Ditch Rules and Value Values
While not entirely applicable to knowledge businesses I ran across this list of workplace rules at a Chinese keyboard manufacturer via @BillCarroll. It was too shocking, not to pass along. Imagine if you got docked three days pay for leaving your workstation. I’d be out a years pay by Thursday.
It got me thinking about the differences between our workplace rules and values.
Where rules are petty and only succeed in causing alienation between ‘them’ and ‘us,’ values bring everyone together. They give everyone a construct for how to succeed. They promote the actions that will draw the shortest line from here to there.
People will behave as positively as you let them. Everyone wants to do good work and achieve success. If you reward results while ignoring how they were achieved behaviors will deteriorate and align with the behavior behind the falsely rewarded results.
When a company lacks strong values it often devolves into a semi-professional Lord of the Flies, everyone for himself environment. Standing out typically comes at the expense of others.
photo by steve wampler
If you stand for everything, you stand for nothing.
While it’s never too late to rethink values, you don’t get many shots at this. If you look around and see chaos and dysfunction it may be time to rethink your values.
Those at the top of an organization, business unit or even small team who believe change has to come from the bottom are copping out. Values change from the top. Period. The top defines who succeeds and who doesn’t. And therein is an implicit statement of values.
So as a leader ask yourself these questions to build your values foundation:
- What actions do you admire in others? I like this one because it allows us to also strive to be better individuals too.
- What actions can you carry out each and every day without fail? You have to walk the talk constantly. You have to hold yourself to an impossibly high standard in order to succeed in getting these universally acknowledged and followed.
- What does your company require to succeed in the long-term? Do you want to promote competition or collaboration? Are you dependent upon new ideas? Depending on your answers, certain values will be more apt.
Values aren’t decoration for the company walls or cute desk magnets. Nor are they the catalyst for some feel good, touchy-feely, Kumbaya love-in. You have to enforce them as viciously as the Chinese keyboard manufacturer seemingly does their rules.
If someone doesn’t hold the values the company holds you need to get on the same page. Should that fail, you need to part ways. Period. Values are the lifeblood of an organization. An engine doesn’t run when you mix water and oil.
Zappos 10 core values and how ardently they celebrate them are a good start for further exploring.
Puppet vs. Puppeteer
I had coffee with Dr. Skippy this morning which always gets me thinking. While talking about how our motivation plays into how we behave at work I got thinking about how bizarre our philosophy is when it comes to promoting people.
Basically, you do a great job as an individual contributor you are rewarded with more responsibility until ultimately you are overseeing a bunch of people.
From puppet to puppeteer. How can we possibly think that being a good puppet means that we’ll be a good puppet master?
Switching metaphors, I like looking at sports because things are relatively simple, transparent and the stakes are ‘enormous.’
Only eight of the thirty baseball teams have managers who were all-stars in their playing days. With the possible exception of Joe Torre, there isn’t much chance of any of those guys being mistaken for a Hall of Fame player.
The old axe in baseball is that good players don’t make good managers. The reason given is that the skills needed to succeed came naturally so explaining how you perform a task was difficult. While I think there is some truth to that the biggest reason is that one has nothing to do with the other. The skills to succeed in each are completely different.
Having the skills to perform on the field are different than knowing how all the pieces should be utilized. The most successful managers know how to motivate people. They are able to adapt their style to meet the person they are coaching.
Good managers care about people. That doesn’t mean they are softhearted it just means that they are aware of what is happening in the heads of their players.
In the working world, selflessness is often the flint that starts the fire.
If a manager who came up the ranks as an outstanding performer is motivated by receiving recognition via his own performance excellence he clearly won’t have the team’s best interests in mind.
If a manager has the people-centric traits and is intrinsically motivated by achieving performance excellence for the team you can bet that the team will have far more staying power, evolve to take advantage of everyone’s strengths and ultimately produce better results through the manager’s motivational skills.
I’m not naive enough to think we can change this any time soon, but we have to start evaluating managers on the softer skills. Gone should be the days where individual drive, excellence of thought or sterling silo’d performance get someone to the head of the line. Good performance should be rewarded and promoted, but it shouldn’t default to managing people.
Let’s get smarter about this and figure out how to separately assess and cultivate the people skills that will make for successful teams.
What Business Can Learn From Baseball
Until recently baseball front offices had been filled with crusty, grizzled ‘baseball’ guys. The Moneyball crowd of 30-something sabermetricians has changed that but, surprisingly, the old-schoolers recognized the importance of some of the softer skills and nailed the execution, which has only been expanded upon today.
And despite all the ‘advancements’ made in the white-collar workplace there is plenty that executives can learn from those old-time, stogie-chomping, pot-bellied baseball guys.
1. Focus on hiring and coaching. Big league teams are only as good as the people on the team and how well they work together. Massive amounts of dollars are spent on scouting new talent (not waiting for players to happen to send their resumes to them), operating farm clubs and paying their managers and coaches. According to MLB, clubs spend an average of 46% of their revenue on non-player expenditures. These do include expenses related to non-scouting, coaching and farm club related expenses, but those are comparatively small. Even taking the base case scenario as suggested (Oakland and Montreal’s spending levels) we’re looking at ~31% of total revenue being spent to acquire potential superstar employees and proactively work to improve upon their performance.
Does your company care that much?
Sure, it’d be cheaper to do away with the farm systems. It’d be easier to cut the coaching staff and assume people will improve on their own. But your team wouldn’t be competitive for very long.
(note: My digging didn’t uncover recent financial statements. MLB financial statements are kept close to the vest but they did release some carefully prepared statements at the turn of the century to help diffuse labor issues.)
2. Merit-based Promotions. My wife works in an industry where ‘paying your dues’ is required. Similarly, I’ve experienced situations where sychophantism was the road to success.
Can you imagine baseball doing that? You could hit .400 with 50 HRs and not get promoted because you hadn’t spent enough time at your appropriate minor league level or because you didn’t tell the manager he did a great job setting the lineup. It’s reckless for mid-level managers and executives not to promote their best talent (best being defined by results rather than time served or ‘likeability’).
More attention needs to be paid to how we evaluate talent and ensure that the right people are retained, motivated and rewarded.
3. Continual Feedback is Vital. Can you imagine the coaching staff or front office only sitting with a minor league player once the season is completed? And yet in every workplace I’ve been involved, not only has there not been continual feedback (though I’ve always made a point of doing so with my reports) but the formal annual performance review has been anything but formal, regular or valued.
4. Hire the Best and Don’t Get Stuck Pigeonholing Based on Past Performance. Like other sports, baseball teams draft for the best player available rather than what their team needs at the moment. Hire based on intelligence (be it emotional, technical, interpersonal etc.) rather than someone who has performed the specific tasks you need accomplished in the past. How many times do you hear outfielders or shortstops being converted to pitchers? Baseball doesn’t give a damn what you’ve done in the past. It cares about what an athlete is capable of doing in the future and where he can best help the organization. But, how often do we see HR people not look at resumes because someone doesn’t have the exact requisite past experience?
We have a long way to go and there is a lot of easy, low-hanging fruit to really improve our businesses should we choose to pay it the attention it deserves. Yes, things happen quickly inside the cubical mazes but we have to rethink our priorities and adjust accordingly.
How do we reprioritize the importance of employees?
