All Posts in Business Ethics

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“Oh, you hate your job? There’s a support group for that. It’s called Everybody, and they meet at the bar.”

It’s a Drew Carey line. Think he was exaggerating? He was. By 35 percent. That, according to the “Bad Boss Study” led by Michelle McQuaid, is the fraction of U.S. employees who are happy at their job. The remainder would, if given the choice, prefer a better boss to a raise.

How reliable are the numbers? Beats me. While the results of this study have been widely reported, the study itself is well hidden. I know nothing about the methodology, whether survey questions were without bias, the sample and error bar sizes, whether the study was subjected to peer review, or, for that matter, anything else that would affirm its validity.

It is, that is, pretty much par for the course for this sort of thing. Caveat emptor.

But even if we imagine the study was poorly done, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the leadership provided by U.S. managers is pretty bad.

Why is that? And what, as a leader yourself, can you do about it in your organization?

Here’s one place to start: Stop reading the Harvard Business Review. This will save you time and money, and will have the same effect with respect to bad ideas that frequent hand-washing has on infectious diseases: It will help you avoid exposure.

There is, for example, “One Out of Every Two Managers Is Terrible at Accountability,” (Darren Overfield and Rob Kaiser, 11/8/2012, and thanks to Mike Bowler for bringing it to my attention). According to the authors, “… far and away the single-most shirked responsibility of executives is holding people accountable. No matter how tough a game they may talk about performance, when it comes to holding people’s feet to the fire, leaders step back from the heat.”

How do we know? Their “database of 5,400 upper-level managers from the US, Europe, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific gathered since 2010” tells us so. But speaking of missing methodologies, theirs is conspicuously absent.

Want evidence of the authors’ contempt for evidence? They ascribe much of the problem to “The youngest members of the workforce, especially in the U.S.,” who have a poor work ethic, an entitlement mentality, and “have grown up in a sheltered environment; they expect praise and recognition and can be indignant when it is not forthcoming.”

The evidence? “… blogs at US News, Daily Finance, Forbes.” That’s right. Several other bloggers say so too.

The authors don’t even bother to explain why they think holding people accountable is a good idea. They simply assert it as a management axiom.

But it’s a practice whose drawbacks exceed its virtues. Holding people accountable – “holding their feet to the fire” in the authors’ terms – assumes the root cause rather than discovering it. It simply presumes that if something goes wrong, someone must be at fault, and that the manager knows who that person is.

But if there’s fault, it’s almost always the manager’s, because when something goes wrong the most likely causes are such barriers to success as bad processes, frequent interruptions, inept delegation, politics, a failure to provide proper training, or otherwise leaving systemic problems in place that exemplify Peter Drucker’s principle that “Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.”

And if the root cause really is a bad employee, who made the hiring decision?

Now, imagine the manager dodges all of these pitfalls. Something goes wrong and it is one person’s fault – not malfeasance or sabotage, but an employee simply botching a responsibility. Does anyone seriously think that, given a choice between negative reinforcement and positive coaching, the negative reinforcement leads to a superior result?

The answer: Yes, some people do think so. They’re called “bad managers” because negative reinforcement turns teams into a giant game of Whack A Mole, where employees keep their heads down so they aren’t the ones to get whacked when something goes wrong. Let the manager know there’s a problem? That’s an invitation to be the scapemole.

So as holding people accountable leads to employees doing everything they can to keep their manager in the dark, it also leads to managerial ignorance. Perfection!

My recommendation: If you want to fight the scourge of bad management, start by helping the managers who report to you choose their sources of information wisely.

Like, for example, avoiding The Harvard Business Review.

The superior alternative is right in front of you.

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Somehow, I’ve become embroiled in a controversy (why do these things happen to me?) about the proper use of “professional.”

Many of those who have studied the topic insist it be restricted to, at a minimum, roles for which accredited institutions award certifications.

Some go further, wanting “professional” to be used only when the law doesn’t allow anyone to practice a craft without certification. By this definition, of course, cosmetologists qualify, but there is no such thing as an IT professional.

My own position? As I lack the authority to enforce linguistic usages on anyone (and if I had it, I’d use it to make using hopefully to mean I hope a felony), I limited my part of the conversation to description rather than prescription: “Professional” has at least four different meanings. In addition to the two already listed, it can mean “someone who practices a trade or craft that makes use of an extensive, well-defined body of knowledge and skills.” That’s what we mean when we talk about IT professionals.

And, it can mean “someone who gets paid for doing what they do.” I’m old enough to remember when professional athletes were barred from Olympic competition, the only difference between professional and amateur athletes being whether they’re paid for their efforts.

For some reason, these rather obvious points made some participants in the conversation downright grumpy.

Which brings us to the seemingly unrelated topic of whether incentive pay amounts to bribery, as claimed here not very long ago (“Do retention bribes make sense?” KJR, 7/2/2012).

The place to start is the definition. Many correspondents insisted it isn’t a bribe unless the result is nefarious or illegal behavior, so incentive pay isn’t bribery.

But by that definition, giving a politician money in exchange for their agreeing to vote a certain way on an issue isn’t a bribe either. After all, voting a certain way on an issue isn’t illegal. For that matter, changing one’s mind, and therefore one’s vote isn’t illegal. Changing it in exchange for cash or other favors is what makes the cash or favors a bribe … and therefore illegal … in the first place.

Unless it’s a campaign contribution, of course, which, I’m told, is an exercise of free speech, not a bribe. Which of course makes complete sense: The purpose of free speech is to allow us to persuade each other through the presentation of compelling arguments, and what argument is more compelling to elected officials than a large wad of cash they can use in their attempts to get elected?

I trust the distinction is clear. But I digress. The question is whether incentive compensation is bribery. As what makes bribing an elected official illegal is that it gets them to do what they otherwise would not have done, that appears to be the essence of the beast.

Which leads to this frequently expressed objection to the incentive-comp-as-bribery proposition: If that’s a bribe, isn’t all compensation a bribe? After all, very few of us would show up for work if our employers stopped paying us.

It’s a good point. A very good point, that leads to a very important insight about leadership. But it isn’t quite right, because basic compensation doesn’t get anyone to do what they wouldn’t otherwise do.

Unless you’re wealthy enough to retire with the lifestyle you desire (and aren’t in a position to get enough money to live on via other means, like extortion or armed robbery) your options are limited: Starve to death or get a paying job.

So when your employer pays you, it isn’t to get you to go to work. You’d do that anyway. It’s to influence your choice of where to go to work—a very different matter.

Which gets us to why the point matters: Many business “leaders” (as opposed to leaders) think that money is the only tool they have to get employees to work for them, instead of somewhere else. They think, that is, they have to bribe people to work for them.

And so, they pay more than they have to and get worse results for it, because if money is all that matters to their employees, how they treat their employees doesn’t matter. “Leaders” like this don’t treat them very well.

Which leads to this week’s question: What could an employer offer you to get you to work for them if the best they could pay you was 15% less than what you’re making right now?

And this week’s second question: If you’re in management, do you offer this to the employees who work for you right now?

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