Shall we stop taking silly risks, and go back to being sensible and boring again?
 

If you’re at all interested in the history of the last hundred years, you’ll be familiar with the cases where governments have done bizarre and stupid things in a crisis, usually resulting in their own downfall. From the disastrous German offensive of 1918, to the mad idea of the Georgian government to start a war with Russia last year, via—oh, I don’t know—the calamitous Argentine invasion of the Falkands/Malvinas 25 years ago, modern history is full of madcap endeavors which always seem destined to fail. What on earth, ask historians despairingly, can they possibly have thought they were doing?

The classic case is probably the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, where historians still cudgel their brains trying to understand why the Japanese could possibly have thought they could get away with attacking a country which was the largest industrial power on earth, with twice their population.

Handling risk—usually very badly

Those of you not especially interested in military history will be relieved to hear this article is about human psychology; in particular, the inability of humans to understand and process risk.

In all of the cases cited, leaders took insane risks in the hope of achieving a smashing, overwhelming success: the end of World War I on German terms, the restoration of national territory seized by the British, and so on. For the Japanese, with a week’s supply of petrol left in the country, the choice was a humiliating withdrawal from China (think an oil embargo to force the US to withdraw from Afghanistan) or a very risky attack which promised, if successful, control of as much oil as they could want and strategic mastery of large parts of Asia.

Roll the dice . . .

You can see where this is going. Human beings are basically lousy at understanding and managing risk. That’s why it can be argued that every sensible organization should try to remove risk from its day-to-day operations as far as it can—because people can’t handle it properly.

Why people make such a mess of risk

Studies have shown that we assess risk based mainly on what we hope to gain, not what we fear to lose. People go to casinos because of the small chance of becoming a millionaire, not because of the very large chance of losing all their money.

It’s no different with the fate of nations. War games in 1918 and 1941 showed that there was a large probability of failure. They also showed there was a very small chance of a smashing success. As for modern financial risk-management techniques, we had better pass over those in silence, out of respect for the dead.

Part of the problem is cultural. This year in Britain, people are celebrating (or in some cases not celebrating) the thirtieth anniversary of Margaret Thatcher becoming prime minister. Thatcher helped publicize the idea that uncontrolled risk-taking was brave and worthy; when in most cases, in fact, it’s either stupid or naïve. Businessmen who took insane risks were given the kind of honors previously reserved for polar explorers and war heroes.

More recently, the willingness to take risks with other peoples’ money was seen as worthy of high salaries and fat bonuses. (I sometimes think that “risk-taking entrepreneur” is a fancy way of saying “greedy idiot”, but I may be overly cynical.) There’s always risk in life, and many successful enterprises involve a degree of uncertainty , but sensible human beings, and sensible organizations, manage to keep it to a minimum.

A new attitude to risk

In practice, the most successful organizations, companies and economies don’t take unnecessary risks. They innovate cautiously, learning from their mistakes and seeking to do better each time. When Toyota developed the Lexus brand, they didn’t risk untold trillions of Yen on someone’s bright idea. They sent a team to California for six months to live among their target market and find out what people wanted and liked. Then they designed and built a car on that basis.

We need to re-think the culture of risk-taking. In today’s bureaucratized and corporate world, individuals rarely suffer any major damage if the risks they take lead to disaster. Heads they win, tails we lose. Risk is part of human life and is an element of taking decisions in any organization. But it needs to be got back into proportion, and minimized as far as we can. We should stop praising and rewarding people who lose all our money at the roulette table.

Technorati Tags: risk, uncertainty, decision making, leadership

“What distinguishes our age from any other is not the world-flattening impact of communication; not the economic ascendance of China and India, not the degradation of our climate and not the resurgence of ancient religious animosities. Rather, it is a frantically accelerating pace of change.” (Gary Hamel, The Future of Management.)
 

(This is a guest article from reader Bay Jordan)

Even our recessions come faster and threaten to hit harder than anything we have seen to date!

Hamel’s statement, made before the current recession, is fundamental to his case for a new management approach. He argues the historical management model is outdated and wonders why the views of senior executives are granted a “higher co-efficient of credibility” than the convictions of mid- and lower-level employees. It’s a fair question. Why should organizations give so much weight to the views of those furthest away from the customer, with “most of their emotional equity invested in the past?”

The pace and severity of this recession seems to reinforce the view that large companies have borrowed their change model from “poorly governed third-world dictatorships,” as Hamel claims. Certainly, the scale of layoffs and the reluctance of executives to give up their high salaries and perks, highlights feudal ideas still embedded in modern management practice.

Is productivity so important?

Hamel’s solution is more proactive management systems. He believes employees need more thinking time. “Too much of what gets done in most companies is a response to some already pressing issue,” he writes. “There’s no slack, no space for improvisation and no way to defend projects that are not already useful.”

This is entirely logical, but it presents a massive challenge to conventional organizations. It runs entirely counter to their traditional focus on improved productivity and presents massive logistic challenges.

If you consider the pattern of the typical working year. there are never 365 days available for work.

