Monday, February 26, 2007

The Myth of Productivity Without Creativity

I was in some meetings with two heads of a health care company’s new business division who are obese. From what I could glean, they didn’t take the time for exercise largely because they worked so many hours. They’ve compromised their own health as they are busily pursuing business solutions to health problems.

The boundary between work and home has disappeared along with the wires we once needed for phones and computers. Work hours are steadily creeping upwards.

For me, the worst thing about this is that it overlooks what research into the mysteries of the mind has repeatedly proven: gestation is a necessary component in creativity. When people are continually rushed to translate problems and information into solutions, the solutions they arrive at are almost invariably clichéd, predictable, and of little value. Research indicates that people need time after immersion in a problem to let it gestate before expecting a breakthrough.

My work with dozens and dozens of organizations has convinced me of this: there is no shortage that creativity cannot overcome. Whether the organization is short of customers, cash, or talented employees, the shortage can be overcome by creativity. Creativity, however, has trouble overcoming a shortage of time. And as organizations become less creative, they feel compelled to work longer hours, which further reduces the level of creativity.

Lest you think this hypothetical, you may be interested to know that Darwin worked only two to four hours a day. Last I heard, his insights had led to research and products worth hundreds of billions - perhaps trillions of dollars by now. You can't calculate the productivity of creativity any more than you can calculate the number of apples in an apple seed.

Saturday, February 24, 2007

The Myth of Rating and Ranking

Once or twice a year, supervisors all over the world sit down and solve for X in the following equation:

Y * X = 47

X = the employee performance.
Y = the system they perform within.
47 (or whatever value) = what the employee was able to create within that system.

There are so many things that are wrong with this equation, literally.

For one, the value of 47 is itself subject to massive amount of measurement error. The performance of an individual in a system typically results in indeterminate and hard to measure outcomes.

If Y is the value of the "system" in which the individual performs, this system is constantly changing. Even if the company is static, its environment, its markets, its technology are all changing. Y is a dynamic variable, not a static value.

Nonetheless, supervisors around the world are sitting down right now to solve for X. The scariest thing? Most will actually think that they've found "the" value of X and will never realize that as long as they attribute complementary values to Y, they can justify any value of X that they want.

[And yes, alert readers, this is basically a recap of an argument that Deming repeatedly made onto deaf ears. Apparently, the millions of administrators demanding grades and managers giving performance reviews all understand systems, and variability more than the departed Dr. Deming. Either that or they just don't get it and feel compelled to continue with a system of grading and ranking only slightly less archaic than sinking women in water to determine whether or not they are witches.]

Friday, February 23, 2007

The Myth of Motivational Distinctions by “Class”

An often-observed myth held by senior and executive management is that subordinates, especially those well down the hierarchical chain, are motivated solely by a subset of the things that motivate managers higher up the chain. What do we mean by this?

Specifically, when you sit in the boardroom listening to senior executives talk about what motivates the ordinary worker, the character of their conversation takes on a distinctly paternalistic and condescending flavor. The whole conversation seems to descend from an attitude that the senior executives are the caretakers of those in their charge, and that the meek and the poor workers will be ever so glad just to have a minimal set of needs satisfied in order to attain happiness. So the conversation tends to center on the company’s pay scale compared with the industry’s, fringe benefits as a percent of salary, and small rewards and discretionary bonuses for employee suggestions. The dialogue continues with a focus on how much merit increases should be and how happy workers should feel to get them. It next centers on how benevolent the leadership is for paying such a large percentage of health care costs, and how lucky everyone should feel that the company helps pay for long-term disability. Finally, the corporate “fathers” talk about how beneficent they are by having better than average vacation or time-off policies. And what about the company’s 401K contributions?

But when these same senior managers talk about what motivates them—in addition to their big fat paychecks, incentive compensation, stock options, and restricted share awards—other factors arise in the conversation. They talk about the specific challenges of their job and the enjoyment and satisfaction they derive from meeting those challenges. They talk about the range of experience they have gathered and their desires for increased visibility and accountability. They talk about their accomplishments and the pride they take in them. They talk about their ability to contribute to the company’s bottom line. The talk about the challenges to their organization, the steps they’ve taken to overcome them, and their specific achievements. They also talk about their future goals and what it will take to accomplish them.

