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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Get the pitchforks.

We haven’t progressed much since Salem. When something goes wrong, most of us waste little time deciding who’s at fault so we can “hold them accountable.” And nowhere is this better-developed than the cable-news commentariat, where, no matter what bad news is being discussed, someone complains that nobody lost their job or went to jail.

The go-to-jail branch is beyond KJR’s purview. Besides, when a corporation commits a felony it can’t be put in jail, nor is it often clear that some individual within the company committed the felony, let alone which one.

Moving on to the importance of firing someone …

When something goes wrong, whether it’s an offshore oil rig blowing up, veterans waiting too long for medical care, or falsified metrics about how long veterans are waiting for medical care, asking who’s at fault means making two false assumptions.

The first is that firing someone for being the root cause will put everyone else on notice that failure has consequences … that the threat of punishment will deter failure.

But it won’t, for a bunch of reasons, like:

  • Very few people come to work every day planning to find yet another way to screw things up, so there’s nothing to deter in the first place.
  • The person who gets punished is only rarely the source of the problem. More likely, they’re just a scapegoat who lacked the political savvy to keep his or her head down to let some other poor sap take the fall.

 All that will be deterred is visibility. Mostly, employees will learn to keep their heads down and their mouths shut.

  • The person doing the firing is probably the person who hired the person they’re firing, which means the terminator screwed up worse than the terminee, and will probably screw up the same way again when replacing the dear departed. What is it that will be deterred, exactly?

So the value of deterrence is the first false assumption. The second is that the root cause of the problem was that someone was at fault in the first place.

You could, I suppose, make the case that no matter what goes wrong, someone was in a position to prevent it and failed to do so. When, for example, the asteroid hit the earth 65 million years ago or so, just before the last few dinosaurs expired, one probably looked at his fellow reptiles and said, “It’s those danged T-Rexes! If they’d only invented rockets and Bruce Willis we wouldn’t be in this mess!”

But really, it’s much more useful to ask what went wrong. When you do you’ll learn what you need to change to make sure the same thing doesn’t go wrong over and over again.

Sometimes, what went wrong was that someone was sitting in the wrong chair — that the person responsible for whatever it was had the wrong attitude, aptitudes, skills, and knowledge to make things work the way they’re supposed to.

If this describes your situation, you should move that person to a different chair — one in which they’re more likely to be successful. If you don’t have any chairs like that, you might have to terminate the employee, who will then, one hopes, find the right chair in a different organization.

You do need the right people in the right chairs. But this isn’t holding anyone accountable. It’s effective staffing — a very different matter. And oh, by the way, managers who find themselves having to do this frequently might ask themselves what they’re doing wrong when it comes to hiring people.

Which is why I give President Obama and General Shinseki credit. There was no mention of holding anyone accountable and no suggestion that Shinseki was being punished. Both agreed the VA needs new, distraction-free leadership. The president complimented Shinseki for his decades of service, as he should have.

General Shinseki has, in his career, proven himself to be immensely capable in a variety of roles. At the VA he demonstrated that turning around a giant bloated bureaucracy isn’t one of them.

And that’s what the VA needs right now. We can hope that when Obama proposes and the Senate confirms Shinseki’s replacement, this is what everyone will be focused on.

Probably, it won’t, because when it comes to public officials, just about everyone, from politicians to the talking heads to, for that matter, the voting public cares more about policy than competence.

What they ignore is that without competence, the chance of following the best policy is unlikely, while with it the chance of implementing policy is greatly enhanced.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

You’re General Shinseki.

What happened to him could happen to you. Here’s how to prevent it:

But first, let’s get two facts straight.

Fact #1: The scandal at the VA isn’t that the VA provides awful care to veterans. Veteran satisfaction with VA care is on a par with private-sector care. An acquaintance who heads a chapter of the Vietnam Veterans Association and has been involved in the current inquiry confirmed for me that care quality isn’t an issue.

Fact #2: Nobody in the VA delayed care or treatment. Veterans seeking care were scheduled into the earliest timeslots available.

The “scandal” is that managers throughout the VA required staff to fudge the numbers to make it appear the agency was meeting its required service levels.

The VA’s leaders, from Shinseki on down, didn’t act on chapter 3 of the KJR Manifesto. They didn’t, that is, avoid Metrics Fallacy #4, which is, in case you need reminding, extending organizational metrics to individual employees. It’s a fallacy because the moment you do you won’t be able to trust your numbers any more.

What was true for Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay at Enron is just as true for a low-level manager at the VA: When your performance is gauged by numbers, you have an incentive to fudge the numbers, which in turn makes the numbers useless for gauging organizational performance.

If you lead a large IT organization I’d bet good money it’s happening to you right now.

Start with time tracking. Employees all know that if the numbers show they’re under-utilized they’re more vulnerable to the next round of layoffs. Think they don’t allocate some of their open time to various categories of doing something productive?

Of course they do.

Now think about Agile. Many Agile variants use some form of backlog management, the “backlog” being the project’s to-do list of desired new or improved system capabilities. These are usually described in terms of “user stories,” which describe what’s needed.

Each user story receives a consensus degree-of-difficulty rating from the Agile team. Agile teams become very good at this, which in turn means Agile projects forecast delivery more accurately than traditional waterfall projects.

It has to be tempting to use weighted user-story development time to rate developer performance.

Resist the temptation. Succumb and here’s what you’ll get: padded degree-of-difficulty estimates, slower development because developers will live down to their inflated estimates, and inflated performance numbers, because of the same padding.

Then there’s the Help Desk. Help Desk managers have a lot in common with VA scheduling managers, in that the amount of staff time available to resolve reported incidents is often quite a bit less than the time needed. Think your Help Desk staff don’t quietly close incidents they’ve touched but that aren’t really resolved, to make their close rate look better and their incident backlog smaller?

Which brings us to the most astonishing aspect of this whole sorry mess: General Shinseki apparently acted like a manager, not like a leader, and not a very good manager, either.

Shinseki, that is, relied on reports, his 12-level chain of command, and extensive time spent with the VA’s regional medical directors.

None mentioned the metrics-fudging. Why would anyone expect them to?

Generals are supposed to know that if they want to know what’s really going on, they need to talk to the soldiers. I’ve encountered no hints that Shinseki did much of this.

Look, fudging management reports to make performance look better is a time-honored tradition in the world of organizational dynamics. This isn’t a scandal in any meaningful sense of the word.

If there’s a scandal, it’s that the metric that mattered most … a metric on which lives depend if it’s the VA, and your relationship with the business depends if it’s the Help Desk … was jeopardized by the insistence on measuring individual performance. That metric? Demand/Capacity. So long as it’s enough less than one to cover day-to-day variations in demand, veterans will get the care they need when they need it and users with failing tech will get the fixes they need.

Turns out, in the VA it’s nowhere close.

Which in turn reveals Shinseki’s true failure.

The VA budget has increased significantly during the past two administrations, yet somehow that budget increase hasn’t turned into sufficient capacity.

With money to spend, Shinseki and his predecessors failed to make sure it was spent hiring and retaining doctors and nurses. That’s a scandal.

I trust the parallel is clear.

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