Office Politics – Page 95

Which comes first, the carrot or the stick?

By: Bob Lewis|In: Leadership|Last Updated: November 10, 2003

Violence, as last week’s column suggested, is the first refuge of the incompetent. Physical violence is, of course, frowned upon in business, but disciplinary actions of various kinds — close relatives of physical punishment — are all too commonly the first response of business leaders. The obvious, syllogistic conclusion is left as an exercise for the reader.

Disciplinary action is a tool corporations use in a variety of circumstances, from employee performance management to enforcement of policies and procedures, and it’s a necessary one. In the end, some things just can’t be optional. Disciplinary action should, however, be the option of last resort, not the first.

You’re in IT, which among other roles and responsibilities is a purveyor, or at least a collaborator in the purveyance of standards and policies. If they’re truly to be standards and policies you must be willing and able to enforce them.

Now that we’ve agreed on this point, can we also agree that every time IT has to enforce a standard, it’s a failure?

An instinct toward enforcement has three undesirable consequences. One at a time …

First: If your instinct is to enforce, you’ve made yourself responsible for something that should belong to others. If you start the conversation by saying “comply or else,” it means my sole reason for complying is the consequence of failing to do so. That makes it your standard, not mine, and I have no stake in it.

But what’s the point of an IT standard? It’s a choice among alternatives — a decision that of the many different ways of addressing some situation or other, we’ll use only the ones the standard allows.

A standard is, in other words, a decision about how a company will conduct its business, presumably to improve how it conducts its business. If that’s the goal, then IT’s responsibility should be limited to setting standards that have this potential. The responsibility for achieving the desired effect rests with those who make use of the standard. None of them will accept this responsibility if their sole reason for embracing it is the consequence of failing to do so.

That leads to the second consequence: That an enforcement instinct leads to poorly chosen standards. Here’s an easy way to demonstrate this point: Imagine you lack the authority to enforce the standards you set. What can you do instead?

Envision every standard you have to set as a decision delegated to you by those who will have to live with it once you’ve set it. They know the company needs a decision, and while they have the authority to make it, they’ve decided you have sufficient expertise that they’d like your recommendation.

Would thinking about standards this way change how you go about setting them?

It shouldn’t. Your goal is to set standards that make the business more effective. Who is the final authority on that subject? Those who operate the business. Until you’ve explained your proposed standard and they agree it will make the business more effective, all you have is an untested hypothesis.

You sell recommendations on their merits, where enforcement is a demonstration of authority. Which brings up the third reason enforcement should be your last resort rather than your first.

“Because I said so,” is a phrase used by parents when facts and logic prove ineffective at changing a young mind. Parents have to be willing to say this, because it’s their responsibility to add notions like responsibility and morality to creatures who arrive in their care with no ethical imperative beyond “It’s all about me!”

Businesses work best when employees act as adults, taking personal responsibility for the organization’s success. Every time a manager resorts to enforcement, he or she is saying, “Because I told you so,” to an employee, which defines their relationship as an adult interacting with a child.

So think long and hard before you use enforcement as the starting point of any conversation, let alone one about accepting standards you’ve decided to set. It’s a bad idea.

There should, after all, be more to leadership than assigning chores and withholding dessert if they don’t get done.

The dark side of accountability

By: Bob Lewis|In: Leadership|Last Updated: November 3, 2003

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent,” or so said Isaac Asimov through Salvor Hardin, a character in the Foundation trilogy. With all respect to an excellent epigrammatist (and apologies to Ambrose Bierce who I’m paraphrasing), it isn’t the last refuge, it is the first.

While physical violence in the workplace is, of course, generally frowned upon, its close relative, punishment (also known as disciplinary action, probation, or the ever-popular “holding employees accountable”) is not just commonplace, but encouraged.

“We have to hold people accountable!” This, the sum and substance of root cause analysis in popular culture today, is our new panacea. Never mind that there’s no unbiased evidence demonstrating that lack of accountability is the root cause of very many problems. Never mind that when organizations instead focus on fixing processes and systems, the rate at which problems crop up plummets, nearly every time.

Never mind all that. We have to hold someone accountable, even if that someone is just a scapegoat. Which in all likelihood it will be, because that’s all we ask of the real culprit — the person responsible for the integrity of the broken process. We ask only that he or she “hold someone accountable,” meaning performing some act of public punishment.

If there’s a problem, someone must be at fault. The not-holding-people-accountable explanation is, as a result, doubly satisfying, since it lets us blame one person for the problem itself and a second for failing to punish the first. The result: The real culprit cries “We need to hold people accountable,” as well, using the phrase to avoid his or her own accountability, and as a fringe benefit also avoiding the hard work of identifying and fixing the real problem.

When something goes wrong and you perform a root cause analysis, there are five places to look. Most often the problem lies with your systems and processes — how employees go about performing whatever business function is involved. Holding someone accountable means insisting whoever is responsible for the system or process in question figure out what about it allowed the problem to happen and make the necessary changes to prevent a recurrence.

Systems and processes are far from the only source of problems, though. Two other common ones are that the organizational structure or corporate culture … core responsibilities of leadership … preclude the behaviors needed to prevent problems from occurring. Another is substandard tools and technologies, which can absorb a lot of an employee’s time and attention. You can, and perhaps should hold people accountable for overcoming these sources of difficulty. Just keep in mind that what you’re really doing is holding them accountable for overcoming barriers you put in their path, rather than holding yourself accountable for removing the barriers.

Yes, sometimes the root cause of a problem really is the result of an employee just flubbing an assignment. Your next task still isn’t finding a punishment that fits the crime. It’s finding out what caused the employee to flub the assignment. If the cause was insufficient training, excessive workload, or conflicting work direction (often the result of “matrix management” — a structural flaw), holding the employee accountable won’t fix anything. You might address a symptom temporarily, but address the root cause? Not a chance.

If the cause was bad character or simple, chronic incompetence, you also won’t fix it by holding the employee accountable. You’ll fix it by separating the employee from his or her job, terminating bad employees and reassigning incompetent ones to roles better suited to their aptitudes, if that’s possible.

Nothing ever get fixed by holding employees accountable as the phrase is usually used. Punishment rarely accomplishes anything, and the threat of punishment results in blamestorming sessions that preclude discovery of the actual source of the difficulty. Even when the phrase is used properly, meaning you insist the responsible employee fix the problem and prevent future recurrences, it’s only a cure for a very specific, limited set of causes.

So when a problem arises because of a lack of diligence, attention to detail, or persistence on the part of an individual employee, by all means hold that employee accountable. In any other situation, you’re just taking the lazy way out. That’s a bad idea.

Because someone might hold you accountable for it.