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Imagine your company, like so many others, makes use of some form of stacked ranking system in its employee performance management process.

Now imagine you’re the CIO, and don’t much like it.

What do you do about it?

Business executives find themselves in this sort of situation all the time. It’s why politics is a good thing, in spite of the word’s negative connotations: Politics is the art of finding a way forward when people disagree about the best path forward.

Which is pretty much every time people (1) have to find a path forward; and (2) aren’t alone.

Another piece of the puzzle: There’s an immeasurable but critical aspect to personal effectiveness when you’re an executive, called political capital. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. If you haven’t, you probably haven’t accumulated any. If you have, you know … it’s a combination of trust earned, favors provided, and reputation acquired for not needlessly making waves over every decision you don’t completely agree with.

If you’ve accumulated political capital, live with stacked ranking, and don’t like it, you probably … and probably, wisely … decided there’s no point expending any trying to fight it.

When you’re an executive, that is, you often have to support positions you don’t entirely agree with, and sometimes have to support positions you vehemently disagree with.

Support? Yes, support. From a personal-integrity perspective, this can be something of a challenge, as when someone who reports to you asks you point blank how you can defend such a cockamamie system. Your alternatives:

  • “Yes, it is a cockamamie system, but you know what those bureaucrats in HR are like.”
  • “As leaders we need to take responsibility for recognizing that some employees aren’t measuring up. This is part of it.”
  • “Gee, I’m late for a meeting. We’ll have to continue this conversation another time.”

Better but not good: “I don’t fully agree with a lot of things. When I don’t I’m not always right. Regardless, when the organization makes decisions I support them because that’s part of being a leader. And no, I won’t list which ones I do and don’t like.”

However you decide to answer, stacked ranking really fits only a very particular circumstance — an organization plagued with complacency and mediocrity, and overstaffed because of it. Any place else it’s a seriously bad idea.

So let’s pretend, just among ourselves, you think getting rid of stacked ranking is important enough that you’re willing to do something about it. Your first step is to find out why the company first adopted the practice. Make sure the original root cause has been fixed. Otherwise, don’t even try.

If you’re still willing to expend some of that political capital we were talking about earlier, as with financial capital, a willingness to spend the political kind isn’t the same as the knowing what to spend it on.

Your down payment is discreetly discussing the matter with your closest confidants among your fellow executives. If you’re all alone in this, give up, and unless they think there’s likely to be significant support for the change among the rest of the executive leadership team, give up.

Next: Amass literature that supports your position, and that offers practical alternatives, because whatever its flaws, stacked ranking is practical. Also, with your confidants, accumulate a half-dozen to a dozen examples of good employees who left the company because of the system.

Next: Assess the head of Human Resources. He or she might be wanting to change the system, but not brave (or foolish) enough to take the lead. If so, make HR your next stop. If not, wait until just after the next review cycle — changing a system like this mid-cycle is worse than having the system. Timing matters.

Then, meet with the CEO. Announce the subject. Provide the best of the best of the literature. Explain that you’ve spoken with quite a few members of the executive team, and there’s a lot of support for doing something different.

Ask to put the subject on the agenda of the next executive leadership team meeting, at which you make your points and suggest the company bring in some independent experts to assess the situation and recommend a course of action.

Yes, consultants. There is a place in the world for them (us), and this is one of them … defusing a politically explosive situation by providing an independent perspective.

Because part of winning the point is acknowledging you might be wrong about it.

One more thing: Win or lose, your political capital is now depleted. Don’t take any other strong stands until you’ve had a chance to replenish it.

* * *

Don’t worry. I’m not trying to drum up business. This isn’t one of my consulting topics. It isn’t even one of our (aka Dell Global Business Consulting’s) topics.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Which matters more, working on what’s most important, or doing whatever you’re working on well?

I raised the question a couple of weeks ago and several correspondents asked for more. Here goes.

As the figure shows, doing the work matters more, because no matter what you’re working on, if you never get it done, or deliver junk when it does get done, you won’t deliver any value (no, this isn’t intended to be “ripped from today’s headlines.”)ValueQuadrants

So unless you or whoever gives you your assignments has truly horrible judgment, if you get the job done, whatever the job, you will deliver some value.

Which means that if both IT governance … budgeting and priority-setting … and delivery are broken, fix delivery, because in the greater scheme of things, doing the work is always more important than managing the work.

More important, at least, if your measure is the value you deliver. If you value ego-gratification or the amount of power and influence you have, that’s a different matter.

But not entirely, because if those who set direction and manage the work don’t run competent organizations, they’ll need to add blame-shifting to their repertoire of management skills. Otherwise, the visibility they crave will backfire.

Which is the logic behind guideline #7 of the KJR Manifesto — before you can be strategic you have to be competent. If you can’t deliver the goods, nobody will care about your brilliant insights.

Especially with respect to IT, there’s another reason competence trumps priority-setting in the corporate hierarchy of values, and it’s a nice irony: If priority-setting is more important than getting the work done, that just elevates the importance of getting the work done even more, because there are only two meaningful outcomes of the IT priority-setting process — scheduling or rejection.

It’s like this: A list of projects, ranked by priority, is more or less useless. Some projects need the deliverables of other projects, so they can’t start until their predecessors are done no matter what their priority. Others depend on staff assigned to other projects too, so one or the other has to wait.

And, business planners, being planners, have an annoying habit of wanting to know what’s going to get done this year.

Right down at its core, what IT governance does, then, (really, business change governance but that’s a well-worn topic here so let’s not quibble) is maintain a projects master schedule. And because what determines when one project on the master schedule can start is when projects it depends on actually finish, they’d better finish on time. Predictably on time.

It’s that competence thing — without it, the project master schedule is just pretending.

Doing the work is always more important than managing the work. Want more evidence? Let’s go to annoying sports metaphors. Like, in football, the basic blocking and tackling wins more games than calling brilliant plays.

If you prefer baseball, if you don’t have great bunters and fast runners, there’s no point calling a suicide squeeze.

Perhaps you like historical metaphors. Consider the case of George Washington. By any reasonable measure he was barely competent at strategy and tactics, and any ability he might have had at logistics was subverted by the Continental Congress. What made Washington a great general was his ability to turn his troops into a professional army, and his ability to keep his army together (I’m relying mostly on David McCullough’s 1776 for this interpretation).

Does this mean leaders and managers are unimportant? Of course not. Executives and managers who have outstanding talent in their organizations and who manage high-performing teams are in that position because they’ve developed the ability to attract, recruit, retain, develop and promote the best employees in their fields.

Oh, and there’s one more reason doing the work is more important than managing the work.

Imagine you’re a manager. The employees who report to you aren’t particularly good at what they do, and they don’t function well as a team either. But, you figure you’re a good enough manager to overcome this disadvantage. So you start to hold people accountable, hold their feet to the fire, and hold their hands when they need it.

All this holding takes a lot of time and attention. Where does it come from? From your ability to gather information and think about what it means … exactly what you can’t afford if you think what matters is setting brilliant strategies and tactics, and making smart decisions.

It’s the Edison Ratio one more time: Genius isn’t just one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. If the 99% isn’t very good, there won’t be any time left for the 1%.

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