefits to which they are legitimately entitled. It is the manager’s job to keep the Theory X people in line, just as much as it is to make sure the Theory Y people take the leave to which they are entitled (not refuse it “for the good of the company”).

Ultimately, policy can not replace the work of the management team, no matter how liberal or employee-friendly that policy happens to be. One large company I worked for had no set leave policy of any kind – sick leave, bereavement leave, and family leave were all purely at the discretion of the management team at the local level. Only vacation time was computed according to a set formula, and even then, scheduling was at the manager’s discretion. It takes an extremely capable manager to handle that kind of responsibility without creating bad feelings, conflicts or lawsuits, but I can tell you for a certainty that no one in my work group or my division was ever denied a few days off to be with their family in a time of loss…

Four Types of Managers

Management science owes a lot of its basic theory to military command theory, largely because up until the Industrial Revolution, the only institutions to attempt any form of large-scale, multi-level operations were governments and military units. One traditional lesson from command theory, which is still applicable to our discussions of management today, is the concept of the Four Types of Officers, which can be rendered as the Four Types of Managers for our purposes.

The origin of these classifications is uncertain; the late David H. Hackworth attributed these distinctions to Carl von Clausewitz, the 19th Century Prussian military theorist, but if this attribution is correct I haven’t yet found the reference in On War, Clausewitz’s primary work. In any case, regardless of where Colonel Hackworth got them from, these classifications are still just as useful as they were fifty years (or two hundred years) ago.

In any large organization, this line of thought goes, there are four basic kinds of officers: the intelligent and lazy, the intelligent and industrious, the stupid and lazy, and the stupid and industrious. Hackworth (and presumably Clausewitz) argue that the lazy and intelligent make the best commanders, since the lazy man will invariably find the easiest way to do anything, and on the battlefield, the easiest way is generally the one that gets the fewest people killed. In general, the side that loses the fewest soldiers will probably emerge the winner. By contrast, the intelligent and industrious will make the best staff officers, because they will throw themselves into getting all of the details right – again, saving lives and potentially winning the war. But if you try to make commanders of these officers, they are too likely to bog down in the details, and lose the larger picture.

The lazy and stupid are merely the natural by-product of any large organization, and can always be slotted in somewhere – give them any job that requires a commissioned officer’s authority but no actual work, and they will succeed brilliantly. It is the industrious and stupid who must be eliminated from the organization as quickly as possible, given their habit of working like bees – and screwing everything up.

In management terms, these same types apply. The lazy and intelligent make the best line managers (or executives) because they will find the easy way to do everything – provided higher management does not allow them to just make everyone else do the work (easy but not helpful). The intelligent and industrious make the best staff people, and are the ones you want running the staff departments, because they will always get it right. You can usually find something to do with the lazy and stupid – provided you can convince them to stay out of active management functions. Running a work group full of experienced professionals, for example – your lazy and stupid “manager” can sign the time sheets, approve the requisitions, write progress reports to higher management, and stay out of the way. Certainly a better arrangement than having one of your valuable professionals waste his or her time doing all of that.

It is important to note that when we speak of eliminating the industrious and stupid from the company, we are not referring to those individuals who can be taught to complete a task (or better still a number of tasks) without fouling them up. While these individuals may not be the most intellectually gifted of your subordinates, they can’t really be described as “stupid” in this context. Indeed, if we as managers have an employee who can be counted on to do even one useful task correctly, it is incumbent upon us to find the proper position for that individual, and we who have failed if he or she is assigned to do anything else.

Take another look at the management team reporting to you. Are you making proper use of each of them? It’s worth thinking about…

The Universal Skill

Anyone who has known me for a while will have heard me going on about how Management is the only profession that everyone in the world automatically assumes that anyone can do. That’s not strictly true, by the way; nearly every literate person also assumes that he or she could write a book (and secretly harbors the belief that their book would be an instant best-seller). But it’s still a rant you will hear me go off on at the drop of a hat, simply because unlike a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, a carpenter, a teacher, a baker, a scientist, a peace officer, or even a garbage collector, everyone seems to assume that if a given employee manages to survive two years on the job without doing anything incompetent enough to be fired, that employee is automatically qualified to supervise other personnel.

Obviously, this drives me slightly nuts. As a management professional, I’ve taken three years of Master’s classes, compiled fifteen years of corporate experience (and another six of consulting experience), read, studied and reflected on the profession of leading and managing people, only to be confronted time and again with people who place no value on the profession I practice. Some companies will go so far as to make managerial appointments purely on the basis of price, promoting the individual who will require the smallest salary in their new position, and some others will sink to the level of offering no salary increase whatsoever (expecting their new “managers” to accept the higher workload purely for the joy of their new “power”).

If the only consequence of these displays of idiocy were that management personnel had something to complain about, and Scott Adams got a never-ending supply of material for the Dilbert comic strip and his other works, I’d just put up with it, the way lawyers put up with lawyer jokes and doctors put up with snide remarks about their handwriting. But the truth is, the mirror Mr. Adams holds up to the working world is sometimes chillingly accurate (I’ve actually received memos that unintentionally quoted Dilbert strips!) and these lapses (and the idiots who make them) are often responsible for companies failing, investors going broke, and thousands of worthwhile people losing their jobs.

