Two different people I respect recommended this book to me
for two different reasons. And it turns out they were both right. It’s a gold
mine of useful information about one of the most crippling afflictions facing
organizations today—the inability to turn knowledge into action.
As with most business books I read, the lessons I take away
are not always the ones the author intends. But in reading them, ideas will
often strike me with a clarity they very infrequently have in the
mile-a-minute, topsy-turvy world of expectations and performance I seem to find
myself in. I’ll list just a sampling of the “a-ha” moments I had while reading
this book.
There Are No Wrong
Actions
Here’s a handy chart.
How to Drive Fear and Inaction Out of
Organizations
1. Praise, pay and promote people who deliver bad news to their bosses.
2. Treat failure to act as the only true failure; punish inaction, not unsuccessful actions.
3. Encourage leaders to talk about their failures, especially what they have learned from them.
4. Encourage open communication.
5. Give people second (and third) chances.
6. Banish people—especially leaders—who humiliate others.
7. Learn from, and even celebrate, mistakes, particularly trying something new.
8. Don’t punish people for trying new things.
1. Praise, pay and promote people who deliver bad news to their bosses.
2. Treat failure to act as the only true failure; punish inaction, not unsuccessful actions.
3. Encourage leaders to talk about their failures, especially what they have learned from them.
4. Encourage open communication.
5. Give people second (and third) chances.
6. Banish people—especially leaders—who humiliate others.
7. Learn from, and even celebrate, mistakes, particularly trying something new.
8. Don’t punish people for trying new things.
Guess which one jumps out at me the most. “Treat failure to
act as the only true failure; punish inaction not unsuccessful actions.” If you
needed one sentence to summarize a winning formula, I think this would be it.
Increasingly, in my line a work at least, I’m beginning to realize that there
are no wrong courses of action. Some courses are better than others, but no
course of action, taken with forethought and good intentions, is actually bad,
because they all help move the project or the conversation forward. If you
accept this premise, then the only truly wrong course of action is to take no
action at all—to allow opportunity for engagement and learning to slip by.
Measure Performance
at the System Level
The model of behavior implicit in the measurement systems
used by most firms is that individuals are atomistic and economic, rather than
social, creatures. The atomistic view is captured by having measure for each
individual. This procedure presumes that (1) individual results are the
consequences of individual decisions and actions and that (2) individual
outcomes and individual behaviors are under the control and discretion of these
individuals, so that results and decisions can be reasonably reliably attributed
to individuals.
There’s a lot of wisdom in that short paragraph. It stresses
the need for system-based performance measures in any organization that behaves
like an interconnected and interdependent network of actors (i.e., just about
every organization on Planet Earth).
What you are able to accomplish, and indeed, what you choose
to do and how you behave, is not solely under your individual control. Rather,
your behavior and performance are influenced by the actions, attitudes, and
behaviors of many others in the immediate environment.
Right on. Find ways to measure performance at a system
level, and provide incentives for contributing to systemic, not individual,
performance.
Measure the Productivity
of the Relationship, Not Individual Performance
More good wisdom on the performance appraisal process, this
time direct from the vice president of human resources at the software firm SAS
Institute:
If there were a good performance appraisal process, everybody
would be using it. … I don’t think you can really manage someone’s performance.
I think you can observe the results. I think you can give them the tools. I
think you can set short and long-term goals. And you can sit back and see if it
happens or it doesn’t happen. … Our idea is to have performance management be
based on conversation instead of documentation.
Three cheers for that. And from a 1998 Fast Company article:
Too many leaders confuse feedback with paperwork. “Filling
out a form is inspection, not feedback,” says Kelly Allan … “History has taught
us that relying on inspections is costly, improves nothing for very long, and
makes the organization less competitive.”
What does matter, evidently, is a metric that is closely
related to your core competitive advantage. For SAS, in the very competitive
software industry, that was employee turnover. Managers were evaluated
primarily on their ability to attract and retain people, and the company went
to great lengths to ensure that it was a great place to work.
In a relationship-oriented business based primarily on
intellectual talent, SAS encourages long-term relationship behavior through its
measurements and through what it chooses not to measure and make public. In a
place in which the attraction and retention of talent is key, turnover and
factors related to the building of talent are what the firm measures. The
emphasis, even in a geographically dispersed organization of 5,000 people,
remains on interpersonal communication—and emphasis consistent with the
relationship-oriented business model and philosophy. You have relationships
with people, not with reports or numbers.
Lots of good lessons here for the association world—a place
where the emphasis on people, talent and relationships is equally important.
Internal Competition
Retards Organizational Succeess
The authors spend a lot of time talking about the value of
competition in the workplace. They are, in fact, quite dismissive of it,
feeling that it retards performance far more frequently than advances it.
Here’s an interesting section, reminiscent of many of the lessons in Dan Pink’s
Drive, published more than a decade
later.
The confusion between what it takes to do well in routine
tasks, especially physical tasks, versus novel intellectual tasks is another
reason that people develop misguided beliefs about the positive effects of
competition on performance. … Hundreds of studies show that intellectual tasks
that require learning and inventing new ways of doing things are best performed
under drastically different conditions than tasks that have been done over and
over again in the past.
The authors argue, persuasively, I think, that…
People are better at learning new things, being creative, and
doing intellectual tasks of all kinds when they don’t work under close
scrutiny, they don’t feel as if they are constantly being assessed and
evaluated, and they aren’t working in the presence of direct competitors.
Learning, creative, intellectual work is far more associated
with the modern workplace that raw, repetitive tasks. Furthermore, this kind of
work requires something the authors call interdependence—productivity,
performance, and innovation that result from joint action, not just individual
efforts and behavior. And the problem is that…
When even modest levels of learning are required and some
interdependence exists, individual incentives and internal competition
discourage needed knowledge sharing, cooperation and mutual assistance.
The Value of Core
Assumptions
I’ve been reading and thinking about the value of values,
lately. The clarity and focus that can come from a clearly identified and
respected set of organizational values. But one firm profiled in this book
takes things a set further. Their core values—fun, fairness, integrity and
social responsibility—strike me as yet another meaningless list. But they have
something in addition to that.
It also has a set of core assumptions about people that it
tries to implement in its management approach: that people (1) are creative,
thinking individuals, capable of learning; (2) are responsible and can be held
accountable; (3) are fallible; (4) desire to make positive contributions to
society and like a challenge; and (5) are unique individuals, deserving of
respect, not numbers or machines.
Now that is something I can sink my teeth into. Imagine what
managing people would be like if every day—especially when we were facing some
kind of management difficulty—we reminded ourselves of these five simple facts.
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