Manager or Cosmetician?

Sometimes being a manager appears to be a matter of making it look like something has been achieved, even when it hasn't. And that is one of the reasons why organisations  may appear to achieve their strategic plans and yet never actually improve in any meaningful way.

To begin with, there is cosmetic change rather than actual change. Where a change would disrupt the status quo that managers are happy with, they may massage the details of the change, water it down and put their own controls in place in such a way as to make it appear that they have embraced the change when in fact they have sabotaged it. And as a result, it may appear that a change has been ineffective when in fact it has been poorly implemented if at all. If a person has a skin cancer then you can treat it medically or you can conceal it with makeup. Sadly, in many cases, managers will take the latter course rather than deal with the reality of a situation that requires serious attention, giving the appearance that something has changed when things have remained fundamentally the same.

Paradoxically some of the most enthusiastic adopters of the change may do the most (unintentionally) to ensure it is ineffective. Like Procrustes with his bed, they stretch or amputate aspects of the change to suit their particular view of how things should be and in the process eliminate critical factors required for its success. Even this may be an application of the cosmetic art: their enthusiastic support of the change may be more about being seen to support it than about truly being committed to implementing it (in fact they may not even understand what the change entails.)

Cosmetic skills also come into play in evaluating whether efforts towards a particular goal have been effective. The goal posts may be shifted so that what was actually achieved is now within an acceptable range. Or what the result is compared to may be changed to present the best outcome: comparison with the last quarters figures, last years figures, segmenting results so that it can be claimed that failure only occurred in one area...there are any number of tools in a managers toolbox to make a bad result look good.

When it comes to the final evaluation of a project, the skills of a mortician may come into play: giving something that is actually dead the appearance of life. When there are a number of dimensions on which a program or project could be evaluated, even if it is a failure then there may have been success after a fashion on a couple of dimensions so those are elevated to being the important ones and publicized while the important dimensions on which failure occurred are downplayed.

Such tactics create dangers for the business and the only way to protect against them is to clearly define up front and unambiguously which outcomes are important and how they are going to be measured, and how comparisons will be made. And where changes are going to be made, to require managers to document how they have implemented those changes, why they have implemented them in that way and to justify their 'modifications' in terms of the intent of the change. It might even be the case that you need to ensure up front that managers really do understand what the intent of the change is and that satisfying that intent must take precedence over anything else (protecting turf, preserving pet ideas etc) and that in the end they will be judged by whether that intent has been met not by how much 'activity' they have put into it.

Cosmetics may be about concealing flaws, about making the ugly appear beautiful, or about making what is merely pretty appear beautiful. But it is always about making something appear to be other than it is, to hide reality.

And when you hide from reality, the risk is that sooner or later reality will sneak up on you and stab you in the back.

Why employee recognition schemes fail - Part 3: The selection process

In Simpsons episode Brother Can You Spare Two Dimes Mr.Burns awards Homer  the "First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence" and a US$2,000 prize in exchange for a legal waiver against any claim for his radiation induced sterility.

In most Employee Recognition Schemes there is a complete lack of transparency and no-one knows whether the selection of the winners is a matter of legitimately recognising excellence or whether it is more a matter of quid pro quo. (It isn't just Employee Recognition Schemes by the way: the same doubts concern honors lists and knighthoods in Commonwealth countries and comparable awards in other countries.)

This lack of transparency is even more problematic in organisations where there is not a lot of trust to begin with. And it is further multiplied when there is management involvement or interference in the selection process (as described in a previous post.) And the fact that guidelines as to how the winners will be chosen are not made publicly available just raises more suspicions.

Then there are issues with things such as suspected quotas ("Last year we gave it to someone from that Division so we can't give it to someone from that Division this year") or the fact a person may win who everyone knows (apart apparently from the selection committee) causes more problems to the organization than they solve.

And the perception that the selection process is unfair and biased simply leads to disgruntlement and disengagement from the process.