And the worst part is, it doesn’t have to be this way…

Management is a science; leading people is an art. Neither one is something you can just pick up out of the atmosphere and instantly achieve professional competence in. Yet by the same token, the theories and rules of management science are just as simple and logical and necessary as those of any other science. Once you understand the Hierarchy of Needs, for example, you will never fail to grasp why a company picnic is a useless gesture when the workforce is underpaid or fearful of losing their jobs. Once you grasp the concept of “managing up” you will never fail to consider how you can get what your unit needs from higher management, nor why it is critical for you to do so.

Management remains one of the most lightly regarded of all of the professions, not because people cannot understand it, or even because they do not understand it, but rather because it is the only truly universal job function. No one cares if a lawyer can’t practice medicine, or if an accountant has no idea of how to bake a cake, yet both of these professionals will, in all probability, be required to manage other people at some point in their career. To do this effectively, they need to apply the same care, determination and professionalism to learning the manager’s skills that they would apply to learning any other aspect of their professions. Because the simple truth is, sooner or later, management WILL become part of their professions.

And probably yours, too…

Annual Review Nightmares

I could probably write an entire post just about the mistakes I’ve seen managers make in trying to review me. Well, actually, I could probably write a book about those errors, and maybe someday I will. The fact is, you can learn a lot about an organization just by examining its annual review process. In particular, you can learn which mistakes are being made because the management team doesn’t know any better, and which ones are being made because the organization’s entire structure is rotting…

All too often, management personnel regard these reviews as a useless drain on their time, and put as little effort into them as possible. They don’t keep track of the employees’ performance, make no note of their subordinates’ accomplishments, and conduct annual reviews only because their own superiors require them to do so. In fact, on one job I did not receive a review for nearly 30 months – and then got one only because the company was being sued, and had been required to produce their internal records. I’ve even seen cases of managers having subordinates write their own reviews, and then signing them and putting them in permanent files still unread.

I’m not sure “management apathy” is actually a term. But I’ve watched it kill any number of otherwise worthwhile organizations, and this is a clear case of it.

Then we have inappropriate rating systems. On one past job, our division President decreed that since no one is perfect, no one could receive a “5” on the 1 to 5 performance scale on their review. Most of the division’s managers interpreted this to mean that no one could receive a “5” ranking on any part of the review. Since our review had 20 ranking questions, this made the highest possible score an 80, although it was still alleged to be 100. Even worse, these rankings determined the size of your annual raise; so while there was a percentage given for those who got a “5”, no one EVER received that amount.

Then we have the raises themselves. In the company I just mentioned, a “5” meant that you got a 3% raise; a “4” meant that you got a 2% raise; a “3” meant 1%, a “2” meant that you did not get a salary increase, and a “1” meant you were fired. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that no one ever got a “5” and very few people ever saw a “4”, this practice is stupid for at least two other reasons. First, the low salary increase completely ignores the employees’ level 4 (Recognition) needs and may actually ignore their level 1 (Survival) needs as well, if the increase is lower than the prevailing rate of inflation. Even worse, however, is the fact that you can not discipline someone by threatening to withhold their raise if you are not giving them one in the first place. “Behave, or you won’t get your 1%!” is just not effective.

Finally, there was the case of management telling us that there would be no raises this year because it had been a difficult year for the company, financially. Unfortunately, every employee in this company was also a stockholder, since we received stock as part of the retirement plan, which meant that every one of us had received a letter three weeks earlier bragging that the company was having its best year ever and would be paying record dividends. I stapled together the stockholder letter, the memo from senior management saying they couldn’t afford to give raises, and the Dilbert cartoon where exactly the same thing happens, and gave it to my boss at my annual review that year, right after he told me I was getting 1%. It probably didn’t help… But then it’s hard to imagine that anything would have at that point.

THAT Time of Year Again…

No, not the “Holidays.” I refer here to the season when most companies, and many other employers, begin the Annual Review process, one of the most universally hated rituals in the working world. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t have at least one horror story to tell about annual reviews, and I’ve met very few people who’ve ever had a completely positive experience with the process. Even allowing for the fact that the review is intended to address long-term bad habits, it still seems outrageous that a basic function of day-to-day management has devolved into this sort of quagmire. It makes you wonder if anyone out there remembers what these reviews are supposed to do, doesn’t it?

First off, an annual review is supposed to provide the employee with feedback about their overall performance for the previous year. Unfortunately, this requires managers to keep track of how their subordinates are performing over the course of the year. Since management personnel for the most part believe that they will receive the same salary whether they do this or not, many of them don’t; they will just use whatever vague memories they have of the year, often colored by the last interaction with the employee they can remember. As a result, many people have learned that all they have to do is perform well in the first few weeks of June each year, and their review is a breeze.

