What's Best Next

  • Newsletter
  • Our Mission
  • Free Resource
  • Contact
  • Coaching
    • Center for Coaching
    • 2-HOUR DARE
    • Our Coaches
  • Speaking
  • Store
    • Online Store
    • Cart
    • My Account
  • Resources
    • Productivity
    • Leadership
    • Management
    • Web Strategy
    • Book Extras
  • About
    • Our Mission
    • Our Core Values
    • Our Approach to Productivity
    • Our Staff
    • Contact
You are here: Home / 2010 / Archives for May 2010

Archives for May 2010

How to Design Jobs Right and Make Every Job Meaningful

May 28, 2010 by Matt Perman

In order to enable people to be effective in their jobs and find them motivating and satisfying, you need to design work right. A compelling mission and cause to work for—as important as that is—can be interfered with and even undermined if the work itself is not structured in a way that accords with how humans are designed to function.

The reason is that if certain factors are not present within the work itself, dissatisfaction and even misery result. This has been documented by the Gallup organization in their twenty-year effort to identify the characteristics of great managers and workplaces[1] and articulated anecdotally very effectively by Patrick Lencioni.[2]

Our aim at Next is that we not undermine the mission that we are passionate about through the structure of our jobs. Rather, our aim is not only that every job actually be meaningful, but that every job feel meaningful. We do not want the reality (meaning) to be obscured by poor structure and job design.

Hence, I am going to outline five models on designing work, and then draw a few implications for us.

Five Models on Designing Work

1. Motivation

The Components of Motivation

In his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink argues that there are three factors of intrinsic motivation:[3] autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Autonomy

Autonomy means having the freedom to chose and be self-directed. There are four areas of work over which you can have autonomy: what you do, when you do it, how you do it, and who you do it with. In general, the greater autonomy one has over these conditions, the more motivating the work[4]—assuming the other two components are also met (mastery and purpose).

The opposite of autonomy is control. Whether a manager believes in increasing autonomy or increasing control reflects something about his or her view of human nature. If we believe that people do not naturally want to work, accept responsibility, and do a good job, we will tend to think people need a prod to move forward, that “absent [extrinsic] reward or punishment, we’d remain happily and inertly in place,”[5] and that once people do get moving, they need a firm and close guide or they will wander off task.

But if we believe that people are not passive and inert by nature, but rather “wired to be active and engaged,” then people don’t need to be controlled.[6] Rather, what they need are clear outcomes (which they also have a part in setting) so that they know what is expected of them. Along with this they need to have the knowledge and resources that they need to do their work. The role of the manager then becomes that of a supporter and source of help, making sure they are equipped in the way they need, and removing the obstacles that restrain active engagement and intrinsic motivation.[7]

Here’s how this all comes together: control leads to compliance, whereas autonomy leads to engagement.[8] And this relates to the second component of motivation.

Mastery

Mastery is “the desire to get better at something that matters.”[9] Only engagement, not compliance, can produce mastery.

Managers help create the conditions for mastery by creating environments where it is conducive to get into the state of flow, or “the zone”[10] and making sure that people have “clear objectives and a way to get quick feedback.”[11] Another crucial part of this is making sure that people are able to play to their strengths—to do what they do best every day. For the opportunity for greatest improvement and growth and mastery lies in our areas of strength.[12]

Purpose

Purpose means working for a cause that is greater than yourself. This is what leads to the deepest level of motivation. Ironically, traditional management did not recognize purpose as a motivator. Instead, it relegated it to the status of “ornament—a nice accessory if you want it, so long as it doesn’t get in the way of the important stuff.” By taking this view, it “neglects a crucial part of who we are.”[13]

Evaluation

I think that Pink is right on the target with the three elements of motivation. Autonomy is one of our core guiding principles of leadership and management overall, and so it ought to be reflected in job design. Autonomy is good for the person, because it is motivating, and it is good for the organization, because when people are motivated they do better work.

Autonomy has to be combined with clarity of expectations, which we discuss in our approach in another document, and which is reflected in the other models in the “measurement” component. Measurement is one of the means of feedback on results, which is a form of accountability (but not the only form).

Mastery relates very much to our aim to focus on strengths and make sure people are able to do what they do best every day. We want to see people become better and better at what they do—and here we see that this is good for the individual and produces more effective results for the organization.

Purpose is becoming especially relevant in the modern workplace, because more and more people are realizing is essential to them in their work. People are not merely economic beings, and hence they do not work only for money. This is especially true in the nature of our work, being ministry. Our purpose as an organization is strong, and people come work here because they resonate with and want to contribute to that purpose. What we need to do is make sure that we don’t allow ourselves to become lazy on the other fronts because of this. It would be a tragedy if people were inspired by the sense of purpose in serving the kingdom, but we did not equip and empower them for effectiveness and growth in the other components that are necessary for job meaningfulness and effectiveness. In fact, as the Gallup research points out (which I discuss in the document “Employee Engagement” [link]), if people resonate with the purpose of their organization but lack some basic factors such as clear expectations and having the tools they need to do their work, they will ultimately become disengaged. So we cannot simply think in terms of the high level of purpose. We also have to serve people at the levels down lower on the mountain, at base camp.

2. Engagement

Description

Engagement means having an emotional connection to your work. Marcus Buckingham’s book First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently is based on a Gallup study of 80,000 about how to build an engaged workforce—that is, a strong work environment. Their findings show that a great work environment is not something that just happens randomly; rather, it is something that we have no control over.

Their most surprising finding is that the key role in creating a strong work environment is not the leadership of the company, but the managers. Your manager plays the greatest role in determining whether you will stay with a company and how effective you will be while you are there. People join companies, but leave managers.

Buckingham gives a full picture of what the management role needs to look like in order to build a strong workplace and create employee engagement. In brief, the role of the manager is not to perfect people, but rather unleash who they already are—to turn talent into performance. This is done by turning four keys: selecting for talent, motivating by focusing on strengths, setting expectations by defining the right outcomes (but no the right steps), and developing by finding the right fit.

If the managers throughout the company play this role effectively, time after time, a strong workplace is built. Further, the strength of a workplace can be measured through the 12 Questions that Gallup developed through its study. The primary role of a manager is to develop positive responses to the first six of these questions. The manager does this by carrying out the above four keys effectively.

The 12 Questions are:

  1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
  2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
  3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
  4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
  5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
  6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
  7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?
  8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
  9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
  10. Do I have a best friend at work?
  11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
  12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

Evaluation

We have baked the realities that these questions measure into our management systems, including performance management, career discovery, and strengths discovery. When it comes to job design, the three biggest factors that we see at this point are: people need to have the equipment they need to do their work right, and so we ought not skimp there, and every job needs to have clearly defined outcomes, or expectations. Third, each person needs to be positioned in a way that will enable them to play to their strengths, which is not just an ambiguous ideal, but something that can be concretely measured by the question “are you able to do what you do best every day.”

3. The Non-Miserable Job

The Nature of a Miserable Jobs

Patrick Lencioni makes a distinction between miserable jobs and bad jobs. A “bad” job is often in the eye of the beholder—it’s defined by what you value and what you want your job to be like.

A miserable job is one that “saps your energy even when you’re not busy. It’s the one that makes you go home at the end of the day with less enthusiasm and more cynicism than you had when you left in the morning.”[14]

You can have a “great” job—a professional basketball player or a CEO—and still be miserable because “being miserable has nothing to do with the actual work a job involves” (217).[15]

Consequently, “miserable jobs are found everywhere—consulting firms, television stations, banks, schools, churches, software companies, professional football teams, amusement parks. And they exist at all levels, from the executive suite to the reception desk to the mail room.”[16]

The Consequences of Miserable Jobs

Miserable jobs matter because they are harmful to people and cause the organization to be less effective. “Economically, productivity suffers greatly when employees are unfulfilled.”[17]

But it is the social cost that is most significant, because miserable jobs don’t simply affect the employee himself—which is bad enough. Rather, they have ripple effects. “A miserable employee goes home at the end of the day frustrated, cynical, and weary and spreads that frustration, cynicism, and weariness to others—spouses, children, friends, strangers on the bus. Even the most emotionally mature, self-aware people cannot help but let work misery leak into the rest of their lives.”

Thus, it makes sense that we should do whatever we can to make sure we have no miserable jobs at DG, and know how to help reduce job misery in society at large. So we need to know, what makes a job miserable?

The 3 Signs of a Miserable Job

Lencioni argues that there are three characteristics of a miserable job: anonymity, irrelevance, immeasurement.

Anonymity

Anonymity simply means not having someone, usually at least your manager but also peers, who take an interest in you. So anonymity doesn’t mean “not widely known”—that’s not the point. It is when no one at work takes a personal interest in you.

This is the first component of a miserable job because “people cannot be fulfilled in their work if they are not known. All human beings need to be understood and appreciated for their unique qualities by someone in a position of authority….People who see themselves as invisible, generic, or anonymous cannot love their jobs, no matter what they are doing.”[18]

Irrelevance

Irrelevance is when there is no clear indication that your work matters to someone. Once again, the point here is not that it needs to matter to millions of people; it just needs to matter to a few. “Everyone needs to know that their job matters, to someone. Anyone. Without seeing a connection between the work and the satisfaction of another person or group of people, an employee simply will not find lasting fulfillment.”

Immeasurement

Immeasurement is when there is no way to gauge your progress—and do this for yourself. This brings objectivity to evaluating your performance, which is critical because people “cannot be fulfilled in their work if their success depends on the opinions or whims of another person, no matter how benevolent that person may be. Without a tangible [emphasis added] means for assessing success or failure, motivation eventually deteriorates as people see themselves as unable to control their own fate.”[19]

Making Jobs Meaningful

To make jobs meaningful, therefore, we need to make sure that they include three factors:

  1. Non-Anonymity. People must be known, and not seen as invisible, generic, or anonymous.
  2. People must know that their job matters to someone.
  3. People need to be able to gauge your progress and contribution for themselves.

The Benefits of Making Jobs Meaningful

By making sure every job is meaningful, many benefits result.

First, it increases productivity. “Employees who find fulfillment in their jobs are going to work with more enthusiasm, passion, and attention to quality than their counterparts who do not, mostly because they develop a sense of ownership and pride in what they are doing.”[20]

Second, it results in greater retention and lower costs. “Simply stated, employees hang on to fulfilling jobs as long as they can, mostly because they know their chances of finding another are relatively slim. What is more, fulfilled employees tend to attract other good employees to an organization, either by actively recruiting them or merely by telling friends about their enthusiasm for their work. The result of all this for an organization is significantly lower costs related to recruiting, hiring, retraining, and termination.”[21]

Third, it results in sustainable cultural differentiation. “In a world of ubiquitous technology and rapid dissemination of information, it is harder and harder to establish sustainable competitive advantage through strategic and tactical decision making. Cultural differentiation, however, is more valuable than it’s ever been, because it requires courage and discipline more than creativity or intelligence.”[22]

Fourth, it serves people. Managing for job fulfillment is not only beneficial to the organization; rather, it is right in itself because it serves people. This is how we ought to treat people, who are in the image of God. Organizations are not exempt from the Great Commandment. We ought to treat people the way they ought to be treated—the way we would want people to treat us—and that means managing our organizations in a way that seeks to maximize job fulfillment.[23]

4. Job Enrichment

In Treat People Right, Edward Lawler gives a good summary of what researches have found regarding job design.

He writes: “job design greatly influences employee motivation, satisfaction, and performance and ultimately has a powerful influence on organizational effectiveness.”[24] This is because “a great deal of research evidence shows that when jobs are designed to contain high levels of involvement and challenge, the result is high levels of intrinsic motivation and satisfaction.”[25]

The Characteristics of Enriched Jobs

There are three critical characteristics of “enriched jobs”:

  1. The experience of meaningfulness.
  2. The experience of responsibility for outcomes.
  3. Feedback or knowledge of results.

“When all three of these conditions are present in the minds of employees, the work itself can be both motivating and satisfying. However, if any one of these conditions is not present, research suggests that people will not be motivated because they will not experience a connection—or line of sight, as we have called it—between feeling good and performing well.”[26]

Feedback

For example, without feedback, you can’t know if you’ve performed well. There is no line of site between performance and results, which comes close to the definition of futility.

Responsibility

Likewise, without responsibility, you don’t “own” your work. There is one single defining characteristic for responsibility: autonomy. (This is reminiscent of Daniel Pink’s research.) “Autonomy occurs when people feel they can determine their own work methods and procedures without close supervision. Autonomy is what allows people to take responsibility for how well they perform. When freedom and choice are not present, people feel that someone is controlling them so much that they literally disown the results of their own behavior.”[27]

Meaningfulness

And without a meaningful task, “people do not feel that they have done something worthwhile, and so they don’t experience a positive feeling, even if they perform well.”[28] There are three characteristics of meaningfulness: doing a whole or complete piece of work, doing a significant task and the degree to which it requires the use of valued skills.

Most organizations are doing better at the factors of meaningfulness and feedback, but are often fail to give attention to giving more autonomy. It is for this reason that “many job enrichment efforts fail.”[29]

Diminished Jobs: The Thinking of Scientific Management

Much of this is contrary to the school of scientific management, which dominated work design during much of the last century. Scientific management “called for standardized, specialized, simplified, and where possible, machine-paced jobs—all in the name of efficiency, productivity, and low labor costs. People were expected to add little value beyond their manual labor, and thus they could be easily hired, trained, and replaced when needed. To keep people working hard, two carrots were used: financial incentives and the threat of being fired.”[30]

Scientific management stems from a faulty and unbiblical view of human nature. “A key assumption behind the scientific management movement was that in return for a job, people should be willing to behave like machines for eight hours a day.” Some today, in fact, still hold this. For example, in Coaching for Improved Work Performance, Ferdinand Fournies, writes that “people are hired in business to do jobs only because we don’t have a machine that can do those jobs.”[31] Ferdinand also states that the implied agreement between the employer and employee goes something like this:

She: I will do what you tell me to do as long as you pay me with a check that doesn’t bounce.