The take home message from this is that where there is no trust to begin with a recognition scheme that is not open and transparent will simply serve to increase distrust and cynicism.

Complicators and Simplifiers

Managers can change processes in one of two ways: they can simplify them or they can complicate them. And they can do each of these things in two ways as well: smart and dumb.

dumb simplifying: where something is simplified but the manager doesn't know why it was complicated in the first place. Remember:

Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

~Robert Frost

If you don't know why something is complicated then you may need to study it more before deciding to simplify it.

Example:

Suppose you have a set of offices where you employee a lawyer, a doctor and a dentist. Sometimes one has more work than they can deal with, while another may be twiddling their thumbs. Brilliant idea: why not combine their roles so that when a client comes in they can just see who is available. No waste time. Great. well, there would be increased time required for training, plus there would be a drop in the level of expertise and a greater likelihood that something important would slip through the cracks but hey look at the idle time that is no longer being wasted! So much simpler than having three separate kinds of jobs

...Yeah, I know this would never happen in real life, but managers who don't really understand what staff do may at times decide to combine functions into a single job type without realising the complexities of what their staff do.

dumb complicating: where something is made more complicated than it has to be.

In some cases this may be a matter of building a process that is designed to explicitly cope with every imaginable set of circumstances even the unlikeliest one, rather than a process that deals with what happens most of the time, while allowing for exception handling. In former case, the process is supposed to deal with everything without having to trust the judgement of employees, but as a result it is complex, rigid and hard to change and undermines employee initiative. Plus we pay the additional costs involved in a complex process for every case we process even the simplest one. In the latter case, the process may be easier to modify and trust is shown in employees' use of their own discretion. In some cases, dumb complicating loses sight of why a process exists in the first place and so the manager concerned may design it to conform to some abstract ideal rather than what reality demands.

smart simplifying - where the complexities don't serve any useful role in the process. To simplify something in a smart way you have to understand the purpose of the process and to see how each part of the process contributes (or not as the case may be) to that purpose. It is slicing through the Gordian knot of complexity rather than trying to unravel it one snarl at a time.

Example

a flowchart could be used to map every aspect of a given process, showing every decision point and running over several pages, looking like a big flat plate of spaghetti. Or it could be simplified to show the usual flow of the process with notes explaining what happens when there is an exception. The former is unusable and remains unused, so it was effectively a waste of time developing it. While the latter doesn't comprehensively describe the process, it does give an overview of each of the major steps required and makes it clear what the typical flow is. And once a person understands the typical flow they are better placed to understand deviations from that flow.

 However remember:

Things should be made as simple as possible but no simpler.
~ Albert Einstein

smart complicating: where a process is made more complicated because of differences that actually do make a difference.

Example:

The type and dosage of medication may depend on a number of different factors: age, bodyweight, other medications a person is taking, allergies and other conditions. Taking all these factors into account when prescribing is smart complicating since it could be a matter of life and death.

The smart complicator recognises when differences matter enough to require specialised attention.

There is a sense in which these approaches group into pairs of opposites:

smart simplifying vs dumb complicating

smart complicating vs dumb simplifying

The hard thing is working out which you are doing and the only way to find that out is to study the process an understand its purpose and whether simplifying or complicating (in the right way) will better achieve its purpose.

If you don't properly understand it can mean that there may be no reason for the process at all, but it may also mean that you need to keep your hands off of it until you have a better handle on it. 

This can be a hard lesson for some managers to learn: some always try and complicate things, others may always try to simplify them even when it causes problems. There may be a tendency to think that doing something is better than doing nothing, even if you're doing the wrong thing.

Don't give in to this tendency!

Careful thought is a form of action too, and it may save the need for remedial action later.