• We take two days off per week (Saturdays and Sundays) for 52 weeks per year (104 days), which leaves only 261 days.
• Paid holidays entitle us to a further 20 days off , which leaves 241.
• There are 9 public holidays a year, which leaves 232 days for work.
• In most organizations in the UK, you can take three days or less sick without a doctor’s note, although not more than three times a year. Factoring this in removes a further six days, leaving you with 226 days a year for work.
• Assuming a work day is eight 8 hours, actual time spent working accounts for the equivalent of 75 days (226/3).
• Now subtract 30 minutes for lunch each day, and another half an hour for tea/coffee and nature breaks, and you lose a further nine days (226 hours/24)—which means you have only 1,584 hours (the equivalent of 66 days) available for actual work in a year.

This is the UK figure and may vary slightly from country to country. However, it does not include time spent in meetings, or training, or even—perhaps even more significant—answering emails. My estimate is that that the average person is likely to spend considerably less than 1,500 hours actually working in any given year.
Reckoning like this makes me how much time there actually is for any proactive work of the type Hamel is recommending. Nevertheless, he gives good examples of companies that have successfully adopted such practices.

We now know how little time in hours the average person has for productive work. given this, you have to wonder how companies laying off people due to the economic climate can hope to compete effectively. Are they saving themselves, or are they sabotaging their own efforts? In a workforce of 100 people, around 150,000 man/hours of working time is available each year. Lay off 10 people, and you cut away 15,000 man/hours—not just 10% of the headcount, but the equivalent of 62.5 working days.

So are are such organizations effectively committing suicide? One thing is for sure—if they wish to thrive they need to rethink their strategies.

Saying good-bye to command-and-control

For me, this starts with changing the attitudes to people. Traditional, command-and-control’ management is built on the premise that people are costs, and that the organization is paying for their time.

This accounting convention (for that is all it is) ensures that, despite the ubiquitous cliché that, “Our people are our greatest asset,” few organizations see their staff that way. As soon as business falls off, they begin throwing their supposedly most important asset, ignoring the long-term damage this causes to their business, to the people made redundant and to the wider economy as a whole. They don’t just discard many potential hours of available work, they discard unknown quantities of know-how and experience. It makes no sense.

Valuing people and putting their value on the balance sheet is the only way to overcome this traditional mindset—one that still shapes most organizational behavior, no matter how good people’s intentions, or how often they make pious statements about the worth of employees.

Finding salvation

We cannot persist with ‘business as usual’ and avoid sabotaging our future and risking corporate suicide. Only getting away from the old-fashioned, accountants’ attitude to people as costs can offer salvation. Here’s what we should be doing instead:

• Recognizing an organization is the sum of its parts and empowering the people who are closest to the customer.
• Using greater engagement to stimulate a more productive and happy work environment and improve the customer experience.
• Reducing the supervisory burden that comes with command-and-control working and the time and effort it consumes.
• Making it easier to create shared values and embed a culture of continuous improvement.
• Lessening the effort expended on improving productivity by artificial means, and focusing instead on using all the time and people available in the most useful ways we can think up.

What do you need to run a successful organization? People, time and money. If you throw people and time away, as many organizations are doing right now, how long will you have even the money, since it is the other two elements that produce it. All that will be left is borrowing—and we all know where that has taken us.

Bay Jordan is the founder of of Zealise Limited, a company helping businesses develop human capital management strategies, based on the ideas contained in his book “Lean Organisations Need FAT People.”

This followed his recognition, after nearly 30 years in financial management and consulting, that, no matter what the investment in systems and technology, business is ultimately all about people. He has just published his second book, “A Feeling of Worth—a manifesto for mending our broken world.”

Technorati Tags: change, corporate culture, command-and-control, accounting conventions, business attitudes

Managing risk is supposed to be a key aspect of leadership. Why are most so poor at doing it?
 

Leaders and senior executives are rubbish at assessing risk. The financial crisis and economic meltdown prove it. Even top bankers, whose whole job is surely most about risk, got it so badly wrong that they not only killed the goose that was laying the golden eggs to satisfy their greed, they came perilously close to cooking everyone else’s goose as well.

Of course, leaders don’t accept how bad they are at understanding the risks they undertake. If they did, they might well be able to do something about it. Instead they do what all macho managers do to avoid admitting a weakness—they resort to mindless bravado.

This only makes matters worse. Instead of slowing down, or shying away from risks they don’t understand, they plunge ahead to show what tough guys they are. Then, when it all comes crashing down around their heads, they indulge in the other age-old custom of all bullies and egotists—blaming someone else.

You have to accept that human beings in general have a poor ability to estimate risk accurately—especially if they do it based on emotions, as most do—but that’s not an adequate excuse. Leaders are paid to manage risk. It’s one of the things they claim to be able to do better than the average Joe. If they cannot do better than anyone else, why pay them so much?