You: I will tell you what to do, give you some tools to do it with, and try not to dismember you in the process.[32]

What a horrible perspective! I will mention four of the core problems with it. First, it treats people as merely economic beings (note how the economic dimension is represented as the full range and purpose of the agreement: “as long as you pay me with a check that doesn’t bounce”). But people are not only stomachs; they are also resourceful, social, and spiritual. Managing people merely from the economic perspective fails to treat people as whole people. It is a truncated view of people that does not accord with truly treating them as whole persons who are in the image of God.

Second, this perspective doesn’t work. As I discuss in the document (I believe) on compensation, in a society of abundance it simply is not effective to manage with the carrot and stick approach because people’s economic needs are largely satisfied (or can easily be satisfied simply through a different job). People no longer work primarily for a paycheck, but also for the sake of higher level needs such as social relationships, performing at their peak potential, and meaning. If managers ignore these dimensions, they will have no influence.

Third, this perspective is inherently demotivating. This should be clear from what we have seen from our discussion above on motivation. As Pink argued, the three factors of motivation are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Fournies perspective ignores all of these. He ignores autonomy: the employer says “I will tell you what to do.” He ignores purpose: the arrangement is only about getting paid “with a check that doesn’t bounce.” And he ignores mastery: the arrangement is only about “doing what you tell me” rather than what I am good at.

Now, scientific management was efficient. But that doesn’t mean it is right. We need to be concerned about more than efficiency when dealing with people. Scientific management accomplished its efficiency at the expense of people—and, ironically, the long-term result was actually very inefficient. As Lawler sums up very well:

“[Scientific management’s] use in most large organizations for decades caused low intrinsic motivation on the part of employees, high rates of turnover and absenteeism, and a strong inclination to solve workplace problems through unionization. In response to their mind-numbing repetitious jobs, employees frequently engaged in counterproductive behaviors, such as shoddy-quality work and even sabotage. Poor quality and productivity, along with constant labor-management disputes, were problems that frequently plagued U.S. car makers and for that matter most other U.S. manufacturers for decades. It was these problems that opened the door to foreign competitors.”[33]

5. Principle-Centered Leadership

Treating People as Whole People

Principle-centered leadership, articulated by Stephen Covey, means treating individuals as whole people, rather than simply one-dimensional. In other words, people are not merely economic beings, and so work needs to provide more than just financial incentives. People are also social, talented, and spiritual. And so work must tap into these dimensions as well. Covey writes that there are four basic management paradigms and suggests that “three of them are fundamentally flawed because they are based on false assumptions about the nature of people.”[34]

First, the scientific management paradigm saw people primarily as economic beings. This led to an authoritarian style, because if people are primarily economic, then it follows that the task of the manager is to “motivate them through the great jackass method, the carrot and the stick.”[35] In this view, the manager is in control and is the “elite one” who knows what is best. “I will direct you where to go, and I will do it through the carrot and the stick. Of course, I must be fair with the economic rewards and the benefit package. But it’s all designed to meet the needs of one’s stomach.”[36] The manager is fundamentally seeing themselves as “manipulating an economic reward package in order to get the behavior they want.”

Second, there is the human relations paradigm. This paradigm sees people not only as economic beings, but also social beings. Hence, it seeks to “treat people not only with fairness, but with kindness, courtesy, civility, and decency.” But “the power still lies with the manager—the shift is usually simply from being an authoritarian to being a benevolent authoritarian because we still are the elite few who know what’s best.”[37]

Third, there is the psychological paradigm, which recognizes the economic and social components of people, as well as the need to use one’s talent and grow and contribute creatively to the accomplishment of worthwhile objectives. This paradigm cares about contribution and realizes that “people have minds in addition to stomachs and hearts.” “With this larger understanding of man’s nature, we begin to make better use of their talent, creativity, resourcefulness, ingenuity, and imagination.” In this paradigm, “managers try to create an environment in which people can contribute their full range of talents to the accomplishment of organizational goals.”[38] This paradigm is pretty close, but is not yet reckoning with the all dimensions of human nature.

Fourth is principle-centered leadership. As mentioned above, this means treating people as whole people, which means recognizing that in addition to being economic, social, and resourceful, people are also spiritual. That is, they seek meaning, “a sense of doing something that matters.” It realizes that “people do not want to work for a cause with little meaning, even though it taps their mental capacities to the fullest. There must be purposes that lift them, ennoble them, and bring them to their highest selves.”[39]

On this paradigm, the you manage people through principles. “These principles are the natural laws and governing social values that have characterized every great society, every responsible civilization, over the centuries. They surface in the form of values, ideas, ideals, norms, and teachings that uplift, ennoble, fulfill, empower, and inspire.” The power in this paradigm shifts away from the “elite authoritarian group—however benevolent it may be” with the result that “every person in the organization will feel more empowered.”

Covey expands:

This enlarged view of human nature underscores the need to make work challenging and fulfilling. Principle-centered leaders try to automate routine, boring repetitive tasks and give people a chance to take pride in their jobs. They encourage participation in decision making as well as other important matters. In fact, the more important the decision, the more challenging the problem, the more they attempt to tap the talents of their human resources. They continually seek to expand the areas over which their people could exercise self-direction and self-control as they develop and demonstrate better insight and ability [emphasis added].”[40]

So principle-centered leadership is about empowerment and meaning. Rather than seeking to control people, the manager aims to expand the areas over which people exercise self-direction and self-control. There are certain conditions that make self-direction and freedom more effective for people (and enable it to remain aligned with organizational goals), which Covey calls “the six conditions of empowerment.” These go to the heart of Covey’s thinking on how to manage people as self-governing, holistic, mature individuals who are in the image of God.

The 6 Conditions of Empowerment

Covey’s discussion on the 6 conditions of empowerment provide a helpful summary of his entire approach in a nutshell. He writes:

To motivate people to peak performance, we first must find the areas where organizational needs and goals overlap individual needs, goals, and capabilities. We can then set up win-win agreements. Once these are established, people could govern or supervise themselves in terms of that agreement. We would then serve as sources of help and establish helpful organizational systems within which self-directing, self-controlling individuals could work toward fulfilling the terms of the agreement. Employees would periodically give an accountability for their responsibilities by evaluating themselves against the criteria specified in the win-win agreement.[41]

This paragraph brings out the first four of the six conditions of empowerment, which we will now discuss:

  1. Win-win agreement (which provides the clear expectations and outcomes)
  2. Self-supervision
  3. Helpful structure and systems
  4. Accountability

These four conditions of empowerment are in turn based upon the other two conditions: skills and character.

Win-Win Agreements

The win-win agreement is essentially “a psychological contract between manager and direct report. It represents a clear mutual understanding rand commitment regarding expectations in five areas: desired results, guidelines, resources, accountabilities, and consequences.”[42]

Covey’s approach here is consistent with the principle of autonomy, and is in fact built on it:

These five features of a win-win agreement basically cover what a person needs to understand before undertaking a job. We clarify the desired results, the guidelines to work within, the resources to draw upon, the means of accountability, and the consequences of on-the-job performance. But we do not deal with methods. Win-win is a human resource principle that recognizes that people are capable of self-direction and self-control and can govern themselves to do whatever is necessary within the guidelines to achieve the desired results.[43]

Self-Supervision

Win-win agreements, in turn, enable self-supervision—which is a model of freedom and autonomy (within a structure) rather than command and control. “Once a win-win agreement is established, people can then supervise themselves in terms of that agreement.” What, then, is the role of the manager? “Managers may then serve as sources of help and establish helpful organizational structures and systems upon which self-directing, self-controlling individuals can draw to fulfill the win-win agreement.”[44]

Helpful Structure and Systems

The role of organizational systems is important, as they help “facilitate the fulfillment of win-win agreements.” The systems might include things like “strategic planning, company structure, job design, communication, budgeting, compensation, information, recruitment, selection, placement, training, and development. In a helpful system people receive information about their performance directly, and they use it to make necessary corrections.”

Accountability

Accountability happens through a routine of conversations and quarterly performance reviews. We introduce our process for this below, and then link to the documents that give the more complete details.

Skills and Character

The other two conditions of empowerment are skills and character. “Character is what a person is; skills are what a person can do. These are the human competencies required to establish and maintain the other four. Hence they are really preconditions to the establishment of trusting relationships, win-win agreements, helpful systems, and employee self-supervision and self-evaluation.”

And all of this is based on trust. “In a low-trust culture, it is difficult to establish good win-win agreement or allow self-supervision and evaluation. Instead, there would be a need for control systems and for external supervision and evaluation.”[45]

So trust is at the foundation of everything, and the foundation of trust is trustworthiness.

Our Approach

Everything that we have looked at in the above models is important for how we design and think of jobs at Next. This comes together into an integrated picture for us through mindsets and systems.

Mindsets

For Managers

  • Manage in a way that maximizes autonomy—what to do, when to do it, how to do it.
  • Yet also complement autonomy with accountability for results by making sure that outcomes are clear (while leaving the way to the outcomes up to the employee), providing feedback, and being a source of help.
  • Position your people so that each of them is able to more and more do what they do best every day.
  • Make sure your people always have the tools and equipment they need to do their work right.
  • Praise good work routinely and highlight how it makes a difference.
  • Proactively seek to develop your people in line with their strengths by suggesting training and other opportunities that will add to their strengths, and helping them find the right fit as they look to their next steps.
  • Lead and direct primarily through values and principles rather than rules.
  • Make sure that there are ways for people to count, rank, and measure their own results.

For Employees

  • Focus on your strengths. This means adjust your role if necessary so that you are called upon to do what you do best every day, and when you seek out training do so not mainly to shore up weaknesses, but rather build your strengths further.
  • Supervise yourself in terms of the win-win performance agreement and utilize your manager as a source of help and coach.
  • Do great work and make things happen!

Systems

Mindsets are significant all on their own, but become even more effective when they are also reinforced through specific systems that concretely keep them in motion. Here are some specific systems that embody the above principles and mindsets, with links to the specific documents where we describe them in more detail.

  • Strengths-based hiring. [link]
  • Win-win agreements [link] (job profiles) that are established at the beginning of each hiring relationship or change in job. See the link for components.
  • Quarterly performance planning. [link]
  • Annual strengths interview. [link] (This is just done after someone is initially hired, and then integrated into the first quarterly performance planning meeting for each year after.)
  • Annual career discovery. [link] (This is also integrated into one of the performance planning meetings.)
  • Role tweaking. [link]
  • Organization-wide talent profile. [link]

Notes

[1] See the book First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman, pp. 21-49.

[2] See his 3 Signs of a Miserable Job.

[3] There is a role for extrinsic motivation, but it is very secondary. Pink shows how extrinsic motivation often backfires and reduces commitment to a job or task. Further, I’m not interested in using motivational theory to shape people’s behavior; rather, the point is to make sure we aren’t creating conditions that get in the way of what people are naturally motivated to do.

[4] Note that “autonomy” is not identical to “independence.” Autonomy means acting with choice, not being a rugged individualist, like a Cowboy. Hence, Pink points out that “we can be both autonomous and happily interdependent with others” (90).

[5] Pink, p. 88.

[6] These two views on human nature were first articulated best by Douglas McGregor in The Human Side of Enterprise. Note that, while human nature is fallen, the fall has not wiped out the desire to be active and engaged and productive. While the fall wiped out the moral image of God in mankind, it did not totally wipe out the natural image of God. Those who think that people are naturally lazy and wanting to avoid work, and thus need to be controlled, are at odds with the fact that fallen man remains in the image of God. The image of God in man implies not only the principle of respect for the individual, but also recognition that people are full of potential and the ability to achieve. Both of these principles, together, thus imply that the right way to treat people in a workplace is to be continually seeking to increase autonomy rather than seeking to increase control. It is not that “control” is all bad; the issue is what is our default direction and which are we seeking to maximize.

[7] Note also that autonomy is not at odds with accountability. Accountability is critical and, along with autonomy, is necessary for empowerment. An individual who has autonomy but not accountability is not empowered—lack of accountability is de-motivating because it makes it seem as though one’s work doesn’t matter (since no one is seeking to provide accountability, they must not care) and because it undermines the ability to have clear outcomes (with no accountability for outcomes, it begins to become unclear what the expectations really are). Pink elaborates on this well: “Encouraging autonomy doesn’t mean discouraging accountability. Whatever operating system is in place, people must be accountable for their work. But there are different ways to achieve this end, each built on different assumptions about who we are deep down. Motivation 2.0 assumed that if people had freedom, they would shirk—and that autonomy was a way to bypass accountability. Motivation 3.0 begins with a different assumption. It presumes that people want to be accountable—and that making sure they have control over their task, their time, their technique, and their team is a pathway to that destination” (106-107).

[8] The biblical view of people is that, as adults, we are to be mature, wise, and capable of increasing responsibility. We are to be servants, but we are not to need to be closely managed. Our aim, therefore, should not to be to turn people into increasingly compliant individuals who do what they are told but don’t take initiative; rather, it is to act in line with the fact that people are to become increasingly responsible and mature—and thus engaged and taking initiative, not merely following directions.

[9] Pink, 111.

[10] See Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The State of Optimal Experience.

[11] Pink, 117.

[12] This is one of Marcus Buckingham’s main points. See his First, Break All the Rules or Now, Discover Your Strengths.

[13] Pink, 134.

[14] Patrick Lencioni, The 3 Signs of a Miserable Job, p. 217.

[15] Likewise, you can have a “bad” job and not be miserable.

[16] Lencioni, p. 217.

[17] Lencioni, 219. Further, this can actually be measured, as Matthew Kelly shows in his book The Dream Manager.

[18] Lencioni, 221.

[19] Lencioni, 222.

[20] Lencioni, 224.

[21] Lencioni, 225.

[22] Lencioni, 225.

[23] Lencioni points out that, ironically, when managers work to reduce these three signs, there is an unexpected side effect that creates a virtuous spiral: “employees themselves begin to take a greater interest in their colleagues, help them find meaning and relevance in their work, and find better ways to gauge their own success, and they do all of this without specific direction from their bosses. In essence, they take some responsibility for keeping the three signs of a miserable job at bay. Ironically, this gives them yet a greater sense of meaning while creating a sustainable cultural advantage that competitors will envy but find difficult to duplicate” (225).

[24] Edward Lawler, Treat People Right, p. 139.

[25] Treat People Right, 139.