Second, the review is supposed to correct long-term bad habits. Not actual mistakes or infractions, which should be dealt with as they occur, but simply things that either irritate fellow workers or lead to lower efficiency. Too often, a review will turn into a “slam session” as the manager vents his or her anger regarding everything the employee has done wrong over the previous 12 months. One manager of my acquaintance was actually keeping a “secret discipline file” in which he would catalog everything his subordinates did that he felt was wrong or annoying. However, he only mentioned this file when trying to bring people into line (“That’s going in the file!”), and only shared the contents during the annual reviews. Or sometimes, at a review two or three years later.

Third, the review is supposed to deal with any discrepancies between the employee’s written job description and what they are actually being asked to do. Job descriptions are another in a long list of business documents that, like mission statements, operating philosophies, and the like, are more often ignored or misapplied than actually used correctly. In many cases, a job description is only used during the hiring process or when an employee is refusing to do something. When used properly, however, a set of job descriptions should tell the reader everything the unit does, and which employees are responsible for which tasks – in other words, everything you would need to know to operate or even reproduce the unit in question. It in turn forms the basis of operating plans, company regulations, strategic planning cycles, and orientation for both the management personnel and those they supervise.

All too often, however, these descriptions are simply rubber stamped by both management and the employees, and completely ignored. Done properly, a review should include a statement written by the employee detailing their current duties and the procedures they follow to complete those duties, which should then be compared to the written job description during the meeting with their supervisor, and either the duties or the description modified to bring them into agreement. An employee should also have the opportunity to comment on their own performance and any other relevant issues during the written and verbal review process. The manager should read this self-assessment before starting the actual review meeting, and be prepared to address the employee’s concerns as well as voicing their own.

Finally, the employee and the manager should discuss any improvement in performance that appears to be necessary, and any changes in job description that appear to be needed. The manager needs to use this process to provide recognition for good work (see my posts on the Hierarchy of Needs and Level 4: Recognition) and, if at all possible, reward for good performance where applicable. At least, that’s how this process is supposed to work. Next time we’ll go over some examples of what happens when it doesn’t…

The Audience is Listening…

Well, actually, they’re probably not. Anyone who has spent any time at all in Corporate America has probably complained that management isn’t listening to the employees at least once. Let me say up front that you should not take this personally; I was once the senior business analyst of a $450 million dollar wholesale unit, and my division President refused to listen to me, despite the fact that I had been consistently accurate. Unfortunately, even people who do, in fact, know better will sometimes refuse to listen to input from their subordinates, either to establish how important they are, put the subordinate in their place, or just because thinking about input requires work, while a knee-jerk rejection does not.

That this type of behavior is stupid should be obvious; if you do not listen to your subordinates, how will you know what is going on within your unit? What is less obvious is that in addition to being poor management practice, this also fails to address the needs of the employees at level 4 of the Hierarchy of Needs : Recognition.

No one wants to feel like a faceless cog in the machine, especially if they are. So once their survival and security needs are met, and they begin to form social connections to the employees around them, most people will begin looking for recognition of the quality of their work, their importance to the organization, and the fact that their input matters to higher levels of management. This may or may not have a competitive element, depending on the psychology of the individual, but even those people who do not feel any need to compete with their peers still like to feel appreciated.

The most obvious form of recognition, monetary reward, is harder to utilize than most people believe; even if your department has the budget to do so, it is not practical to be constantly handing chunks of money to the employees. Many companies make use of non-monetary awards, such as certificates of appreciation, but these are ultimately little more than adult versions of the gold stars we received in Kindergarten; unless the award itself is of value/prestige to the employee, the piece of paper itself will have little value.

The first step in providing proper recognition for your workforce is simply listening. Make it clear to your people that you want their input, and if you find their ideas sound, you will act on them. When you do implement an employee suggestion, make sure their peers (as much of the company as possible, in fact) know that you have done so. If someone has achieved high levels of productivity, make sure that everyone knows about that, as well. A token of your esteem (like a certificate) can work if it fulfills the employee’s fourth-level needs; so can an extra perk like an afternoon off with pay, or tickets to a sporting event, so long as they come with “bragging rights” – recognition from the rest of the group that the individual is being rewarded for their high performance.

One of the best variations of this idea I have ever seen was the “Lunch with the CEO” program. The idea was, each month the CEO of a large corporation would select the Employee of the Month from a list of candidates forwarded up through the Vice Presidents, Directors, Managers, Supervisors and Team Leaders. Instead of a nice certificate, however, what the Employee of the Month got was a one-on-one lunch meeting with the CEO, in the Executive Lunchroom. The meeting was a “no ranks” conversation; the CEO made a point of getting the employee’s first name and calling him by it, and asking for the employee’s input on the direction of the company (and any other issues the employee felt were important).

It’s debatable whether the CEO ever actually learned any deep, dark secrets this way – although these lunches undoubtedly gave him a look into life on the factory floor, in the warehouse, and down on the cubicle farm that he would otherwise never have gotten. The effect on morale, on the other hand, was quite obvious. Every time this happened, the employee would go back to the floor and tell his (or her) peers about having lunch with the CEO, and how the head of their company wanted the employee’s input and how he LISTENED to everything he/she said.

And this cost the company… One lunch. Usually a nice lunch, something a CEO wouldn’t mind eating, but still less than $20 for a boost in morale that thousands of dollars in company-sponsored social events could not have equaled. It’s worth thinking about…