What we have almost never heard during our time in the executive boardrooms during conversations such as these is a focus on incentives that might otherwise interest a host of employees at least as much, if not more, than the pale subset mulled over by management. Not commonly discussed were things like added responsibility, changing job status to gain experience and knowledge, increased organizational visibility, flexibility in career assignments, greater autonomy, participation in more entrepreneurial activities, more time for personal development and innovation, and participation in more technically challenging work. Why is this?

What if managers saw their employees as having the same potential they see in themselves and devoted time and energy to creating similar kinds of positive incentives and opportunities to fulfill those potentials? What would a company be like then?

Saturday, February 17, 2007

A Myth: It’s OK to Create Personal Goals in a Void

We have to admit that we’re always amazed when a supervisor of ours comes to us once a year and asks us to write up our personal goals for the next year and have them on his desk the next Tuesday. (We’re not talking for the moment about personal development goals, but those that target discrete activities to improve the business, its processes or its products.) How is it that anyone in management thinks an employee can set meaningful goals for improving the business without reference to some framework, some overarching strategic context, to guide him or her?

Our first and immediate reaction is always to ask the same questions, if not out loud, at least in our heads: (1) What are the corporation’s goals for the next year? (2) What are the primary strategies the company is employing to realize those goals? (3) What are the departments’ goals for the year and how do your own personal goals tie with and support them? (4) What specific activities do you think we’d be best suited for that would support all of the above, and (5) How do you see us being best able to align our goals with those at each layer of organization to make sure that what we’re doing is fully supportive of and synchronized with them?

Why does it not seem to dawn on management that one of the most powerful forces they can harness inside an organization is to make sure that everyone is aligned around the strategic objectives the company has set for itself for the ensuing year? Everyone under the sun has heard about “rowing the boat together in the same direction” to maximize efficiency and effectiveness. If these goals truly meant something to the corporation, wouldn’t they want everyone's to contribute maximally to accomplishing the company’s annual goals? Wouldn’t they want to make sure this happened by paying particular attention to synchronizing them at every level (from the company's marketing and product development strategies down to departmental work instructions), and across all the functional silos, as people developed and planned them. And wouldn’t they want to make sure that both up and down and across the organization everyone knew who was doing what, so they could harmonize their efforts throughout the year to produce the greatest effect?

Monday, February 12, 2007

The “Human Nature” Justification Myth

This entry is more along the lines of a “pet peeve” than some great management insight. But please bear with us because it’s important to get this off our chests.

Have you ever noticed that one of the quickest ways a manager (or anyone, for that matter) can end a dialogue, particularly one concerning a point of disagreement, is to pronounce your point of view “countrary to human nature”? This assertion is presented as being definitive, unarguable, sacrosanct, and therefore, finally determinative of any point under discussion. Once this decree has been uttered, any further disagreement or challenge may simply be viewed as argumentative and insubordinate. The issue has now been decided once and for all, by fiat and undeniable truth, hasn’t it?

Resorting to this argument, in our estimation, simply avoids having to confront or deal with any criticisms of the status quo, recommendations for change, or counterpoints to prior assertions. It is all that is left to be said when the manager runs out of valid and cogent counterarguments to your proposition. But its message is clear: leave it alone.

To what extent do you view your manager or supervisor as a great student of human nature? When he or she blurts out in the context of a debate something like “human beings are by nature competitive animals, and therefore trying to put together incentives for group cooperation is a waste of time,” how often do you actually find yourself in agreement with the manager’s pronouncement? Do you sit and question the degree to which you actually believe his or her statement and the conclusions implicit in it?