[26] Treat People Right, 141.

[27] Treat People Right, 142.

[28] Treat People Right, 140.

[29] Treat People Right, 143.

[30] Treat People Right, 140.

[31] Ferdinand Dournies, Coaching for Improved Work Performance. Fournies is also author of Why Employees Don’t Do What They Should –the title of which alone is a dead give away on his point of view, betraying a perspective of control and compliance rather than autonomy and empowerment.

[32] Coaching for Improved Work Performance, p. 49.

[33] Treat People Right, ” 140.

[34] Stephen Covey, Principle-Centered Leadership, p. 176.

[35] Principle-Centered Leadership, p. 176.

[36] Principle-Centered Leadership, p. 176.

[37] Principle-Centered Leadership, p. 177.

[38] Principle-Centered Leadership, p. 178.

[39] Principle-Centered Leadership, p. 179.

[40] Principle-Centered Leadership, p. 180.

[41] Principle-Centered Leadership, pp. 191-192.

[42] Principle-Centered Leadership, p. 192.

[43] Principle-Centered Leadership, p. 194.

[44] Principle-Centered Leadership, p. 195.

[45] Principle-Centered Leadership, p. 196.

Filed Under: Job Design

The Producer, Manager, and Leader

May 28, 2010 by Matt Perman

From Stephen Covey’s Principle Centered Leadership (p. 244):

In organizations, people usually perform one of three essential roles: producer, manager, or leader. Each role is vital to the success of the organization.

For example, if there is no producer, great ideas and high resolves are not carried out. The work simply doesn’t get done. Where there is no manager, there is role conflict and ambiguity; everyone attempts to be a producer, working independently, with few established systems or procedures. And if there is no leader, there is lack of vision and direction. People begin to lose sight of their mission.

Although each role is important to the organization, the role of leader is most important. Without strategic leadership, people may dutifully climb the “ladder of success” but discover, upon reaching the top rung, that it is leaning against the wrong wall.

In light of this, let me offer a small (OK, massive) critique of GTD (“Getting Things Done”): I would argue that, by its very nature, it inclines people to think in terms of individual contributors rather than managers or leaders. This is great if you are, in fact, a producer. But as a producer, your efforts can only scale so far–you can only get so much “done.” If your efforts are going to scale, if you are going to exponential increase the impact of what you do, you need to operate as a manager or leader. And to do this, you need to operate with a different mindset, and slightly different approach, than that which is set forth in the GTD system.

(Note: this doesn’t mean everyone should be a manager or leader–be what you are called to be, and want to be. If you are a producer, good management and leadership will also result in your work becoming effective for joint performance that is larger than itself. But those managers and leaders will be more effective if they are not operating according to GTD, as it is.)

Filed Under: 3 - Leadership

Management as Ministry

May 28, 2010 by Matt Perman

Patrick Lencioni:

I have always thought it was a shame that more people don’t go into “giving” professions. In fact, I have occasionally felt pangs of guilt that I didn’t choose a career that was completely focused on serving others. I have deep admiration for dedicated and hard-working clergy, social workers, or missionaries, and I wonder why I haven’t abandoned my career and moved into one of those kinds of jobs.

While I have not completely abandoned the idea of one day doing that, I have come to the realization that all managers can–and really should–view their work as a ministry. A service to others.

By helping people find fulfillment in their work, and helping them succeed in whatever they’re doing, a manager can have a profound impact on the emotional, financial, physical, and spiritual health of workers and their families. They can also create an environment where employees do the same for their peers, giving them a sort of ministry all their own. All of which is nothing short of a gift from God.

(From The Three Signs of a Miserable Job.)

Filed Under: 4 - Management

Against Over-Professionalism in Management

May 26, 2010 by Matt Perman

Or, Managing for the Human Side

It has often been argued that the professionalization of the ministry has done much harm to the ministry. I would agree, but add that the professionalization of management has also done much harm to management.

In other words, many of the things that make the professionalization of ministry bad are not simply right concepts from the business world that are wrongly applied to ministry; rather, they are wrong concepts altogether.

In one sense, Tom Peter’s and Robert Waterman’s landmark book In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies is all about this very thing. The book could be summed up as an articulation of what goes wrong with organizations when ultra-professionalism holds sway, and what goes right when management acknowledges the human side of things and treats people in accord with how God designed human beings.[1]

This paper is a rough sketch of some of the incomplete (and often incorrect) ideas of the rational model of management (which is responsible for the over-professionalization of management) and the more complete and more accurate model that Peters and Waterman set forth. Both sides are dependent on their classic book, In Search of Excellence.

Even though In Search of Excellence was originally published in 1982, it’s analysis of the rational model remains true and helpful, and the ideas that they set forth remain relevant because, in my view, they sync more accurately with the unchanging nature of human beings. The one change since Peters and Waterman originally wrote is that the rational model has fallen into less favor, and their concepts (and related concepts) have gained much ground.

The Rational Model

Description of the Rational Model

The bad kind of professionalism in management is a manifestation of an overly rational view of humans. As such, this kind of professionalism can be equated with a “hard-headed rationality.” It took an almost exclusive numerative, rationalist approach to management. It sought “detached, analytical justification for all decisions” and taught that “well-trained professional managers can manage anything.”

This detached, overly rationalist approach came about because of an over-emphasis on measurement. Measurement is good and important in itself. But it also includes an inherent bias – namely, not everything that matters can be so readily measured. So the rationalist approach contained within itself a numerative bias—those things that can be more readily measured were regarded as the only realities that really matter, and the more intangible, “softer” realities tended to be discounted. At root, therefore, the rational model of management failed to account for the emotional dimension of humans. When people would tend to act in a certain way, the problem was not the theory, but humans – in the rational model, “man was simply designed wrong.”

As a result, the rational model encouraged and sought to implement all sorts of policies and practices which made sense in themselves if you took a solely rational view of people, but which in actuality were completely at odds with how human beings actually function. The result was that people were demoralized and demotivated, all in the name of what people thought were “proven” and “scientific” practices. In reality, the rational approach was not even reasonable—not reasonable, that is, in the correct sense of the word.

Peters and Waterman argue that the rational view “is right enough to be dangerously wrong, and it has arguably led us seriously astray.” Some of the main problems are:

It doesn’t tell us what the excellent companies have apparently learned. It doesn’t teach us to love the customers. It doesn’t instruct our leaders on the rock-bottom importance of making the average Joe a hero and a consistent winner. It doesn’t show how strongly workers can identify with the work they do if we give them a little say-so. It doesn’t tell us why self-generated quality control is so much more effective than inspector-generated quality control. It doesn’t tell us to nourish product champions….It doesn’t command that we overspend on quality, overkill on customer service, and make products that last and work. It doesn’t show, as Anthony Athos puts it, that ‘good managers make meanings for people, as well as money.’ The rational approach to management misses a lot.[2]

Peters points out that quantitative analysis per se is not bad. In fact, the excellent companies are very good at it and are among the best at solving problems with it. Further, if you take any company without a good fact base—without “a good quantitative picture of its customer, markets, and competitors”—and you will see an aimless, ungrounded company where “priorities are set with the most byzantine of political maneuvering.” So data matters and helps objectify things.

But what they are against is “wrong-headed analysis, analysis that is too complex to be useful and too unwieldy to be flexible, analysis that strives to be precise (especially at the wrong time) about the inherently unknowable.” And, perhaps above all, they point out that they “deplore the unfortunate abuse of the term ‘rational.’” For:

Rational means sensible, logical, reasonable, a conclusion flowing from a correct statement of the problem. But rational has come to have a very narrow definition in business analysis. It is the ‘right’ answer, but it’s missing all of that messy human stuff, such as good strategies that do not allow for persistent old habits, implementation barriers, and simple human inconsistencies.

They also point out that the “soft stuff” is simply “the province of the ‘art’ factor in management.” Quantification of these things is difficult—and maybe not even useful, but “the factors can certainly be considered sensibly, logically, and fairly precisely in the face of modestly well documented past experience.” For example, John Mitchell won’t let plants grow much beyond 1,000 people because “something just seems to go wrong when you get more people under one roof.” Is that merely art? More likely, it is “an enlightened version of sound reasoning, based on fairly precise recollection of experience.”

But why was the rational model so successful? Simply because it came right after the seat-of-the-pants model. Compared to that, it is miles ahead. The problem became when the analytical techniques became the dominant focus and “love of product” the pinch of salt.

One of the core effects of the over-professionalization of management has been that “managers don’t personally identify with what their companies do.” Managers became detached from the reason they were there—in the case of business, the love of product and the people they are there to serve.[3] I would argue that this is the central problem with the professionalization of the ministry as well—taking a detached approach to ministry, where style and analysis and segmentation are given priority over loving people and loving God’s word. It is not that style and analysis and even segmentation are bad. It’s that they need to be kept the tablespoon, and affection for the reason for ministry—God and people—the point.

What has proven especially interesting is that this scientific approach to management ended up being one of the core reasons that America fell behind the Japanese in the 80s. The competitive advantage of the Japanese was not a more rigid approach or even automation. Rather, it was

that they developed a ‘people’ approach to the manufacturing of cars….They have a work force that’s turned on, willing to work, and is excited about making cars….We have a different basic productivity position in this country, and it’s because of a lot of minutiae. It’s not the sort of thing that can be corrected by investment policy.[4]

The analytically detached approach to management leads to a lack of love for people. As Steve Lor put it, “American managers are too little concerned about their workers.” When you fail to value people as the ultimate value and source of value creation in the company, you lose focus on what really makes a company effective. So it’s no wonder that the scientific approach to management undercut itself.

Thus, Peters and Waterman argue that “treating people—not money, machines, or minds—as the natural resource may be the key to it all. Kenichi Ohmae, head of McKinsey’s Tokyo Office, says that in Japan organization and people (in the organization) are synonymous. Moreover, the people orientation encourages love of product and requires modest risk taking and innovation by the average worker.”[5]

So the rational approach to management lacked proper focus on product and people—the two most important things for a company. And this resulted from “the simple presence of a focus on something else”—namely the “analysis from corporate ivory towers and overreliance on financial sleight of hand, the tools that would appear to eliminate risk but also, unfortunately, eliminate action.”[6]

Peters and Waterman are arguing for a major paradigm shift in management. Thus, it is helpful to understand all together the core attributes of the old model—which they regard “as a direct descendant of Frederick Taylor’s school of scientific management”—and then outline the attributes of the new model.

They summarize the attributes of the old model—and this builds on what we’ve seen above—as follows. The old model holds:

  • “Bigger is better because you can get economies of scale.”
  • “When in doubt, consolidate things; eliminate overlap, duplication, and waste.” And, “as you get big, make sure everything is carefully and formally coordinated.”
  • Focus on cost in the final analysis, because “low-cost producers are the only sure-fire winners.”
  • “Analyze everything.” Since you can genuinely avoid “big dumb decisions” through things like market research, discounted cash-flow analysis, and budgeting, apply these things in massive quantities. You should even apply these things to “risky investments like research and development.”
  • “Forget that the course of invention is, by definition, unpredictable.”
  • “Get rid of the disturbers of the peace—i.e., fanatical champions. After all, we’ve got a plan.”
  • “”Control everything. A manager’s job is to keep things tidy and under control.” “Treat people as factors of production.” “Ensure that every possible contingency is accounted for.”
  • “If we give people big, straightforward monetary incentives to do right and work smart, the productivity problem will go away.”
  • “Inspect to control quality. Quality is like everything else—order it done.”
  • “If you can read the financial statements, you can manage anything.”
  • “Top executives are smarter than the market. Above all, don’t let quarterly earnings stop growing.”

But the conventional business wisdom doesn’t drive the engine of business today. “It does not explain most of what makes the excellent companies work.” It’s shortcomings are discussed next.

Weaknesses of The Rational Model

A Built-in Conservative Bias

The numerative, analytical component has a built-in conservative bias. This is because the buried weakness in the analytic approach is that “people analyze what can be most readily analyzed.” The things that are less readily analyzed—but which may be just as important—this get less attention.

It has often been argued that the professionalization of the ministry has done much harm to the ministry. I would agree, but add that the professionalization of management has also done much harm to management.

Cost-Driven Rather than Value-Driven

As a result, cost reduction takes precedence over revenue enhancement. This is because the numbers are hardest and most clear on the cost side of the equation. As a result, the priority is not to build value, but to control costs—which means that value is sacrificed.

Analysis also has no way of valuing the “extra oomph” of certain measures. For example, the Frito-Lay really took its customer service level to the point of overkill. They aimed for a 99.5% service. Whenever the analysts noticed this, they aimed to show how much Frito-Lay could save if it would reduce its commitment to service. And the analysts were technically right—it would save money. However, what they were overlooking was what doing this what subtract from the value side of the equation. The very extreme level of service commitment was a source of high moral for the ales force of 10,000 people. What would reducing this commitment and introduction of a tiny degree of unreliability do to this sales force-not to mention the retailers? Many things do not make sense in quantitative terms because all that is readily measured is the cost side of the equation.

Leads to an abstract and heartless philosophy

“The rationalist approach takes the living element out of situations that, above all, should be alive.”[7]

This is the same thing that John Steinbeck talked about. Steinbeck talks about the Mexican Sierra fish. It has 41 spines in the dorsal fin. If you catch a living one, “a whole new relational externality has come into being—an entity which is more than the sum of the fish plus fisherman.” But if you want to count the spines on the fish apart from the inconvenience of this external reality, you have to “sit in a laboratory, open an evil-smelling jar, remove a stiff colorless fish from the formalin solution, count the spines and write the truth.” And when you do this:

There you have recorded a reality which cannot be assailed—probably the least important reality concerning either the fish or yourself….It is good to know what you are doing. The man with this pickled fish has set down one truth and recorded in his experience many lies. The fish is not that color, that texture, that dead, nor does he smell that way.[8]

To be narrowly rational is often to be negative

Peters quotes Drucker to make this point: “Professional management today see itself often in the role of a judge who says ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to ideas as they come up ….A top management that believes its job is to sit in judgment will inevitably veto the new idea. It is always ‘impractical.’” And as John Steinbrenner has noted: “It is inherently easier to develop a negative argument than to advance a constructive one.”

