Archive for the ‘People Management’ Category
People-first management
Edwards Deming believed that work quotas and management by objectives (MBO) are counterproductive because they have a detrimental effect on quality – i.e they emphasise quantity over quality (see point 11 of Deming’s 14 principles). Despite this, quotas and “objective” performance indicators advocated by MBO continue to be popular in many organisations. I have had several discussions with assorted managers from diverse organisations about this, and although some concede the shortcomings of MBO, many continue to believe it is the best available method for managing people because it “eliminates” subjectivity.
Now, the alleged objectivity of MBO can be debated, but it’s probably not going to make a whit of a difference: performance measurement systems and those oh-so SMART objectives are here to stay. Which brings me to my point: performance measurement systems tend distort the behaviour of many managers who, in the push to achieve their objectives, drive their teams beyond reasonable limits. In the long run this is counter-productive: folks suffer burnout, lose respect for the manager or, if things get too much, simply up sticks and leave for pastures of a better shade. This is a loss for the organisation. There is another way – one which maintains employee motivation and engagement in the workplace whilst also getting the best possible results. Honestly, there’s no rocket science involved; just a small shift in perspective. It can be summed up follows: put people first and results will naturally follow.
How might one do that? Here are some concrete actions one can take:
1. Set people up for success, not failure: This is important: ensure that you set realistic objectives for team members, else you’re just setting them up for failure. Yes, I know Realistic is the “R” in SMART, but it’s frequently forgotten. What do you do if your boss sets you unrealistic goals? Two words: push back. Longer answer: explain logically (but without getting emotional or excited) why you think the goals are unachievable in the time allotted. By the same token, be prepared to receive similar feedback from your team. If you have to live with MBO, make sure that meeting objectives doesn’t call for superhuman effort. The workplace is no place for heroics.
2. Assume everyone wants to do their best: Some managers start with the assumption that people need to be supervised and monitored continually (as per Theory X) else they will lapse into slackness and indolence. In my experience the opposite is true: people generally want to do well and be recognised as valuable members of the team. This makes a manager’s job easy:give people meaningful work, empower them to make decisions about how they will do it, and get out of their way; don’t interfere , avoid gratuitous advice (unlike me!), unnecessary recurring meetings and pointless written reports. Monitor progress informally ( MBWA works well for me in this regard). Jump in only when asked to do so, or if intervention is really necessary.
3. Be consistent: Tell a consistent story from day-to-day. What does this mean? Well, it’s a combination of things, including:
- Not flip-flopping on decisions. I’ve seen managers who’ve changed their minds as often as they’ve changed clothes. Such behaviour confuses and eventually irritates everyone who reports to them.
- Approaching work and any work-related issues that arise in a consistent way. This amounts to having a set of principles by which you live your professional life. This is particularly important when you’re under stress, because that’s when impulsive or “out of character” decisions are made. At such times remind yourself of the need for consistency: take a step back and examine the decision in the light of your principles.
Consistency is important; any inconsistency, though not apparent to you, will be quite evident to those who report to you.
4. Treat failures as learning experiences: Despite everyone’s best efforts, there are times when things go wrong; sometimes badly wrong. At such points it is important to remember that mistakes happen. Identifying and berating a scapegoat may feel good for a moment or two but the satisfaction soon fades, leaving you with a very upset team member. Instead of looking to anoint a scapegoat, find out what went wrong and why, and what might have been done to avoid it. This should be done dispassionately, with a no-blame attitude even if the offender is responsible for a mess up.
5. Don’t “crunch credit”: Often a manager will get the credit for work done by his or her team. This is natural because the manager is the public face of the team. Unfortunately in some of these cases, the manager hogs the credit, barely acknowledging the efforts of his or her team. The right thing to do, of course, is to pass the plaudits on to the team, ensuring that those involved are recognised and rewarded appropriately. The latter is important: the rewards should be appropriate (no lucite plaques!).
