A Real Live Dinosaur

I just saw a real live dinosaur. President of a successful industrial company, this fearsome creature roared his mighty roar, in a throwback to prehistoric management practices:

"If somebody makes a mistake, I fire them! Nobody makes a mistake twice here."

"Discipline is everything. If the union ever gives me trouble, I wait a bit and then fire a couple of them."

"I've never lost a union dispute. I just send my accountant with a checkbook to settle it. Way cheaper than a severance package!"

"The only thing workers care about is money. They don't understand anything else."

This superb example of  Tyrannosaurus Wrecks was terrifying; the blood-red wine flowed, chicken bones crunched, and it took every ounce of courage not to run screaming from the darkened restaurant. Well, it wasn't that bad, but lordy it wasn't that good.

We've all had tyrannical bosses at some point in our lives, but few match the ferocity of this specimen. His proud reliance on fear, intimidation and discipline bring to mind the horrors of slavery and serfdom. Yet despite the offensiveness of his managerial approach, his company, his empire, is financially successful and has a good reputation in the industry.

There are many management styles, both in terms of personal approach and in terms of policy, and all work to some degree. Indeed, in a well-controlled study of CEO management style, Bertrand and Schoar found that the financial and investment policies of the leader accounts for only about 4% of the variance in a company's results. In terms of personal style, the research is scarce, but it's clear that some bully managers succeed, and some bully managers fail. Some respectful managers succeed, and some respectful managers fail.

In my own experience, aggressive bullying management seems to make all the good people leave. And those that stay behind tend to keep their heads down to avoid the teeth, and constantly look for increasing compensation, either within the company, or in greener pastures. Aggressive bullying can work as a management style, but there are good reasons that dinosaur managers have been going extinct. Hopefully, the remaining few will soon follow.

Nothing to do With Technology

A TV news production company has an online presence, a 24-hour news channel with text, photos, and videos; glitzy and content-rich, but basically, a website. The technology and tools they use are identical to the tools you can use to do this at home, with the same kind of software running on the same kind of computers. Sure, they have fancier cameras, and professional staff, but there's nothing in the technology they're using that differentiates them from us, from the masses. So what does differentiate them? What gives them a competitive advantage?

Touring their facility, you see computers, cameras, computers, microphones, and more computers. There is a physical desk and background set where the news is produced, but most of what you see throughout the building is technology. Indeed, a news production company is a technology company, an IT company. But that's not what they feel is responsible for their success.

The people in this organization are remarkable, the relationships are remarkable. The production engineer talks more about how well the different groups work together than about how the technology works. The person who creates the headlines and graphics enthuses about how good the internal technical support group is. The technicians are so grateful for how well the five branch offices work together, with a frequent and free flow of problems, solutions and support. The union leader is proud of how well management and labour get along - "we just talk things out; it seems like everyone's just trying to help people do good work and enjoy their work. We do really cool things. People love coming to work here."

Over and over, throughout the company, people would willingly demonstrate the technology they used. But, more noticably, people would enthusiastically rave about how good the people were, how positive the environment was, how strong the relationships had become and how much of a joy it was to work there. These were people who were doing an unplanned technical demonstration for an unplanned technical guest, but their enthusiasm and their presentations had little to do with technology.

Indeed, the success of their technology company has little to do with technology. The continuing success of their company is firmly rooted in the human side of things. Isn't yours?

Human Resources Discussion Group

Dave Hunchak of Swift Fox will be facilitating an interactive discussion group for SATA (Saskatchewan Advanced Technology Association) called HRX - Human Resources Exchange. In a relaxed, confidential environment, participants will share issues and challenges and learn about current industry practices around one of the most important components of a business – people.
The 2010-2011 program runs the 2nd Tuesday of each month, from 4:30 – 5:30 pm at Ideas Inc., 207-120 Sonnenschein Way, Saskatoon. Registration is free for members of SATA.

• Tuesday Dec 7, 2010
• “Compliance is not an option”
• HR Basic Rules - Labor Standards, OH&S
• Tuesday Jan 11, 2011
• “To set policy or not to set policy, that is the question”
• HR Policies
• Tuesday Feb 8, 2011
• “Lead, follow or get out of the way?”
• Leadership Style and Practice
• Tuesday Mar 8, 2011
• “Finding them, getting them, keeping them”
• Talent Management
• Tuesday Apr 12, 2011
• “Cooperation vs. competition - what works when
• Productivity
• Tuesday May 10, 2011
• “More than just a paycheck”
• Compensation
• Tuesday Jun 14, 2011
• “Wrap-up and Review”
• And topics for next year…

For more information contact Laurel Reich, SATA Program Director at lreich@sata.ca or phone (306) 244-3889.