George Gilder in Wealth and Poverty makes the point hat “creative thought requires an act of faith.” If you are narrowly rational, however, you will be unwilling to take—or entertain—such a leap of faith. As a result, many great ideas will never be tried. Gilder gives example after example of this principle, even pointing out that even back when we built the railroads, they “could hardly be justified in economic terms.”

This version of rationality does not value experimentation and abhors mistakes

The conservatism inherent in this approach leads to inaction and eliminates the process of “trying a lot of stuff and building on what works.” The only alternative is “the big product launch.” This makes the company dependent upon “one home-run product, with every bell and whistle attractive to each segment.” But in the meantime, the companies that have proceeded “irrationally” have introduced several new products during the same period, and learned from each, so that they can incorporate more real-time feedback from the marketplace into their future products.

It is ironic that the predecessor of this version of rationality was called scientific management, because “experimentation is the fundamental tool of science.” So you would have expected that scientific management and its successors would make use of experimentation and trial and error rather than punishing mistakes.

Anti-Experimentation Leads to Over Complexity and Inflexibility

The result of over complexity is “the immobilization of the group with countless small decisions.”

The rationalist approach does not celebrate informality

The focus is on analyzing, planning, telling, specifying, and checking up. There is little room for interacting testing, trying, failing, learning, shifting direction, adapting, modifying. But it is these latter words that they heard most often among the excellent companies. The excellent companies, info act, went out of their ways to create things like extra conference rooms simply “to increase the likelihood of informal problem solving among different disciplines.” One company sponsored al sorts of clubs in order to enhance interaction; others spent a lot on transportation systems “just so people will visit one another.” Let people interact informally, and more problems will be solved.

The rational model causes us to denigrate the importance of values

“We have observed few, if any, bold new company directions that have come from goal precision or rational analysis.” They do believe that the excellent companies of solid analytical skills, but they believe that “their major decisions are shaped more by their values than by their dexterity with numbers.”

“The top performers,” they write, “create a broad, uplifting, shared culture, a coherent framework within which charged-up people search for appropriate adaptations. Their ability to extract extraordinary contributions from very large numbers of people turns on the ability to create a sense of highly valued purpose. Such purpose invariably emanates from love of product, providing top-quality services, and honoring innovation and contribution from all.”

But this type of higher purpose is “inherently at odds with 30 quarterly objectives, 25 measures of cost containment, 100 demeaning rules for production-line workers, or an ever0-changing, analytically derived strategy that stresses costs this year, innovation nest, and heaven knows what the year after.

In other words, you cannot be led both by values and detailed rules. These two approaches to leadership are mutually incompatible. For if you specific objectives and rules and measures in great abundance and detail, there is little room for the human judgment to operate, which is where values make their application.

There is little place for internal competition

That’s because it appears inefficient. But the excellent companies were filled with internal competition. Peer pressure was a much stronger motivator than orders from the boss. Sure, this is messy and seems less efficient, but the result of the divisions overlap, product-line duplication, and multiple product development teams was greater innovation and improvement.

The costs saved by eliminating duplication and messiness can indeed be measured, and thus make it appealing to go the rationalist direction. But this is simply the numerative bias, where what is more easily measured is given the greater emphasis. The “analyze-the analyzable bias” is failing to account for the incremental benefits that come from a “steady flow of new products developed by zealous champions” and the “increment of productivity gains that comes from continuous innovation by competing shop floor teams.”[9]

“Many otherwise smart and business-savvy people are operating from a theoretical base that is simply out of date.”[10]

People are not just a pair of hands and the managers should not be the ones with all the thinking and all the control.

“The old management theories were attractive because they were straightforward and not laden with ambiguity or paradox. On the other hand, the world isn’t like that.”[11]

“The new wave of management thought leads us to an ambiguous, paradoxical world—just like the world of science.”[12] The key is that you need to be willing to acknowledge the existence of paradox and ambiguity, and know how to manage them.

A Better Model

Assumptions Behind the Better Model

The right model recognizes certain things about the (sometimes paradoxical) nature of human beings and seeks to accord with those things rather than fight against them. In other words, it realizes that we should deal with human nature as it is, not as we think it should be.

The right model also recognizes certain things about the nature of reality and seeks to accord with those rather than fight against them.

The characteristics of the right model flow, then, from these two sets of beliefs: beliefs regarding the nature of reality, and beliefs regarding the nature of human beings. The wrong model, on the other hand, simply goes against the nature of reality and the nature of human beings. It tries to change people rather than its model.

The beliefs regarding the nature of reality include:

  1. The world is complex and often ambiguous
  2. Often the best way to navigate ambiguity is to feel your way forward
  3. Not everything that is important can be measured analytically; numerical analysis, for example, often has no way of valuing the “extra oomph”

Peters argues that the excellent companies were effective in creating both commitment and regular innovation from their workforces (many times even from tens of thousands of people) because they took into account the paradoxes that are built in to human nature.

The beliefs regarding human nature include:

  1. Humans are made in the image of God and therefore ought to be respected
  2. Even though fallen, people still have incredible potential; this is even more true in regard to those who have been redeemed.
  3. We are very limited in our ability to know the future, let alone control the future. This is good and part of how we are designed.
  4. People are emotional as well as rational, and this is good.
  5. People like to think of themselves as winners, and this is good.
  6. We reason by stories at least as often as by good data, and this is good.
  7. We can hold very little explicitly in our conscious mind at once, but our long-term memory can accumulate a vast storehouse of patterns.
  8. We respond to external rewards and are also strongly self-motivated.
  9. We need to be a part of something greater than ourselves and also need independence.

From these basic assumptions, certain characteristics of a more human approach to management arise. They include the following.

Characteristics of the Properly Professional Model

Realize that Beliefs are at the Core of Effective Organizations

Thomas Watson

Provides transcendence.

Realize that Truly Great Innovations are Often the Result of a Sloppy and Ambiguous Process

Science itself has a very messy road to progress. Peters quotes Robert Merton, “a respected historian of science”: “the [textbooks] on methods present ideal patterns, but these tidy, normative patterns…do not reproduce the typically untidy, opportunistic adaptations that scientists really make. The scientific paper presents an immaculate appearance which reproduces little or nothing of the intuitive leaps, false starts mistakes, loose ends, and happy accidents that actually cluttered up the inquiry.”[13]

The story of the IBM 360 is another excellent example here. Most of us today don’t even know what the 360 was (other than that it was a breakthrough computer developed by IBM), but it is “one of the grand product success stories in American business history.” Yet, “its development was sloppy. the chairman of IBM, Thomas Watson, Sr., thus asked vice-president Frank Cary to “design a system to ensure against a repeat of this kind of problem.” Cary did so. But when he became chairman years later, one of his first acts was to get rid of that system which he had developed. He noted: “Mr. Watson was right, it [the product development structure] will prevent a repeat of the 360 development turmoil. Unfortunately, it will also ensure that we don’t ever invent another product like the 360.”

Organize for Fluidity, Which is the Administrative Version of Experimentation

The response to complexity should be fluidity. Don’t over-organized. Fluidity is “the administrative version of experimentation.” Be willing to re-organize whenever you need. Put resources on the problem that needs fixed. And communicate through the most effective channel when getting things done—not the organizational chart.

Recognize that the Final Decision is Often One of Taste

Peters points out that “management has at least as much to do with pathfinding and implementation as it does with decision making [which is the focus of the rational model]. The processes are inherently different, but they can complement and reinforce one another.”

“Pathfinding is essentially an aesthetic, intuitive process, a design process.” A multitude of alternatives can be posed for any design problem, whether an architectural design or the guiding values for a business. Within that multitude, many ideas aren’t so great—and the rational approach can help you sort that out. But a large umber will still remain of good ideas, and “no amount of analysis will choose among them, for the final decision is essentially one of taste.” And that’s OK. It brings in the emotional element.

Take Risks and Experiment

This means accepting mistakes.

Be Value Driven Rather than Cost Driven

Be Human—Affirm the Role of Passion and Emotion

Humans are not only rational, and not everything that matters can be measured.

The goal is not detached, analytical justification for all decisions. Do not take the living element out of situations that ought to be alive.

Insight over analytical detachment

Affirm the emotional side of human nature.

Celebrate Informality

Talk to who you need to in order to get the job done, rather than going up and down the org chart. Make sure all the relevant people are informed, which often would include many people along the org chart, but run through those channels to get the work done when it is most efficient to talk directly to the person you need.

Do Not Let Revenue Enhancement Take a Back Seat to Cost Reduction

Do not focus on cost in the final analysis. Do not be afraid of waste, overlap, and duplication either.

Do not be afraid of inefficiency if it is part of the essential process for becoming effective and generating useful innovation and missional advancement which simply would not be possible otherwise.

Realize that there is a Conflict between Being Led by Values and Having Detailed Rules

“Ability to extract extraordinary contributions from very large numbers of people turns on ability to create a sense of highly valued purpose. This purpose is inherently at odds with 30 quarterly objectives, 25 measures of cost containment, and 100 demeaning rules for production workers.”

Be Doing Things

“Doing things is the hallmark of the well-run company.

Build Mechanisms of Forward Progress

Affirm the Emotional Dimension

Approaches to management that assume that humans are merely or only rational will always run up against how human nature really is. As Tom Peters writes, “the central problem with the rationalist view of organizing people is that people are not very rational.”[14]

We need to appeal to the emotional dimension of people just as much as to the rational. Which means that not everything has to make logical sense. For example, if we can make a very logical and analytical case as to why running all Windows computers and Windows collaboration tools makes incredible sense, but people wouldn’t want to use it, then the strength of our analytical case doesn’t matter.

Let people use what they want, because what matters is creating good will, enhancing moral, and enabling people to have the tools that work best for them. The result will be greater productivity and development of our people—something that fixation simply on the cost side does not reveal.

This also has implications for what we do externally as well. For example, having a decent logo and graphic look is not simply a nice optional extra. Rather, it is a matter of accurately reflecting what we do in the emotional dimensions of look and feel. It is thus a way of connecting with people emotionally, of creating emotional engagement with the people we serve. This is certainly not the only, or even primary, way of doing this, but if we take a holistic view, it matters.

See People as Winners and Trust Them

You often hear about the surveys where 70% of people rate themselves as being in the top 10% of the population in their ability. This is often followed up with the observers of this fact turning up their noses at how inaccurate most people are in assessing their abilities.

But maybe the joke is on the folks who turn up their noses. What these studies show is that people like to think of themselves as winners. As Peters puts it, “We all think we’re tops. We’re exuberantly, wildly irrational about yourselves. And that has sweeping implications for organization.”[15]

In contrast to this, though, most organizations tend to take a negative view of their people. They create detailed regulations that reflect a default distrust of their people; they focus more on overcoming weaknesses than building on strengths; and they “design systems that seem calculated to tear down their workers’ self-image.”

That’s not how we think here. Our fundamental belief is that our people are capable of incredible things and can be trusted. While not everyone is equally talented in the same area, everyone is incredibly talented in some area. It is our role to help people identify what they are best at and enable them to do what they do best every day. This both develops people and furthers the mission of the organization.

And, interestingly, a high view of one’s abilities and potential is actually self-fulfilling. It turns out that realism doesn’t drive performance. (And as a result, you have to question just how “realistic” it actually is.

Marcus Buckingham details several studies that have been done on this. Buckingham summarizes this very well, so I’m going to quote him at length:

Conventional wisdom tells us that self-awareness is a good thing; that people who have a realistic assessment of their strengths and weaknesses outperform those whose assessments are inflated; that, in short, unrealistic self-confidence leads to a fall. Hence the widespread use of 360-degree surveys to reveal to an employee how her peers, direct reports, and supervisor perceive her performance.

In this case, however, conventional wisdom is misguided. Current research suggests that accurate self-awareness rarely drives performance, and that in many circumstances, it actively retards performance. Only self-assurance drives performance, even when this self-assurance turns out to be unrealistic.

Very interesting—self-assurance drives performance even when it is unrealistic. Buckingham continues:

For example, researchers from a number of different universities have conducted studies in which they asked children from lower socioeconomic segments of society whether they thought they were likely to get into college. Objective data revealed that these children, with their disadvantaged status, actually had a slim chance of making it through school, let alone gaining admission to college. Those children who thought they didn’t have the ability to go to college, who were, in this sense, realistic in their self-assessment, ended up performing in line with their assessment—very few of them made it to college.

Conversely, a significant percentage of those children who thought they had what it took to make it to college, who were unrealistically optimistic, actually wound up getting in. Realism hindered performance, where unrealistic self-assurance fostered it.[16]

It may seem inaccurate to suggest that being unrealistically optimistic is a good thing. Is that even truthful? Here’s the thing: the so-called “realistic” perspective is assuming things that we do not actually have the right to assume. It doesn’t matter what the environment is; the fact is that the environment and these other factors are not determinative. You cannot really know what is realistic for any individual before it actually happens. It is actually the “realistic” view which is failing to be faithful to the truth, because its “realism” is based on an assumption that we have more truth than we actually do.

In our systems and management approach at Desiring God, this means that our aim ought not be to give people this so-called realistic perspective. We will not make a virtue of accurately understanding all of people’s flaws (often called “areas of opportunity” in conventional HR language) and try to knock people down to the so-called “realistic” perspective. This so-called accurate self-assessment is not actually that accurate (since it is proven wrong by those who don’t hold to it) and actually hinders performance. Our aim is to create systems and have a mindset that has confidence in our people and encourages them to attempt big things—things that are even bigger than many might think are realistic.

Now, this doesn’t mean that “blithe overconfidence is the secret to a person’s success” (104). Buckingham brings in another study to show this. He points out how lately much educational material has been redesigned to be more “fun,” relevant, and accessible to kids. It uses educational shows and video games and other game-like stuff. But it turns out that these programs don’t teach very much. A study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology noted that children invested “high cognitive effort and learned much from instructional media they considered difficult,” but “invested less effort and learned less from the same information conveyed by media they believed to be easy.”[17]

This shows us that, while people ought to have high confidence in their ability to be up to the task, they must also recognize the inherent challenge of the task. Self-assurance does not mean thinking that the task is easy; it means confidence in God’s grace and gifting to you to enable you to be up to the task.