6. Offer opportunities to learn new skills: Doing the same thing over and over again gets boring. To maintain the interest and engagement of people in their work, it is critical to offer them opportunities to do new things. Ideally you would have the means to send them to external courses, but sometimes that isn’t possible. However, it is always possible to give people a chance to pick up new skills whilst on the job. Admittedly this is somewhat easier in IT, where even a small corporate IT shop would have a range of technologies – certainly enough to offer people something new to learn. However, people need the time (and official sanction) to do this – and that’s where the manager comes in.
7. Empower people to make decisions: People should be able to make decisions regarding how they do their jobs. This helps in two ways:
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Decisions get made at the level at which work is done.
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Folks who do the work feel in control of what they do, and are able to fulfil their potential.
See my post entitled Empowered or Not – a litmus test of organisational culture for more.
The points listed above are based on personal experience. They’ve worked well for me in many different contexts ranging from projects to corporate environments. I can attest to their effectiveness in improving team motivation and morale which, in turn, leads to improved productivity and results.
To summarise: push people to achieve results and you’ll get neither results nor a happy team; improve team motivation, though, and you’ll get both in spades.
A new model of motivation and its relevance for project managers
Many managers struggle with the question of how to motivate their team members effectively. A recent Harvard Business Review article entitled, Employee Motivation: A Powerful New Model, by Nitin Nohria, Boris Groysberg and Linda Eling-Lee describes a new model that provides concrete steps which organisations and individual managers can take towards improving team motivation. The model is based on analysis of data gathered from a large number of employees across many organisations. Projects are temporary organisational structures so the model is of potential interest to project managers: hence this annotated summary of the article.
The authors start with the premise that people’s choices are guided by four basic human drives which were described in a book written by Nohria and Lawrence in 2002 (see a review of the book here). In brief, these are the drives to:
- Acquire: To obtain tangible items (things such as a car, house etc.) and intangibles (such as respect, status etc.) .
- Bond: To seek membership in groups (e.g. work teams) and form connections with individuals (e.g. friendships)
- Comprehend: To understand the world and thus develop a personally meaningful and coherent view of one’s social and work environment.
- Defend: Protect what is important (to the individual) and ensure fairness (to those who form a part of one’s world)
The authors make the point that these drives are independent, and that one must address all of them in order to motivate employees fully. This is interesting because it implies, for instance, that people cannot be motivated by money alone. This point may be obvious to some, but I know some managers who believe that financial rewards alone are enough to motivate employees and team members.
The authors suggest some organisational levers that may be used to fulfil each of the aforementioned drives. These are:
- Reward System: A well-designed reward system that includes equitable remuneration and transparent, performance-related bonuses can be used to address the drive to acquire.
- Corporate/Team Culture: A collegial work environment. which encourages openness, camaraderie, and team work will foster a sense of belonging in employees / team members. This can fulfil the drive to bond.
- Job Design: The drive to comprehend, or understand one’s place in the world can be fulfilled by engagement in a job that is interesting, challenging and meaningful. The employee or team member should clearly understand the importance of his or her job, and where it fits in the big scheme of things.
- Performance management and resource allocation: Any system that includes performance-related rewards must be accompanied by an transparent and trustworthy processes to assess performance. Further, any resource allocation (for projects or other corporate initiatives) must be done in a way that is based on the merits of the endeavour, completely free of bias. Performance assessment, through its effect on individual and team rewards impacts the employees drive to acquire and bond; whereas the resource allocation, through its effect on projects impacts the drive to comprehend (i.e. people’s jobs). Hence these two offer employees ways to defend things that are important to them (or things that fulfil other drives).
Granted, project managers do not always have control over all (or even any!) of the organisational levers listed above. However, the authors’ research indicates that employees more often than not understand the limited influence that their direct managers have on these levers. Hence, most employees only expect their managers to do their best to fulfil all four motivational drives within the organisational constraints that are imposed from above. That is, employees are pretty realistic about what their managers can and can’t do. This is good news for project managers because it means that team members generally do not expect miracles from them! Examples of specific things a project manager might do include:
- Offer more autonomy and learning opportunities to team members.
