Counting the Hours

We tend to think of counting as a straight-forward activity - one, two, three, how could anyone disagree? Yet many organizations have tension and disputes over how to count, especially something as seemingly simple as counting the number of hours somebody worked.

An engineering office had a 37.5 hour work week. Staff were expected to be in the office 7.5 hours per day working, not including lunch. From staff and management interviews, here are six areas where the company was experiencing a lot of tension:

1. One work group had gotten into the habit of taking coffee breaks mid-morning. During these breaks, they'd chat about a variety of things, including work. Their manager felt that this was productive time, since it helped build relationships and staff often came up with creative solutions to work issues during the relaxed interactions over coffee. Other managers didn't feel that coffee breaks should be allowed, and their employees were not allowed to count coffee time as work time. Dispute arose over whether the coffee-breakers should have to work longer days to make up for the time "lost" during coffee.
2. As part of their regular work day, some field staff would be required report to the central office, then drive ninety minutes out to a job site for the day. The drive TO the work site was considered part of their work day since they first met at the office, but the ninety minute drive back was "on their own time" since they were just driving home from work. Staff that stayed in the office worked for 7.5 hours. were productive for 7.5 hours and were paid for 7.5 hours. Staff that worked in the field put in 9 hours, were productive for 6 hours and were paid for 7.5 hours.
3. Other staff were required to travel to a nearby city, usually flying in and flying out the same day. The morning flight left at 6am, and their end of the day flight returned home at 7 pm. Counting the time from when they arrived at the terminal in the morning to when they left the terminal at the end of the day, their workday was 14.5 hours. They were paid for 7.5.
4. Yet other staff were required to travel to more distant cities, with four to six hours flying time, and usually with an overnight stay on Saturday to get cheaper air fares. Some staff loved this time away, others felt resentful that it took them away from their families, and wanted time-off in lieu for the time they were required to be away. Management paid them for the days they were working in the other cities, but didn't compensate in any way for the time away from home. Flight time that was outside regular work hours also wasn't considered work. Lots of tension and disagreement over this.
5. A few staff were able to work from home because of the nature of their jobs. Tension mounted from in-office staff who's requests to work from home had been denied; they felt their driving time to work should now be paid for, since they couldn't do anything else during that time and the work-from-home people were not required to commute as part of their jobs.
6. Managers would take staff out for lunch and dinner occasionally. Some managers would allow their staff to count this as work time, some would not. Tensions mounted.

These situations show how difficult it can be to count something as simple as hours of work. How much more difficult is it to measure more complicated tasks in ways that everyone can agree on?

Planning Paralysis

How many projects are sitting on your desk, unstarted, because you can't find the time to make a plan?

In the ideal world of project management, you create a plan listing all the steps needed, in order, to get you where you want to go, with timelines, responsibilities and required resources all figured out down to the last nickel. (And a nickel might mean 5 cents, 5 hundred bucks, or 5 grand, depending on the size of your venture). In the real world that most managers live in, they can't find the time to make this comprehensive plan, so the project sits, unstarted, for weeks, months, years.

For some projects, like building an oil refinery in 18 months, you'd be crazy to start without a solid project plan. But for many projects that are sitting on manager's desks throughout the world, a comprehensive plan is not that important. The important thing is to start.

So, figure out the first thing you could do to make some progress on the project. Call someone, gather one piece of information, take one small step, give direction to one minion. You need a general idea of where you're going, but more importantly, you really need to start making progress.

Then, after you take that first step, you see if it's taken you closer to your objective, or if it's a little off target. Based on what you learn, you adjust your direction and take the next baby step. This simple breakdown of a journey into little cycles of Step, Adjust, Step, Adjust, Step, Adjust can take you through to completion of a project, without ever having to define an intricate, detailed, step-by-step project plan. This works surprisingly well.

So, take a look at your desk, figure out which project would make the biggest difference to you over the next weeks, months, years, and take the first step. It's time to get started.

