December 26, 2014: A Few Steps Away From the Office

We all hear about work-life balance.  In the last few years, with the advent of ubiquitous laptops and smartphones, the more accurate phrase is work-life integration.  Both intrude on each other.  Some days you'll be at the office until 8.  Some days you'll leave the office at 3 for a parent teach conference or take 3 hours in the middle of the day to have tires installed.  

This post is not about work-life integration.   Take a few steps away from the office.  Separate yourself from your work.  

This Christmas I was able to spend Christmas in person with my teenage son with a visit from my brother and video chat with the rest of my family.  It was such a different experience.  We did not get a tree.  We bought some poinsettias, and put one in the middle of the living room with Christmas lights in it.  The gifts went there, of course.  We woke up late, and after our Christmas morning gift thing, we played video games together.  Our current favorite is Crash Team Racing, a game from 1999 on the original Play Station that we play on the PS3 now.  

In the afternoon, we put a ham in the oven and then took a nap.  Then we made doughnuts.  Real doughnuts.  You make the dough, then let it raise for an hour.  Then you form it into doughnuts and let it raise for another hour.  Then you put them in 375 deg oil for 1 minute per side, and put them on paper plates with paper towels.  Then you add the glaze.  They are crunchy, and when still warm they are amazing.  Unlike Krispy Kreme or Dunkin, the dough isn't very sweet.  I had 4.  

As I sat there, a chunk of warm ham in one hand, a warm glazed doughnut in the other and my son across the table from me, I felt that Jack London-Herman Melville-Ernest Hemingway feeling.  You know it.  "This is life," I said to my son.  The feeling would have found place in a king's hall with a tankard of ale in a fantasy novel, on the open sea with a Viking.  And it found me in my cozy dining room with my son, eating our fresh pastries and plotting how we'd blow each other up with missiles while racing.

To be sure, I have had many years of enjoyable work.  Sometimes even joyous work.  My chosen career path, however, is not primal.  And it's good to get to that primal place sometimes.  So I suppose cooking is primal for me.  What is primal for you?  When do you feel like you can look up at the sky and shout, "THIS IS LIFE!"?  Do you know?  When was the last time you did it?  

How soon will you do it again?

December 24, 2014: Your Executive and You

It's Christmas Eve!  Just to be contrary, I took yesterday off from the blog and instead will cover a somewhat esoteric topic, I think: the work life of an executive.

The news (and office scuttlebutt) often make the work life of an executive sound easy and fun: you travel, meet people, get paid well, and sometimes the company will even pay you when they fire you.  The reality is different.

Yes, you travel (you miss your kids' soccer games).  Yes, you meet people (and if they are customers and don't like you, it could sink your business).  Yes, you get paid well.  No different reality for that one, that part is true.  Most executives don't get golden parachutes.  They are often given the chance to resign instead of be fired.  Executives are married to the company.  They have 16,000 things (my favorite number to convey limitlessness) going on at the same time.  People call them at all hours of the day and night, and they have to be available for emergency phone conferences 24/7.  Romantic dinner with your spouse?  Customer emergency in Singapore!  Saturday morning soccer game with your buddies?  HR needs you in a disciplinary action meeting! Leave your cell phone at home when you go on vacation?  I don't think so!

The reality of an executive's work life is that she has a huge set of responsibilities, and there is no possible way she will know every thing going on in her operation.  The VP has meetings all day long - budget strategy sessions, revenue opportunity meetings, IT project updates, customer escalations, personnel disciplinary meetings, operation status updates, training planning, you name it, it's part of the executive's portfolio of responsibilities.  Most of the day is spent going from meeting to meeting and making decisions based on snippets of data.

Even though you and your team spend all day every day on a certain project, the exec doesn't have an hour to hear all of the important things you're doing.  She has 10 other people with projects to talk about today.  Yours is probably not the most important one.  But the exec will try to make you feel like it is.  That is also part of the job description.

Given this reality, executives have fundamental bandwidth issues.  They gather a trusted cadre of lieutenants who receive, filter, and pass along important information.  These lieutenants know what words like "risky" and "potential" and "troublesome" mean to the executive.  Some are more risk-averse than others.  Each has his own areas of expertise and areas of ignorance.  Some will admit ignorance, some will fake competence or deny ignorance.  They must trust the team to give them good information.

When the exec goes out into the company to speak with the likes of you, she may not realize that you don't know what "risky" means to her.  If you use that word casually because it's not a hot-button for you but it is to her, you may get a sudden case of executive attention.