I've Only Ever Worked for Idiots!

After a couple of beers, an articulate and well-educated teacher, with years of experience, great relationship skills, and a reliably positive attitude, lamented that, throughout his career, he had "only ever worked for idiots!" As examples he gave:

• One administrator awarded managers a 14% pay increase, then, citing poor economic conditions, was shocked when the teachers' union balked at a 4% raise for them.
• Another bureacrat required weekly reports that took up to three hours a week to prepare, when the teachers already didn't have enough time to prepare for their classroom lectures.
• Another manager allocated half a million dollars a year for research stipends, and then created such a large administration staff for the program that less than $25,000 / year was ever available for research.
• At another job, the boss would request that skilled and professional workers wash the manager's shoes when they got muddy in the construction around the facility, because "his time was too valuable."

These kind of power-abusing experiences are shockingly common. These kind of experiences seriously compromise morale and create a toxic environment that damages the effectiveness of even the most positive of employees.

So much of our Human Resources effort seems to be focused on fixing problem employees. This isn't surprising when you realize that management hires HR people to help with the people issues, and HR reports to management. But maybe the focus on employees is a little misguided, a little too much on symptom bandaids and not enough on root cause analysis. Perhaps the Human Resources Department needs to set itself apart a little, and direct a little more energy at finding and fixing managers whose behaviours are destroying the morale of the company's precious human resources.

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.

Seven Features of Destructive Conflict

Conflict is not inherently good or bad. Conflict can inspire growth and creativity, it often carries the seeds of renewal, and it can motivate us to find breakthrough solutions that move us to a much better place. Conflict can be cooperative, with the feel of working together to solve a problem.

On the other hand, conflict can be very destructive, with a competitive, war-like, win-lose mentality that develops a mind and momentum of its own. Destructive conflict has several common features, which you will certainly recognize from your own experiences.

Destructive conflicts tend to...

1. Expand and escalate, often continuing long after the initial causes have been forgotten, or after initial causes have become irrelevant.
2. Rely on competitive processes as each side tries to win the conflict, through force, deception, alliances or cleverness.
3. Encourage black and white thinking, with strong pressure to choose sides and be loyal to your side's point of view.
4. Focus on strategies of power, using tactics of posturing, misinformation, threat and coercion.
5. Shift away from tactics like discussion and concilliation that minimize differences or enhance mututal understanding and goodwill.
6. Minimize direct communication between the people in conflict, relying instead on heresay, go-betweens, espionage, and other round-about ways of gathering intelligence.
7. Allow us to behave towards the other in ways that would be outrageous and morally unacceptable if directed towards us instead. The Golden Rule goes out the window as distrust and suspicion disable our social graces.

There are resources available on how to wage conflict, how to win your negotiations, and how to suppress or contain conflict. Less well known, yet more effective and powerful and pleasant, are the tools of constructive conflict and cooperative problem solving. If the seven features listed above permeate all your interactions, consider that there may be ways to help make your conflicts more constructive and positive.

The Savage World of Management

As your troops struggle with a hoard of zombies that were time-teleported onto your battle cruiser from ancient Rome, you swing your mono-molecular sword and attempt to decapitate the tentacled Zygorthian leader who's been leading the rebellion. The entire battle hinges on your success, and your success depends on the roll of a dice.

As you try to convince a herd of rebellious nurses and their union representatives to change how they organize their work, the entire campaign depends on your success, and your success depends on the roll of a dice.

As you try to battle the evil out-of-scope health region warlords and convince them that six nurses can't actually do the work of thirty, your department's sanity depends on your success, and your success depends on the roll of a dice.

In the role-playing and action game of Savage Worlds by Pinnacle Entertainment Group, the role of the dice feels particularly realistic, and is a useful analogy for anyone looking to improve their intuition about change, risk, randomness and prediction as it applies to management and business.

