Boss pathologies--trying to beat Mother Nature
In 1991, the United States Air Force faced two formidable opponents. One was named Saddam Hussein and the other Mount Pinatubo. Against Saddam, forces were marshaled, missions were flown, bombs were dropped, and the dictator was rebuffed. Against the volcano, one day after the first low-level eruption, the United States started the evacuation of Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. Why such a contrast?
In the Philippines, the antagonist was Mother Nature; in Iraq, it was just a megalomaniac leader with a seasoned war machine a half million men strong. With Mount Pinatubo, the United States Air Force showed modesty and good judgment in deciding not to fight and opted for flight. Five days later, on June 16th the base was buried in several feet of volcanic ash.
Often our human response is to fight natural forces, or deny that the threat is real. Consider the story of Harry Truman. Harry lived at Spirit Lake, located on the lower slopes of Mount Helens. Warned of the volcano’s increasing activity Harry refused to evacuate saying, "That mountain's part of Harry and Harry's part of that mountain. ... I'm coming down feet first or I'm not coming down at all.” The second part of his statement was prophetic--Harry is still on the lower slopes of the mountain--under a quarter mile of rock of what used to be upper Mount St Helens.
Sometimes people do prevail against the forces of nature. National Geographic magazine chronicled the story of Icelanders that diverted a lava flow away from their town by spraying millions of gallons of seawater on it. Heroics do occasionally work, but it would be foolish to plan on them working every time.
Managers often try to fight human nature – a force potentially just as awesome and destructive as Mount Pinatubo in the business environment. With arrogance and bravado managers attempt to steal people and resources from their peers, pretend that groups that never see each other will communicate effortlessly, and assume that everyone will do the right thing for the organization—even if it isn’t the best thing for them. Many a project has failed because the manager refused to distinguish between a tough task, and a task that pits you against the forces of nature.
The Vision Thing
I often hear the complaint that “We don’t have a shared vision.” In 22 years of management, I have gone from ignorance of visions, to embracing visions, to becoming an anti-visionist. ”The Vision” is a myth, created to explain the intangible difference between managers/organizations that are effective, and others aren’t. A few years ago I endured a multi-hour meeting with a group of managers trying to create the vision for a new organization. I kept a low profile, not wanting to poison the discussion with my “anti-vision” feelings. It struck me that amongst these 8 managers, a reasonably well functioning team, no two managers agreed on more than one or two of the essential attributes of a vision. They disagreed on whether it should be “customer viewable”, the time frame represented, ideal number of words, how often it should updated, inclusion of financial goals, was it specific enough to help us make decisions, how inspiring it should be, should it be developed collaboratively or generated by the leader, and so on. I don’t believe I sabotaged the meeting, I think there were just fundamental disagreement on what a vision was.
Could it be that we can’t agree on hardly anything that has to do with “The Vision” because it has more to do with our personalities than the true needs of the organization? Does an organizational vision ever exist, or are we just trying to verbalize what motivates us as individuals? If this is true, the attributes of the visions we propose say more about us than it does about the organization. Is it reasonable to insist that a diverse group of people must share the same vision in order to be successful?
Some people attempt to use “proof by example” that Visions can exist. Two ubiquitous examples are John F. Kennedy’s “put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade” and Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. These were incredibly inspiring speeches, but were they Visions? Or did they just tap into the country’s underlying energy and direction of the time? JFK wanted a goal that would spark the nation into action. He made it specific, measurable, and achievable—it worked. MLK explicitly tapped into the bedrock of the American dream that values your character and what you accomplish over who you happened to be born to. This worked too, although his dream is still not fully realized.
The fact remains, that some organizations are generally agreed to be healthier than others. What can managers do to create a healthier environment?
Have clear, relatively stable goals
Be willing to make decisions on what tasks get resources, saying no to others
Encouraging realistic scheduling—not planning for everything to go right
Not punishing people who take the risks we ask them to take and failing at it
Giving credit, where credit is due
Dealing proactively with poor performers
Be able to reasonably show how the business will be successful
Setting priorities -- does it really work?
