Right on the heels of my recent blog post about keeping bad employees too long, an article appeared in the 4Jun10 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education by Michael Munger subtitled, Five Suggestions for New Academic Administrators. In it, he summarizes part of what I was trying to say in that post: fire those that need to be fired. He repeats my theme that firing people who need to be fired is best for you, the employee, and those left. Many will even thank you for it in the end. Often being fired is the impetus they need to find really satisfying employment elsewhere. So, I highly recommend following the link above and reading Munger’s article, especially the last point on page 41.
Month: June 2010
-
When to release in-progress plans….?
I’m normally an advocate of complete transparency and openness. The more information you share with your employees and community, the more involved they are and the more support and help you get from them in return. I’ve been a bit shocked lately, though, at the complete dismissal of this approach when it comes to ideas or plans that are in development and not yet finalized. The response is stated so matter of factly like “of course we can’t distribute the plan yet; it’s not been finalized or approved.” The stated concern is that there is no reason to keep people up in arms about something that might change later – that releasing an incomplete plan is simply asking for trouble and creating chaos for no reason.
I’m pretty sure I disagree with this argument. That the plans are not finalized makes it the PERFECT time to share them with people. To do otherwise seems to me to be saying that the people can’t be trusted to distinguish a work in progress plan from a final plan – that somehow they aren’t smart enough to know the difference. It also seems to be saying that we don’t want people’s input in these plans; we will simply tell them when it’s all been ironed out. Even if this isn’t the intent behind withholding the in-progress information, it ends up being the perception. People feel untrusted and unvalued.
If there are concerns about an idea or plan, isn’t it better to get them out ahead of time – when they can actually be addressed? Time spent debating, understanding, and fixing the issues up front will be much more useful than time spent convincing people the plan they had no input on is the best way to go after the fact. The way to get buy-in for an idea or plan is to let people get involved in its formation, not by spinning it to them afterward.
The one concession I offer to these folks is if you can’t share these in-progress works now, then at least make it clear what the process is, when information will be shared, and what role people can then have on helping to shape and finalize it. Without these steps, I don’t see any way to get trust and acceptance by the affected people and what good are new plans and ideas if no one accepts them?
So, I’m interested to hear your ideas- am I wrong? Are there occasions (other than sensitive personnel or contractual issues) where plans should not be shared until after they are finalized? I tried the experiment I mentioned in an earlier post: google “advantages of open communication” then google “advantages of closed communication” and various variants thereof. A lot of hits on the former; nothing significant on the latter.
Scot thinks releasing information sets you free; no need to worry about what you can say and what you can’t and more likely to get valuable input and help from others. Scot would probably make a terrible politician. -
Are we too generous in hiring and keeping employees?
A recent article I read about how to hire the right people for the right jobs gives a statistic attributed to the US Department of Labor that 50% of all new employees are gone within the first six months of the job. I’ve tried but failed to verify this number; I even get different answers when I try to find out what the overall average turnover rate is. So, I take this statistic with a grain of salt (although it may be true, say in the fast food world, for example), but it did get me thinking. I’ve seen a number of new hires who clearly demonstrated, within their first six months on the job, that they really weren’t going to work out, yet I’ve rarely (if ever) seen them leave, neither on their own accord or through dismissal.
While I suspect this situation is true in the business world, too, I would bet it’s more prevalent in academia and less prevalent in the highest performing institutions in and out of the real world. Correctly hiring and firing people is a difficult task. I won’t discuss hiring here, other than to say sometimes you hire the right person, but put him in the wrong job, or give her the wrong supervisor. A person underperforming in a new job may simply be in the wrong seat on the bus, to use a Good to Great analogy. I don’t have any magical means to determine if it’s the person or the position that’s wrong, so I just note it as another area where careful attention to the process and good management are again needed.
Academia – and observatories are run more like academic than commercial institutions, for better or worse – has a specific mission to train and educate. This educational mission, I believe, is one reason for the reluctance to let a new employee go who isn’t performing. Perhaps they just need more training, or more time to learn the system, goes the logic. Additionally, through the fundamental trait of academic life called tenure, people have grown accustomed to having underperformers remain on staff with nothing that can be done to move them on. This sort of tone, combined with a general desire to avoid confrontation and spend as little time as possible in managing, means poor hiring decisions are rarely actively corrected.
While I’m all for giving the right person in the wrong position a chance, there are multiple reasons why we should be more responsive to removing new employees that are simply that aren’t going to work out. First of all, keeping these employees is bad for business (remember, astronomy is a business) as they obviously won’t be performing as well as your star employees. Perhaps even more important, though, is that keeping these people on board is bad for morale and makes the rest of your staff work also less efficient – both through morale loss and having to cover for the poor job of the subpar employee. When someone is hired who clearly isn’t right for an organization (or a position), most people can tell right away; it’s not a secret held only by a few manager or HR staff. When employees see new hires with poor performance being kept on, they lose respect for managers (and HR) and lose motivation to perform at their best,seeing as how poor performance is apparently enough to stay on the job. One bad hire can lower the performance of an entire group or division. And finally, as both Jim Collins in Good to Great and Buckingham and Coffman in First, Break all the Rules say, you aren’t doing anyone – you, your organization, or the employee – any good by keeping on people who are simply not going to work out. You lose performance and the employee loses a chance to actually find employment that is a better match to his skills.
So, all this is really to say that the hiring process does not end when the new employee starts her first day on the job. Managers and HR personnel should be continually assessing employees’ performance and fit to their jobs, making corrections as necessary – and making it clear to the new hires that their evaluations don’t end when they get the job!
[4Jun10: A reader pointed out I have oversimplified things here- see the comments below for what I really meant to say and please continue the discussion, if you like.]
Like any other management decision, mistakes can be made in deciding whom to hire. The best leaders Scot has seen are those who can recognize their mistakes and correct them – whether they be in hiring or anything else. Luckily, Scot hasn’t (or so he hopes) yet been anyone’s hiring mistake.