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.

And those that don't... (A Cautionary Tale)

A friend of mine told me the following story:

In the strategic plan for a branch of a business, one of the goals was to set up a staff recognition scheme for the branch. About a month before the end of the financial year one of the managers in the branch decided to do something about achieving this goal. Their motivations for doing this weren't particularly laudable: basically they wanted to be able to dot the i's and cross the t's in the plan and to stick it to the other managers who had done nothing. In other words, it was more about self-promotion than genuinely wanting to recognise staff.

So the manager emailed the staff within their unit seeking nominations for awards and asking for volunteers for a committee. So far so good....

But then, as they say in The Bill [UK Police show] it all went 'pear-shaped'.

The committee got together to decide on who should get what awards but for one category they reached an impasse because they couldn't decide between two of the nominees for one category. Now, in that situation, I would simply have said 'Give them both awards', but the committee made the mistake of asking the manager for her opinion. Once the manager got involved it all fell to pieces.

Firstly, she questioned all of the other decisions they had made, and when she noticed that certain people she favored had not been nominated she told the committee 'I haven't made my nominations yet', even though the closing date for nominations had passed and even though her nominations carried no more weight than that of anyone else in the unit.

Secondly, she told the committee that they weren't making the decision; they were only making recommendations - she and the team leaders would be making the final decision.

Needless to say, by changing the rules she totally alienated the committee members and within minutes of the meeting ending, most of the staff in the unit were aware of what had happened. And as a result she undermined the integrity and credibility of the awards.

In the greater scheme of things, the awards weren't that big a deal. If she had stayed out of it, then whatever the outcome of the awards, she could have said "The nominations were made by staff and the decisions were made by a staff committee, neither I nor the team leaders had any influence or involvement". But once she became involved, she could no longer say that and the perception became that no matter who they nominated the winners would be the manager's favorites.

But there was also a further consequence. This manager was already not particularly trusted by staff and there was already a perception that they played favorites in making promotion decisions and also that some of the people that the manager thought were great were absolutely terrible. So by intervening, even though the final decisions were almost the same, she simply reinforced the existing negative perceptions of staff. And she also sent the message that she didn't trust staff to exercise good judgement. As a result, those who volunteered for the committee won't be volunteering again any time soon: it is one thing to be given responsibility for something and quite another to just be the manager's hand-puppet.

And remember, for the manager the point of the whole exercise wasn't even to recognise staff: it was purely self-promotion. But in the end she shot herself in the foot because not only did staff now have an even lower opinion of her but the same staff had friends in other units and so word spread beyond the unit about what had happened.

Recognition schemes that work...

Staff recognition schemes are fraught with perils and some of those perils and pitfalls will be discussed in my next post. However, a staff recognition scheme can work in an environment where there is genuine trust and caring in the organisation and where staff are in control of the process, so that it doesn't become Big Brother manager patting the good little workers on the head.

But here is an example of a scheme that did work and as you read it perhaps you can guess why.

This scheme was implemented when I was working at a local University a few years back. At the time, I was employed at probably the second lowest pay level of administrative staff, a job which I basically took to support myself while I was working on my PhD research.

The University Registrar decided to implement a recognition scheme and asked for volunteers from our Division to be on the selection committee. I was one of the volunteers along with a half dozen other people from all levels of the division (but no managers) and I volunteered to chair the committee and this was accepted even though I was pretty low on the totem pole and ad only been working at the University for a few months. We were given a fairly small working budget (about $1000 as I recall) and then we asked all of the staff in our division to nominate individuals and teams who had displayed excellence in a number of categories. The decision of the Committee was final (i.e. it didn't require management signoff)

As a Committee, we decided that after reading all of the nominations and their supporting statements, we could have argued forever about who should be ranked where, so we decided that each person on the Committee would get 10 points for each category which they could distribute to nominees however they wanted - for example, they could give 10 points to one nominee or 6 points to one, three to another and one point to a third. The idea of this system was that each person on the Committee could show the strength of their preference but no person on the Committee would have any more influence than anyone else.

We also decided that with the individual awards, we would award a small trophy, a small monetary payment plus a further small monetary payment to their team to pay for a morning tea to celebrate the award. The point of this was to indicate that no individual can achieve much without the support of the people around them.

Finally, on the day of the awards, we organised it so that it was like the Academy Awards, so that we announced the nominees and then opened an envelope and announced "And the winner is...". This was done in conjunction with a barbecue.

Staff we amused, those who won were pleased, and we sent a clear message about teamwork. And because there was no management interference, the awards had credibility with the workers.

Formal recognition is good, but in managing staff my preference is to tell staff that they are doing a good job when they are doing it, not once a year. And even better is to tell a third party about the good job they have done and for it to get back to them. Recognition shouldn't be about reward but about appreciation, something that is sometimes overlooked by the sticks-and-carrots school of management - this is one reason by an awards should be small - they are a token of appreciation, not compensation for doing a good job.

How managers can derail continuous improvement

When a continuous improvement program is introduced into any organisation, it is introduced into a particular historically determined set of circumstances, the existing status quo. Even where current managers are trained in continuous improvement, they are likely to view it through the lens of their pre-existing biases and a day or so of training is unlikely to change this.