Conventional wisdom states that when confronted with too much to do, it is time to prioritize things. This is good advice, but it stops short. As a senior level manager once said: “Having ‘high’ priority projects short circuits planning and accountability. High priority projects don’t need to plan because they can rob lower priority projects if needed, and lower priority projects don’t plan because they know that it is inevitable that the high priority projects will come raiding for resources.” Priorities are useful, but they should be used strategically, and at a high level for allocating resources. Once those resources are assigned then project managers should be held accountable for planning to those resources. Of course people don’t show up when planned, other resources (e.g. money, equipment) may be reduced or delayed, and unexpected problems may be encountered, but grabbing resources from other projects should not be the first line of defense. Instead the project should have built in buffers, or shock absorbers to address these almost inevitable shortfalls/problems.
Is speed the key to success?
In a landmark Harvard business review paper researchers showed that getting a product to market on time is more predictive of overall profitability than meeting investment goals or delivering later with more features. This paper spawned a cult of speed amongst managers. I won’t argue that getting to market soon enough with a product is important to business successes, but it is hardly a guarantee of success. Sony’s Betamax was earlier to market than VHS, but recording time and cost ended up being a more important factor. Southwest Airlines was hardly 1st to the airline business, but it is certainly more profitable than many earlier to market companies. I am all for speed--I hate analysis paralysis--but speed has its pitfalls and qualifiers too. In the "Book of 5 Rings" speed as a fundamental strategy in warfare is discouraged because it is not always applicable. For example what if the battle is on marshy ground? It is hard to be fast if you are stuck in a bog. It is better to have a core approach that is less sensitive to environmental conditions. Speed doesn’t make sense if we don’t have a strategy. As Roland May said: “Man is the only animal that runs faster when it is lost”. Purposeless running leads to fatigue and confusion—it usually doesn’t do much good for business to just try random things without a plan.
Market windows are one of the reasons that the cult of speed is so popular. While I don’t deny that windows of opportunity exist, my experience is that if these windows open, they usually open later and linger longer than predicted. People are not very good at predicting the future—don’t let them stampede you into movement for movement’s sake.
Boss pathologies--Trying to beat Parkinson's Law
Prof. Cyril Parkinson, in his book “Parkinson’s Law" states that the amount of work done on a task will always expand to fill the time allocated to complete it. This law feels right to managers--they seldom see a task finished ahead of schedule. Even an on-time completion for a farily routine task is rare enough that we usually celebrate it! A clear implication of the law is that employees, either through poor judgment or sloth, do more than is necessary or laze around enough to ensure that a project is never completed ahead of schedule. Managers try to beat Parkinson’s law by allocating less time for tasks—their logic being that this will reduce the amount of “expanded” work. This process generates tons of Reality Distortion Field (RDF). The big problem for the manager is figuring out how much time the task should take. Obviously if the manager allocates zero time for the task there will be no “expanded” work—however it will be hard to convince anyone this is a reasonable plan. As a result managers are forced to compromise. With the goal of minimizing “expanded work” they set the schedule to the shortest time interval that no one can prove is impossible—the Everything Always Goes Right (EAGR) schedule. The EAGR schedule creates problems—lots of them. These problems impact at least four different groups of people within the organization: the workers themselves, the task planners (either senior level workers or lower level managers, the manager that sets the schedule, and the managers of the groups that are dependent on the completed task. The workers assigned to the task with an EAGR schedule experience a sense of foreboding that their lives are about to be disrupted yet again with demands for long hours, skipped vacations, and exhortations to work smarter and harder. Has management yet again lost its mind—how can anyone believe that the task can be done that quickly? The task planners try to figure out how to create a workable plan. They struggle with with the expectation that evaluating any approach, however efficient and productive, that is not consistent with the existing EAGR schedule cannot be considered. It would be like planning for failure. In reality, very few EAGR schedules are achieved, and by not considering valuable approaches the planners may ironically cause the task to take even longer than is necessary. This situation is addressed by Harwood’s rule number one “Don’t do dumb things because of unrealistic schedules.” Granted, there will be cases that necessity will birth some innovative approach that achieves the EAGR –but these are rare.