Why employee recognition schemes fail - Part 2: The nomination process

One of the reasons that Recognition Schemes fail is that there are many biases built in to the nominations process, even if the people doing the nominating are employees themselves.
Some of these biases include:

• quiet achievers (people who come to work, do their job and do it well without any fuss) are unlikely to be nominated simply because they don't even make it onto the radar.
• self-promoters - There are staff who actively self-promote, who draw attention to every good thing they do, while minimizing or draw attention away from the things they do less well or fail to do at all. This makes such staff more salient than other staff who may be bending all of their efforts to just doing a good job rather than to big noting themselves. Self-promoters may be more likely to be nominated because everyone is aware of what they've done, even though they may have done no more than anyone else. (On the other hand, blatant self-promotion may also result in a lower likelihood of nomination because no-one likes them.).
• friends nominating friends (self-explanatory)
• mutual nominations or circular nominations (with staff nominating each other)
• underperformers who have done one outstanding thing - People may perform well in a high visibility task, but have otherwise poor performance. In fact their neglect of their normal work may have contributed to their more public success. To reward them for this would send a poor message: that the day-to-day work is unimportant, that only high profile tasks matter.
• people working on high profile projects - Staff are sometimes recognized for doing a task or project that they were selected to perform, so it was the job they were being paid to do. There is no way of knowing how well any other person might have performed in the role had they been given the opportunity or whether the person’s performance is outstanding relative to what could have been achieved. So there is an opportunity bias in recognising anyone for project type work.
• workload bias - The people doing the nominating are the ones who have enough time on their hand to do such a nomination. So in general a smaller proportion of nominations would be expected from the busiest, highest volume work areas than from low volume work areas. To a degree, the proportion of nominations from an area could be more indicative of over-resourcing for that area than great performance and it may be that what that work area considers great performance would be considered mediocre in a higher volume area.
• recency bias - nominations may be made on the basis of things that have recently happened rather than on things that have happened throughout the period covered by the awards.
• cynicism - work areas that are cynical about the whole thing may submit less nominations

Any or more likely all of these things are likely to affect the quality of nominations being received by any selection committee and tend to undermine the credibility of the whole process. Managers sometimes assume that staff aren't aware of such biases but in general staff are better aware of them than the managers and as a result recognition awards tend to become a fiasco.

However, at least if the employees do the nominating rather than the managers, there is at least a perception that there is some equity in the process and an absence of favoritism.

Micro-Managers are overpaid!

Let's suppose we have a manager who spends a lot of time micro-managing the work of the people under them.

I claim that they are overpaid and here's why.

Effectively, they are trying to do the work of lower level employees rather than just letting those employees do the work they are getting paid to do. Suppose the manager is being paid $60 an hour and the lower level employee is being paid $30 an hour. Then for every hour the manager spends micro-managing, that manager is being overpaid by $30 an hour.

But it gets worse.

Every hour spent on micro-managing is an hour not spent on doing the work the manager should be doing. So effectively micro-management is a form of loafing.

And on top of this managers who micro-manage create bottlenecks when they want to approve work that should simply be allowed to be done and in the process they create waste and delays which are a cost to the company. These unnecessary costs should also be deducted from their salaries.

And finally micro-managers disempower those who work from them and the employees end up suffering from learned helplessness - they become afraid to make decisions and manage their teams because they are certain that they will be second-guessed and over-ruled by their manager.

The lesson here is that micro-managers don't just not earn their own salaries, they also make it hard for those who report to them to earn their salaries as well, so there is a domino effect that undercuts the efficiency and effectiveness of the organisation.

Why employee recognition schemes fail - Part 1: the management motivation

In Simpsons episode Deep Space Homer Homer is the only employee who has never won the "Worker of the Week" Award; he is sure he will win but Mr.Burns gives the award to an 'inanimate carbon rod'.

What lesson does this hold for us?

Frequency and easy availability devalues awards

Well to begin with what value does an award have if everyone wins it at some time or another. Almost by definition recognition is about recognising performance which is superior or exceptional in some way. The frequency of recognition undermines any value in recognising at all. People tend to value what is rare and what is earned. They don't tend to value things that they know they will get sooner or later without exerting any effort.

