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Swap Control for Accountability

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This is from a Gallup Management Journal interview that I recently came across in some of my notes. It’s right on, and is applicable to all organizations of any type, not just government organizations (which is the immediate context):

GMJ: How can government begin engaging the minds of all its employees, managers included?

Mears: The answer begins with swapping control for accountability — and accountability requires ensuring that employees understand the outcomes that are expected of them. When employees understand desired outcomes and have simple metrics to track them, you have accountability.

Employees also should be empowered to think about better ways to reach those outcomes. They can experiment and make appropriate local improvements as long as outcomes are reached. This helps eliminate some of the busywork that builds up when people don’t understand the big picture. Accountability works better than control.

An Easy Way to Measure the Creative Environment of Your Organization

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From FedEx Delivers: How the World’s Leading Shipping Company Keeps Innovating and Outperforming the Competition:

Creativity in the business world involves continuously asking “What if . . . ?” Yet when faced with a problem, people tend to quickly lock into “how to” — a quick solution — before exploring all the options.

An easy way to measure the creative environment in an organization is to count how often someone in the company asks questions like “What if we frame the problem this way?” “What if we look at the relationships between these variables?” “What if we explore these options?”

HBR On What Really Motivates Workers

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Daniel Pink summarizes an insightful article in the latest HBR on what really motivates workers.

Here is the main idea, which is interesting because it goes beyond simply saying that intrinsic motivation surpasses external motivation:

Amabile tracked the day-to-day activities and motivations of several hundred workers over a few years and found that their greatest motivation isn’t external incentives, but something different: Making progress (or what Drive calls “mastery” — the urge to get better and better at something that matters.)

So a key motivator is making progress. Good insight. Pink gives some more helpful quotes from the article in his post as well.

The article is a part of HBR’s “10 Breakthrough Ideas for 2010,” and I think you can obtain (purchase–sorry) it here.

Massachusetts Vote Could Bring an End to the Health Reform Bill

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Very interesting turn of events, which could prevent the very wrong-headed health reform bill from being able to pass:

Voter disenchantment in liberal Massachusetts with President Barack Obama’s policies has turned a Senate election into a nail-biter that could imperil U.S. healthcare reform.

Democrats envisioned a smooth passing of the baton in the January 19 special election to fill the seat of the late Edward Kennedy, a political giant who died of brain cancer in August after holding the seat for 46 years.

A victory would maintain the Democrats’ 60-seat Senate majority, allowing them to overcome Republican procedural hurdles that could block reform of the $2.5 trillion healthcare sector, Obama’s top legislative priority.

Instead, some polls say the race between State Attorney-General Martha Coakley, 56, and her Republican opponent, State Senator Scott Brown, is too close to call.

“The closeness of the race reflects deep voter dissatisfaction with how the president and the congressional majority are dealing with vital matters,” including healthcare and the war on terror, said Mark Landy, a political science professor at Boston College.

For my view on health reform, see my posts The Worst Bill Ever and How Health Savings Accounts–Not New Laws–Are the Key to Health Reform.

Innovation Comes from Unexpected Juxtapositions

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From FedEx Delivers: How the World’s Leading Shipping Company Keeps Innovating and Outperforming the Competition:

When it comes to innovation, the question is not how to innovate but how to invite ideas. How do you invite your brain to encounter thoughts that you might not otherwise encounter? Creative people let their mind wander, and they mix ideas freely. Innovation often comes from unexpected juxtapositions, from connecting subjects that aren’t necessarily related.

Another way to generate ideas is to treat a problem as though it were generic. If you’re experiencing a particular problem, odds are that other people are experiencing it too. Generate a solution, and you may have an innovation.

If You Take a Bottom Up Approach to Productivity, Will You Ever Make it to the Top?

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There are two main ways to put in place an approach for staying on top of things. First, you can start with the “runway” level — all the actions and stuff that lies right before you. Second, you can start at the top levels of mission, values, and goals.

The difficulty with the top down approach is that all of the things at the runway can easily keep bugging you and make it hard for you to see at that level.

But starting at the bottom is worse. If you tell yourself that getting all of your runway actions in order will allow you to work on up to the level of roles, goals, values, and mission, you’ll never make it.

It’s like a few months ago when I was jogging through a field of grasshoppers. When I went faster, there were just more grasshoppers to jump out.

That’s what happens if you focus on the runway level of actions and the stuff you need to process and try to work on up from there. The runway-level stuff will just multiply, and you’ll never rise much above it.

The best solution is to take a both/and approach. You have to deal with the stuff right before you, of course, and that will in turn provide good illumination on the nature of your roles and goals. But if you start there, don’t stay there too long. Go up to the higher levels and work down so that you will have your priorities defined, which will enable you to cut out a bunch of that stuff that’s been cluttering the runway anyway.