Why leaders don’t grasp risk properly

These are some of the commonest reasons why leaders get it wrong when it comes to understanding the risks that they are taking:

• They don’t grasp the laws of probability. Rather than take the time and trouble to delve into what it is, admittedly, an arcane discipline, they rely on mythology and rules of thumb. Since, however, no macho manager ever admits to not knowing anything, they either ignore all the statistics are telling them or ‘interpret’ them to match their own biases. Fire, it is said, is a good servant but a bad master. That’s even more true of statistics.
• They make decisions emotionally. How you feel about something has nothing to do with the actual likelihood that it will happen. This is the mistake gamblers make. Winning makes them feel good, so they wager more next time. Losing makes them feel angry, so they wager more and ‘double up’ to get their money back. Few stop to work out the exact possibilities of winning and losing.
• They let their egos rule. Many mergers and acquisitions come about, not from business logic, but to feed the ego of the CEO. That’s probably why 70% or so fail. Betting big on a merger makes those at the top feel important, whether or not the decision makes any sense from a business point of view. There will always be bankers and consultants eager to prove it does. Those guys make so much money from feeding the grandiosity of CEOs they can always justify anything that produces fees for them.
• They don’t understand the figures and so give too much respect to experts. The phrase ‘scientific management’ has become the curse of our time. No matter how crazy the idea, it can nearly always be sold to a boardroom full of professional leaders, provided it is wrapped up in scientific jargon and supported by sufficient tables of data. Few around the boardroom table understand any of it. They decide on whether or not they like the expert and find the presentation sufficiently entertaining. (Privately, I suspect they judge the strength of the evidence by weight. The heavier the report, the more trust they put in it.)
• They treat anecdotes as evidence. You have to put much of the blame for this failing on the media. We have become so used to news reports filled with ‘human interest stories’ instead of facts or logical argument, many people have lost the ability to see a difference between them. Management books use anecdotes, trotted out one after another, to support what the author is claiming. Stories are much more entertaining than logic or data, and a good deal of management writing today has long ago crossed the border between instruction and entertainment. Much of it should be re-shelved under ‘comic books’.

Even when leaders do try to grapple with the evidence, they still get it wrong.

The human mind, as I said, is poor at understanding probability. There are three patterns of thought which are especially effective at leading us into incorrect decisions:

• ‘The proximity effect’ bedevils our understanding of cause and effect. When two things occur closely together, in time or distance, we have a tendency to assume the one caused the other. As a result, people misunderstand what is going on and apply their efforts to dealing with things which are more or less irrelevant to what they want to achieve.
• ‘The recency effect’ describes the way that recent events appear larger and more important to us than those which happened some time ago. People who have just taken a risk and succeeded are more likely to take another one. Those who fail will hang back, even if they have an excellent record of success in the past. (This effect , by the way, explains why the small error you made yesterday erases from your boss’s mind all the good things you’ve done in the previous twelve months.)
• ‘The familiarity effect’ makes us underestimate the risks associated with something we know, and overestimate those associated with something unfamiliar. It explains why doing what we have always done feels less of a risk than change—even if it’s obvious that what we have done in the past won’t work and new ideas are necessary.

The mythology of conventional management is that a combination of statistical analysis, past experience and the pragmatic application of a handful of management models renders most business risks negligible. The reality is that conventional management’s obsession with speed, substitution of action for thought, tendency to confront uncertainty with bravado, emotional bias, and confusion of egotism with leadership, has made dealing with risk into a quagmire which has already swallowed up billions upon billions of dollars.

Ordinary humans are poor at assessing risk and usually accept it. Managers are supposed to be professionals at risk management, so deny any weakness in their approach. Yet, in recent years, most executives have been no better at handling risk that the man or woman in the street—often considerably worse. Isn’t it time to acknowledge this weakness in conventional management attitudes and put a stop to it?

Technorati Tags: risk, choice, managing risk, making decisions, emotional decisions, management myths

Are you a procrastinator . . . or are you being made to be one?

If you look at management and self-help sites on the web, procrastination is amongst the commonest topics. Either all the solutions suggested are ineffective, or it is one of life’s most intractable problems. I suspect neither of these is correct. Most of the answers given have something going for them. The reason they often don’t work is they address the symptoms, not the causes.

We can group causes of procrastination into two categories: personal and organizational. The problem with much of the available advice is it addresses the first category, while the true causes of workplace procrastination lie in the second. The organizational causes of procrastination are amongst the strongest and commonest reasons for putting things off.

By contrasting the categories, you can discover whether you are one of nature’s procrastinators, or are being forced into it by organizational defects.

Are you a procrastinator by nature?

Of the personal causes, these seem to me to stand out:

• Simple disorganization. Most of the anti-procrastination techniques being offered try to deal with this. If you know you are disorganized, read them.
• Waiting for inspiration. The answer to this is simple: just do it. However, while this seems to be a personal difficulty, it may also point to something organizational, as noted later in this article. Waiting for inspiration often means you have no idea how to do a task, so you hold off in the hope that an approach will occur to you. It rarely does.
• Belief in the magic power of deadlines. When I was at college, I had a number of friends who would never start preparing an essay or an assignment until the evening before it was due to be delivered. They honestly believed that this helped them produce a better piece of work. I can see no reason why this should be true. What I suspect is that it increased their excitement, so whatever they handed in felt as if it were the product of white-hot inspiration.
• Macho posturing. This is related to the previous item. Telling everyone that you completed your assignment at 4 a.m. suggests greater machismo than admitting you prepared it carefully and had it ready several days beforehand.
• Laziness. If the reason you aren’t doing something is that you’re lazy, no amount of anti-procrastination technique is going to help you. It’s impossible to say how much procrastination is due to laziness, but some of it surely is.

Does your organization (and your boss) make you a procrastinator?