A friend of mine told me about a practice in his organisation where the minutes of meetings of the top management always contain a section in which there are about 20 examples like the following:

X thanked Y for their excellent work in doing Z

i.e. where dozens of people are thanked for relatively trivial contributions. Where everyone is recognised, effectively no-one is genuinely recognised. And when staff read these minutes they roll their eyes and think to themselves how self-congratulary they are.

Everybody has won and all must have prizes
~ the Dodo in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Cynical manipulation

And this raises the question of why management wants to recognise employees. What is its intent? What is it intended to achieve?

It isn't intended to make staff feel good. It might make the 'winners' feel good, but more likely than not the 'losers' feel bad or are indifferent to the whole process.

It may be intended to encourage other staff to aspire to similar levels of performance. However people also tend to devalue what they know they will never get regardless of how much effort they put forth.

The winners of awards may have had more resources to help them than other staff (resource bias). Or they might have been tapped on the shoulder to do a project that other people not chosen might have done as well as or better than that person (opportunity bias). Or they may be working in a job with a higher profile than other workers (profile bias). Or they may just be management lackeys (favoritism). None of these things provide anything that may be achievably aspired to.

And on occasion the motivation has nothing to do with the staff at all.

Another friend of mine told be a story about a manager who saw that in the strategic plan that the division of which their unit was a part was required to put in place a staff recognition scheme. So purely to be able to tick off that it had been done and more importantly that they had done it and other managers in their division hadn't, they went ahead to set up such a scheme. It had nothing to do with staff and everything to do with playing politics.

When staff become aware of such things, you can't really blame them for being cynical.

The takeaway from this is that an employee recognition scheme needs to have the right motivation.

And what is the right motivation?

It beats me. I have yet to see anyone justify any value in such a scheme, even 'successful' ones (successful in the sense that they had no adverse effects) don't seem to have any clear motivation.

If you think of something, let me know!

Cross checking data - The Dangers of Single Sourcing

Here is an example of an error I made which provides an object lesson in why whenever possible data should be cross-checked and compared with other independent data sources.

A couple of weeks ago, I did some analysis of the workload received by one of my teams over the previous 2 years and what I found was alarming. The data suggested that there had been an 80% reduction in workload over that time but a much smaller drop in the number of people working in the team. I knew that there had been some reduction in workload but this was larger than expected. However, the timing of the reduction squared with a change in corporate policy, so on the face of it it appeared that the policy change had had a major effect.

So superficially at least the change was explicable. On this basis, we decided to reallocate some of the staff to other functions. So we had discovered surplus resources that we could utilise more fully.

Or had we?

When I looked at our weekly workload reports, they didn't seem to match the monthly reports which were drawn from a different source. In fact, where the monthly report suggested our workload had dropped to around 500 per month, the weekly reports suggested we were receiving 500 per week.

So I looked more carefully at the report that seemed to be showing the biggest change and once I looked at the SQL code for the report, I found the reason for the apparent drop.

About 18 months previously, we had made it possible for our customers to do some of their business on-line and when they did this a different workitem type was created. But the monthly report didn't include this new workitem type and as a result it significantly deviated from the actual work we were receiving. We hadn't realised this because the initial uptake of the web option had been quite low, however over time it had grown to 50% of our work, so as the uptake grew, our apparent workload dropped.

We had already started planning to move more staff to different functions, however once I noticed this I contacted our information analysts to have the report corrected. In the meantime, we had to re-think our strategy.

The most serious implication of this was that the incorrect report could have been used as a basis for our next year's budget and could have left us seriously understaffed.

The lesson I learned is that just because you get a report from an analyst, it doesn't mean it's right - you still need to identify what the report is based on and whether it includes everything you would expect it to include, including all information relevant to what you want to use the information for.