As managers, then, this means that our goal should be to build each employees self-assurance—not self-awareness per se—while making sure they have a high appreciation for the challenge of the big tasks that are before them.

Another implication is for our systems design. Don’t design systems that set most people up to lose. For example, we shouldn’t design our performance management system to render 60% of our people a failing result. Tom Peters explains this well:

The message that comes through so poignantly in the studies we reviewed is that we like to think of ourselves as winners. The lesson that the excellent companies have to teach is that there is no reason why we can’t design systems that continually reinforce this notion; most of their people are made to feel that they are winners. Their populations are distributed around the normal curve, just like every other large population, but the difference is that their systems reinforce degrees of winning rather than degrees of losing.[18]

In contrast, the not-so-excellent companies in Peters’ study did the reverse. In one company, only 40% o the sales people were able to meet their quotas. He notes that “with this approach, at least 60 percent of the salespeople think of themselves as losers. They resent it and that leads to dysfunctional, unpredictable, frenetic behavior. label a man a loser and he’ll start acting like one.”

The way you view people is often self-fulfilling. If you view people as effective people with great potential who can be trusted, most of the time they will fulfill those expectations. This, in turn, builds their sense of self-efficacy (different from self-esteem) and results in an increasing spiral of upward performance. “People live up to the expectations of them.”[19]

People want to be treated as whole people. They “want to contribute to the accomplishment of worthwhile objectives. They want to be part of a mission and enterprise that transcends their individual tasks. They don’t want to work in a job that has little meaning, even though it may tap their mental capacities. They want purposes and principles that lift them, ennoble them, inspire them, empower them, and encourage them to their best selves.”[20]

On the other hand, if you distrust people and put their ability to perform under a cloud of suspicion, then you will often get underperformance.

Treat people as high performers and set up systems that will highlight their ability to perform, and you will get high performance.

Allow for the Intuitive—for the Role of Judgment

Peters points out that even when it comes to science, logic is not the true engine of progress. He notes how James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, described the double helix: “It’s so beautiful, you see, so beautiful.” peters notes: “In science the aesthetic, the beauty of the concept, is so important that Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann was moved to comment, ‘When you have something simple that agrees with all the rest of the physics and really seems to explain what’s going on, a few experimental data against it are no objection whatsoever.”[21]

This is not just a fact to reckon with, it is a good thing. It is a good thing because it aligns with reality. Reality is more than rational; therefore our ways of processing reality should be more than emotional as well.

This means that, while data is critical, we also need to allow people to trust their gut and reason intuitively. This is how people work, anyway, and will enable us to sync up more effectively with the non-rational (note: note anti-rational) features of reality. With beauty.

And leaving room for the intuitive is also essential for solving complex problems. In a world of such complexity, we must “reason with simple decision rules,” utilize our pattern recognition (which is what ones “gut,” or intuition, really is), and have ways of “sorting through the infinite minutiae out there,” which involves starting with heuristics—associations, metaphors, and ways that have worked for us before.”

Keep Things Simple but Affirm the Complexity that Intuition Recognizes

Since people can only hold in their conscious mind about 6-8 things at once, things need to be kept simple. This means we should only have a small number of top-level priorities in the organization. This focuses our efforts better anyway, but also ensures that everyone in the organization can thus keep them in mind and work toward them—so you get greater organizational effort pushing in the direction of your priorities when there are just a few.

When it comes to personal performance planning as well, each person should have a manageable number—usually at most 6 per quarter. And so forth.

The limitation of our working memory, however, is not the whole story. In our long-term memory, we can store a vast array of knowledge and patterns. If short-term memory is the size of a coffee cup, our long-term memory is the size of the Milky Way. The knowledge and patterns of long-term memory can be brought to mind often at a moments notice. This often comes out most of all as intuition—we sense that something is a certain way or ought to be different, because it is out of sync with our collection of patterns. The more experience and knowledge one has, the more accurate their intuition. Hence, we need to leave a place for intuition in the mix of our decisions, and not default to a reliance on data alone. We need to exercise judgment, not simply let data make decisions for us.

Sometimes the Efficient Way is Not the Best Way

Many things that appear more efficient—for example, eliminating duplicating and standardizing roles—actually undermine the engines of growth, innovation, and progress.

Use Positive Reinforcement

The primary motivation should be intrinsic, but there is also a role for extrinsic motivation. In general, extrinsic motivation should occur in the form of positive reinforcement rather than negative reinforcement.

Peters the general findings of research when he notes that there is an asymmetry between positive and negative reinforcement. “In short, negative reinforcement will produce behavioral change but often in strange, unpredictable, and undesirable ways. Positive reinforcement causes behavioral change too, but usually in the intended direction.”[22]

So negative reinforcement often produces change in unpredictable and undesirable ways. Further, negative reinforcement does not tend to guide. It shows you what not to do – and there is a place for that – but it doesn’t show you what to do. So you often don’t know how to improve when negative reinforcement has been applied. We’ve all heard examples of this. Peters gives the example of getting punished for not treating a customer well. The person in that case might respond by simply avoiding customers altogether—for that would be just as effective in avoiding future punishment as many other means. If we say “that’s not rational,” we are forgetting that people are not entirely rational, and that’s OK. We need to deal with people as they are, not as we think they should be. Further, in one sense it is rational. What is really going on here is that “customer” per se is being associated with punishment, rather than “treating customers badly.”

A way of improving how people treat customers that would coincide with positive reinforcement would be praising an employee when you see them go the extra mile for a customer, or even simply acknowledging the worth of the common courtesy that they show to each customer.

Another benefit of positive reinforcement is that it seems to create greater ability to change. Instead of simply yanking bad things off one’s agenda, which can be a real battle, it pushes new and better things onto the agenda. By default, less important things then have to fall off the agenda. This is really another way of saying, in other words, that the way to get a “no” off the agenda is to put in place a better “yes.” The use of positive reinforcement “goes with the flow rather than against it.”

Here is an important implication: If you manage primarily by authority, rather than influence and respect, you are relying on negative reinforcement. The notion of the manager primarily as a “boss” who issues orders that must be done is at root a notion of negative reinforcement—namely, that if you don’t do what the manager says, bad things will happen to you. “The threat of punishment is the principal implied power that underlies it all.”[23] “To the extent that this underlying notion prevails, we are not paying attention to people’s dominant need to be winners.”

Positive reinforcement is most effective when it is specific, immediate, achievable, and when a fair amount of it is intangible.

Primarily Seek Intrinsic Motivation

While external motivation has a place, the most effective form of motivation is intrinsic motivation. You foster lasting commitment to a task by creating conditions that build intrinsic motivations. This  comes from tapping the inherent worth of the task as a source of intrinsic motivation. It also involves being seeing the connection between the task and the values of the individual and organization.  

Realize that People Often Act Their Way into Commitment

People often act their way into commitment rather than commit their way into acting. Hence, one way to help build commitment to a task is to start involving people in small ways, and building from there.

As a corollary of this, many of the excellent companies found that they actually acted their way into many of their strategies.

Make Meaning

This was a very interesting observation by Peters:

Perhaps transcendence is too grand a term for the business world, but the love of product at Cat, Bechtel, and J&J comes very close to meriting it. Whatever the case, we find it compelling that so many thinkers from so many fields agree on the dominating need of human beings to find meaning and transcend mundane things. Nietzsche believed that “he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” John Gardner observes in Morale, “Man is a stubborn seeker of meaning.”

The best business experts are realizing what Christians have known all along: people seek meaning. This is an innate part of how God created us. And we know that ultimate meaning is found in him.

Secure in Christ, so not threatened by structural changes and etc.

Finally, the principle-centered leadership paradigm acknowledges all of the dimensions of man. It deals with fairness, kindness, efficiency, and effectiveness. “We work with the whole person.”[24] People are not just assets, “not just economic, social, and psychological beings. They are also spiritual beings; they want meaning, a sense of doing something that matters.”[25]

PCL recognizes that “people do not want to work for a cause with little meaning, even though it taps their mental capacities to their fullest. There must be purposes that lift them, ennoble them, and bring them to their highest selves.”[26]

What provides meaning?

  • Beliefs. True beliefs. The task connects to a bigger picture and makes a difference.
  • Intrinsic worth of the task. You like it and see the value in it.
  • Proper motivation: doing your work unto the Lord.

Give People a Measure of Control

Accords with human nature. It is right to give people a measure of control over their work. This accords with the fact that they are in the image of God and is a matter of respecting the individual. In fact, it may be the fundamental implication of respect for the individual: let people have as much control as possible.

This is not only right, but also results in greater effectiveness. Psychologists, for example, have studied the concept of individual control and found that “if people think they have even modest personal control over their destinies, they will persist at tasks. They will do better at them. They will become more committed to them.”[27]

Story of factory changing things, and found that what really made the difference was simply the awareness that they were being paid attention to. Also the “shut off the noise button”—the group that had it performed better even though they never used it.

Implication: push authority as far down as you can, even when the economics seem to favor consolidation.

Give people the opportunity to stick out, “yet combine it with a philosophy and system of beliefs…that provide the transcending meaning—a wonderful combination.”[28]

Trust People

This is what frees you to give people a measure of control. People can be trusted. Accords with human nature and respect. Not to trust people is not to respect them. Some jobs maybe need to have an innate distrust, but not management.

A Biblical Perspective on This

The rational model assumes that we have more control than we really do and more knowledge than we really do. In other words, it has too high a view of man and too low a view of God. Further, God does not seem to value efficiency in the same way.


[1] Peters and Waterman don’t make the connection to how God created us, but the principles that they observed in the best-run companies align with human nature (and as created, not as fallen).

[2] In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies, 30.

[3] You could also add, as corollaries of this, “the lack of any feeling for the whole on the part of the so-called professional manager” and the lack of “a gut feeling for the gestalt of their business.” In addition to the numerative bias, another reason for this has been that most top managers since the 50s rose through the financial and legal areas rather than production. As a result, top executives lacked intimate hands-on knowledge of “the company’s technologies, customers, and suppliers.” The result was “managers don’t love the product. In fact they are defense about it.” You see the same thing happen in biblical studies as well—it is regarded as a cause of bias if you don’t come to the text with a detached perspective, lest you distort the text to fit your system or make it say what you want. But the proper response to this danger is not to take a detached approach to the text; it is rather to take a humble approach to the text.

[4] Abernathy, quoted in Excellence, 38.

[5] Excellence, p. 39.

[6] Excellence, p. 40.

[7] Excellence, p. 46.

[8] Excellence, p. 46.

[9] Excellence, p. 52.

[10] Excellence, p. 89.

[11] Excellence, pp. 89-90.

[12] Excellence, p. 91.

[13] Excellence, p. 48.

[14] Excellence, p. 54.

[15] Excellence, p. 57.

[16] The One Thing You Need to Know, pp. 102-103.

[17] The One Thing You Need to Know, p. 105.

[18] Excellence, p. 57.

[19] Stephen Covey, Principle-Centered Leadership, p. 179.

[20] Principle-Centered Leadership, pp. 179-180.

[21] Excellence, p. 61.

[22] Excellence, p. 68.

[23] Excellence, p. 69.

[24] Principle-Centered Leadership, p. 178.

[25] Principle-Centered Leadership, p. 178.

[26] Principle-Centered Leadership, p. 179.

[27] Excellence, p. 80.

[28] Excellence, p. 81.

As a result, cost reduction takes precedence over revenue enhancement. This is because the numbers are hardest and most clear on the cost side of the equation. As a result, the priority is not to build value, but to control costs—which means that value is sacrificed.

 

Filed Under: 4 - Management

Notes on Motivation

May 26, 2010 by Matt Perman

Stephen Covey writes: “Whether they realize it or not, business leaders are practicing psychologists in the sense that their attempts to motivate people are based on their assumptions of human nature.”[1]

Some of the prior dominant approaches to management were based on faulty views of human nature. Thus, they may have resulted in great efficiency, but at the expense of people.[2] Ultimately, of course, this also hindered productivity because when people are less engaged, they are less effective. But worse, these approaches were against the purpose of management, which is not simply to get things done through others, but to develop people in the accomplishment of tasks.

Thus, Covey suggests, following Lee Iacocca, that “maybe we should study motivation before we set up structure.”[3]

This document brings together some of my notes on motivation. It is not intended as a full article, but just a collection of notes. We will first discuss motivation, and then some suggested practices for motivating on the basis of strengths.

On Motivation

Foundational Realities

What Motivation Is

Motivation is first of all not getting people to do what you want with minimum trouble. That is authority. Our aim is motivation, not control.

It is getting people to act willingly. Because it is in their interest and the organization’s interest.

Things to Recognize

The only motivation that really works is self-motivation. Put people in the position where they will be self-motivated, and remove things that hinder them. Collins stuff here also.

Must know how different people respond. Different people are motivated by different things. Factors of intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery, purpose.

If you label someone a loser, they will act like one. If you hold people to high expectations, they will achieve them. “When teachers held high expectations of their students, that alone was enough to cause an increase of 25 points in the students’ IQ scores.”

Must allow for and take advantage of the more emotional side of human nature.

Positive reinforcement from Peters.

Important Theories on Motivation

Maslow

Hierarchy of needs. They are sequential: higher level need doesn’t motivate until levels beneath it satisfied. Satisfied needs don’t motivate. Self-actualization never satisfied, and revised hierarchy later in life to have sixth level: self-transcendence.

  • Level 1: Physiological. Food, water, air, sex etc.
  • Level 2: Safety. Security of body, employment, resources, morality, family, health, property.
  • Level 3: Love/belonging. Friendship, family, sexual intimacy.
  • Level 4: Esteem. Self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respect of others, respect by others.
  • Level 5: Self actualization: Performing at your peak potential. Morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving.

Herzberg

Motivators and satisfiers. Satisfiers (hygiene factors) prevent dissatisfaction but do not motivate. Motivators are intrinsic to the work itself: challenge, enjoyment, etc.

McGregor

Theory X and Theory Y. People naturally want to do good work and grow in responsibility.

That Management Seminar

Talked about people as primarily motivated by one of three things: relationships, order, and opportunity to rise.

Christian Hedonism

The ultimate aim everyone has is to maximize their happiness.