Ten Improvement Models for Leaders Who Don't Know How To Improve

If you want better results from your company, but you really don't know how to systematically make things better, here are ten models you can use to flail away at improvement:

1. Get people to work harder. Generally done through some combination of begging, bullying, and bribing.
2. Work longer hours. Crank up the number of hours that you and your people work.
3. Hire more people. Throw more bodies at the problem.
4. Downsize some people. Growth and profits through emaciation.
5. Add some technology (the mythical silver bullet). This gizmo ought to fix things.
6. Set targets and hold people accountable. I don't know how to improve things; maybe they'll figure something out.
7. Set big bold stretch goals. And then hope some magic happens.
8. Work smarter, not harder. Which isn't insulting at all to those who've been experts at their jobs for fifteen years.
9. Fire anyone who makes a mistake. Only for perfect managers or hypocrites, of whom I've met several.
10. Hire only the best. We need a hero, because we don't know how to succeed without heroes.
11. Reorganize. Changing who people report to will somehow fix what we do.
12. Counting. Make decisions based only on the numbers you can measure.

I realize that was twelve, not ten, but there are so many of these desperate-feeling improvement models that it's hard to stop. These models all seem powerless, relying on hope and wishful thinking, relying on "something" happening; something magical, or lucky, or wished for. Yet these models are all used. Commonly. Ineffectively.

When the temperature outside goes above zero again (it's -40 today with wind chill), we'll look at ten improvment models used by leaders who DO know how to improve.

Misguided Incentive

At hockey practice, the kids lined up at center ice for a shoot-out, where each skater would in turn try to score on their goalie. This is a fun drill, especially for the goalies, who go head-to-head with each of their friends, their teammates. Shoot-outs are a matter of pride for goalie's; their reputation is on the line so they do everything they can to keep the puck out of the net. But, on this occasion, the coach decided to offer a prize of two dollars if the goalie could stop all the pucks on the first round of about twenty skaters. The rationale was "you have to give them incentive or they won't try."

The goalie was pretty excited - two bucks is two bucks - still a significant amount of money for a kid. But, when the fourth skater of twenty scored, this external "incentive" dissappeared, and the goalie visibly reduced his effort, even moving out of the way on some harder shots. The coach was miffed, and when he asked the goalie what he was doing, he said "why bother, I can't get the two dollars anymore."

So, by offering the perk, the bonus, the money incentive, the coach replaced the pure joy of stopping pucks with the calculated pursuit of two bucks. What the kid normally would do just because he loved it, he now stopped doing as soon as the external "incentive" was no longer attainable.

Managers, coaches, and leaders need to learn that internal incentive is the only true incentive. So set a fair wage, then take money out of the day-to-day picture, and let people enjoy their work.

Home By Six

A manager in the Toronto office of a large insurance provider was having an odd problem with his staff. The overall corporate culture was one of long hours and competitive posturing between employees. If John started working until 6:15pm, Steve would one-up him and stay until 6:45pm. When Heather worked until 7:00pm, Janice would then stay even later. Soon, everyone was in the office until eight, nine at night.

In their daily work, none of their clients or insurance suppliers were working at these hours, and the manager was aware enough to realize that these long hours were not really about getting the work done. Gathering the staff together, the manager laid it on the line:

1. You need to get your work done in the regular work day. If you can't, you need help with time management. We'll provide training and support. If that doesn't help, we need to examine our work flows and our capacity.
2. If you don't want to go home at the end of the day, there's something wrong with your personal relationships and work-life balance. Our EAP provides free confidential counselling and coaching. Use it.
3. "Home by Six" is now policy, and we'll help you achieve that, as part of our daily work.

We often talk of work-life balance, of respect for people, of the importance of family, of the need for rest and recuperation, yet how many of us live it? How many of us really encourage this for our staff?

You can demand more from your people than they can sustainably provide, and over time you will deplete them and have to replace them. This is a valid business model.

Or you can create a culture where life balance is truly valued, and still get the work done. If you are having retention problems, with high levels of stress and anxiety, perhaps something like "Home by Six" would work for you.

Have You Built a Tower of Babel?

To mess up the ambitious plans for construction of the Tower of Babel, God "confounded the language of all the Earth."(Genesis 11:5-8). In a bit of a mischevious intervention, God divided the people by getting them to speak different languages, where before they had spoken one. Without the ability to communicate, they were unable to coordinate their efforts. There was no possibility of getting the job done at all, let alone getting it done on time or under budget.

In the 1967 sci-fi short story "Babel II", available in War Games, Harry Crosby (aka Christopher Anvil) describes a world where the technology has gotten so complicated, where the degree of professional specialization has become so extensive, that none of the professionals can understand each other, and no-one understands completely how the technology works. Their attempts to build an Esmer-drive starship are doomed!