How many supervisors have actually been educated to any extent on the “nature” of human beings? Are they literate in the most recent scientific findings concerning human perception, human psychological development, human motivation, or attitude and belief formation. Or has most of their learning come through the “school of hard knocks,” whereby virtually all of their conclusions about human nature have been filtered through their old work environments’ cultures. Aren’t they simply bearing witness to the way things have always been in the worlds in which they’ve survived in the past and figured out ways to succeed? How much of their experience and personal evolution has been fueled by environments that encouraged individual learning and growth, risk-taking, experimentation, and continuous formal education. Is their pronouncement simply more along the lines of “we’ve always done it that way,” or “better not challenge the status quo if you know what’s good for you”?

We would argue that it’s not far-fetched to claim that it is human nature to defecate in the woods, if history is any guide of how humans behaved for thousands years before the advent of fixed communities and plumbing. Nevertheless, humans have evolved over the millennia with the advent of ideas such as civility, cleanliness, cooperation, and social responsibility. One of the great advantages of being human is that, unlike other creatures in the animal world, we are not saddled once and for all with our instinctual behaviors. Nor do we have to be slaves to prescriptions justified by pronouncements that they correspond with “human nature.” We can actually use our cerebral cortexes to develop new ideas and ways of thinking and acting that generate more positive and effective outcomes in the world.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

The “Openness” Myth

John was sitting on a weekly departmental “all hands” phone call when the question was asked by the general manager, “How valuable did you find the 2-hour web training session that was conducted yesterday by the IT department?” After some brief hesitation by all the participants, someone eventually pipes up to say that he thought the training was quite well done and very valuable for all of the participants. You smile to yourself because you know that the training was horrible: the trainer failed to present the material cogently and succinctly; the trainer offered no context for the material being presented; and, the material seemed to be presented disjointedly, in random order, without observations about the relative importance of different elements, and with little explanation as to its use cases. What do you do now? Should you say something?

Well, what you do depends largely on the culture of your organization. If it’s permissible to be honest and open about how you felt, diplomatically of course, you voice your concerns over what you think was missing from the training and make suggestions on how to improve it. You also acknowledge your appreciation for the effort made, but suggest concrete ways in which it could have provided greater benefit to you.

If it’s not permissible to be open and honestly critical of the effort made by another employee, then you simply parrot the same positive refrain issued by the first commenter and let it go at that. In fact, to do otherwise might be viewed as openly challenging or confrontational by the first commenter, who might therefore be offended by your “flagrant” contradiction. So, you refrain from saying what you think; you try to figure out what to say and how to say it so as not to offend the original speaker or the trainer. Or maybe you just waffle and slur some comments in ways that make them largely indecipherable.

Many companies take great pride in what they consider to be their open and honest work environments. But underneath management’s affirmations of these core values and beliefs--honesty and openness--often lies much withholding of sincere dialogue, innovative ideas, suggestions for process improvements, and valid criticisms of current process and policies. People ultimately disengage from the company meetings and supervisor dialogues for three primary reasons: (1) they know that their comments and suggestions will largely be ignored; (2) they realize that their ideas and contributions will be dismissed without explanation or exploration, because that’s what has always happened, or (3) they come to resent management’s “air” of indifference and condescension for anything that challenges the norm. Without the ability to make open and sincere contributions to the company’s body of knowledge and to influence how things are done, people will eventually withdraw from making such offerings. Once this happens, the company loses not only the immediate opportunities for individual and collective performance improvements, but it begins to stifle the development of its employees’ potential through their disengagement from improving the organization and any real long-term organizational learning.

In all honesty, ask yourself the following questions: How often does you manager solicit ideas and feedback from you and others about what's happening inside the organization? In what ways specifically do your supervisor and senior managers work to create a climate of openness, honesty, and trust with respect to the feedback they solicit? Do they then comment directly on the observations, criticisms and recommendations you make; give them due consideration and provide you with their perceptions and conclusions in return; or simply listen and then ignore everything you’ve said, with no explanation? What kinds of dialogues are held around your offerings? How are people rewarded and recognized for such contributions? How does your supervisor react when people’s recommendations or comments appear to contradict the mainstream thinking? Depending on your answer to these questions, your organization may be learning a lot or nothing at all.