Why bosses lose touch with reality--Ignorance
One of the reasons management loses touch with reality is that they don’t understand the work. I wouldn’t be surprised if Henry Ford could have rolled up his sleeves and done any job in his factories. Today, in a large corporation the CEO couldn’t even come close to doing this. Even if they could once do the complex tasks that their employees do, after years of not using those skills, and having technology progress has rendered them incapable of doing or understanding everything that is being done in their organization. Ultimately the knowledge workers, as John Kenneth Galbraith calls them, reside in an interesting situation—where their boss controls their pay and advancement, but the knowledge workers control the flow of information to management. Since the managers are not technically proficient at the tasks they are managing they usually attempt to quantify what they measure / manage by necessity. A manager may not understand software programming, but they can certainly demand that 100 lines of code be written per day. Whether this makes sense or not is a separate issue, but the manager feels like they have somehow added value. This gap between what the knowledge worker does and what the boss can comprehend and measure does not help the mental help of the corporation.
Why bosses lose touch with reality--Stonewalling
Subordinates stonewall – and the bosses call their bluff
Many aggressive bosses have had the experience where they have their teams tell them something is impossible—and then their teams manage to do it anyway. Human creativity is a wonderful thing, and it is amazing what people can do when they are told that “they, or their replacement” will solve a specific problem. However, one effect of this rabbit-out-of-a-hat behavior is that managers start distrusting the veracity of their teams. Are their people saying that something is impossible or hard because it really is that way, or because out of laziness, fear, or some other human weakness they don’t want to do it. Good managers challenge their teams, and often succeed in doing things that many doubted. But there are things that are hard or impossible. If the boss challenges the organization to do something truly outside its capabilities then bad things will happen. Winston Churchill would say—stop arguing the matter; let the difficulties argue for themselves. At that point he was making a decision—to move from the theoretical to the actual. However if predicted or unexpected showstopper problem arise, then there is no sensible reason to continue. At what point does challenging a team turn into the ravings of someone that is truly asking the impossible?
Why bosses lose touch with reality -- Their subordinates don't tell them the truth
So why do managers lose touch with reality? Perhaps more than any other role in our modern society business managers are expected to do a lot of things well. For example, managers are expected to predict the future, be inspiring leaders, selfless servants, and coordinate tasks they themselves don’t understand These expectations and others power the Reality Distortion Field. One of the things that drives managers away from the truth: subordinates don’t tell them the truth.
A writer once stated that the quality of the information flow in an organization is inversely proportional to the person’s position in the organization. This situation is pretty understandable if you think about it. Who wants to tell the boss about their screw-ups? The boss has more positional power over you than anyone since your parents. True, you can quit the company, but changing a job is not a trivial thing—and it might have significant impacts if you have a family, stock options, retirement plans. Since they don’t get much negative feedback from their employees it is no wonder that they develop a distorted view of how things really are.. Their bosses are usually not all that connected to what is going on with their subordinate’s activities—so the quality of that feedback is pretty low too. Without high quality feedback just about everything and everyone will start losing touch with reality.
Management -- the wellspring of the Reality Distortion Field
Management is hard. In spite of what the one minute this-and-that books say, it is difficult to be a good manager. Even in the best of times, businesses fail. M. Scott Peck suggests that a person’s mental health relates to how well that person’s view of reality matches the real thing. Within organizations something similar to “mental health” is also present, but it has some significant differences. For example, instead of being the activity between a person’s ears, it is the activity that happens via communication—written, spoken, and non-verbal. This organizational mental health is not just the reflection of the mental health of the individuals within it -- there is a group dynamic too. I have observed groups of apparently sane, well adjusted people come together into an organization that has miserable group mental health. Because this group mental health is significantly different in nature than an individual’s mental health I call it something else—the Reality Distortion Field. This is the best name I have found, the term, evidently was invented in the late 80’s to explain some of Steven’s Job’s impact on Apple's organization in his first engagement as CEO. I have monitored the Reality Distortion Field, or RDF for short, in organizations for at least a decade, and I have noted a few of its characteristics: - All managers generate at least some RDF
- In meetings the RDF of the people adds together—creating some pretty scary environments
- Higher-level managers tend to generate a higher levels of RDF than their subordinates
Common examples of high RDF behaviors include setting the “aggressive” schedule that no one thinks is possible, the overloaded organization being asked to take on yet another task—without dropping any existing responsibilities.