In your company, it's very likely that the people in purchasing have no idea what any of the stuff they're buying is used for, or how to tell a good flux capacitor from a bad one. Your people in operations probably have no idea what finance means when they talk about "Net changes in non-cash working capital items related to operations". As we divide our companies into departments, into specialists that speak different languages, we build a Tower of Babel where people are truly unable to understand each other.

As you examine the sequential steps that your organization takes to satisfy your customers, you'll see many handoffs from one department to another, from one language group to another. More often than not, the handoff is not well understood by either group. A complete order, for the sales department, means they got a deposit or purchase order from the customer. A complete order for the shop means all the line items are correct and all required materials are in stock. A complete order for shipping has no back orders and clear delivery instructions and address.

When we try to improve, it's common to work within a department, trying to make our work as efficient as possible. We aim to meet our departmental targets in the belief that this will achieve the company targets. We work to improve our individual departments in the belief that this will improve the organization. Paraphrasing a little more of "Babel II": All the departmental curves showed progress. It was natural to assume this meant company progress. But what about the connections between the departments, between their managers and between people generally. It would be possible to carry this specialization so far that nobody understands anyone in any other line of work, and then what will we have?

What we'll have is the typical modern company, where departments speak their own languages and work to improve within themselves, but the real flow of work and value never gets much better.

This is Not Good Enough

Sometimes you grow too fast, or you lose focus, or you lose some good people, or [insert your crisis here], and all of your talk about Customer Service and Quality goes out the window. For whatever reason, your customers end up getting it in the shorts, even though you swore you'd never let that happen.

Sometimes you have to get tough and tell your people that "This is Not Good Enough!" It may be a supplier, it may be an employee, it may be a manager, or it may be your whole company that needs to hear this message. If your company is facing a harsh reality, your people need to understand that, so they can do what needs to be done.

Speaking at an NSBA dinner meeting, Wally Mah of Northridge Development Corporation candidly spoke of the problems they faced during the intense Saskatoon housing boom in 2008. Paraphrasing his comments, "We failed our customers. We let the busy trades dictate our schedule and decide on the quality of the homes we were building. It came to a crisis. So we gave one of the owner's wives the final word in quality control. She would go to the trades and say 'This is not good enough; you have to come back and fix it.' That way it wasn't just an employee talking, it was an Owner. We had to do this to regain control, to regain the trust of our customers."

W. Edwards Deming told leaders to Drive Out Fear and Eliminate Numerical Goals from our management toolkit. Yet he also made it quite clear that communicating the facts about harsh realities that might be facing a company was totally justified. In words he might have used - "Unless our quality improves by 20% in the next six months, we will be out of business."

Yes, work on your systems. Yes, engage everyone in continuous improvement. And, yes, tell your people when your company faces a harsh reality, so they can pull together to do what's necessary.

However, if you find yourself repeatedly in crisis, and repeatedly telling people that "This is Not Good Enough," you need to read Deming's Out of the Crisis. If your people are always "Not Good Enough", it's likely your management approach that is "Not Good Enough". There are better ways.

Do You Treat Your People With Respect?

Do you treat your people with respect? I know you'll say "Yes" - everyone says "Yes". But do your actions really demonstrate respect? Would your people say "Yes" if asked the same question?

Without respect, both given and perceived, managing becomes infinitely more difficult.

Here are a dozen ways that managers disrespect their slobbering, unwashed, incompetent employees...(oops, did I say that out loud? make that thirteen ways)...

1. Do you hold people accountable for the results of the system? Deming said that 95% of results come from the system, yet we seem to direct 95% of our management efforts into fixing "bad" people.
2. Have improvements resulted in layoffs?
   Do you think anyone will help you make further improvements if their jobs, and their friends jobs, will be at risk?
3. Do you identify who causes each problem?
   Root cause analysis is not about finding culprits, it's about changing the system so problems can't recur.
4. Who designs the work?
   Engineers? Managers? Bosses? The people know how to do the work; the people know how to improve the work. Most of the details of the work are probably never known to those who don't actually do the work.
5. When asked a question do you typically respond with an answer?
   Decisions should be made as close to the work as possible. People need the information, the understanding, and the support to make their own decisions about their own work.

