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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Random thoughts while on vacation in southern Spain:

Want to know how to motivate people? Forget the books and formulas — even mine; even Daniel Pink’s!

Just pay attention to your life. For example, there I was, “canyoning” at the top of a 90-foot cliff (estimated from the top; from the bottom estimates ranged from 3 to 4 meters). Below me was a pool of water of uncertain depth.

In the pool were my stepsister and stepbrother who had just cheerfully jumped in. Next to me was our guide and a young woman, perhaps 27 years old, who had joined our little expedition.

While perched on the rock, while our guide was explaining that all I had to do was take one step, I idly wondered if the proper diagnosis was acrophobia (fear of heights) or bathophobia (fear of falling).

But with two already down an all four watching me …

This is why, when you manage projects, you want a weekly status meeting, where everyone on the project interacts with everyone else on the project team as they discuss whether they made their deadlines for the week or not. Neither my list of motivators (need for approval, exclusivity, fear, greed, and guilt) nor Pink’s (autonomy, mastery, purpose) mentions peer pressure.

But peer pressure is what launched me off the rock and into freefall. And when you’re managing a project, peer pressure is the your most effective tool for keeping everyone on schedule.

* * *

We drove to Gibraltar. On the way we  read  a wee bit of its history: England got custody as part of the Treaty of Utrecht, and Spain has been angry about it ever since.

Having driven there, gazed upon it, and admired it, and also having spent time and energy facilitating discussions and brokering agreements, I have this advice for Spain:

Get over it. It’s a rock. Sure, if you owned it maybe you could get Prudential to pay you for usage rights, but probably not. Other than that … your economy is in depression, your overextended banks took you there, bailing them out nearly bankrupted your government, and you have no control over your own currency.

My advice: Ignore the rock. My related advice to the managers and staff who read this missive on a regular basis: Someone you worked with slighted you recently, or insulted you, or otherwise took possession of your Rock of Gibraltar. Your best strategy just might be to ignore it, too.

(Along these lines, Ambrose Bierce once wrote of a lion’s encounter with a skunk. Feeling threatened, the skunk did what skunks do best, but the lion took no apparent notice. So the skunk said something like, “Sir, I beg you to notice that I have set upon the earth an implacable aroma.” To which the lion replied, “You needn’t have bothered. I already knew you were a skunk.”)

* * *

My Dad updated his iPad to iOS 7. It froze mid-update. As I’m the closest thing to a resident tech here, it was my responsibility to do something. It being an iPad, I pushed various buttons in varying combinations until it unfroze, at which point the screen informed us that nothing else was going to happen until we plugged it into iTunes.

With my usual technical panache I figured out this meant the iTunes software and not the iTunes store. So we found an appropriate Windows laptop, downloaded and installed iTunes, plugged in the iPad, and pushed various buttons in varying combinations once again, until voila! The iPad booted up. Remarkably, it was then able to restore from iCloud and my Dad was back in business.

Apple. It just works. Except when it doesn’t.

So then, for reasons that mattered at the time but not to you, I had to install some videoconferencing software on my personal Windows 8 tablet. Pathetically enough, the software didn’t detect that it was being installed on a version of Windows with which it was incompatible, but it was, and it didn’t, resulting in a hung system, followed by an uninstall, after which  much of the installed software no longer worked.

Fortunately, Windows 8 comes with a feature called “Refresh,” which is supposed to fix up munged systems without doing any collateral damage. Unfortunately, Refresh caused quite a bit of collateral damage: It uninstalled every bit of Windows Desktop software, including Microsoft Office.

Which is why I’m writing this week’s column using whatever Google calls its office suite these days.

Proving that no matter where you are and whatever you face, there’s probably a way to fix it, but there’s a good chance the way you find will be pretty annoying.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Geeze alert! Geeze alert! Hide, hide, hide, hide, hide!

When I was a lad in high school we all took the SATs, and our scores had some bearing on our academic potential.

Now, we have SAT study guides, and SAT scores mostly reveal how hard a student studied for the SATs. As SAT scores have become more important they’ve become less reliable, and it’s cause and effect.

Sound like most professional certifications?

In the world of measurement, gauging someone’s potential is one of the three great unsolved, and very likely unsolvable challenges (the other two are customer loyalty and employee performance). We’ll save customer loyalty and actual employee performance for other days. Today …

So you’re trying to decide which of two applicants to hire for a project management position. One has a PMP. The other one doesn’t. Which one do you hire?

The answer is, whichever one:

  • Has brought more and more difficult projects to a successful conclusion.
  • Speaks intelligently and in enough depth about the projects they list to convince you they really did manage them and they really did reach a successful conclusion.
  • Leads you to conclude, from your conversation, that their “personal culture” will be compatible with your company’s business culture, and their personality will mesh with the people they’ll be working with.
  • Their potential peers think will be the stronger addition to the team after they’ve had a chance to talk with both applicants.

Or, even better, whichever one proves to be the better project manager in your organization after you’ve contracted with each of them to manage an actual project and they’ve either run their project to a successful conclusion or run it into the ground.

Understand, the problem isn’t with the certification itself, and in fact, to its credit, the Project Management Institute includes successful project management experience in its PMP requirements.

The problem is that using the certification … using any certification … to evaluate applicants is an example of the observer effect.

The observer effect, in case you aren’t familiar with it, is the scientific principle that all acts of observation affect whatever is being observed. Sometimes the effect is trivial … for example, the act of looking at a comet through a telescope doesn’t change the comet’s orbit in more than a quantum way.

But here, the more companies that use certifications in hiring decisions, the more the people who seek the certifications just want the piece of paper. Gaining actual competence becomes secondary at best.

This is true for professional certifications. It’s increasingly true for college degrees.

And it isn’t limited to individual certifications either.

Take, for example, ISO 9000 and its associated certifications. What they’re intended to be is evidence that a company has strong quality management practices. What they too-often are is evidence that companies need ISO 9000 credentials on the corporate resume and have learned how to tell a good quality story.

An actual commitment to quality on the part of its executives and managers? That’s optional. The International Standards Organization lacks the resources to actually investigate applicants in enough depth to ensure they truly qualify — just as well, many cures being worse than the diseases they treat.

What’s the solution? Here’s one: Every certifying organization forbids the use of their certifications for hiring or vendor selection.

That’ll happen. Just not here on Earth. Still, there are ways to improve the situation. What they have in common is moving beyond short-haul thinking.

Take medicine. There’s a reason most doctors are fundamentally competent, and it isn’t their getting a degree. To become a doctor you have to go through a residency … you have to practice medicine under the watchful eye of practicing doctors. It’s a long-haul, labor-intensive process, for which we should all be grateful.

With most certifications, both certifiers and those certified want a process for verifying competence that’s quick and cheap. Since you only get what you pay for if you’re lucky, the outcome is predictable.

Awhile back I wrote a column predicting a business failure (““Business failure in progress,” KJR 12/12/2011). The company is, in fact, gone. I mention it because its founders and leaders won an entrepreneurship award right around the time I wrote the column.

Demonstrating, I guess, that business awards are even less reliable than business certifications.

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