The most important organizational causes of procrastination are these:

• Impossible goals and crazy expectations. I find it hard to blame anyone for putting off beginning a task they feel sure will be a failure. In recent years, far too many managers have believed in the ‘magical’ effects of near-impossible goals. Our macho organizational cultures have fallen for the nonsense that performance will be improved by setting goals that seem out of reach, then hounding people to achieve them. All this does is make them feel miserable and frustrated. They don’t even gain any pleasure from achieving the target that seemed impossible, because they know that, if they do, it will be added to their normal workload and they will be set an even more inaccessible target.
• Poor (or no) training. People who don’t know what to do put things off rather than bumble around making mistakes (for which they will surely be blamed). They wait for inspiration, as noted already, hoping to find some way forward. If the boss is too busy to help them out (or too ready to treat any ‘weakness’ as an excuse to label people as losers), this waiting period can last for ever. They’re caught between equally unpleasant options: to have a go and perhaps make a bad error, or to hold back and be blamed for late inputs and lack of initiative. Either way, they take the blame for organizational meanness with the training budget.
• Goals that are imposed. Conventional management is all about command-and-control—whatever fine words and spin organizations use to try to conceal it. Leaders assume goal setting means they choose what goals they like (and which make them look good) and everyone else has to achieve them. They ignore the reality that, while people will work hard to achieve goals that they have had a hand in deciding, most people resent the idea of being driven to the edge of exhaustion to achieve goals that have been imposed on them. While employees might not be able to refuse, for fear of losing their jobs, they can still drag their feet. It may be a petty act of defiance, but it’s very understandable.
• Excessive uncertainty. If you think something contains too much risk, or there are too many variables for you to be able to make clear decisions, the simplest thing to do is hang back. It’s a leader’s role to reduce uncertainty. Too many increase it by establishing a vague strategy and leaving it to their subordinates to fill in the details.

The final organizational cause of procrastination is, I believe, the most important. That’s why I’m giving it a paragraph on its own.

A great deal of procrastination by subordinates is caused by indecision on the part of their leaders. As a result, team members lack guidance, are given confused and confusing instructions, are set tasks without first checking whether they have the necessary skills to achieve them, or are left waiting for a key decision from the boss—then blamed for the subsequent late running of the project.

The alternative

Imagine you are faced with a task for which you know you have the skills, which someone has taken the time to explain to you clearly and fully, which you have every reason to believe you can do well, and whose goals you believe you can achieve because you had a hand in setting them. In such a case, you have no reason to procrastinate—unless you’re lazy, disorganized and unmotivated, all of which can be tackled by the many sources of advice available on the Web and elsewhere.

Instead of taking the blame for procrastination on ourselves, as individuals, we should see it for what it is most likely to be: a symptom of poor organizational systems, inadequate strategies, unrealistic expectations and incompetent leadership. If we did that, maybe organizations would stop putting off finding a suitable answer.

Technorati Tags: procrastination, time management, priorities, getting things done, productivity

Most leaders act as if creativity is a disease they hope won’t affect their part of the operation. Why?
 

There seems to be no end to the number of situations where organizations claim to want something, then act in ways that make it clear they don’t. This thought came to me again as I was musing about some more management basics.

Take creativity. If the best things in life are free, as the old song has it, the best things in work—the creative activities that employees tend to enjoy the most and find most satisfaction in doing—seem to be regarded by many bosses and organizations as unnecessary. That’s certainly true of innovation or thinking for yourself.

Making the sale is important. Completing that report is said to be essential. Checking your data is ready and submitting it on schedule will earn you a friendly nod from the boss—at least if it’s done right—and a furious dressing down if it’s late and there are mistakes.

But, despite all the claims to the contrary, you will find that corporate life goes on very smoothly if you never have a new idea, never display any imagination, never produce anything creative, and never question the established ways of doing things. Perhaps you won’t be regarded as brilliant, but you’ll be seen as ‘a safe pair of hands’—which is almost certainly better, if you want to be promoted.

So which is right, the value organizations say they put on creativity, or the value demonstrated by the actions of their executives? Words are cheap. If there is a mismatch between what someone says and what they do, it’s usually best to believe the action represents their true desires.

“Just do as you’re told and don’t get fancy!”

If you ignore what and leaders corporations claim, and look purely at what they do, you have to reach the conclusion that creativity is not only treated as unnecessary, it is often actively resented.

Creativity messes up the schedule and interferes with the smooth progress of routine. In the short term, it doesn’t make money. More often, it requires additional expenditure. It doesn’t cut costs (at least in the short term again) and it doesn’t show up as an asset on the balance sheet.

The very people who claim to want creative subordinates—the executives—are typically those who are most irritated when creativity intrudes on their neatly ordered day. As those with the most to gain from preserving the status quo, they are least happy to see it challenged. To parody the words of the Church of England wedding service, “What I, in the past, have put together, let no man put asunder.”

“Not another weirdo!“

There’s another problem. The people most likely to produce creative ideas are often on the edge of acceptability.

Many creative people don’t restrict their questioning and innovations to workplace issues. They don’t fit in with corporate norms. They’re untidy, they don’t dress well, they don’t spend time socializing or brown-nosing those above them. Even worse, they keep asking difficult questions and are often visibly unimpressed by the answers. They waste time thinking when they should be taking action, and wanting to change things when they should be humbly obedient.

Most executives will put up with a great deal from people they think they need badly enough. Many up-and-coming macho managers are arrogant, pushy and not very trustworthy, but they get away with it because they ‘deliver the goods’. In an emergency, creative people will be also accepted easily; but once the emergency is over, it’s not unusual to find the organization starts re-applying pressure to force conformity to various petty rules and expectations.

