All Posts in Policies and Procedures

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

My daughter Erin just caught her first fish.

Regular readers may recall that her dad spent years studying fish. Mine emitted electric impulses and lived in Africa. To catch them we dammed small streams, then shoveled the water through nets.

Erin caught hers with a salmon egg on a hook. It’s an entirely different experience. After we de-hooked the fish and returned it to the lake, I felt like we owed it an apology.

I might owe Managing in Manhattan an apology, too.

If you don’t recall, Manhattan wanted sample policies to use as a starting point for his own. In response, I suggested he avoid creating policies whenever possible.

In retrospect, I’m not sure if Manhattan wanted policies or procedures. Despite their linkage in the phrase “policies and procedures,” they’re entirely different concepts.

What’s the difference? The short version: Procedures are good, policies are bad.

The longer version: Policies define what behavior is and isn’t allowed. They exist to replace the good judgment of individuals with the better judgment of the institution. Static documents, they’re immune to context and nuance. As a result, they’re useful only for circumstances where context and nuance aren’t important. Reserve them for black-and-white situations.

For everything else, communicate principles. Doing so allows employees to be adults and managers to use discretion. Sure you’ll have difficulties in the gray areas, but that’s the nature of grayness.

Policies replace good judgment with inflexible edicts. Procedures, on the other hand, replace improvisation with step-by-step instructions. There are plenty of situations where step-by-step instructions are pretty helpful.

Consider the lowly tape backup. When you first install a new tape backup system, you need to do a fair amount of configuring and testing to make sure all data is recoverable. If you aren’t using an automated tape handling system, you also need to be able to locate and identify tapes when you need them.

If your operators follow your written procedure (not always a safe assumption) you ensure the utility of your backup system. If they don’t, it doesn’t matter how much you spent on the technology — it’s worthless.

“Procedure” is just another word for “process”. Well-defined, tested processes are important tools that help your employees succeed. Here are a few more tips:

1. Only write procedures for recurring situations or emergencies you can anticipate: You don’t need procedures for everything. For one-time occurrences or unanticipated exceptions, have this written procedure: “Use your best judgment and improvise.”

2. Keep them simple: State purpose, scope, and authorization, so each procedure is applied only in the right circumstances and by the right people. The rest is a numbered list of steps.

3. Don’t confuse procedures with tutorials: A procedure isn’t an instruction manual. And if you need an instruction manual you also need employee training. Provide it.

4. Test, adjust, test, adjust, and test again: Process designs are never right the first time, so don’t try: Get close tinker, and make sure each procedure works.

5. Make sure you can find the right one: Use your intranet. Burn some CD-ROMs for when the intranet is down. Keep hard-copy too.

Finally, keep them refreshed. Retire those that are irrelevant and reinvent any that are obsolete, because you need to periodically reinvent the wheel. If we didn’t, we’d all look like Fred Flintstone, driving cars that roll on logs.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

Before you read this column, pull out your company’s organizational chart. Put a G next to individuals who always seems to get along. Next, put an S next to those who generally speak their minds, regardless of the issue or its popularity, and a P to denote those who pick their battles, only speaking their minds on a few issues.

In the best companies the Ps dominate (they’re P-rated), because leaders know how to focus their energy on what’s important. I’d rank S-rated companies second, because issues at least get raised and thrashed out, even if the process is more raucous than it needs to be. S-rated companies can be a lot of fun, once you get used to it.

G-rated companies rank last, because their leaders avoid any discussion that might cause hurt feelings or cause conflict. G-rated companies are almost guaranteed to slide into mediocrity, because the only programs put into action are the safe ones. The Gs dominate most American companies today. Getting along is their core competency.

How do companies get to be G-rated? Lots of factors contribute, but one of the most pernicious is the so-called 360-degree feedback program.

360-degree feedback programs seemed like such a good idea. Instead of being subjected to their manager’s narrow perspective, employees get reviewed by peers and “internal customers” (ugh!) as well, so they get a more complete picture of their performance, or so says the theory.

It’s a good theory. Sadly, it suffers from both bad execution and the law of unintended consequences.

Bad execution? Yes, it’s frequently bad, and sometimes execrable. I’ve seen the forms used by several companies; many asked only social questions: “Was the employee pleasant to work with?” “Does the employee work well in a team environment?” “Does the employee show a customer-service attitude?”

I once asked the coordinator of a company’s 360-degree feedback program why her form had no questions about job performance. Her non-verbal response was as though I’d noisily eructated. Her verbal answer? “We think that will come through from the questions we did ask.”

Even when done well, the unintended consequences of 360-degree feedback will usually outweigh the intended ones. Performance appraisals determine salary increases, bonuses and promotions, and have an impact on self-esteem as well. Faced with 360-degree feedback programs, employees tend to act so as to generate good feedback, which means these programs quickly degenerate into popularity contests. Who’s going to take an unpopular position with a 360-degree feedback program in place? It’s better to get along.

Managers often use 360-degree feedback as an excuse to avoid their own leadership responsibilities. What was supposed to be 360-degree feedback becomes something less, because now the manager’s perspective is missing. Managers are supposed to set goals and hold employees accountable, so when their perspective is missing, so is accountability. Heck — the people providing all the feedback don’t even know what goals and priorities the manager established, so it’s easy for feedback givers to become confused about where a given problem begins.

360-degree feedback isn’t worthless. It can be a useful source of information for managers, so long as the manager applies good judgment in evaluating the results.

But that’s about all it’s good for.

Unless you want to work in a company where everyone concentrates on just getting along.

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