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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

“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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|In: Cloud|Last Updated:

Ready for a classic horror story?

It’s a dark and stormy night (of course it is). Deep shadows are spreading. In them, a nameless evil starts to take form.

A secret society is there to name that evil and fight the shadows (sound fx: crack of thunder). But it needs your help!

The secret society is Internal Audit, the spreading shadows are shadow projects — the too-small-to-notice-but-too-important-to-let-fail projects business managers charter. The name of the nameless evil? “Shadow IT“!

Now you know why I don’t write fiction.

It is, however, a horror story because the last thing IT should be doing in most organizations is treating these as evils.

The story so far:

Before the cloud became a force, IT had mostly stomped out shadow IT by locking down desktops, limiting the availability of MS Access, and disabling VBA. That successfully eliminated the risk that non-IT staff might create value with IT innovation, while shifting intruders from buffer-overflow exploits to phishing attacks.

But then came the cloud, and specifically Salesforce.com, which represented a triple threat:

  • It catered to Sales, the least rule-conscious group in any business. Being part of revenue and all, it has more political muscle than IT, too.
  • Unlike most business applications, Salesforce.com can be implemented effectively without any integration into other business systems.
  • IT couldn’t stomp it out without instituting Internet filtering, which is a labor-intensive pain in the patootie requiring additional headcount the CFO probably wouldn’t approve were IT to try to make its case.

Face it: The cloud means shadow IT is going to happen. That ship has sailed. We can either climb on board or wait at the Greyhound station, doing what we can to keep our so-called “internal customers” from climbing onto buses they no longer want to ride anyway.

Oh, and in a classic case of turnabout being annoyingly fair play, while IT can’t stop shadow IT anymore, our partners throughout the business can easily stop us from climbing the gangplank to join them.

Then there are shadow projects. Like shadow IT, shadow projects happen outside the company’s approval processes. The managers who want them to happen simply charter and assign them, because they have enough authority without anyone else butting in to make sure they’re “done right,” whatever that might mean.

Something else the two shadows have in common: As a practical matter, their costs are low, their benefits are, in proportion, high, and the cost of stopping them would exceed the cost of just letting them happen.

One more characteristic they share is that they increase risk, because the folks who take them on often aren’t as familiar with the company’s compliance requirements as IT professionals are who have to take them into account with everything they do.

That doesn’t, however, mean IT has to become the Deputy Dawg of company compliance.

The fact of the matter is, Internal Audit gets a bad rap in most companies. It’s goal isn’t to prevent people from doing their jobs. It’s to recommend a healthy set of management controls, then to make sure everyone complies with the controls management actually adopts.

Describe a hypothetical shadow project to Internal Audit. Make it a typical one — one that’s going to build some shadow IT that won’t cost very much, and will do something useful and profitable. Ask if it should be stopped because it might lack the proper controls, and the most likely answer will be, no, don’t stop it. Just have it add the proper controls.

Internal Audit isn’t the only compliance function in the company. Inside IT (or inside its orbit), enterprise technical architecture management (ETAM) and information security wear compliance hats, and sometimes the PMO as well. Because they’re compliance functions, making sure everyone complies is almost instinctual. That is, after all, what compliance means.

And so, ETAM turns into the architecture police, the PMO turns into the methodology police, InfoSec turns into the Value Prevention Society, and IT takes the easy way out, doing its best Sergeant I-see-nuthink! Schultz impression while deploring the whole shadow enterprise.

There are alternatives. ETAM and InfoSec can collaborate to create a secure and supported end-user-computing platform. Internal Audit can provide a compliance checklist available to anyone who wants it.

IT can provide consulting services on how to design and build small applications. And if you have a PMO, it can provide training and coaching in ultra-basic project management techniques.

Preventing failure and encouraging success aren’t the same thing. The difference is the vast gap separating “No!” from “How can we can help?”

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