“Who’s in charge here?”

Command-and-control, macho management and creative thinking don’t mix. The essence of creativity is individuality. The essence of control is doing everything my way—or else.

In conventional management thinking, all the emphasis is on doing things quickly, cheaply and predictably. The ideal is to establish a set of systems and procedures that require little or no maintenance. Once you have set up them, you leave well alone. Doing anything else increases costs—and cutting costs is usually seen as the best way to ensure profits. In fact, in the ideal management world, you would become the lowest-cost (and highest-profit) producer by establishing a mechanistic, take-it-or-leave-it system in a monopolistic environment—rather as Microsoft has been attempting to do for a number of years.

Creativity and innovation mess this up. If your competitors shift the nature of the business in their favor—as they will certainly try to do—you have to fight back to undermine their attempt at industry and world domination in the same way. But once you have done that (if you can), it’s time to put away the creative ideas (and people) and get back to business as usual: repetitive, predictable and smoothly profitable.

If you must retain some creative people, the simplest way to keep them out of the way until you need them next (hopefully, not for a long time), is to put them in a separate building on another site and try to forget about them.

Turning the tap off

Most organizations today are actively resisting creativity, not promoting it. The current economic crisis gives further evidence of this. Faced with the breakdown of existing systems, executives are making enormous efforts to put the status quo back into place—to go back to business as usual—where they should be using the opportunity to re-think the fundamentals of their business models.

They want creativity to be like water: something you can turn off when you don’t immediately need it, but which will be there to turn back on when you do. Since it doesn’t work like that, they try to spend as little time, attention and money on it as they can most of the time—then complain loudly when they need innovation and it’s not available in an instant.

They also want creativity only where they want it (which is safely away from affecting them) and nowhere else—least of all where it might require them to do anything new, or where it might show them up for being ineffective and out-of-touch. Like all aspects of change, it’s fine when it affects someone else and damnably infuriating (and quite unnecessary) if it might affect me.

The conclusion that best fits the evidence is that creativity and change mostly come about in organizations in spite of those in charge, not because of them; and that all the talk about needing creative people who think and ask questions is just that—talk.

Depressing, isn’t it?

Technorati Tags: creativity, change, innovation, new ideas, fresh thinking

A book by Charles Jacobs (“Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn’t Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science”)says it is—or most of it. Jacobs writes, “The managers who produce the best results are the ones who do the least managing. The biggest challenge is for managers to stop doing most of what they’re doing now.”

I haven’t yet read the book, only a review by Stefan Stern of The Financial Times. It seems that Mr. Jacobs, arguing from the findings of neuroscience and animal studies, claims we need to move on from standard management practices. They are, he says, ill-suited to human beings.

Who let the top dogs out?

I would be the last to defend ‘standard management practices’, which are indeed ill-suited to human beings (or any other species that doesn’t enjoy being lorded over, pushed around and manipulated for the benefit of the ‘top dogs’). I also agree that common practices like performance reviews and management appraisals often come very close to the definition of ‘inhuman and degrading treatment’ the courts use to outlaw torture.

Yet this argument misses a fundamental point: our management practices today, however flawed and backward-looking, were invented by human beings. Indeed, they do exactly what they were designed to do: hold those at the top where they are and keep all the rest under tight control to prevent them disobeying or questioning the aforementioned ruling elite.

Know your place

Practices like appraisals are as much about reminding underlings of their place in the scheme of things (at the bottom, subject to constant judgment by the bosses) as they are about supposedly producing better results. They are also based firmly on the mind-set that pervades the whole edifice: that people are lazy, work-shy and disinterested in anything except their own short-term pleasure.

To get them to work, you have either to bribe them with rewards or threaten them with punishment. If you aren’t watching them, even for a moment, they’ll stop work and go back to lying around, gossiping and wasting your time. You are the master and they are your servants, so you set the rules and ensure they are followed, since, like all servants, they will probably steal the silverware if you don’t. It’s a totally 19th-century set of attitudes, little changed since the Industrial Revolution and invented by the owners of the grand houses of Regency and early-Victorian England.

All too human?

Chimpanzees, our nearest biological relatives, are violent, often blood-thristy animals who live in troops governed by an alpha male and subject to a strict hierarchy, partly based on ‘breeding’ (offspring of the alpha family start near the top of the heap, while the rest have to claw their way up).

Doesn’t that sound like many organizations today?

If so, it may be that our standard management practices are all too human—far too close to our unrefined animal nature and a long way from the rational choices we ought to be making about how to live our working lives.

Probably the best representation of standard management came in the original TV ‘Star Trek’. It wasn’t the rational, logical, objective Mr. Spock who ran the starship ‘Enterprise’, but the over-emotional and rash James Kirk. Mr. Spock’s role was usually to dig the captain out of whatever mess he’d landed them all in by his impulsive choices and egotistical urge to play the hero—the perfect image of the modern CEO.

Technorati Tags: management, management practics, leadership

Before blaming ‘communications’, look at the these five alternative possibilities.
 