6. Do you use carrots and sticks?
   Performance management in all it's flavours implies "I'm OK, but you need to be motivated and controlled."
7. Do you “roll out” changes?
   When you assume that a success in one area can be rolled out to another area, it implies that people are interchangeable. They're not. They're all unique and every change must be adapted and adopted, not imposed.
8. Has there ever been a strike or a lockout? Have people had to work without a contract?
   Pretending that labour-management disputes somehow evaporate after the contract is signed is naive. Of course it damages trust, destroys respect.
9. Do you blame people for absenteism and sick leave?
   People miss work because they have to; they're trying to survive in the system.
10. Do you set targets and quotas?
    Systems have capacities. Imposing arbitrary targets with no idea how people will achieve them isn't management, it's wishing, it's abusive
11. Do you tell people that they're the problem?
    If you've ever put up a poster saying "Do it right the first time," your true thoughts are clear - people screw up because people aren't careful enough.
12. Do your people ever truly get to contribute to the improvement of their daily work?
    In most companies, only an elite few ever get to change the work. This is insane.

Respect is the core of Lean, of Continuous Improvement, of the Toyota Production System, of effective auditing, of teamwork, of communication. It's crucial. Yet so many of the things we managers do are deeply disrespectful. Belittling. Condescending. The damage is vast, as are the opportunities as you start to turn it around.

What's Our Purpose?

The CEO of a $30 million/year retailer was struggling. Her board of directors was torn between two very different strategies - either continue at the current levels, work on containing costs, and seek safe, moderate profitability or take on debt to pursue an aggressive growth strategy. Either strategy could make sense, but the board wasn't clear on what it wanted.

Because the board was unclear, the CEO was effectively handcuffed on every significant decision. Because she was handcuffed, management was understandably cautious. Because management was cautious, staff was paralyzed. Because staff was paralyzed, none were taking any intiative and the company was stagnating, and losing ground.

The CEO had the insight to force the issue and placed both options before the board. The board continued to waffle, so the CEO resigned. "I could have implemented either strategy, but there was no direction. We had no clear goals - were we trying to expand, or just trying to sustain? What was our purpose?"

The first of Deming's 14 Principles was to "create constancy of purpose". Without this, management is ineffective. What's your purpose?

Sometimes You Just Have to Pull Forward

You've arrived with your family at the busy 300-site campground, and look with dismay at the sharp ninety-degree turn required to back into your narrow tree-lined site. As other trailers queue up behind, you survey the bush, the steep ditch, the light post and the big boulder that complicate your task. You want to be cautious, but you also want to appear competent and confident - after all, everybody's waiting and watching - so you start to back up.

In your haste, you turn a little too tight, the trailer starts to pinch, and soon you're stuck with one wheel an inch from the boulder and a twelve-inch pine tree threatening to make a new window in your trailer. You start to sweat. You crank the wheels hard the other way, and keep backing up. You cringe as the boulder gently scrapes a groove down the side of your trailer, and yet you push on. More people gather to watch your efforts.

In your anxious desire to get into your campsite and out of the limelight, you gun the engine and the trailer bumps over a couple of pieces of firewood left over from the previous campers, and you slam to a stop with a tree branch embedded in the rooftop air-conditioner. The truck is wedged between a tree and the boulder, and you can't open either door. So you crawl out the passenger side window, trying to look nonchalant as the line of waiting campers slowly drives by, gawking at you in all your RV glory. This wasn't how it looked in the brochure! (At Candle Lake Provincial Park. We were in the queue of waiting campers.)

When learning to back up a truck and trailer, some of the best advice is simple, yet not entirely obvious. "To get good at backing up, you have to know when to pull forward." Some campsites would be completely impossible to get into if you only allowed yourself the option of backing up; you'd get stuck, you'd do damage, you'd fail, or even worse, you'd be publicly humiliated! Pulling forward allows you to correct the line, adjust the angles, and back into spots that are inaccessible if you only go backwards.

A similar concept applies in business, with three examples presenting themselves recently:

1. A C-suite team had serious inter-personal conflicts and poor communication, but would never take the time to address these. In the words of the CEO, "we've got to focus on our objectives, and can't let ourselves get sidetracked." So, they continued to bang away at their goals, and bang away at each other, without ever stopping to adjust and get agreement. Consequently, but not surprisingly, they could never get agreement, and were completely ineffective at reaching their goals.
2. A software development team was being taken to task for their productivity levels, so they started banging out code before having a clear understanding of the client's requirements. Management insisted that the developers meet certain quantity targets, but wouldn't invest the time to clarify what exactly the code should do. In their blind pursuit of efficiency, they backed themselves into a corner they couldn't get out of; the hours wasted on useless code made the department miss all their productivity targets once they finally found out what the client wanted.
3. A leader insisted on positive language among her team. She continually used upbeat, cheerful language, and required all of her people to speak favorably and enthusiastically about the company's initiatives, about departmental policies, about everything. Her stated goal was to build team spirit and keep everyone focused on the positives to foster engagement and motivation. A few quick interviews revealed a great deal of negative cynicism festering under the surface; festering because it could never be expressed, and could never then be addressed. By allowing only positive comments, she unintentionally backed her people into frustration and negativity.