Daniel Pink

The three components: Autonomy, mastery, purpose. Bake into job design and culture. Autonomy, primarily from job design and principle of trusting people. Mastery, need to train and direct people towards their strengths. Purpose, from culture—our beliefs, mission, and values. The rest of this document is on the second, mastery, by focusing on strengths.

Buckingham

Motivate by focusing on strengths. As Buckingham points out: Find out what motivates your employees, and try to create an environment that will help them become self-motivated. One of the primary responsibilities of manager is to change the feelings of team members from “have to” to “want to.”

Other Points

Six Reasons Focusing on Weaknesses Doesn’t Motivate

The problems with focusing on weakness, and thinking that anyone can become anything they want if they just fix their areas of non-talent:

  1. It eliminates individuality. If we all can be anything we want to be, then we all have the same potential. And if we all have the same potential, we lose our individuality. “We are not uniquely talented, expressing ourselves through unique goals, unique capabilities, and unique accomplishments. We are all the same. We have no distinct identity, no distinct destiny. We are all blank sheets of canvas, ready, waiting, and willing, but featureless.”
  2. It can’t work. Since our talents are given and we cannot create new ones (we can create new strengths by building on talent, but not new talents—recurring patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior), focusing on turning our nontalents into talents is doomed to failure and will result in a “crushingly frustrating life.” Persistence directed primarily to your nontalents is self-destructive.
  3. The person ends up being characterized by those few areas where he struggles. The person ends up being and feeling defined by those things they don’t do well rather than things they can do well.
  4. This, in turn, harms the relationship. When we know someone else well and try to change them, we imply that we wish they weren’t the way they were. This feels awful and makes the relationship just as demotivating as the focus on our nontalents is weakening. This often proves the undoing of the relationship. Who likes being around people that are always pointing out what they do wrong? “Most often, a bad relationship is one where your partner came to know you very well indeed…and wished you weren’t that way.”
  5. It is demotivating. Working on your nontalents is demotivating because nontalents deplete rather than energize. Talents, on the other hand, are energizing and self-reinforcing. This creates an upward virtuous cycle, whereas focusing on your weaknesses creates a downward vicious cycle, which can in turn spread to other areas by undermining your self-efficacy.
  6. It implies that the person is to blame. Failing to know the difference between talents, knowledge, and skills, and that while skills and knowledge can be acquired, talents cannot, the manager relentlessly points out each employee’s nontalents in the belief that he can fix them and become well-rounded. “You just need to work at it.” The implicit message is that the employee can control the outcome if they just work hard. The responsibility is theirs. And therefore when this doesn’t work, when their nontalents fail to turn in to talents, the finger of blame is pointing at them. “By telling you that you can transform nontalents into talents, these less effective managers are not only setting you up to fail, they are intrinsically blaming you for your inevitable failure. This is perverse.”

Individualize

Individualizing things. Thus, you must individualize autonomy.

Motivate Through Values

Tap the inherent worth of the task and mission of the organization to build intrinsic motivation.

“So much of excellence in performance has to do with people’s being motivated by compelling, simple—even beautiful—values.”[4]

Why contingent rewards reduce motivation

Contingent rewards can destroy intrinsic motivation because they reduce autonomy, which is one of the three core components of motivation.[5] (Note, however, that unexpected, non-contingent rewards do not.)

For the short term, you might increase performance through if-then extrinsic motivators. But in the long-term, you kill it. “Try to encourage a kid to learn  math by paying her for each workbook page she completes—and she’ll almost certainly become more diligent in the short term and lose interest in math in the long term.”[6]

Why traditional management undermines motivation

This has implications not only for rewards, but also our management theory—it is additional evidence that a command-and-control approach to management is bad, for it also reduces autonomy and thus motivation. Consequently, it will tend to result in lower performance in most cases.

It is Not that There is No Place for Extrinsic Rewards

Note that Pink is not arguing for the “basic evil of extrinsic incentives.” He states clearly “that’s just not empirically true.” His point is that “mixing rewards with inherently interesting, creative, or noble tasks—deploying them without understanding the peculiar science of motivation—is a very dangerous game. When used in these situations, ‘if-then’ rewards usually do more harm than good. By neglecting the ingredients of genuine motivation—autonomy, master, and purpose—they limit what each of us can achieve.”[7]

Baseline rewards must be in place:

Of course the starting point for any discussion of motivation in the workplace is a simple fact of life: People have to earn a living. Salary, contract payments, some benefits, a few perks are what I call “baseline rewards.” If someone’s baseline rewards aren’t adequate or equitable, her focus will be on the unfairness of her situation and the anxiety of her circumstance. You’ll get neither the predictability of extrinsic motivation nor the weirdness of intrinsic motivation. You’ll get very little motivation at all.

But once we’re past that threshold, carrots and sticks can achieve precisely the opposite effect of their intended aims. Mechanisms designed to increase motivation can dampen it. Tactics aimed at boosting creativity can reduce it. Programs to promote good deeds can make them disappear. Meanwhile, instead of restraining negative behavior, rewards and punishments can often set it loose—and give rise to cheating, addiction, and dangerously myopic thinking.[8]

Natural Rewards are Not Necessarily Extrinsic Rewards

Lewis’ point on natural connections. Christian hedonism is about motivation. The reward is to be the activity itself and the natural completions of it—deepened learning as the reward of study, satisfied customers as the reward of excellent customer service, or Lewis’ example of marriage as the reward for love.

We should not confuse the natural completions of an activity with extrinsic motivators.

Covey’s four levels

See document on the history of management.

Scientific Management and Motivation

Different management theories assume different theories of motivation. For example, scientific management ran on the assumption that humans are primarily economically motivated. But this of necessity fails to treat us as whole people, because biological and economic urges do not fully account for who we are. As a result, the principles and practice of scientific management are contrary to what it means to be a fully functioning, mature adult. Mature adults operate according to autonomy, for example—that’s part of what it means to be mature. But scientific management operated on a principle of control, which was primarily wielded through extrinsic motivation—rewarding the behavior the managers wanted, and punishing that which they didn’t.

The key point is that people are more than economic beings. They also seek purpose. If people were merely economic beings who dislike work and do so only to put food on the table, then you would need to coax them to work with extrinsic motivation and closely monitor them to make sure it got done. But people aren’t that way. They also seek purpose. We are “intrinsically motivated profit maximizers, not only extrinsically motivated profit maximizers.” And we need to recognize that in the way we manage and structure work. When work is creative and engaging and aligned with a person’s strengths, they don’t need to be directed; they are self-directed. You don’t need to figure out how to motivate people; you just need to ensure that the conditions exist where people are able to do what they are naturally motivated to do, and remove the obstacles that would interfere with this.

Why get paid at all?

Because the economic dimension and need is real. It must be met. It’s just that we are more than that.  

Aren’t Some People Motivated Extrinsically?

Some people are motivated by money and extrinsic factors. This reflects that people are different. But, Pink argues, this facet of people can change—you can move from being primarily extrinsically motivated to being primarily intrinsically motivated. And, being intrinsically motivated is most in line with what it means to be human.

Success Motivates

Believing that you are succeeding is a large cause of continuing success. Peters notes: “The old adage is ‘nothing success like success.’ It turns out to have a sound scientific basis. Researchers studying motivation find that the prime factor is simply the self-perception among motivated subjects that they are in fact doing well.” (58). And he quotes Warren Bennis, who mentions that in one study of teachers, “it turned out that when they held high expectations of their students, that alone was enough to cause an increase of 25% in the students’ IQ scores.” (59).

The Key is Self-Motivation

But the secret is to get people that are already motivated, that are self motivated, to do the things the organization wants. Then make sure that their goals and the organization’s overlap. Then ultimately motivate from principles, values, and meaning.

Remember Maslow here as well. The hierarchy. Self actualization and then self transcendence are the ultimate motivators. Create environments that tap into those levels, then give people the conditions for managing themselves. The manager then becomes a source of help and a coach.

Creating a Culture Where Self-Motivation Can Flourish

Plus Collins four points on creating a culture where self-motivation can flourish, from GTG. Summarized in Drive, 198.

Collins: “Expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time. If you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated. The real question becomes: How do you manage in such a way as not to de-motivate people?” He gives four practices:

  1. Lead with questions, not answers.
  2. Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion.
  3. Conduct autopsies, without blame.
  4. Build ‘red flag’ mechanisms. Make it easy for employees and customers to speak up when there is a problem.

Suggested Practices

Casting People

Excellent performance comes when the person’s talents are matched with the role. Hence, “if you want to turn talent into performance, you have to position each person so that you are paying her to do what she is naturally wired to do. You have to cast her in the right role.” (Buckingham, 148).

Excellent managers are deliberate in discovering the strengths of their people. This comes in part through the strengths-based performance planning approach. But they also talk with each individual, “asking about strengths, weaknesses, goals, and dreams.” And they notice things, “taking note of the choices each makes, the way they all interact, who supports who, and why.”

In doing this, it often becomes apparent that some individuals are miscast—they have valuable talents but are not in a position to use them. “By repositioning each in a redesigned role, great manager are able to focus on each person’s strengths and turn talent into performance.”

Managing by Exception

Since everyone is different, it also follows that you need to treat everyone differently. Fairness does not mean treating everyone the same. It means treating everyone in accord with their own unique individuality. Treating everyone the same runs over our uniqueness, and thus fails to honor each person as an individual. That is one of the basic fallacies of the over-standardized, overly detached approach to HR and management that can be so common.

This means that a manager has to learn about each employee’s uniqueness. Know how your people are different, and then treat them as they would like to be treated. The Golden Rule—“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”—doesn’t mean that you assume everyone is like you. Rather, the way that we want people to treat us is to first understand us, and then treat us according to who we are. That is, likewise, how we ought to treat others and how managers ought to treat employees—understand them, and treat them according to their individuality.

Spend the Most Time with the Best People

By default, we tend to spend most of our time with the least productive and less of our time with the most productive. This seems safe and logical—the less productive need help, right? And the most productive are able to handle it on their own, right?

But this is actually contrary to the purpose of management. It assumes that the purpose of management is “to control or to instruct.” If that is at the core of management, then this does make sense—the least productive need more control and instruction.

But, as we’ve seen, the core of the management role is to turn talent into performance. This doesn’t happen primarily by controlling or instructing. It happens by positioning the person in the role such that they can call on their strengths most of the time, crafting a unique set of expectations that aligns with those strengths, and helping each employee understand his or her own unique style so that they can understand better why it works for them and how they can perfect it. And it happens by running interference for each employee so that their talents aren’t covered over by red tap and bureaucracy.

So when a manager spends time with his or her people, he is not primarily coaching and controlling, but rather “setting unique expectations, highlighting and perfecting individual styles, and running interference.” As a result, most time needs to be focused on the employees whose talent is showing the most potential, because talent is the multiplier. “The more energy and attention you invest in it, the greater the yield” (154).

Not Focusing on Your Best Can be Destructive

In fact, by paying the most attention to those who are struggling, you can actually end up altering the behavior of your stars. This is because things that receive less attention tend to die out, and things that receive more attention tend to increase. Thus, your stars may end up “doing less of what made them stars in the first place and more of other kinds of behaviors that might net some kind of reaction from you, good or bad.”

In other words, “no news is never good news. No news kills the very behaviors you want to multiply.” “In practical terms, then, great managers invest in their best because it is extremely productive to do so and actively destructive to do otherwise.”

Investing in Your Best is the Fairest Thing to Do

Buckingham notes:

Each individual might value different kinds of attention, but, to a person, we all hate to be ignored. If love is no the opposite of hate, then surely indifference is the opposite of both. If you spend the most time with your worst performers, then the message you are sending to your employees is that “the better your performance becomes, the less time and attention you will receive from me, your manager.” From any angle, this is an odd message.

Investing in Your Best is the Best Way to Learn

The way to learn about what makes for excellent performance in a role is to watch those who are excellent in that role.

Our default thinking is sometimes that we can learn just as much by looking at those who are underperforming, identify what they are doing that hinders them, and then conclude that excellence means doing the opposite. But that is actually not the case.

Excellence is often not the opposite of bad. It turns out that those who are excellent in a role often share many traits with those who achieve poor performance in a role. The difference is often that those who are excellent in a role do something else that neutralizes those things.

For example, Gallup discovered that poor sales people suffered from call reluctance. So one might think that excellent sales people do not. And that would make a lot of sense. But it turns out that they do. The difference is that the excellent sales people also had the talent of confrontation, which enabled them to overcome their reluctance.

You cannot learn about the distinguishing features of excellence in a role, therefore, by simply studying poor performance and inverting it. Good is not the opposite of bad. The way to learn about excellence is to study excellence.

Investing in Your Best is the Only Way to Reach Excellence

It can be easy to fixate on what is “average” and gauge our expectations by it. The temptation is to compare each employee’s performance to what is average, and then help strugglers to get closer to average and leaving those who are above average to their own devices.

But this will be inherently limiting. Average should not be the bar against we measure performance. Excellence should be. Average is often far, far below what is possible. If we make it the measure, we often sell people short.

In fact, the greatest room for growth is usually in the employees who are already performing above average. And this is another reason why a manager should spend the most time with his best people. “If a manager is preoccupied by the burden of transforming strugglers into survivors by helping them squeak above ‘average,’ he will have little time left for the truly difficult work of guiding the good toward the great.”

Managing Around Weaknesses

Nonperformance will inevitably happen in some roles, and so we need to know how to deal with it. Here is how to handle nonperformance.

Nonperformance is not always the result of a non-talent. There are many factors other than lack of talent in an area where the role needs talent that can lead to nonperformance. These include mechanical causes, personal causes, lack of training, and the manager tripping the wrong trigger. Look to these causes first.

First, there are mechanical causes. This would be when, for example, the employee does not have the right equipment or information to do his job. If an employee is underperforming, first make sure that they have the tools they need.

Second, there are personal causes. They may be struggling with a difficult issue in their personal lives, such as a death in the family or health issues. There isn’t much you can do help solve these, other than being available to listen, but at least you will have an accurate understanding of what is causing the performance problem.