Are organizational communications really as bad as they are made out to be? Do we need all the books, courses, articles and blogs on the subject? At one level, the answer has to be ‘yes’. Organizations are full of managers who confuse, lie to and manipulate their subordinates, executives who never listen to anyone and employees who hoard information and use every means possible to cover up their mistakes. There are also lots of honest, well-meaning people get caught up in misunderstandings, muddled intentions, incorrect assumptions and mixed messages.

Are ‘poor communications’ all that is behind these problems? I don’t think so. I think that ‘communications’ has become a buzzword that allows senior management to divert the blame and avoid dealing with the real issues.

Here are five serious issues that should always be checked out before jumping to the conclusion that ‘communication’ is what needs to be improved.

• Is the problem communication—or what is being communicated? The homespun saying that became famous during the last US presidential campaign sums it up: you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. Executives, like politicians, are devotees of ‘spin’, but however you communicate an unacceptable message, the message remains unacceptable. Blaming poor communications for a poor response is diverting attention from what really matters: the message itself.
• Are the expectations behind the message impossible? Executives often blame poor communications—and “middle level managers who cannot motivate”—for the organization’s failure to deliver on what they promised, even if what they promised was never realistic in the first place. It’s the old chestnut called, “mistakes were made, but not by me.” To avoid admitting their own failure and incompetence, these executives try to shift the blame onto vague concepts like communications and, of course, onto lower-level managers.
• Was the failure due to poor systems? By jumping to the conclusion that communications lie at the root of every problem, you can postpone indefinitely any consideration of the systems within which people have to work. Blaming communications is cheap and attributes the problem to someone else. Accepting that systems are inadequate is likely to be expensive and, if you’re the person in overall charge, lays the blame squarely at your door.
• Was the thinking behind the communication too rushed? In many cases, what is diagnosed as a communications problem comes down to nothing more than a muddled and inadequately explained message. Before you blame the communicator or the process, ask yourself whether the message was prepared to adequately, laid out clearly and contained everything necessary to be understood. Managers are often in such a rush to do things they send out messages no one can understand.
• In the case of communications about goals or targets, was it clear to the recipient of the message what his or her role or task should be? It’s all too common for senior managers to throw out a slew of messages about what has to be achieved, and by when, without taking time to consider who needs to do what. You cannot blame poor communications for an inadequate strategy.
• Did the recipient listen? In upward communications, the most likely cause of any problem is simple: the person above has failed to listen. As executives rush from meeting to meeting, terrified that they might miss something—or that others are plotting behind their backs—they don’t give themselves time to listen to what is said to them. Later, when it becomes clear what they missed was important, they blame the other person for ‘poor communication’. In addition, many executives are so puffed up with their own sense of importance that they feel no need to listen to anyone. They aren’t kept in the dark by others; they do it to themselves.

Can communications be a problem within an organization? Indeed they can. Is it a topic that we should pay attention to? Of course. Is it as widespread a cause of problems as conventional management holds? I don’t think so, but no one will know for certain until managers and executives stop using it as an excuse and start inquiring into the true cause of the problems they face.

Technorati Tags: communications, workplace communications, management, leadership, motivation

Maybe motivation by management does more harm than good
 

I’m beginning to feel about motivation as I do about communication. Why are there so many books and articles about it? If one or two of them contained all you needed to do it well, the others would be unnecessary. It’s more likely that motivation has been hyped, like communication, because it’s a vague topic with broadly positive connotations—an ideal area for offerings from consultants, authors, publishers, and bloggers.

Why do we even need to motivate people? As far as I can see, people are well able to motivate themselves. Look at all the time, effort and money people devote to things that interest them. In the majority of cases, these activities often no material gain. They don’t help people’s careers, they don’t bolster them socially and they consume large amounts of money.

Just one example. Over the past few years, a group of enthusiasts in Great Britain raised enough money, and contributed enough unpaid labor, to build a steam locomotive to a 1940s design—starting from scratch. Now that it’s completed, the media excitement is over, and it pulled its first few trains of excited passengers, the only thing they have to look forward to is raising still more money, and contributing yet more unpaid labor, to keep it operating. Who ‘motivated’ them to do that?

The more I think about it, the more motivation by management seems to me to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Just as war is said to be diplomacy continued by other means, conventional management approaches to motivation are command-and-control given a more fashionable and acceptable face. The carrot may be dangled ahead, but the stick is never very far behind.

Why not appreciate people instead? It’s quick, cheap, uncomplicated and requires no training manuals or courses to learn how to do it.

This table summarizes my concerns with motivation and how I think appreciation avoids the problems.

Motivation has a fundamental dishonesty hidden within

My final concern is this: there’s a fundamental dishonesty at the base of motivation. Take the requirement that any leader should be able to motivate his or her staff. It sounds perfectly reasonable until you test the concept a little further.

I suspect anyone could ‘motivate’ any number of staff by offering them huge amounts of money or unlimited benefits. Of course, this isn’t what is required. The test of a leader’s skill in motivation is the ability to get people to do things without giving them more. It assumes a basic minimum use of incentives. Coercion is always cheapest.

That’s what I mean by a fundamental dishonesty. The leader is expected to save the organization money by persuading or manipulating people to work harder for less reward. This is the hidden agenda behind conventional approaches to motivation. It’s little wonder that there are so many books, articles and training courses on how to do it. It’s just another way of cutting costs.