Whenever you launch a new product, or start a new improvement initiative, or even just have a conversation with someone, there is never certainty of the outcome - it may go the way you hope, it may succeed beyond your wildest imagining, or it may fail miserably. You bring a certain skill level to the process, either as an individual or as an organization, and then luck kicks in; the random variation of complex dynamic real-world systems.

In a Savage Worlds game, an action generally succeeds if you roll four or higher on your dice. So with a regular six-sided D6 dice you have a 50% chance of basic success. But, if you happen to roll a Six, you get to re-roll and add the new roll to the first. If you get another Six, you keep adding. So, even with a six-sided dice, there is always a small chance that you could roll a really big number (ie. roll Six, then Six, then Five and the total is 17). So, let's say you need a Four to wound the Zygorthian leader, but each additional four adds an extra wound. There's always a chance that you will really succeed and roll 17, inflicting four wounds to take him out of the game.

Another neat twist is that on some actions, if you roll a One, it's not just a miss but it's a "things go bad" failure of some sort. So, if you're swinging your "collective agreement" at the evil warlord, and roll a One, you might accidentally chop off the only leg you had left to stand on. Sometimes, even the best of us do something bone-headed and make a big mess of something that we had expected to go smoothly.

As you gain experience and knowledge, you can improve your skills in certain areas. Maybe you take some Leader Effectiveness Training so now you're rolling an eight-sided dice (D8) when kicking off your next team improvement project. Now, your chances or rolling a Four or more have increased to 62.5% from 50%, making it more likely that you'll succeed. However, even if your skill level increases to Legendary, and you're rolling a D12+1 on every attempt, with a 83.3% chance of success, there's always a chance you'll fail.

This feels real, for most situations we face in business.

When cold calling, there's a small chance you'll get a huge order, there's a pretty good chance that you'll start to develop a relationship that might lead to orders in the future, and there's a small chance that you'll cause so much damage to the relationship that you destroy any further chances of doing business with that firm.

When trying to improve the capacity of your service department, there's a small chance that you'll figure out a way to triple capacity without adding any staff, there's a pretty good chance that you'll have some conflict but work through it and gain 35% in capacity, and there's a small chance that it'll go very sour, with serious customer complaints, huge staff turnover, and a new job for you as a homeless person.

There's no certainty in Savage Worlds, and there's no certainty in business. Work on your skills and do everything you can to improve your effectiveness. On a really good day, everything will fall into place in ways you only dreamed of. But every once in a while you'll roll a One, and see how savage the world of management can be.

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.

Why Don't Unions Ask for Better Management?

I'm always surprised that management and labour negotiations focus so narrow-mindedly on the countable things like wages, overtime, vacation, raises, retroactive pay, hours of work. So often, the real issues in an organization emerge from non-countable things. The real frustrations and pain for workers arise most often from management philosophy, management techniques, management direction (or lack of direction), from the measurement and reward systems themselves, and from the leadership's lack of understanding of the day-to-day work. Everyone would be better served if labour negotiators put management training on the negotiating table, and made "improved management" a higher priority. Shifting management thinking from the archaic Command and Control to the world-class Support, Engage and Facilitate has huge potential upside for the workers and the workplace, and even more upside for management and shareholders. Both sides are always fighting about the money. This seems trivial and counterproductive in light of the deeper, more impactful issues.

If You Build a Nursing Home That Looks Like a Hospital

If you build a nursing home that looks like a hospital, the people who live there will behave like patients. They will be sick, they will be unhappy, they will defer to those giving them care.

If you build a nursing home that looks like a community of small houses, the people who live there will behave like functioning independent people. They will be active, they will take more control of themselves, they will ask for the care that they need.

Behaviours truly do emerge from the systems you set up. If you want to create a nursing home that is respectful and promotes activity and vibrant living, if you want to create an environment where multi-skilled staff do whatever is necessary to help those who live there, then the design of your building is important, the design of your policies is important, the priorities of your value systems are important.

The Village Model at Sherbrooke Community Centre in Saskatoon is living proof of this. Rather than an institutional look and feel, the resident live in a small community of joined houses, complete with indoor streets. Staff provide the medical services along with all the diverse, normal services that anyone would provide for their own homes. Residents are more independent and in control of their own care. As CEO Suellen Beatty says, "We did not realize how much simpler the environment would make our work."

It is harder to do compassionate, respectful, client-centered care in an institutional hospital setting. The systems that your people work within are important, and can make the path forward easy and natural, or bumpy and difficult.