Or if the executive is in a project status update meeting and sees something she doesn't understand (why would the Toledo office be so far behind in training?), she may ask a question to the presenter.  Because the exec knows she doesn't know everything that's going on, a random audit is a simple way to keep people on their toes.  She'll ask a question.  It could be anywhere, about anything.  Sometimes she's only curious.  Sometimes she's concerned.  Her close circle will be able to tell which it is.  The purpose is just to keep everyone on their toes and prepared for such questions.

If such a question comes down to you, your best bet to answer it is usually not to give the executive a call.  Your best bet is usually to call one of the exec's close circle, ask some questions to clarify what the concern is.  The Toledo office is behind in training.  Is the executive concerned that the management team is not leading that effort?  Concerned that the training quality is perceived so low that the team doesn't prioritize it?  That the IT system that delivers the training has been unreliable lately, and maybe the team can't get the training?  You know the answer, of course.  But you don't know the question.  So you call the person who does have 30 minutes to talk to you about a specific issue, understand why you are being asked the question, and then you can prepare a reply.

The most important thing to realize about your executive team is this: they are all humans.  They all have 24 hours in a day.  They are usually pretty smart.  And they are fallible.  And ignorant about large swaths of your company's detailed operations.  So when you interact with them, prepare yourself to speak in a condensed form, get right to the point, ask for any help you need, and let them go!  Hopefully they have other issues that are more pressing than yours, and you can get their help to get your job done.

December 18, 2014: Survivial of a Common Worst Case Scenario

On the last blog, we discussed success and how it may be defined in the workplace.  Your homework from that post was to list up the ways your work could be considered a failure even though these criteria are not listed on your goals and objectives.  Obviously, death, injury, tornadoes and bankruptcy are true worst-case scenarios.  For our purposes on the topic, however, worst-case simply means a situation with a potentially large negative impact to your career.

Faced with what many would consider a worst-case scenario, what can you do?  In many cases, as you look through your list, the answer might be 'nothing'.  Nobody can do everything perfectly.  The modern business climate does not afford anyone the time or money to fix every gap or meet every need.  We are all forced to prioritize.  First we have to decide what must be done vs what should be done.  Then we have to go through the list of what must be done to decide what needs attention on a given day.

Many of my worst-case scenarios were completely out of my control.  I may have noticed something that I want to fix, like a training gap.  If someone from headquarters does a thorough audit, they would find that my team is far behind in training.  If I've noticed the problem but haven't been able to free people up to attend training, all I can offer is the lame, "I noticed this already, but haven't been able to send people."  Which is just as weak an excuse as it sounds.  What the other party hears is, "I know about this, but I don't care enough to take action."

As an individual, you are limited in your power.  Particularly as a front-line supervisor, your options to respond directly to such critiques from headquarters are limited.  If you are able to address an issue yourself, you should of course do it.  If you are powerless to do it (say that you need to sway the opinion of an executive), you must find someone who is not powerless to do it.

Wait, what?  In these cases, networking is key to success.  If you do not know the executive well, you need to be friends with someone who is or who can effectively advocate for your cause.  To a certain extent, this is playing office politics.  In another way, it is a simple recognition of the human condition.  How is that the case?

Executives (and everyone else with an axe to grind) are people.  People have a limited amount of time and patience.  If an executive sees a report and doesn't like something, he may ask a question.  Maybe he's just curious.  Maybe he thinks it's really a problem.  In any case, the executive probably does not have time to hear your valid reasoning.  We'll discuss why this is the case in a later post.  So what you need is someone the executive knows and trusts who does have the time to discuss the issue with you and can take it to the executive and influence his opinion.

There are a few ways this can happen.  Let's assume your contact is part of the executive's common circle of coworkers: they see each other on a regular basis, and have friendly relations.  Your contact could ask the exec about the issue, and find out if it's curiosity or concern that prompted the question.  She could vouch for you to the executive, something simple like, "I know Mike, and he has a good plan to address this."  Or (and this is more difficult) she could follow a completely different line of questioning: "Why are you concerned about this?"  Maybe the executive is not concerned about the training gap per se, but he sees it as an example of letting things fall through the cracks.  Perhaps your contact would suggest a different report that shows all of the objectives that are being accomplished.  Or perhaps the executive is right.  Lastly, and most effectively, you can take the added attention as an opportunity to ask for help.

