All Posts in Organizational Effectiveness

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

I have, in my day, gone through lots of leadership training.

I’ve learned how to recognize excellent personal and team performance with recognition and a variety of financial and non-financial incentives. How to deal with difficult situations, like personal crises, policy violations, substandard performance, and terminations. How to facilitate meetings. Delegate tasks. Coach employees who make mistakes without demoralizing them.

Serious stuff.

I have to be fair. I’ve also received training in how to provide small rewards and incentives as morale-builders, such as T-shirts, pizza, or tickets to movies or plays. The small stuff is important in creating an atmosphere where good work and good attitude are appreciated.

But in all my training, I never once heard anyone talk about the single most common situation most managers have to deal with: Minor infractions.

I’m heartily sick of the phrase, “… potentially leading to termination.” Regular readers will recall an employee who received a one-week suspension without pay for sending a joke over his company’s e-mail. As Mom used to say, they made a federal case out of it.

Have you established techniques for dealing with minor infractions? Small stuff like lateness for meetings, dead-horse-beating in discussions, or slightly too long lunch breaks? It’s important to do so. If you let minor matters go unchallenged, they eventually grow into significant problems. On the other hand, if every time you see some trivial problem you call the offender into your office for a solemn conversation, you’ve established an image … as a pompous twit.

So if you can neither ignore the problem nor counsel the offender, what can you do?

I learned the answer the hard way. After a reorganization I walked into the weekly staff meeting of one of my new teams 5 minutes late. Another attendee, who’d apparently arrived 4 minutes late, breathed a sigh of relief and said, cheerily, “You bring the donuts next week!”

A front-line supervisor in a company with whom I’ve consulted has a similar strategy: When someone breaks the rules he holds a “kangaroo court” and when the accused is found guilty they impose the cookie penalty. You guessed it — the guilty party has to provide cookies for everyone.

Donuts or cookies, it was minor, good-natured, expected, and public. Since the penalty directly benefited the team it boosted morale in the bargain, even if it did harm the aorta a little bit. And these are the keys.

Keeping your penalties small emphasizes your own sense of perspective. Mom would have approved — no federal case.

Keeping the atmosphere good-natured reinforces the desirability of an open, casual environment where you don’t lead by intimidation.

Unlike rewards, where inventiveness is the key, minor penalties should establish a team tradition. Traditions are important in building teams, just as with any other kind of community.

It’s important to publicly razz the trouble-maker in this kind of situation. You get to make the point to everyone that whatever the behavior is, it isn’t appropriate. You again reinforce an open communications environment where nobody has to measure every word they speak.

It’s important for the penalty to benefit other team members, which is why desserts are such a great punishment, as is making the guilty party take notes at the next meeting. Since the offender does something good for teammates, the sentence amounts to community service and builds up the team (whereas each minor infraction incrementally damages team cohesiveness).

And although some companies (for example, those whose IT departments gripe about screen-savers) don’t seem to value it very much, you get to make the workplace just a wee bit more fun.

Maybe you’re the kind of sourpuss who doesn’t see the value of all this. If so, I have the perfect solution.

You get to bring the next plate of cookies.

Comments

|In: Organizational Design|Last Updated:

If I tell you a secret, do you promise to keep it to yourself?

Okay, here it is: In most companies, the IS organization isn’t held in high esteem.

If it’s true in your company, make a list of five likely reasons. Done? Here’s my list of common reasons, which you can use for comparison:

  • Projects take too long, cost too much, and fail too often.
  • Analysts are arrogant, condescending, and speak in gibberish.
  • Systems are slow and unstable.
  • The Help Desk doesn’t.
  • Two words: Money Pit.

In your company it isn’t like this, of course, but I bet you know other IS organizations that have these problems, because they’re as common as dirt, and as hard to get rid of.

Now make another list, this time of how you plan to fix these problems. Take your time … I’ll wait.

Done? Compare it to my list of common solutions:

  • Reorganize IS.

Like high school kids in an old Mickey Rooney movie whose solution to everything is, “I know! Let’s put on a show!” most CIOs try to fix serious problems by reorganizing, which inverts cause and effect. Reorganization only makes sense as a consequence of an improvement program — it’s never the solution to real problems.

Like the old medical practice of draining blood out of a patient’s body, further weakening someone who’s already ill, reorganizations weaken you in three big ways: They distract employees from real work; they eliminate risk-taking, and they focus attention on the organizational chart. Let’s take these in order.

Employees stop thinking about systems architecture, database design and project deadlines during a reorganization. They start thinking about winners and losers. Employees feel loyalties to particular managers and antipathy toward others, so they worry about who’s going to come out on top. It’s a distraction, and no amount of leadership will change that.

And risk-taking? Who’s going to stick their neck out during a management shuffle? If you succeed, the manager who notices won’t be in a position to reward you, and if you fail your new manager will peg you for a loser. The first law of reorganizations is to keep your head down, and every employee knows it.

But the single most pernicious consequence of a reorganization is the attention it gives to the organizational chart. To understand why that’s bad just look at the drawing through an employee’s eyes. The org chart describes what my responsibilities aren’t.

Org charts show boundaries. Anything outside your box isn’t your responsibility — the org chart says so! And if you think that’s a good thing because it helps everyone understand what they’re supposed to be doing, think again.

Do you honestly think you’ve accounted for all the work that has to get done? If so, you’re wrong. In any organization there’s a bunch of miscellaneous stuff nobody keeps track of. Everyone just does what needs doing without thinking much about it.

Until you reorganize and everyone realizes, that stuff isn’t their job.

Even if, by some miracle, you’ve designed your boxes so every single thing that has to get done has an owner, you’re still not safe, because lots of work crosses organizational boundaries. Your new boxes are barriers that create friction — a loss of energy when trying to get work done. The trust that used to lubricate inter-box cooperation has been eliminated along with the old boxes themselves.

Sometimes you really do have to reorganize, but reorganizations always do damage. As with chemotherapy, the benefits sometimes outweigh the side effects.

Sometimes, but not often.

Comments