Painting a Rotten Fence - Sick Leave Among Saskatoon Nurses

At a recently purchased side-by-side duplex, an old wooden fence divides the small back yard in two. The boards in this fence are rotted, the paint is peeling, the exposed wood is soft and weak, and the fence is basically falling apart. In preparation for renting the place, do we rebuild the fence, or do we simply paint over all the soft, weak structure to make it look good for prospective tenants. Do we address the visible problems, or do we fix the underlying core?

A recent article "Sick time abuse eyed" reveals a similar dilemna in the Saskatoon Health Region. Management sees a problem with nursing staff abusing sick leave - some of the nurses seem to be treating sick leave as an entitled right rather than as a means to deal with actual illness. A previous initiative to reduce sick leave by five percent failed, and sick leave in the health region has actually increased. With renewed commitment to tackle the issue aggressively, management is telling nurses that "management will be watching the numbers closely, and looking for suggestions to help reduce the number of sick days."

Most managers experience this kind of dilemma at some point in their careers. They are under big pressure, in this case budget constraints, they have no idea how to really solve the problem, and they're feeling powerless. The only recourse is to blame the workers and plead for a solution. The desperate approach goes something like this:

"If only we had better people, we wouldn't have this problem. The workers are doing bad things, and we have to get them to stop." Management will put more metrics in place, scrutinize every sick leave, find some culprits, discipline a few workers, fight with the unions a bit, and keep the nursing staff under a microscope. The problem will continue, and will probably get worse.

Increased sick leave is not the problem here. Increased sick leave and absenteeism are symptoms of deeper systemic problems. Sick leave and absenteeism emerge from a sick system; from the workplace that legacy has created. Nurses are stressed by the workload, frustrated by the bureaucracy and beaten down by the difficulties of the day-to-day job. Trust between management and labour has been eroded to the point that they're left with airing their differences in public.

Rather than just painting the rotting fence, we need to collectively focus on rebuilding the fence, making the work itself better, making the work environment better, making the leadership better. Otherwise, we'll waste a whole lot of management effort on making the sick leave numbers look better, without addressing the core structural problems in the work itself.

Management needs to go down to the work - in the hospitals, in clinics and in home care - and help get rid of the barriers that are preventing the nurses from doing good work they can be proud of. Leaders should help make the work better, not point fingers at the workers.

Labour leaders need to encourage cross-functional cooperation and integration, encouraging people to work together to give effective care to the patients, regardless of the artificial boundaries created by what union they're in or what their job description is.

And nurses need to try to remember why they went into nursing in the first place - presumably, to care for patients, help people regain their health, and nurture them through difficult times. It's a bit of a flip in thinking, but nurses (and the public) need to start holding management and labour leaders accountable for the stressful, bureaucratic, dysfunctional systems they've created. The leaders need to pull up their socks, and help the nurses regain pride in their work.

If we work on that, I don't think sick leave will be a problem.

Management versus Labour - Prophecy Fulfilled

A brochure for a Union Contract Negotiations seminar begins with "Collective bargaining is a complex process between two opposing sides. One one side, you have management who must ensure the profitability and even survivability of their organization. On the other side, the Union, by legislation, must protect not only the economic welfare of their members, but must ensure that employees are treated fairly and work in a safe environment."

If the parties of the first part and the parties of the second part see the world this way, it's very likely that conflict and opposition will emerge: If I want this, and you want the opposite, we end up fighting. One side wins. One side loses. Conflict, and damaged relationships, result.

But, isn't it in management's best interest to have a well-paid, loyal, long-term workforce who aren't constantly looking for work and struggling to make ends meet? Isn't it easier to run a profitable company when your employees are safe, and treated fairly, with low turnover, high engagement and high productivity? Don't these people create the wealth of the organization?

And, isn't it in the worker's best interest for the company to survive and be profitable? Doesn't that produce job security, stable career paths, more money for salaries, more resources for training and improvement, a place of work that inspires pride? Isn't long-term corporate stability, growth and profit great for employees?

Are management and unions on opposing sides?

If you think this way, you will lose. Your failure is an internal disease.You firmly believe that sound management means executives on the one side and workers on the other, on the one side men who think and on the other side men who only work. (Paraphrasing Konosuke Matsushita)