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Keeping the Monkeys Off

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Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey? is a classic Harvard Business Review article on time management for managers. I can’t find it online for free, but here is a summary that is so good that you probably don’t even need to read the full article:

You’re racing down the hall. An employee stops you and says, “We’ve got a problem.” You assume you should get involved but can’t make an on-the-spot decision. You say, “Let me think about it.”

You’ve just allowed a “monkey” to leap from your subordinate’s back to yours. You’re now working for your subordinate. Take on enough monkeys, and you won’t have time to handle your real job: fulfilling your own boss’s mandates and helping peers generate business results.

How to avoid accumulating monkeys? Develop your subordinates’ initiative, say Oncken and Wass. For example, when an employee tries to hand you a problem, clarify whether he should: recommend and implement a solution, take action then brief you immediately, or act and report the outcome at a regular update.

When you encourage employees to handle their own monkeys, they acquire new skills—and you liberate time to do your own job.

5 Reasons Companies Should Not Block Access to Social Networks

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A good, brief article in Advertising Age that argues that “collaboration can increase productivity and resistance is futile.” The five points are:

  1. Resistance is futile
  2. Don’t assume people won’t find other ways to waste time
  3. Social networks can actually make workers more productive
  4. You’ll miss great ideas
  5. Employees are much more trustworthy than companies think

Point five is absolutely critical  — employees can be trusted. And trusting employees leads to higher performance. She adds: “If you can’t trust your employees, you have one of two problems: You are hiring the wrong people or you are not properly training the people you hire.”

Also, I think that point five overcomes point two — if you hire good people, they won’t waste time. Or, perhaps better, they will only waste time when doing so will lead to greater productivity overall.

Is Attending Conferences an Unnecessary Expense?

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Keith Ferrazzi makes a good case that the answer is no, in Never Eat Alone.

The reason that conferences are not unnecessary expenses is because it is actually revenue generating to attend. But this is often overlooked because only the cost is tied to the conference in an organization’s budget, but the productive outcomes from the conference are not.

First, here’s how Ferrazzi decides whether to attend a conference:

“Conferences are good for mainly one thing. They provide a forum to meet the kind of like-minded people who can help you fulfill your mission and goals. Before deciding to attend a conference, I sometimes informally go so far as using a simple return-on-investment thought process. Is the likely return I’ll get from the relationships I establish and build equal to or greater than the price of the conference and the time I spend there? If so, I attend. If not, I don’t.”

Second, here is Ferrazzi’s very good case on why cutting out conferences is a bad way to cut costs:

“Right after we sold YaYa, the new owners instituted a set of cost-cutting policies relative to travel and conferences. I thought the policies were fundamentally off the mark. The owners saw conferences as boondoggles–pleasant affairs for indulgent executives rather than as revenue generators. To our new parent company, the costs of sending people to a few events each year seemed like an unnecessary expense on the start-up company’s balance sheet.

“I strongly disagreed and promised to convince them otherwise. I set about recording the actual number of revenue-generating projects that came directly from people I had met at conferences. The owners were stunned when I presented a spreadsheet showing successive deals and how a significant chunk of revenue could be traced back to one conference or another.”

Third, here’s a good summary from Fast Company on the value of conferences and conventions: They enable you to (1) make contacts and (2) share ideas.

The Scarcity of Good Management

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From an article in Fortune back in February of 2006; I don’t think things have changed much since, because the driving force of this problem is lack of training and skill:

“Talent of every sort is in short supply, but the greatest shortage of all is skilled, effective managers. Even [in China], where you can hire factory workers by the million, companies can’t find enough managers….Labor is abundant, but managers are scarce.”

Person-Based Pay vs. Job-Based Pay

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From Treat People Right!: How Organizations and Employees Can Create a Win/Win Relationship to Achieve High Performance at All Levels:

Financial status and rewards in most organizations are based on the types of jobs people do. This approach is based on the assumption that job worth can be determined and that the person doing the job is worth only as much as the job itself is worth….

It is not clear that the worth of people can be equated with the worth of their job. This approach clearly does not fit with a company that depends on people for its competitive advantage. The alternative that is being increasingly adopted is person-based pay. It bases pay on each individual’s skills and competencies.

Filed Under: HR

More on the Importance of Beliefs in an Organization

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“…truly great organizations think of themselves in a fundamentally different way than mediocre enterprises. They have a guiding philosophy or a spirit about them, a reason for being that goes far beyond the mundane or the mercenary.” — Built to Last

It is eye-opening to realize the critical role that beliefs play in organizations. For we typically think of beliefs mostly at the individual level. But it is the shared beliefs and values in an organization that play the biggest role in making the organization effective and meaningful, and a place where people want to contribute.

The Importance of a Basic Philosophy to Every Organization

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“The basic philosophy of an organization has far more to do with its achievements than do technological or economic resources, organizational structure, innovation and timing.” — Thomas Watson, Jr.

Who was Thomas Watson, Jr.? From Wikipedia: “Thomas John Watson, Jr. (January 14, 1914 – December 31, 1993) was the president of IBM from 1952 to 1971 and the eldest son of Thomas J. Watson, IBM’s first president. He was listed as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people of the 20th century.”

The Six Major Factors that Determine Knowledge Worker Productivity

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From Peter Drucker’s Management Challenges for the 21st Century:

  1. Knowledge worker productivity demands that we ask the question: “What is the task?”
  2. It demands that we impose the responsibility for their productivity on the individual knowledge workers themselves. Knowledge workers have to manage themselves. They have to have autonomy.
  3. Continuing innovation has to be part of the work, the task and the responsibility of the knowledge workers.
  4. Knowledge work requires continuous learning on the part of the knowledge worker, but equally continuous teaching on the part of the knowledge worker.
  5. Productivity of the knowledge worker is not — at least not primarily — a matter of the quantity of output. Quality is at least as important.
  6. Finally, knowledge-worker productivity requires that the knowledge worker is both seen and treated as an “asset” rather than a “cost.” It requires that knowledge workers want to work for the organization in preference to all other opportunities.

The Errors of Scientific Management

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This is a good, short summary of the main thinking behind scientific management and its core flaws. Scientific management (treating people like robots rather than people) is relevant to us today because it shows exactly how not to treat people. From Treat People Right!: How Organizations and Employees Can Create a Win/Win Relationship to Achieve High Performance at All Levels:

Scientific management called for standardized, specialized, and machine-paced jobs in the name of efficiency and low labor costs. People were expected to add little value beyond their manual labor. Two carrots were used: financial incentives and the threat of being fired. A key assumption was that in return for having a job, people should be willing to act like machines for eight hours a day.

Scientific management has been shown to be highly flawed. Its use in large organizations for decades caused low intrinsic motivation on the part of employees and high rates of turnover and absenteeism, and a strong inclination to solve workplace problems through unionization. Sometimes employees would engage in counterproductive behaviors and even sabotage. Ultimately all of this opened the door to foreign competitors [note what happened to the American automobile manufacturers, beginning back in the 1970s].

Drucker: Do Not Cut Back on Expenditures for Success in Hard Times

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From Management Challenges for the 21st Century:

The most common, but also the most damaging, practice is to cut back on expenditures for success, especially in poor times, so as to maintain expenditures for ongoing operations, and especially expenditures to maintain the past.

The argument is always: “This product, service or technology is a success anyhow; it doesn’t need to have more money put into it.”

But the right argument is: “This is a success, and therefore should be supported to the maximum possible.” And it should be supported especially in bad times when the competition is likely to cut spending and therefore likely to create an opening.