People are always watching you in business, and you probably feel a lot of pressure to seem confident, to appear competent, to continue taking action. You want to be seen as a positive, can-do contributor who's always on task and always moving closer to the target. Onward and upward! Ever-improving quarterly results! When challenges and tight situations present themselves, it's tempting to yield to the pressure and just keep forging ahead.

Sometimes, though, the fastest way to move your company forward is to move backward - to pause and reflect, to regroup and adjust your approach, to deal with simmering issues and festering relationships. And, sometimes, the only way to nestle your trailer into that perfect camp site is to pull forward and start again.

Give Me More...

Have you ever had the joy of working in a very capable organization? In a place where the processes are in control, people are on top of things, and the team is actively seeking to take on more and greater challenges? It's radically different from the more common situation where people feel overwhelmed and do their best to avoid getting burdened with more work.

At some point in an effective improvement journey, the switch happens. Rather than a daily feeling of chaos and stress, people evolve into a feeling of calm capability, of strength, of collective confidence. One day, the group realizes that they are easily handling what used to be impossible beyond imagining. Like buying a new sports car, a new kind of thinking takes hold - "let's open 'er up and see what this baby can really do!"

This can happen in a one-person office. This can happen in a department. This can happen throughout an organization. When you finally figure out a system for staying on top of the daily tasks, clawing away at the backlog, and eliminating the churn and waste from your processes, it starts to get really exciting.

How much better would your world be if you could move your organization from "don't bother me" to "give me more?"

Fudging the Numbers

If you want to encourage your people to cheat
Set them a goal, a challenging feat.
Make them report on their progress to you,
And watch them distort by a number or two.

Now goals are quite useful as management tools

But if you impose them, you're acting the fool
Goals from within drive hard work and persistence
But goals from above demand nagging insistence

Also, from goals, do some problems arise

As the worker reports and, in ways, justifies.
He tries to do well, but when late or overdue
The ethics will suffer, and reports won't be true.

Research by Schweitzer, Ordonez and Douma
Suggests that goal setting causes us gloom. A
problem occurs when the task isn't complete,
unethical behaviour emerges, they cheat.

Especially when people are close, but not quite
Their target eludes them, try as they might
The closer they get, the more likely they are
To toss out their ethics, and report that they're stars.

What does the research suggest that we do,
To set goals but not bid our ethics adieu?
A prescription, it seems, that can be quite effective
Is to ask, please, that reports just not be defective.

For more information, read "Goal Setting as a Motivator of Unethical Behaviour", by Maurice Schweitzer, Lisa Ordonez and Bambi Douma, Academy of Management Journal 2004.

For even more information, read A Theory of Goal Setting & Task Performance by Locke and Latham.

Don't Eat at your Desk

In a call center, as part of a wellness program, the customer service reps were told not to work through their staggered lunch breaks. Since lunch was the only break they were given in the day, management felt it was important for the reps to stretch their legs, go to the lunch room, take a break and chat with colleagues.

On the other hand, management also imposed Service Standards on the reps, which required orders to be processed within a certain amount of time. Because the workload was consistently beyond capacity, most of the reps ended up having to work through lunch, staying at their desk.

So, the reps would be chastised for violating the company's wellness policy, but the consequences were even greater for not meeting the Service Standards. Employees chose the lesser of two evils, and often ate at their desk while they worked through lunch, without pay.

Some people might celebrate or criticize this as a devious management success, but management at this shop truly had good intentions. Unfortunately, they hadn't been able to hear the voices of their employees or of their processes, and truly thought that the workload was manageable. These kind of conflicting job requirements make workers crazy.

Shooting Blanks - The Impotence of Financial Business Planning

"Over the next five years, our projected Internal Rate of Return will be 21.3%."