Yes, added executive attention is often a positive thing.  In the training gap scenario, you may not have enough people to complete necessary business if you send some away to training.  So you can ask for backfill while your people are out.  Certainly you should have asked for it before, but remember, this is a worst-case scenario.  When you receive unexpected negative/scrutinizing attention, make it into a positive whenever you can.  Think yourself into a solutions-based mindset and come up with reasonable solutions that the executive could provide to help solve the problem.

We'll explore this topic some more in the coming weeks.

December 16, 2014: How Can You Recognize Success?

Do you know success when you see it in others?  Do you know it when you see it in yourself?  Do you know when others see it in you?

These are all questions we have to answer.  If we have to answer "no" to any of them, we owe it to ourselves and our coworkers to find out how.

In many organizations, the obvious measure of success is a person's review score.  4/5 might be a great review, 153 out of 200 might be a great review.  Whatever your organization's system is, you should have a good idea of what constitutes a successful review score.

But take a moment: what things are going in in your office that are essential to perceived success but are not on your review?  In one organization, the new management team led an effort to improve the company's performance to a level that previous management teams had said was impossible.  They use that word: impossible.  But the new team did it in about a year.

The company was more profitable than ever before, customers were happier than ever before, and the company suddenly had the opportunity to take market share from its rivals.  Everything looks good, right?  This is what success looks like.  By every single measure on every person's company goals, the company was rocking.  The executive team flew out from headquarters to congratulate the team for such an achievement, they distributed awards, they met with the customer to shake hands and tell each other how great each other was.

6 weeks later, this same team, the one that had achieved the impossible, was under threat for their jobs for something that was not on their performance reviews.  No one would have guess it just a few months prior.  The team was shocked.  After all this work and success and recognition, how is it that perception could change so dramatically?  The team's performance had not changed since all the good things had happened.

For reading today's blog, you have earned a homework assignment: take 5 minutes and write down all the the negative things that could happen in your workplace.  Everything that might reflect your work in some way, no matter how remote.  Is there a report that someone could interpret to mean something that isn't correct?  Is there an individual that upper management has their eye on that maybe you should have taken corrective action with?  Is there a gap in your team's training that you haven't addressed?  What would a highly critical visitor from the home office think of your operation, and would such a visitor be able to tell the home office executive who sent her that all is well?

We'll spend the next few posts exploring these hypotheticals and what your options are surrounding them.

Blog is on hiatus for a few days

A few days of extraordinary events prevents me from publishing for a few days.  I'll be back by December 10.

December 2, 2014: A performance review for a high performer with a significant flaw

Let's suppose an employee on your design team is a great designer.  She is easy to get along with, works hard, and is very competent.  She hates to do any paper work.  Her expense reports are months late, her weekly project reports are late or don't come in, etc.  You know the drill.  Her goals and objectives are weighted heavily to her design work, and the entire admin side is about 15%.  She has earned high ratings for everything except admin.  Her poor admin, however, has drawn attention from your 2nd line manager, the VP for operations.

By the numbers, her review should be about 4.5 out of 5.  You feel like she should get a 2.8 as a wake up call because of this one area of poor performance.  But the numbers don't justify it.  Referencing our analogy from yesterday, her fuel pump gave out.  How do you write and deliver this review?

The first thing you do is do the review by the numbers.  It's not right to change the goals to gerrymander the result to the number you want it to be.  When you do it by the numbers, she ends up at 4.5  Given her total performance compared to her peers (who aren't as good at design work but do take care of their admin), the 4.5 does seem high.  The review then needs a second pass.  Is there a teamwork goal?  You are part of the team, and her poor performance in this one area made your work more difficult.  That one can come down a notch.  Is there something on delivering projects in a timely fashion?  If the admin can be considered part of the project, then this can also come down a notch.  In the end, although you only have 1 specific goal for admin, admin work influences many other aspects of a person's performance.

In the end, she gets a 3.8 instead of the 4.5.  This is still well above average.  The review is very repetitive, referencing these same failings in instance after instance.  You have plenty of positive feedback for her, but you need to make sure she understands how you perceive her total performance.

You meet for your one on one, and you can tell from her face that she's not pleased with the score.  You ask why, and she asks, "What else could I have better?  I thought I was really on top of it this period."

You start to go through the form (it's a long one), and you point out the places where admin brought her total score down.  You tell her that you took the time to do the review without admin impact, and the result was a 4.5.  "When you don't prioritize key business processes, it hurts you over all your goals.  If you have done your admin well, I would have been happy to give you a 4.5."  You complement her on the other aspects of her job.  Thankfully, because she is a good performer, she can take the bad news.