Third, the poor performance may be coming from a lack of training. Remember that strength is the combination of talent, skills, and knowledge. Talent is unchangeable, but skills and knowledge are not. If a person has a talent in an area but insufficient knowledge and skills, helping them get the training that they need can often remedy the situation.

Fourth, poor performance may be coming from the manager tripping the wrong triggers. This stems from the fact that people are motivated differently. So if a manager forgets this, he can easily be tripping the triggers that don’t sync with what actually motivates a person.

So not every performance issue is a talent issue, and the manager’s first responsibility is to investigate external causes such as the above. But if these factors do not seem to be the issue, it may be a talent issue.

Here it is important to distinguish between a nontalent and a weakness. Buckingham writes “A nontalent is a mental wasteland. It is a behavior that always seems to be a struggle. It is a thrill that is never felt. It is an insight recurrently missed.” Most nontalents are harmless. For example, if you have a nontalent for remembering names, but are not in a role that requires you to remember names, the nontalent is not an issue for your performance. All of us have a multitude of nontalents; we are fallen, we are imperfect, and most of all God simply created each of us differently and with different gifts. That is OK, and an eye should not wish it were a hand, and so forth.

A nontalent by itself, then, is not a weakness. “A nontalent becomes a weakness when you find yourself in a role where success depends on your excelling in an area that is a nontalent.” For example, for a server in a restaurant, a nontalent for remembering names is a weakness.

Nontalents by themselves can often be ignored; weaknesses should not be ignored. But what do you do about them? When the weakness is the result of a nontalent, you can’t just fix it—the talent cannot be magically added to the person’s personality. So instead, you have to work around the weakness. There are four main ways.

First, you can devise a support system. Spell check is one of the clearest examples of such a support system. Because of spell check, you don’t have to be great at spelling or proofreading. By using spell check, you can capture most (though not all) of the spelling errors in your document.

Second, you can find a complementary partner. This is the silent secret of some of the most successful, including Bill Gates (who found Paul Allen), Walt Disney (who found his brother, Roy), and Bill Hewlett and David Packard. “Each partnership was effective precisely because where one partner was blunt, the other was sharp. The partnerships were well-rounded, not the individuals.”

The partnering does not have to be formal. For example, if one person in a department is really energized with running reports, and another is not, it makes sense to shift that responsibility from the person that is depleted by it to the person that is energized by it.

“Since few people are a perfect fit for their role, the great manager will always be looking for ways to match up one person’s valleys with another person’s peaks” (171).

Third, you can tweak the role to make it fit the employee’s strengths more effectively. Roles are not rigid and inflexible things. Often, companies value standardized roles. The problem here is that this can easily run over each person’s individuality. It is often easier to change the role than the person. Obviously most roles cannot be changed in simply any way, so there is a limit to how much a role should be changed. But within those parameters, managers and employees should actively seek to tweak roles to call upon the strengths of people in them.

Tying it All Together In a Management Approach

Covey:

To motivate people to peak performance, we first must find the areas where organizational needs and goals overlap individual needs, goals, and capabilities. We can then set up win-win agreements. Once these are established, people could govern or supervise themselves in terms of that agreement. We would then serve as sources of help and establish helpful organizational systems within which self-directing, self-controlling individuals could work toward fulfilling the terms of the agreement. Employees would periodically give an accountability for their responsibilities by evaluating themselves against the criteria specified in the win-win agreement.[9]

Notes

[1] Stephen Covey, Principle-Centered Leadership, p. 190.

[2] See, for example, our discussion of scientific management in the document “Job Design: Every Job Meaningful.”

[3] Principle-Centered Leadership, 191.

[4] In Search of Excellence, 37.

[5] This is based upon analysis of 128 studies; Pink details some of the research behind this in chapter 2.

[6] Pink, 39. Extrinsic rewards can increase performance for algorithmic tasks—“those that depend on following an existing formula to its logical conclusion.” But they decrease performance for tasks that involve creating something new and managing ambiguity, which “demand flexible problem-solving, inventiveness, or conceptual understanding” (46). This is because of how rewards tend to narrow one’s focus. “Rewarded subjects often have a harder time seeing the periphery and crafting original solutions.”

[7] Pink, 49.

[8] Pink, 35.

[9] Principle-Centered Leadership, pp. 191-192.

Filed Under: e Motivation, Job Design

5 Guiding Philosophies for Management

May 26, 2010 by Matt Perman

Management is a form of ministry because it is a matter of serving people. It serves them in relation to their immediate role in the organization, helping them to become more or less effective, and it also has spillover effects into the rest of their lives.

Therefore, we ought to want our organizations to be well managed. Managing well — and developing management systems that help people be more effective — means having a correct understanding of the nature of management. This understanding must, in turn, be based on a correct understanding of people and how God made them.

A correct understanding of management means understanding at least five main guiding philosophies of management. These philosophies guide how we think about management at Next and how we have developed every management system we have, especially the specific management systems throughout this particular section. These five principles are as follows.

 

1. People are made in the image of God

The central question of management, in my view, is this: what does it look like to understand management in light of the supremacy of God in all things? In other words, we should ultimately understand management within a God-centered, theological context. While fleshing that out in detail is outside the scope of this brief paper, we need to begin tracing that out a bit here.

The key to understanding management within a God-centered, theological context lies in the fact that people are in the image of God. This reality has significant implications for how we ought to treat people. We cannot act as though the realm of management and organizations is segregated from the rest of life, as though the image of God has implications for personal relationships but not organizational ones.

At root, I would argue that the image of God in man implies three things for management. First, it implies the importance of respect for the individual. We need to manage in a way that treats people as humans, not factors of production.

Second, it implies that we should manage in a way that creates and supports freedom over control. We should trust people and let them do their jobs. The manager is not primarily a supervisor, but a source of help and someone who makes sure that the necessary systems and structures are in place that will enable the person to thrive.

Third, it implies that we should respect individuality. Everyone is unique, and this is a good thing. It should be respected and harnessed, not something we should work against.

 

2. Each person’s talents are enduring and unique

Talents are distinct from knowledge and skills. Talents are “recurring patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that can be productively applied.” Our talents are given and innate; they probably come from a combination of nature and nurture (both through the hand of God), but whatever their secondary causes, they are mostly fixed by early in life. Consequently, our talents are enduring, fundamental features of our personality that do not change.[1]

Because talents are enduring, the role of the manager is not to try to shape and correct how people were made. But this is exactly what conventional wisdom tries to do. As Marcus Buckingham points out, buttressed by the belief that people can change in any way they want if they just try hard enough, conventional wisdom says that “anyone can be anything they want to be if they just try hard enough. Indeed, as a manager it is your duty to direct those changes. Devise rules and policies to control your employee’s unruly inclinations. Teach them skills and competencies to fill in the traits they lack. All of your best efforts as a manager should focus on either muzzling or correcting what nature saw fit to provide.”[2]

Instead of shaping and correcting how God made the person, instead managers should accept how He made them. They should recognize that “there is a limit to how much remolding they can do to someone” and not focus on making people into something that they are not. Further, instead of bemoaning the fact that people’s talents and fundamental personality are enduring, they should capitalize on this. That is what great managers do — they capitalize on the uniqueness of each individual rather than trying to change it.

Another implication of the fact that talent is enduring is that you need to hire people on the basis of talent (defined in this sense — not in the sense of “a very gifted individual”) rather than first skills or experience. Knowledge and skills can change and be added to; but talent cannot be changed, and therefore you have to hire it in. As with the theatre, “the secret is in the casting.”

 

3. Each person’s greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strength[3]

This follows from the fact that talents are enduring. Conventional wisdom, on the other hand, says that we should grow by fixing our weaknesses. This belief is so prevalent that it is even built in to the language—for example, one’s weaknesses are often labeled “areas of opportunity.”

But when you realize that talents are enduring, this doesn’t make sense. Now, a person might be weak in an area simply because of lack of knowledge; the underlying talent might be there, and it just needs knowledge and skill added to be turned in to a strength. But when the underlying talent is not there, no amount of knowledge or skill will make the person strong in that area. Focusing efforts on such a weakness will yield little results compared to the effort.

Further, focusing on weakness is demotivating — it is not motivating to have to continually turn your attention to what weakens you. Focusing on a person’s strengths, however, yields great results and is motivating. To motivate a person and help them grow most effectively, you have to focus on their strengths.

 

4. The purpose of the manager is to unleash each employee’s talents for the performance of the organization

This follows from the fact that talent is enduring and therefore the manager must capitalize on how each individual is unique. The manager plays a catalyst role. Employees have the ability to contribute, and the organization has aims it needs to achieve. But the connection between an individual’s potential and the organization’s goals is not always automatic; and even when it is, it needs to be sped up. This is the role of the manager.

Further, his catalyst role of the manager — speeding up the reaction between the employee’s talents and the organization’s goals — is essential in powering the performance of the organization. Therefore, the role of the manager is critically important. It is not the case that “it is the work of leadership” that really matters, and that managers are simply mini-executives waiting for the truly important work of leadership to be thrust upon them. Rather, the roles of the manager and leader are different and both are critical.[4] We need effective leaders and effective managers. And while it is possible for the same person to excel in both, it is not necessary. Managers do not need to feel the pressure to be leaders, and leaders do not need to feel bad if they are not strong at the management role.[5]

 

5. This catalyst role of the manager is played most effectively by turning four keys

These four keys are: selecting for talent rather than just experience and skills, setting expectations by defining the right outcomes rather than detailing the steps, motivating by focusing on strengths rather than weaknesses, and developing people by finding the right fit rather than simply the next rung on the ladder.

These four keys correspond to four systems that we develop in other documents in this section:

  1. Strengths-based hiring [link]
  2. Strengths-based quarterly performance planning [link]
  3. Annual strengths interview [link]
  4. Career discovery [link] and role tweaking [link]

 

[1] Note: I am not saying that moral change and sanctification is not possible, of course. I am talking about the non-moral features of our personality. These features can be used for sin or righteousness, of course, but in themselves are simply basic, good features of creation. And this insight that talents are recurring is not unique to Buckingham and the Gallup study they did. Lloyd-Jones himself said “when we become Christians, the fundamental features of our personality do not change.” Our values, goals, and treasure changes; but the features that God designed in do not—they are not intended to.

[2] First, Break All the Rules, 56.

[3] These second and third principles are articulated best in Marcus Buckingham’s book Now, Discover Your Strengths, pp. 5-10.

[4] Marcus Buckingham has some excellent words on this that are worth quoting at length: “Conventional wisdom tells us that the manager role is no longer very important. Apparently managers are now an impediment to speed, flexibility, and agility. Today’s agile companies can no longer afford to employ armies of managers to shuffle papers, sign approvals, and monitor performance. They need self-reliant, self-motivated, self-directed work times. No wonder managers were first against the wall when the reengineering revolution came.

“Besides, continues conventional wisdom, every ‘manager’ should be a ‘leader.’ He must seize opportunity, using his smarts and impatience to exert his will over a fickle world. In this world, the staid little manager is a misfit. It is too quick for him, too exciting, too dangerous. He had better stay out of the way. He might get hurt.

“Conventional wisdom has led us all astray. Yes, today’s business pressures are more intense, the changes neck-snappingly fast. Yes, companies need self-reliant employees and aggressive leaders. But all this does not diminish the importance of managers. On the contrary, in turbulent times the manager is more important than ever.

“Why? Because managers play a vital and distinct role, a role that charismatic leaders and self-directed teams are incapable of playing. The manager role is to reach inside each employee and release his unique talents into performance. This role is best played one employee at a time: one manager asking questions of, listening to, and working with one employee. Multiplied a thousandfold, this one-by-one-by-one role is the company’s power supply. In times of great change it is this role that makes the company robust—robust enough to stay focused when needed, yet robust enough to flex without breaking” (First, Break All the Rules, pp. 58-59).

[5] Marcus Buckingham does a good job explaining the main difference between the role of the manager and of the leader in his book The One Thing You Need to Know. He notes that the role of the manager is to turn talent into performance. He does this by recognizing what is unique about each individual and capitalizing on it. The role of the leader, on the other hand, is to rally people to a better future. The leader does this by recognizing what is universal to everybody and capitalizing on that. The functions of managers and leaders also differ, as John Kotter has explained very effectively in his article “What Leaders Really Do.” Managers decide what needs to be done by planning and budgeting. Leaders, on the other hand, decide what needs to be done by setting direction. Managers develop the capacity to achieve by staffing and organizing. Leaders develop the capacity to achieve by aligning people. And finally, managers ensure that things have been done by monitoring and controlling (in the sense of comparing results to actual, not in the negative sense of control), whereas leaders do this by motivating people to persevere through obstacles. The role of the leader is looser, whereas the role of the manager is tighter and more directly involved.

Filed Under: 4 - Management

Creating Employee Engagement

May 25, 2010 by Matt Perman

We have seen that the role of the manager is important and critical because managers serve a catalyst role in turning talent in to performance. We will look at the specific tools through which managers do this shortly. At this point we are going to look at another critical result of effective management: creating a strong work environment.

What is a Great Work Environment?

Every organization, including Next, aims to be a “great work environment.” These are not simply lofty words that have no real meaning. On the contrary, to say that an organization has a great work environment is actually another way of saying that the organization has high employee engagement and that it is a strong workplace. In other words, a “great work environment” is not a fluffy term with no substance. It means having a workplace with high engagement.

Having “employee engagement” in an organization means that people are emotionally connected to their work. It matters to them. They care about it. And therefore they are willing to put in the extra effort between compliance and commitment which is the key to any organization’s effectiveness.

Great Work Environments are Built

Having employee engagement and a strong workplace doesn’t have to simply be left to good intentions and wishful thinking. There are specific things that you can do to build these things into your organization. Strong workplaces are built.

A strong workplace not only can be built, but must be built. It must be built first of all because it serves the employees. Since management is a form of ministry and is about developing people through tasks, rather than merely getting things done through others, it matters whether the workplace is an environment where people are engaged in what they are doing. A strong workplace must also be built because it is necessary to the health of the organization. The only way to advance the mission effectively is to “build the kind of work environment that attracts, focuses, and keeps talented employees.” That is, to create strong workplace where people are engaged in their work.