"We calculated an ROI of 12.63%"

"In the first three years, using conservative estimates, our sales are projected to be $82,300, $256,805 and $544,080"

I recently attended some presentations by business students, showcasing their business planning skills. The event was pleasant enough, but I see now where managers learn to shoot blanks when they're aiming at business targets. Whether entrepreneurs looking for investment capital, or managers planning improvement initiatives, the presenters always seem to make up a whole bunch of numbers, multiply them by a bunch of other guessed numbers, extend them five years into the uncertain future, and then state their financial projections to three decimal places of accuracy. The reliance on financial business planning is all-pervasive, and I've always felt a bit cynical about its usefulness.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn how recent the development of financial business management is. Prior to the 1950's financial data was rarely used to manage the day-to-day business and planning of operations. It was used extensively to keep score, but it's use was limited to reporting after the fact - to telling shareholders how the company actually did. That is what financial tools are really useful for; for counting the money, for reporting results to shareholders, for looking in the mirror to see what happened.

But I'm shocked by how many companies that are planning improvement efforts look at it primarily as a financial, cost-accounting exercise. The magic formula they use - Profit equals Revenue less Costs - leads to very straight-forward decisions that never seem to quite work out. Yes, this formula is true, but only for keeping score, not for planning. It's like carefully, precisely aiming at a target, but then being impotent to achieve the results and actually hit the target, because there's no bullet in our gun.

For example, to make more profit, an obvious method is to cut costs. But, of course, most costs are associated with some sort of purpose, some function. And, when you eliminate those costs, you also eliminate those functions. So, the company reduces the amount spent on new product development, cuts the number of staff in customer support, and eliminates a number of HR positions that had been dealing with internal conflict resolution, staff training and occupational health and safety. Things look good on the balance sheets for a few months, but surprise!, your products soon fall behind your competitors, your customers become unhappy, and staff conflict increases while safety and quality slip. And, the financial results don't meet up with what was expected from the simple financial planning formula.

The most solid way to improve the financial results is to continually improve the details of how we do what we do for customers. By improving the processes, the details of the daily work, we can reduce the resources required while improving quality, improving speed of delivery and improving employee engagement at the same time. This WILL produce more profit. This isn't rhetoric, this is a practical approach and a long-standing alternative to how to manage your business. Toyota (despite the recent witch-hunt), Scania and other industry-leading organizations, don't use financial accounting to manage their businesses as much as they use them to report the results.

If your attempts at improvement never seem to quite measure up, maybe you should start using different methods to achieve improvement. If you're shooting blanks, you'll never hit your targets, no matter how much effort you put into aiming.

If You Ain't First, That's OK

As I reflect a little more on the now distant memories of the 2010 Olympics, I'm left with the feeling that it's all based on a pretty harsh, arbitrary and ridiculous way of defining success.

Consider Devin Kershaw, Canadian cross-country skier. He trained hard, did everything right, performed excellently but was two one-hundredths of a percent slower than the winner Petter Northug of Norway in the men's 50km mass start. After more than two hours of full-out racing, he had crossed the finish line 1.6 seconds after Northug. This was good enough for ... fifth place. No medal. No reward. Just suck it up, be a good sport, demonstrate the true spirit of the Olympics and go home. Better luck next time. Two one-hundredths of one percent between first and fifth - not a big difference!


Consider also "Neutron Jack" Welch, the notorious CEO of General Electric who famously declared that GE would only stay in markets where it ranked a number one or two. This thinking pervades businesses today, at every scale, with everyone thinking that if they're not first, they're last. Vision statements are filled with some variation of:

- "the number one Asian restaurant in the city"
- "the world's leading cleaning chemical supplier"
- "the best furnace cleaning company in the province"
- "the best health care provider in the country"
- "the largest insurance provider"

Basically, we all seem to be setting out to be the best, number one, top of the heap.

I understand that this is meant to be inspiring; a sort of stretch goal to keep everyone on their toes and focused on "winning". But it has the same harsh, arbitrary, and ridiculous way of defining success that is used in the Olympics. Unless you are the best, you have failed. And this just ain't so.

At last count, there were thirty-one pages of Pizza ads in the Saskatoon Yellow Pages. Obviously, they can't all become "the best", and it seems a little foolish for them all to declare that as their intent. You can run a successful, profitable, satisfying business without being number one in your industry.

Focus on improving the concrete particulars of the daily work, keep getting better at doing whatever it is you do, and don't pretend that you need to be number one. In most businesses, being number two, three, four or seven is still a great place to be. Whenever you rank businesses or people against each other, there can only be a single number one, a single gold medalist. But there can be many very successful businesses.