Alternatives to motivation

• The first alternative I would offer is realism. There will always be situations in which people take jobs that they do not have much interest in, and would prefer not to do, purely out of economic necessity. They agreed to do the job because they needed the money.
       Why not accept this? All these people need is to be told what they have to do and be left to get on with it. Trying to motivate them is pointless. Expecting them to be ‘motivated’ is futile. All it does is add an unnecessary layer of guilt and coercion. Instead of accepting that they do what they’re paid to do, and being grateful for that, managers mark them down as uncommitted and lacking in team spirit — judging them against expectations that have nothing to do with the task, and that the employees never accepted when they signed on.
• My next alternative is appreciation. I think nearly everybody longs to be accepted and appreciated. You only have to look at the opposite to see this is so. People who are rejected and feel themselves to be undervalued swiftly become angry and depressed. You’ll never hear anyone say, “please don’t appreciate me. I really don’t like it.”
       If managers accepted people for who they are and what they can do, and openly appreciated whatever good results they obtained, there would be no need for motivation. People would naturally be drawn to repeating the actions that produced such a happy result.

Am I too skeptical about motivation? I don’t think so. The essence of skepticism is testing things to see if they live up to what is claimed for them. In this case, it seems to me that motivation falls a long way short. At the very least, it suggests the ways being used to motivate people today need considerable revision.

If motivation is truly command-and-control management being carried on behind a smokescreen of smiling faces, it’s hard to see that we need it at all.

Technorati Tags: motivation, management, command-and-control, management myths

Why are working relationships between bosses and subordinates such a problem?

I thought it would be a good idea to review some of the basics of management—topics that we take for granted because they are so familiar to us, or because we assume the last word on them has been spoken and there is nothing more to be said. Motivation is on my list, as is communication, but I am going to start with the topic of working relationships between bosses and their subordinates.

Establishing good working relationships with subordinates is something every manager has to attempt. That’s why it’s the subject of innumerable books, articles, training courses and blogs.

This bothers me. Since managers are obviously still struggling with establishing productive relationships with their team members, the advice being given has to be missing something essential.

I’m not going to claim that I know the answer, but I do have some suggestions for areas of questioning that might move us forward.

Is everyone ‘showing up’ and paying attention?

The most basic requirement for any relationship is that both parties should be ‘present’. By that I mean both should be involved in that relationship and give it their undivided attention, in person, whenever necessary. Yet, what I observe are managers proclaiming their wish to have productive relationships with their staff while avoiding actual contact with them whenever possible.

It’s a truism to point out that relationships have two sides. Have such managers yet to grasp this point? They expect their subordinates to be fully involved in establishing and maintaining a relationship with them, while they make little or no effort in return. Talking with them is like speaking to an answering machine. You get a pre-recorded message back and have no means of knowing whether the message you leave will ever be listened to.

What you give your attention to grows; what you ignore, or attend to only when forced, quickly withers away. No relationship can survive prolonged neglect by either party.

Are they being honest with one another?

Exactly the same point could be made about honesty in relationships. Managers demand that their subordinates be open and honest with them, yet feel no obligation to behave the same way in return.

If you are not honest about a relationship, the message you are giving is that you don’t value it. This is as true of the relationship between boss and subordinate as it is of the relationship between spouses or friends.

Dishonesty destroys a relationship because all are based on some degree of mutual trust. If deal with you only on a one-off, transactional basis, there’s little need for me to trust you. We do what we must do and there’s an end of it. But if you and I are to work together, I have to feel sure that you will do what you promise, tell me the truth and deal with anything that concerns me openly and honestly.

It’s a sad thing to have to say, but many bosses do none of these. It’s little wonder that their subordinates have come to expect duplicity and concealment as normal—or that they repay the boss in kind.

Who’s paying attention?

Another corrupting influence on working relationships is narcissism. Why should anyone enter into a relationship with me, if the focus of that relationship is always fixed on me and what I want?

In today’s rushed workplace, attention is at a premium. That’s all the more reason to direct it where it matters most. A great many bosses think that is on themselves and their own careers. The only time they have any attention left over for their subordinates is when they want to complain or criticize. While the subordinate is ignored for the rest of the time, he or she is expected to find as much attention for the boss as the boss demands—at whatever time and on whatever topic.

Would you stay friends with someone who never found time to give you any attention? Would you stay with a lover who demanded that you fulfill his or her smallest need, while ignoring yours in return? Why should you behave differently with the boss? The boss may indeed be able to demand that you jump as and when requested, but that is a matter of authority, not the basis for a relationship.

The relationship between a boss and a subordinate is always going to be affected by their relative positions in the hierarchy. You have to face this. That’s why so many are based more on the approach you would expect between master and servant than between colleagues pursuing the same goal. Subordinates are paid to carry out instructions from the boss and are expected to comply without resistance. To make the boss feel better, they are also expected to look as if they enjoy it.

Is that a relationship? Hardly. It looks more like prostitution. You pay. I give as little in return as I can get away with . . . and fake some pleasure to make you feel special.

Is the boss trying to change you?

If the boss wants a relationship, it has to be marked by acceptance. No relationship gives either party the right to change the other to fit their expectations or wishes better.

One of the commonest causes is for breakdown in marriage is when one spouse determines to change the other to fix some problem or match an ideal. At once, the relationship becomes manipulative. The one starts ‘doing things’ to the other, who resents it.