How to Create a Great Work Environment

The 12 Questions

But how do create and measure the strength of a workplace? The Gallup Organization did a multi-million dollar study on this question and identified that there are twelve core components to building a strong workplace. These components are captured in “Twelve Questions” to be asked of each employee. These questions “measure the core elements need to attract, focus, and keep the most talented employees.”[1]

What The 12 Questions Are

The 12 Questions are:

  1. Do I know what is expected of me at work?
  2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
  3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
  4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?
  5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
  6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
  7. At work, do my opinions seem to count?
  8. Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel my job is important?
  9. Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
  10. Do I have a best friend at work?
  11. In the last six months, has someone at work talked to me about my progress?
  12. This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

These questions “are the simplest and most accurate way to measure the strength of a workplace” and are based on a multi-million dollar study by the Gallup Organization.[2]

The Structure of the Questions

In order to utilize them correctly, we first must understand their structure. As mentioned above, the role of the manager is to secure a “yes” from each of these questions. To do this, however, it must be recognized that the questions are hierarchical. That is, the order is important.

Buckingham calls the first two questions “base camp.” They ask: “What do I get?” They focus on having what you need. Questions 3-6 are camp 1, and ask: “What do I give?” They focus on individual contribution. Questions 7-10 are camp 2 and ask: “Do I belong here?”

Finally, questions 11-12 are camp 3 and ask: “How can we all grow? These questions are the most advanced stage—people want to make things better, learn, grow, and innovate. The important thing, however, is that you can only do these things after you have climbed the earlier stages—you must have the right expectations, confidence in your own expertise, and be aware of how your new ideas will be accepted or rejected by those around you before you can move up to the higher questions.

Why Disengagement Can Exist Even in Organizations with a Strong Mission

The reason that it is crucial to understand this hierarchical sequence is that “the longer your lower level needs remain unmet, the more likely it is that you will burn out, become unproductive, and leave. To be answering positively to camps 2 and 3 but negatively to the questions lower down is a very precarious positions. Deep down you are disengaged. You have mountain sickness—like if you just helicoptered to the last part of a climb. If you just jump in at camp 3 mountain sickness will sap your energy and slow your progress to a crawl.” (get exact quote.)

This is why things like mission statements, diversity training, self-directed work teams, continuous improvement, learning organizations, etc. were all well-conceived but withered. “They aimed too high, too fast. Managers were encouraged to focus on complex initiatives without spending time on the basics. If an employee doesn’t know what is expected of him as an individual (base camp), then you shouldn’t ask him to get excited about playing on a team (camp 2). Don’t helicopter in at 17,000 feet or your people will die on the mountain.”[3]

Hence, “the key to building a strong, vibrant workplace lies in meeting employees’ needs at base camp and camp 1. Focus your time and energy there, or everything else along the journey is irrelevant.”

The Role of the Manager

Manage in a Way that Leads to a Positive Answer to the 12 Questions (or at least the top 6)

The 12 Questions do not do anything on their own. Rather, they become effective in the hands of a companies managers.

The job of the manager is to secure a positive “yes” to all of these questions from each of his or her employees. As Buckingham writes, “if you can create the type of environment where employees answer positively to all questions, then you will have built a great place to work.” (As mentioned earlier, though, the most important thing is to meet people’s needs at base camp and camp 1—the first six questions—because they serve as the foundation for everything else.)

Why People Leave Companies with Strong Missions and Talented Leadership

What is so significant about this discovery is not simply the identification of the specific components that lead to employee engagement, but the realization of the critical role of the manager. For it is each employee’s manager that is most directly responsible for bringing about the conditions reflected in the 12 Questions.

This is so significant, in fact, that one of the most starling conclusions from the Gallup study is that people leave managers, not companies. Buckingham explains:

Our research yielded many discoveries, but the most powerful was this: Talented employees need great managers. The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor.[4]

So employee engagement serves the employee and the organization not only by making the work more satisfying and the employee more productive, but also by resulting in greater retention of talented employees. And it is the manager who plays the vital link in creating employee engagement.

Which sheds light on the importance of avoiding a truly unfortunate disconnect: an organization can have a compelling and meaningful mission, and even excellent leadership at the top, but if it lacks effective managers throughout the organization, people will be likely to be disengaged in their work and will leave. Worse, this can lead to disillusionment as the employee feels the disconnect in the experience “I love what this company stands for, but it is not doing me good to work here.”

The Four Keys for Building a Strong Workplace

But how do you secure positive answers to the top six questions (the top six, you’ll recall, are the primary focus)? Buckingham outlines four keys the manager turns in order to do this.

  1. Selecting for talent (rather than first skills or experience)
  2. Setting expectations by defining the right outcomes (rather than the right steps)
  3. Motivating by focusing on strengths (rather than trying to overcome weaknesses)
  4. Developing the employee by finding the right fit (rather than simply the next rung)

We have worked these four keys in to our management systems. They keys have been translated into our overall mindsets and five specific systems, each of which are outlined in their respective documents:

  1. Strengths-based hiring [link]
  2. Performance management, which consists of four systems:
    1. Strengths-based quarterly performance planning,
    2. The annual strengths interview
    3. Career discovery
    4. Role tweaking

Notes

[1] First, Break All the Rules, 28.

[2] For more details on this study and how these questions were arrived at, see First, Break All the Rules pp. 25-29.

[3] Note also that the 12 questions relate to the 4 critical roles of the manager. To secure “strongly agree” to question 3, for example, you must know how to select. Which means you must know difference between talent, skill, and knowledge and how to identify them in interviews. For questions 1 and 2, you must be able to set accurate performance expectations and know how to balance need for standardization and efficiency with the need for flair and originality. For questions 4 and 5, you must be able to motivate. And question 6 pertains to ability to develop people.

[4] First, Break All the Rules, pp. 11-12.

Filed Under: 4 - Management

Creating a Climate for Great Managers

May 25, 2010 by Matt Perman

Why Managers Matter

We’ve seen that managers are critically important for several reasons.

First, managers are the key to helping each employee turn their talent into the most effective performance for the organization.

Second, managers trump companies. Even if someone loves the mission and vision of an organization and resonates with its top leadership, if their immediate manager is poor, their job satisfaction will be diminished and their effectiveness will be reduced.[1]

Third, managers themselves become more effective when they have great managers. If we were to ask “what do great managers need?,” the answer would be: “Great managers.” Great managers need great managers.

The Importance of Creating a Climate for Great Managers

But over all this, great managers exist within the context of the overall organization. Thus, the organization plays a substantial role in producing and retaining great managers by creating a climate that will be more conducive or less conducive to this.

In particular, an organization creates a climate that is either favorable or disfavorable to great managers through its web of policies, practice, and language.

Policies that are restrictive, for example, work against the manager who aims to liberate and empower his employees. Policies that affirm the fundamental value of autonomy, on the other hand, reinforce and further the efforts of great managers. The efforts of great managers are amplified or diminished by the overall company environment.

How to Create a Climate for Great Managers

Marcus Buckingham outlines four things that senior management can do to create a climate for great managers.[2] I will outline his four and then add two of my own.

1. Keep the focus on outcomes

Buckingham writes: “The role of the company is to identify the desired end. The role of the individual is to find the best means possible to achieve that end. Therefore strong companies become experts in the destination and give the individual the thrill of the journey.”[3]

He then gives the following practical suggestions for keeping the focus on outcomes:

  • Define each role in outcome terms as much as possible.
  • “Find a way to rate, rank, or count as many of these outcomes as possible. Measurement always improves performance.”
  • For roles relating to customers, “the four most important outcomes for a customer are accuracy, availability, partnership, and advice.”
  • “Hold managers accountable for their employees’ responses to the twelve questions.” (See the document “Employee Engagement” for the list of the twelve questions and their meaning.)

2. Value world-class performance in every role

Every role that is performed at excellence deserves respect and has its own nobility. In order to create heroes in every role, consider:

  • Setting up graded levels of achievement in as many roles as possible. “Identify specific criteria for moving up from one level to the next.” “Take every level seriously.”
  • Creating broad banded compensation plans.
  • Celebrating “personal bests.” “Many people like to compete with themselves. Design a system so that each person can keep track of his or her performance monthly or quarterly. Use this system to celebrate monthly or quarterly ‘personal bests,’ as and when they occur. A growing number of ‘personal bests’ means a growing company.”

3. Study your best

“Strong companies learn from their very best. Internal best practice discovery is one of their most important rituals.”

  • Consider building a talent profile for each role, based on studying your best in each role.
  • “Revise all training to incorporate what you have learned about excellence in each role.”
  • “Set up an internal ‘university.’ The main function of this university should be to provide a forum for showcasing how your best, in every role, do what they do. As far as is possible, every employee should be exposed to the thinking, the actions, and the satisfactions of your best, in every role.”

4. Use the language of great management

“Language affects thinking. Thinking affects behavior. Companies must change how people speak if they are to change how people behave. Strong companies turn the language of great managers into the common language.”[4]

  • “Teach the Four Keys of great managers. In particular emphasize the difference among skills, knowledge, and talents. Make sure people know that all roles, performed at excellence, require talent, that a talent is any recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behavior, and that talents are extraordinarily difficult to teach.”
  • “Change recruiting practices, job descriptions, and resume qualifications to reflect the critical importance and the broader definition of a talent.”
  • “Revise all training content to reflect the differences among skills, knowledge, and talents. A great company is clear about what can be trained and what cannot.”
  • “Remove the remedial element from training. Send your most talented people to learn new skills and knowledge that can complement their talents. Stop sending less talented people to training classes to be ‘fixed.’”
  • “Give every employee the benefit of feedback….[But] stop using [any specific tools] if they are focused on identifying what needs to be fixed.”
  • “Start the great managers performance management routine.”

5. Teach on the nature of management

This is an extension of Buckingham’s third and fourth points. We should teach managers specifically what it means to be strengths-based, what management is at its core (turning talent into performance), and how to implement the four keys.

6. Create systems and structures that embody these principles

The principles of strengths-based, effective management need to be woven in to the fabric and systems of the organization.

In this regard, some of the key systems that we are seeking to implement at Next include: Strengths-based hiring, strengths-based performance management, strengths-based career development, talent profile, strengths based training, etc.

 

Notes

[1] See Buckingham, First, Break All the Rules, pp. 32; 34-36.

[2] See First, Break All the Rules, pp. 236 – 238. Buckingham points out convention wisdom, which holds that

[3] First, Break All the Rules, 236.

[4] First, Break All the Rules, p. 237.

Filed Under: 4 - Management

Why (and How) to Use a Feed Reader

May 3, 2010 by Matt Perman

This is a guest post by Mike Anderson of The Resurgence.

Here are five reasons to use a feed reader (such as Google Reader) to keep up with blogs:

1. You never miss a blog post from your favorite sites
Once you subscribe to a feed, your feed reader will make sure that you see every new post from that feed. Whether you want to read your websites once a week, once a day, or every ten minutes, any unread items will be saved for you.

2. You can scan a ton of articles quickly
When using a feed reader, you can quickly filter through the articles that you don’t want to read. When surfing the web, you have to shuffle through different interfaces, type in web addresses, and surf bookmarks. This takes a ton of time. It’s much better to have the content you want delivered to you than to have to go find it every time you get online.

3. Melting-pot learning
One of the great side-effects of using a feed reader is that you begin to learn about various memes in a melting-pot fashion, where ideas flavor each other. You’ll learn new ideas over time, and understand the relationships between them.

4. You can save articles for later
Feed readers allow you to save articles to read for later. In Google Reader, you can put a star next to items you like and come back later to read them in full. You can also tag articles and search for them later.

5. You can always be up to date with the Resurgence
I am so excited to see theResurgence.com have an impact by training missional leaders. I want more people to sign up for the feed so that they don’t miss anything here. We’re bringing in numerous experts from different backgrounds to help form a Christ-centered vision for our lives, and I don’t want any of you to miss out on that.

So those are five reasons to use a feed reader to keep up with blogs. This leads naturally to the question of how to use a feed reader. Mike also has a video that shows this in very simple terms, using Google Reader:

Filed Under: 1 - Productivity

About

What’s Best Next exists to help you achieve greater impact with your time and energy — and in a gospel-centered way.

We help you do work that changes the world. We believe this is possible when you reflect the gospel in your work. So here you’ll find resources and training to help you lead, create, and get things done. To do work that matters, and do it better — for the glory of God and flourishing of society.

We call it gospel-driven productivity, and it’s the path to finding the deepest possible meaning in your work and the path to greatest effectiveness.

Learn More

About Matt Perman

Matt Perman started What’s Best Next in 2008 as a blog on God-centered productivity. It has now become an organization dedicated to helping you do work that matters.

Matt is the author of What’s Best Next: How the Gospel Transforms the Way You Get Things Done and a frequent speaker on leadership and productivity from a gospel-driven perspective. He has led the website teams at Desiring God and Made to Flourish, and is now director of career development at The King’s College NYC. He lives in Manhattan.

Learn more about Matt

Newsletter

Subscribe for exclusive updates, productivity tips, and free resources right in your inbox.

The Book


Get What’s Best Next
Browse the Free Toolkit
See the Reviews and Interviews

The Video Study and Online Course


Get the video study as a DVD from Amazon or take the online course through Zondervan.

The Study Guide


Get the Study Guide.

Other Books

Webinars

Follow

Follow What's Best next on Twitter or Facebook
Follow Matt on Twitter or Facebook

Foundational Posts

3 Questions on Productivity
How to Get Your Email Inbox to Zero Every Day
Productivity is Really About Good Works
Management in Light of the Supremacy of God
The Resolutions of Jonathan Edwards in Categories
Business: A Sequel to the Parable of the Good Samaritan
How Do You Love Your Neighbor at Work?

Recent Posts

  • How to Learn Anything…Fast
  • Job Searching During the Coronavirus Economy
  • Ministry Roundtable Discussion on the Pandemic with Challies, Heerema, Cosper, Thacker, and Schumacher
  • Is Calling Some Jobs Essential a Helpful Way of Speaking?
  • An Interview on Coronavirus and Productivity

Sponsors

Useful Group

Posts by Date

Posts by Topic

Search Whatsbestnext.com

Copyright © 2023 - What's Best Next. All Rights Reserved. Contact Us.