Problems with managers

Where a manager has managed the same organisational unit a number of years it is almost certain that:

• they have exhausted any ideas for continuous improvement that they may have been prepared to implement
• they are now acting as a barrier to further improvement because they have fixed ideas about how things should be done (as well as blindspots and pet ideas) and are not open to any CI ideas that are inconsistent with their fixed ideas
• they are blocking those ideas and as a result staff are discouraged from making further suggestions
• they have a vested interest in the status quo as representing any improvements they may have made in the past, even if those improvements are now outdated or dysfunctional.
• they have entrenched non-valuing adding activities that they may be unwilling to even discuss giving up.

Bureaucratizing the process

One threat that continuous improvement represents is loss of control.

If improvements are driven by grassroots recognition of problems by workers on the ground, the risk for some managers is that they will lose control of the process. So there may be a temptation to impose a whole set of rules which slow the process, a structure that subjects it to excessive approvals and controls so that it becomes bogged down. And in the process, the workers on whom the success of the process depends become disenchanted with trying to do anything.

Some managers may look on continuous improvement as a way to build their own profile by putting it into plans and trying to act as a clearinghouse for any ideas of the staff reporting to them and in the process act as a bottleneck (as well as bringing in the problems discussed above). I think most of us have known a manager who always manages to complicate things as soon as they get involved.

So what do you do?

The solution (which may not be possible for all organisations) is simple and brutal: replace or rotate managers, particularly ones who have been entrenched in the same workunit for an extended period of time.

By doing this, each workunit would gain a fresh perspective to look at their processes, plus they would be able to benefit from any improvement ideas that the new manager might have implemented in their previous unit, so that there is transfer of organisational learning.

The new manager would have no particular attachment to or investment in the status quo and would be more willing to consider ideas that the previous manager might have dismissed out of hand. Working in an unfamiliar area, they would have no choice but to become familiar with the existing processes and in doing so start to question things that don't make sense, but which have been taken for granted by the existing staff of the unit or which under the previous manager they had given up trying to change.

For continuous improvement there needs to be an openness to new ideas and new managers would lead to such an openness as well as a fresh rather than a stale eye being cast over any improvement ideas suggested by staff.

It may seem radical but sometimes a management reshuffle is the only way Continuous Improvement will work. Otherwise, you end up with the same old tired and ineffective ideas for improvement and a few months down the track it is looked back on as just another 'flavor of the month'.

Planning with Intent - the Mindful, Reflective Approach

There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong

~ H.L. Mencken

A good deal of the corporate planning I have observed is like a ritual rain dance; it has no effect on the weather that follows, but those who engage in it think it does. Moreover, it seems to me that much of the advice and instruction related to corporate planning is directed at improving the dancing, not the weather.
~ James B. Quinn Strategies for Change

Sometimes when managers do strategic plans, what they end up with is a list of planned actions, categorised into areas such as Customer Services, Systems etc. However, very rarely to they state explicitly and in detail what is the Intent of the planned action - what is it expected to achieve. Unless we know why we are doing something we cannot tell whether or not it has achieved the desired objective since there isn't one. All we can say is that it was we intended to do X and we did X. But whether this was a good thing to do remains open to question. We need first to identify what it is we are trying to change.

For example, we may want to change some metric of staff satisfaction. We may want the average score to increase. However, this isn't really what we want. A metric is simply a measurement. What we want to change is what the measurement purports to measure. So let's suppose that we actually want to change staff satisfaction. Then we need to be sure what we understand by 'staff satisfaction' - are we looking for fewer complaints? greater engagement? less turnover? Are we trying to engender an emotional state that will see positive changes in such areas?

Whatever it is we are looking for, we may first need to understand what it is that causes the behavior we want to either increase or diminish. We need to have a 'theory of causality': that these causes result in these outcomes. Based on our 'theory of causality' we can then develop strategies that we think will cause the outcomes we want.

This is important for two reasons.

Firstly, by identifying the desired outcome rather than just an activity, we have a better chance of seeing whether or not that activity achieved anything of value.

And secondly, if the desired outcome isn't achieved but we did the planned activity then it may lead to us having to revise our theory-of-causality. Note that I say 'may'. It may be that the planned activity was implemented poorly, that it was transparently manipulative, that other factors intervened to derail it. But if none of these occurred and the planned activity went off, well, went off as planned, but the desired outcome wasn't achieved then we need seriously to look at whether we have truly understood the causal mechanisms involved.

Maybe our understanding of human nature  doesn't match the reality of how people really behave, what they want and how they respond to various changes in the work environment. Maybe there is a delayed reaction: maybe the change that has been put in place will take longer to have an effect than we anticipated and we haven't failed so much as haven't succeeded as quickly as we thought we would.

The point of all this is that we can take a simple mindless approach:

-  Let's do X.

-  We did X.

-  Good job!

versus a mindful, reflective approach:

- What do we want to achieve?

- Based on what we believe to be true (theory-of-causality) what would we have to do to achieve that?

- Did the desired outcome occur?

- If not, why not? Did we implement poorly? Was our time frame too optimistic? Was our theory-of-causality wrong?

- What do we do now?

The mindless approach may give us a false sense of achievement: "we did it!". But with the mindful, reflective approach we gain a more nuanced understanding of the situation, we gain a clearer understanding of what works and what doesn't and we make genuine changes that matter, rather than cosmetic changes that don't.