Strive to be excellent, to be better than you were yesterday. And even if you ain't first, that's OK.

Ten Common Assumptions About Performance Reviews

What underlying beliefs motivate managers to use performance reviews? Following are ten that I've commonly seen and heard, all of which I believe are demonstrably flawed:

1. Problems result from individual negligence or mistakes.
2. Success requires holding people accountable for the achievement of measurable goals.
3. Employees withhold effort that must be coaxed out of them.
4. Managers can and must motivate and control the workforce.
5. Evaluation improves an employee's performance.
6. Employees can control their results.
7. An employee's contribution can be separated from the contributions of others.
8. Evaluation of employees improve the performance of the business.
9. Evaluators are consistent with each other, and from one employee to the next.
10. Conditional rewards improve employee performance.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys Gone Wild!

While paying for some service work at a local auto dealer, the service manager handed me a Customer Satisfaction Survey that they were required to use as part of a corporate-wide service improvement initiative. The survey had the usual five-point Likert scales for expressing my views, with questions like "Were our people helpful?" or "Was your car ready when expected?" and possible responses along the lines of 1-Totally Wow, 2-OK, 3-Average, 4-Bad, 5-Total Crap.

The interesting twist was that the manager asked me to only rank things as 1 or 2, to represent Happy or Not Happy. If I wanted futher response from the dealership, use a 2 to indicate Not Happy, and they would follow up with me on the issues.

I asked why, and he said that a copy of each response stays at the dealership, and a copy goes to head office. If survey answers go to head office with a 3, 4 or 5, they would send "the Spanish inquisition" to the dealership, rake everyone over the coals, and make a whole lot of noise about doing your best and the importance of the customer. The whole idea from head office was that every dealer should be thrilling their customers, not just providing average or poor service. As an aside, all of my experiences with this dealership had involved an excellent service relationship, in terms of attitude, technical skill, price and schedule.

He further said that whenever the inquisitors swooped in, it just made all his people very unhappy and didn't help resolve any problems anyway. Internally, the dealership treated any 2-OK's as if they were 5-Total Crap's and followed up to try to make the customer happy, but they preferred to do this without the heavy hand of head office. With a little more discussion, he shared that most of the other dealers had been doing the same thing - trying to give good service while distoring the surveys to avoid the tyranny of head office.

So, in the grand survey collection and reporting apparatus of this company, this dealership (and probably most of the others) would show great improvements in service, showing mostly 1's and 2's. Management would be satisfied that their improvement initative was working, where all that had changed was that the dealerships were distorting the numbers to avoid abuse.

If you set an arbitrary target and hold people accountable for meeting that target, they will (validly) find a way to survive, and avoid the wrath of management. If there is no real way they can change the process, they will distort the numbers. Rather than setting arbitrary targets and holding people accountable for things they can't control, go down to the work and see what you can do to help them improve the process; work with them to make the work better and the results will take care of themselves.

Dirty and Abused, But Not in a Good Way

Brian got a replacement credit card in the mail and phoned in to activate the new card. Brian was a long-time card-holder with this company. When the activation was completed, the service agent proceeded into a scripted sales pitch touting a great new opportunity to add balance insurance for the low, low price of blah, blah, blah.

Brian said he didn't want the insurance but the agent handled Brian's objection and kept trying to push it, as per his script. Brian politely informed the agent that he understood he was just doing his job, but please stop trying to sell the insurance. He requested that even if the call was not being recorded, he would like the agent to tell his superiors that Brian did not appreciate this treatment.

Brian hung up, and ended up feeling dirty and abused, and not in a good way. The company had tried to take advantage of the existing relationship by pushing an additional sale, using sales pitches and sales techniques to overcome his objections and force the deal onto him. It's relationship selling, I guess, but it's abusive relationship selling. Don't do it.

Standard Service Levels

We set up a standard service level for our software support team; all help calls were to be resolved within three days. It seemed to work as average times dropped dramatically. But, customers were still unhappy. It ended up that technicians were just closing the tickets after three days whether the problem was fixed or not. They’d open another ticket, or provide help off-the-record in order to meet the standard. We’d ignored the capacity of the system and set an arbitrary, unreachable target. The people did what they needed to do to survive in the impossible system we created. Now that we understand variation, failure demand, and system capacity, we’ve been able to to truly improve service, instead of just the numbers.