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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

In boot camp, the military first starves recruits to get rid of their flab. Then it feeds them to build muscle.

Or at least, that’s what I’ve read in various fictional accounts. Not having had the pleasure, I can confirm neither the truth nor the efficacy of this technique. It’s remarkably similar to one I don’t particularly like, but whose efficacy I must admit, for shaking the dust off a complacent organization: Shrinking it through layoffs, then gradually adding the staff necessary to create a newly effective organization.

Among the hallmarks of a complacent organization is the accumulation of second-rate and third-rate employees. You know who I’m talking about. Second-raters just barely pull their weight. Third-raters don’t even do that, but have perfected the ability to hide behind the few strong performers who produce most of the organization’s results. How does this happen?

Complacent leaders hire placeholders who, on paper, have the right skills and who, in their interviews, make it clear they won’t rock the boat. Hiring happens quickly so the hiring manager can go back to sleep. Then the few strong performers, who already have a well-developed bad habit of carrying everyone else, will carry the new faces as well. It’s just business as usual.

And in you come, ready to get your motor running and head out on the highway. What are you going to do? Surgically remove the second and third-raters one at a time?

Which is why the starve-then-feed method is both popular and effective. It’s quick, and it avoids the overwhelming effort needed to document termination-worthy performance one employee at a time. Which in many cases won’t be possible, as many of the employees who need replacing perform at a level that’s just good enough, and report to managers who are incapable of distinguishing good enough from better.

This makes the starve-then-feed gambit hard to argue with. It’s distasteful, but sometimes it’s the only practical tactic.

If you’re in this situation and see starve-then-feed as your only practical option, please … retain and lay off based on merit, not seniority. The whole point is to raise the bar after all. Make it your choice, not an opportunity to volunteer for a generous severance package.

But take the following steps before you do. They’re essential to making sure the organization survives the experience:

  • Develop effective means for communicating directly with the IT staff — listening to them, informing them, and persuading them. Don’t rely on your chain of command. It’s a big part of the problem. It certainly won’t transmit ideas in either direction with high fidelity.
  • Define the desired change in culture, and start the process of culture change. You need a clear picture of where you are now, and a precise description of the change you’re about to undertake. If you don’t, you’ll find yourself overwhelmed with case-by-case decision-making, which inevitably you’ll make in inconsistent ways that cause you to undermine yourself. When you can articulate what you want, start the program. Everything that’s going to happen must fit the design of the desired culture, not the old one.
  • Replace your problem managers. There’s a reason the organization has accumulated so many ineffective employees — the people who hired them and kept them on. Leave the same managers in place and they’ll simply replace the old group of ineffective employees with a whole new group of employees just like their predecessors, except the new ones also lack deep knowledge of your company and its systems.And by the way: One of the most important reasons for developing direct communication channels with staff is that you’ll be replacing many current managers — the existing chain of command.
  • Preserve critical staff. Remember those few strong performers who are carrying everyone else? You can’t afford to lose them. Identify them, develop personal relationships with them; promote those who are looking for that kind of opportunity; give them raises; and let them know — overtly and without any tiptoeing around the subject — that you consider them essential to the organization.
  • Give everyone a chance, but not a lot of breathing room. Managers first: Some have been itching for a chance to lead well but have been stymied by the old leadership and culture. That goes for the staff even more. They deserve a chance.It’s a fine balancing act, though. If you give them too much of a chance, you’ll find yourself reinforcing the old culture instead of promoting the new one.

On the other hand, if you don’t give them any chance you’ll unnecessarily jettison important skills, organizational knowledge, and loyalty. Replacing that will cost a lot. Not only that, but by providing opportunities to succeed, you’ll have fewer sleepless nights yourself.

Think of it as enlightened self-interest.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

“Better,” said Voltaire, “is the enemy of good.”

I used this quote last year, describing it as a healthy attitude, to finish a column proposing seven warning signs of a culture of complacency. In response, the estimable Frank Hayes, who writes “Frankly Speaking” for Computerworld and is one of the best commentators in the industry, was kind enough to respond:

“It’s an incorrect translation. What Voltaire wrote, possibly quoting an existing French proverb, was: Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien. “Mieux” does translate as “better.” But “le mieux” is always translated as “the best.” (No, I don’t know how they say “the better” in French.)

“So the translation should be: “The best is the enemy of good” — (unattainable) perfection is the enemy of (attainable) quality. Which is a worthwhile thing for us to remember, but it’s the flip side to the point you were making: better is (and should be) the enemy of good enough.

“Which doesn’t need to be translated from French — just translated into a lot of people’s brains.”

It’s an outstanding point (as you’d expect from both Voltaire and Frank Hayes): While satisfaction with mediocrity defines complacency, insistence on perfection is paralyzing. It’s pointless anyway, because the universe is a stochastic place where just about anything can happen. All the molecules of air in your bedroom could congregate in one corner while you’re sleeping, leaving you in a vacuum to asphyxiate. All of the uranium atoms in the nuclear reactor closest to you could decay at the same moment, causing a colossal explosion. Microsoft could release a version of Internet Explorer without security holes.

Hey, I didn’t say these events were likely. But they’re possible given the laws of physics as we know them. All that’s kept them from happening to you are the mathematical laws of probability.

In IT, competent project managers, system administrators and application developers all recognize the stochastic nature of their domains. Project team members get sick, hired away, or reassigned. Servers fail for indeterminable reasons and won’t come back up. The state-of-the-art development tool being used for a bunch of mission-critical code turns out to multiply wrong under certain unlikely circumstances.

Based on much of the correspondence responding to last year’s columns on complacent IT organizations, it appears some readers don’t live in a stochastic universe at all: In a truly well-run IT organization, they assert, everyone can leave promptly at 5pm every day because everything is always under control.

I don’t think so. Yes, in a well-run IT organization there will be days where nothing untoward interrupts the plan. In large, well-run IT organizations, though, the laws of large numbers take over and the odds that something goes awry increase to the point of inevitability. If a culture of complacency permeates, that won’t matter — everyone will leave at quitting time. In a healthier culture, professionals will work late to get the job done.

Quite a few readers agreed with my point — that if IT is a ghost town at 5pm it’s a symptom of complacency — but argued I shouldn’t have said so, because many executives would read it to mean that if anyone leaves at 5pm there’s a problem. That’s in spite of my also saying, in the same paragraph, “If everyone works late hours and six or seven day weeks all the time, it suggests a very different problem: Desperation. It comes from strong motivation — usually fear — coupled with severe ineffectiveness.” Their argument, while correct, is dangerous advice.

Writers are responsible for clarity. We’re responsible for avoiding ambiguity to the extent possible given constraints of space, limitations of language, and last-minute changes imposed by the copy desk. We’re responsible for marshaling persuasive facts and logic into a narrative framework that guides readers through the complexity of the subject matter.

We aren’t, however, responsible for every reader’s ability to comprehend. Some can’t. Others choose to mischaracterize because they read to gather ammunition, not new ideas.

This matters to you. As an IT leader, communication — listening, informing, and persuading — is a critical skill. Often, you’re informing and persuading non-technical executives of the need for hard-to-explain yet vital investments, such as those required to maintain a healthy IT architecture.

Communicators who spend their time and energy worrying about the ability of others to misunderstand them avoid controversial topics altogether, concerned that the consequences of someone misunderstanding their message are too large to risk. Business being a political environment, it’s a valid concern.

If you allow this concern to outweigh all others, though, you’ll have earned two labels: “craven,” and “politician.”

If you’ll forgive the redundancy.

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