- Promote team bonding through joint activities.
- Foster relationships based on trust within the team.
- Recognise achievement through public acknowledgement and other non-financial means (for example, by informing the senior management)
- Raise the profile of the team in the larger organisation.
…and so on. There are ways to tweak organisational levers, even if one doesn’t quite have the muscle to yank them.
To summarise: the article outlines a model of motivation that is built on research in biology and psychology. The model is based on the need to address four basic human drives – i.e. the drives to acquire, bond, comprehend and defend. Managers need to understand that all four drives must be fulfilled in order to motivate employees fully. Employees generally recognise that their direct managers have limited control over organisational culture and reward systems. However, they expect their managers to do their best to motivate teams within these constraints. In my opinion the article is worth a read (regardless of the validity of the model) because it emphasises that motivation involves more than financial reward and, even more importantly, it encourages front-line managers to take an active role in motivating their teams.
The sneak, the subversive, the shirk and the self-promoter
The presence of a bad apple in a team can have a significant negative effect on collective performance and morale. Unfortunately, many managers fail to do anything about these folks until it is too late. Often this happens because they fail to foresee the rot that can be wrought by these individuals. In this post I focus on four types of “rotten apples” I’ve come across. Coincidentally, these characters are best characterised by nouns that begin with the letter S. Now, S also happens to be the symbol for entropy which in social terms is defined as, “a doctrine of inevitable social decline and degeneration.” This is apt, as these folks can contribute to and even accelerate the decline of a team. So here they are, the sneak, the subversive, the shirk and the self-promoter1…
- The sneak: This is the guy who carries tales of your alleged wrong-doing to levels above. He’s dangerous because he has the confidence of a senior manager, whom he regularly regales with stories of your incompetence. His version of events – which may or may not have any relation to the truth – is designed to make you, the manager, look as bad as possible. Unfortunately, because of his connections, one has to be careful when tackling the sneak.
- The subversive: Closely related to the sneak, the subversive is the revolutionary who foments turmoil within the team. He does this by spreading stories of an unsettling kind. These are crafted for shock value – for instance, one could be built around a rumour that the company is about to indulge in a bout of downsizing (and the project team are candidates) or that project funding is about to be cut. These folks tend to tone down their activities once they’re aware that their penchant for stirring things up is known. So the best way to handle a subversive is to confront him.
- The shirk: This fellow is the teflon-man as far as work is concerned. He is seemingly able to avoid any tasks that require him to work at his full capacity. Yet, even though he is under-worked, he’s always late in completing his tasks. He manages to get away with it by palming off the responsibility for the delay on to an unsuspecting team member – “I couldn’t finish because Jake didn’t give me X in time” (where X is just any old Xcuse) or even the odd force majeure. So one’s stuck with the shirk because it’s never his fault. The best way to handle the shirk is to give him work and monitor progress closely. This is one situation where micromanagement (as bad as it is) may actually be necessary.
- The self-promoter: This gent is always in the background when work is doled out, but right at the front to claim credit- more so when senior management’s around. He thrives on accepting kudos for work that someone else did. In the unlikely event that he does something significant, you can be sure that the entire organisation will hear about it for the next few years. The strange thing is that this tactic quite often works. Through relentless self-promotion, the self-promoter rises through the corporate hierarchy much faster than his quieter colleagues. The self-promoter is best handled by giving him only as much attention as is his due – which isn’t very much at all.
Managing teams implies managing people. However, most folks don’t really need to be managed because they’re competent at what they do, and go about doing their jobs in a generally diligent manner. The characters I’ve listed above are exceptions: watch out for them, manage them. You ignore them at your own peril.
1 Although the post refers to these folks using masculine nouns and pronouns, needless to say they can be of either gender.
Eight to Late 