It is clear from the feedback from your VP, however, that a 3.8 is not much of a punishment.  She is still rated higher than all but 1 of her peers despite the headaches from the finance department with her expense reports.  The work for this employee isn't changing for the next review period.  The content of her goals shouldn't change.  In this case, it is worth it to increase the weight for her admin for the next review period.  You explain your plan to the VP, and it makes sense to him.  He is concerned, but trusts you.

At the goal setting session, you explain the need for admin to increase as a percentage of total score, and your employee understands.  She's not happy because admin is only 10% of her time, but now it's 30% of her review.  She understands that the purpose is to focus on it so she'll do it.

You have other options, of course: disciplinary action, move to another department, change job duties, decrease the admin burden.  But she is good in her current role as long as she fixes this little thing.  There is no reason she can't or won't.  You now have to follow up and help her be successful.

Just about every employee has an Achilles heel: poor emotional control, low work quality, tardiness, late work, making promises that he can't keep, etc.  The review process allows both you and the employee to put these weaknesses under the bright lights, examine them, and take some action.  If done properly, it will deepen the trust in your relationship and enable a partnership for improvement for both of you.

December 1, 2014: Ubiquitous Goals

I hope your Thanksgiving and the long weekend went well.  It was nice to take a little break from the blog; at the same time (or 4 days later), it's nice to get back to it.

It is nearing the end of the year.  For some companies, it's time for annual reviews.  In honor of one of management's least loved essential functions, the next few days we'll discuss performance reviews.

In most large companies, the Board decides the direction of the company with input from the company's top executives.  Those executives' goals might read: "increase stock price by 3% per quarter" or something similarly overarching.  At the level of the VP, that 3% share price increase goal might mean a 6.5% market share increase for Widget Zebra.  Below the VP, that market share increase goal might mean the manufacturing line has to find a 15% cost reduction so the sales team can decrease price without sacrificing margin.  The 15% cost reduction goal, when taken to the operations level, might mean reduction in overtime.  It might mean lowering product defect levels.

In the perfect world, every goal on your review can be rolled up the line to the people leading your organization.  It's commonly called "goal cascading", because as the goal descends each layer of management, it is spread out a bit to show a level of detail that is actionable at that level.

We don't live in a perfect world.

The vast majority of management professionals are 1st line managers: the people who supervise the people who are making widgets, writing programs, giving medical care, serving coffee, selling cars, etc.  Many of these peoples' goals will be things that simply don't change, no matter what the executives' goals are: employee safety, paperwork accuracy and timeliness, producing a certain amount of work, training, and a few smaller categories.  One could argue that without these ubiquitous goals, the company would not be able to achieve its share price increase.  Over the long term, that may be correct.  In the larger scope, however, these are things that just have to happen for the business to run.

If we consider the business to be a car, these ubiquitous goals are like the fuel pump.  If you want your car to go faster, you change the exhaust.  You add a turbo charger.  You increase engine displacement to increase horsepower.  The fuel pump?  You just leave that there.  It doesn't need to be improved; it just has to work.  without it, nothing else matters.  An organization that cannot achieve success with these quotidian goals is unlikely to achieve a more specific (increase share price 3%) goal.

How much of your review (and those of your team) should be based on these fundamental goals?  Views vary widely on this, and there is not a single correct answer.  Let's look at a couple of them.

Safety is #1 at your company, right?  So safety should be the most heavily weighted goal.  No?   Not where you work?  I have been lucky to be exposed to an extremely safe work environment for a very long time.  Safety goals ranged from 5-15% in weight, with the expectation that everyone would work safely and that an avoidable incident would weigh negatively but a perfectly clean safety record for the period would result in a "met target" rating.  Similar for admin.  Timesheets, regular reports, work logs, request for quotes, invoicing, all of these could fall in a single category.  In my industry, these kinds of ubiquitous goals usually roll up to about 20%.

The other 80% will be composed of larger, customer-visible goals, internal team goals, and employee development goals.  We'll discuss each of these as we consider goal setting.

How much is the appropriate weight for these ubiquitous goals in your team?  It may be different if you are managing a call center vs a graphic design department vs a restaurant vs a warehouse vs an elementary school.  Take a few minutes to write them out - all the things that a customer won't see or notice, and that won't get anybody a company award, but has to be done anyway, just as a matter of course.  Also take a moment to think on what you are managing with these ubiquitous goals: you are managing the company owners' resources.  How much of that focus should enter into this calculation?