Doesn’t this sound like the typical boss dealing with a subordinate? Isn’t this the basis for performance management and similar techniques? I, the boss, assert the right to change you, the subordinate, into what I want. If you don’t accept me doing that, it means you’re ‘ not co-operative’, ‘not a team player’, or ‘lack commitment’. Your career will suffer accordingly. You may even have to be let go.

To accept someone as they are is the basis of all successful relationships. It doesn’t mean you don’t help them to improve, or that you don’t make clear what works for you and what doesn’t. It does mean you don’t try to ‘do things’ to them or manipulate them. Any changes they make must be of their own, free will. You can advise what might be best, help them find a way forward, and, most certainly, show your appreciation of positive results. What you cannot do is coerce them or use the relationship as a means of blackmail.

Time, attention, honesty and acceptance are the keys

Relationships take time. In the end, their success is what you make it. If you don’t take time to pay the other person adequate attention, accept them for who they are and deal with them honestly, the person to blame for any breakdown is you.

Why are relationships between bosses and subordinates such a problem? The answer is clear. They will remain a problem as long as they are seen as tools of authority and used for manipulation under the guise of co-operation. A relationship is not a technique to be applied to an object to produce a particular result. It must consist of open, willing contact between individuals who are equally committed to its success. Anything else is fake and will fail.

Technorati Tags: relations with the boss, dealing with the boss, working relationships, getting on at work

Management isn’t rocket science—nor should it be.
 

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, whose mild criticism of the economic policies of George Bush earned him such vitriolic treatment a few years ago, was quoted recently as worrying that economics as a discipline is going backwards—and that economists, as a profession, understood less about the economy than they had a generation before. I think he’s right, and I think that other areas, especially management, have the same problem. Yet I find that a cause for optimism in the slightly longer term. Let me try to explain why.

We’ll start with economics. When I studied the subject, a very long time ago, economists were essentially interested in how the economy worked, and how it could be made to work better. During the 1970s, pointy-headed rocket scientists took over the discipline, and maneuvered it into a world of mathematical models, which showed how the economy ought to behave, if certain arbitrary assumptions were true.

They gave each other Nobel prizes for cleverer and cleverer demonstrations of the theoretical consequences of tenuous assumptions. This is presumably the origin of the famous joke about the economist who said, “I accept it works in practice. But I’m not sure it can be made to work in theory.” Meanwhile, the real economy was coming apart at the seams in a way that it had no right to.

Management off the rails

It was the same in management. When I was a young civil servant, I was sent on management training courses run by older and more experienced colleagues, who made use of pragmatic research in areas like occupational psychology. I watched, learned from, and was taught by, my bosses every day, on the basis of their own lifetime of experience.

Twenty years later, my staff returned glassy-eyed from expensive, externally run management courses, having learned that management was about ticking colored boxes and lying about the nature of your job to make it look as though everything you did was objectively measurable.

Like economists, management theorists came to believe that messy reality could be reduced to theories and formulas, generally with the objective of getting more work out of fewer people. When reality intervened (evidence that bonus schemes generally degrade performance and destroy cohesion, for example) it was put to one side, so as not to sully the purity of the concept.

In management, as in economics, theoretical castles in the air were built on the basis of arbitrary and un-provable assumptions. (“Consumers act rationally and with perfect knowledge”. “People are only motivated by money.”) By making such simplifying assumptions, elaborate and satisfying intellectual theories could be constructed, and sold to naïve and insecure senior managers.

Floating away from reality

Like economists, management theorists floated away from all contact with reality, and so were useless when organizations faced real crises.

Just as it’s not surprising that some have begun to question whether economic theory serves any useful purpose at all, so the same question has been asked of management theory too. Like economic theory, management has gone backwards in recent years, and organizations are now less well run than they were, by people who are less knowledgeable and less well trained.

These similarities are not a matter of chance; the two disciplines are closely related. They began as an attempt to understand reality, and finished up as an attempt to impose a design on it. Now they lie in pieces on the floor, revealed in all their uselessness and dysfunctionality. Indeed, one partly caused the problems of the other. Managers in the financial sector were selected mainly for their ability to falsify numbers, even if they couldn’t manage their way out of a wet paper bag, and had no business running anything more complicated than a vegetable stall in a market.

Life goes on

But there’s a ‘but’. Just as the economy must go on, so organizations have to continue in some form. I used to think that the decline in organizations was terminal and unstoppable, but now I’m not so sure. It may be that we have touched the bottom and are about to come up again.

The reason is, very simply, that the kind of theories we write about on ‘Slow Leadership’ do work, and have been tested over many years in all kinds of situations. Most fashionable management concepts, on the other hand, work brilliantly in theory, but fall apart immediately in practice. At some point, organizations will have to adopt practices that truly work, or they will perish.

It’s partly a question of perspective and timescale. Anyone with twenty or thirty years experience in organizations must have had the sick feeling of decay and decline. The temptation is to believe that things can only get worse, or at least no better. Yet just as the rules for running a successful economy are well known—if deliberately ignored recently—so management itself is not rocket science. We know how to manage organizations effectively. You can read about it here. Hang on—at some point, we are going to have to go back to reality.

Oh, and I don’t mean to be dismissive of rocket scientists: at least they know how to construct something that actually works—unlike management theorists.

Technorati Tags: managment myths, management theories, practical management, managing better