Tag: Management

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.

15 June 10
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.

3 June 10
Support needed from above, below and horizontally

I’ve recently started a management support / study group here at Gemini. We’ve only met once, so we’ll see how it goes, but while thinking about it, I realized that the best institutions probably provide three levels of support for their managers: top down, bottom-up, and horizontally.

Good managers will work (and hire!) a team that can both support them and do their own jobs. Good employees know that one of the keys to job security is to make your boss look good. Good managers also work with, support, and mentor the managers that report to them. But what about peer support? How do we make sure people on the same level of the organization chart get support and learn from each other?

If you’re Manger X and are having some trouble with your boss, you probably ultimately need to talk to your boss about it, but you will probably also need some advice and support before you do. It’s really not a good idea to bring your issues with your manager to the people you manage, altough people often fall into this trap. Although it does build group cohesiveness and can unite teams if they feel like they are facing a common enemy, it ultimately does harm to the institution and to one’s own ultimate ability to work within all levels of the organization.

So, you really need a network of peers for support and advice, yet such structures do not tend to naturally evolve in many organizations. There are often meetings with all Board members all upper managers, but not similar gatherings for middle and low managers. I think there should be! (And partially hence, my recent lunch group creation.) So, while you wait for upper management to read my blog and create regular middle and lower management meetings, I recommend calling your own, or creating an informal group like I did. I also think it’s wise to reach out to people in your similar position in other organizations and to do this as soon as possible in the job. This early reaching-out and honest requests for advice and assistance will help build your support group with people already geared up to help you.

These are just my ideas- what has anyone else tried that’s worked? How do middle managers build a support team from other middle managers?

Speaking, of support, Happy Mother’s Day Mom and Mom of our daughter!

9 May 10
What are you really concerned about here?

I learned this particularly powerful combination of words from one of my (few) regular commenters here, Andy Flach. I might generalize them slightly, though to “What are you concerned about?” If managers used these words more often, they’d make their lives a lot easier.

Andy uses them a lot during contract negotiations. Inevitably one side has issues with a particular contract clause or detail and then the other side proposes alternative wording which doesn’t end up satisfying the objecting side and long delays and discussions ensue. Andy cuts through all that by asking quite early in the process, What are you really concerned about here? and I can tell you not only is it a huge time-saver, but it often leaves us with a more advantageous contract than if this question had not been asked. What happens without this question is that side 1 objects to something, side 2 tries to figure out what the objection is and how much it is willing to compromise and then offers some substitute terms. Since side 2 is only guessing at what is bothering side 1, it usually guesses wrong (which means another round of negotiating) and it often gives up too much in an attempt to compromise as it tries to cover all possible bases of discontent.

Instead, by asking directly what the real concern is, Andy can offer a limited, targeted change of terms which directly addresses the other party’s concerns. The issue is usually resolved quite easily thereafter, with each getting more of what they want than would have happened otherwise.

What every good manager should do- carefully look under each rock for trouble or gold! (Photo borrowed from snailstales.blogspot.com.)

Another use for this phrase is for managers to understand what is going on that their people know about, but they don’t. These are often issues that are so apparent to people on the lines that they simply assume that since management is doing nothing about, they must not care. Actually, more often management simply doesn’t know – or worse – doesn’t want to know. By continually asking what are you concerned about? or what should I be concerned about?, leaders and managers can learn a lot about those thorny issues that no one likes to talk about, but that everyone (except themselves, of course) knows. In Good to Great parlance, this is the process of “looking under the rocks”, of finding and dealing with potential problems of the future before they get too big.

And as described in my last post, asking questions like these is a direct, visible request for input. If the response is really heard and actively and transparently processed as I described, employees will feel their input is valued and that they can make a difference to improve the organization by noting and reporting on current and possible future issues. What an empowering environment to work in!

In adopting these words into his daily life, Scot learned (the hard way) to be careful about the word “really”. Someone once thought Scot was implying this person was hiding her true motives by using “really”. He now uses “really” less often, or changes the phrase to “what’s the core issue here?”, when deemed appropriate.

25 April 10
There’s more to getting input than just getting input
It’s funny, I’m starting to feel a bit like Scott Adams, I mean beyond sharing part of a first name. About the time I start wondering what I should next write about and figuring I might finally have to go back and re-read the ends of recent posts to figure out what I said I might write about, something happens, or someone says something that rings a bell- and ding! I have a topic for my next post.

See if this one rings a bell for you, too:

These people are always complaining that we never give them a chance to tell us what they think. They have plenty of chances. I don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re just crazy!

Well, OK. That’s one way to handle it. I say X, you say Y; you’re clearly an idiot. OK, let’s first assume that you really did give people plenty of chances to provide input, yet they’re still complaining. Sure, they might be idiots, but it is probably more productive to take a little deeper look, first. If nothing else, you have a perception problem, and that’s something you probably can and should work on.

So, there are really two issues here. First, if you really want to understand what people are saying about you, take some time to look beyond just their words. In this case, if you’re confident that there really were opportunities for input, yet people still complain about there not being enough, then ask yourself what else might it be they are really complaining about. (You should also ask yourself if their complaint is valid, too. i.e., are you really giving people opportunities to provide input?) Dismissing the complaint as erroneous or nonsensical does nothing to promote a better understanding and relationship between you and “them”. Avoid the easy way out by saying they are simply wrong, and look behind the surface for what’s really going on.

In this case, what’s really behind the surface might be a number of things that are really being complained about.
- You never really asked for my input, so although I found a way to state it, I don’t feel you did enough to actually seek my input.
- Sure, you let me say what I wanted to say, but you didn’t really hear it.
- I gave my input, but I never really heard about what happened next, so I don’t really understand how the final decision was reached. Was my input weighed at all?
- You never do what I want. Why should I waste my time giving input if you don’t take my advice in the first place?
And I’m sure there are other possibilities, but these issues are pretty common so probably bare a bit more discussion:
- It’s not enough (even though you may think it should be) to say something like “my door is always open” or “you have my email address” if you don’t also explicitly seek input. Input given that doesn’t appear to be really wanted or requested, doesn’t really feel like giving input.
- Upon receiving input, you need to really show that you’ve heard it, even if you disagree with it. You need to at least acknowledge the point of view contained within. Don’t ask for input then as soon as it’s given, continue on with what you were going to say anyway. You have to hear, process, and acknowledge the input. What you say/do next should reflect the new point of view you were just offered, even if it doesn’t change the actual action you end up taking.
- You can actively ask for input, receive it, and even properly acknowledge it, but if the decision process from there is opaque, you won’t get any credit for it. It must be clear that the gathered input was considered and evaluated, even if it wasn’t ultimately taken to heart. The decision process needs to be clear and transparent, else people will just assume their input was ignored and the normal decision decided upon anyhow.
- The last step is to explain the ultimate decision. Be clear that alternative options and views were considered, but for reasons x,y, and q, the final decision was made as it was.
If people feel their input was wanted, heard, and considered, and the rationale for the eventual decision was clearly stated, most of the time they will be satisfied even if things don’t end up going completely their way. People want their ideas heard and considered; they don’t expect to always get their way. Treating their opinions with respect and explaining your own will go a long way to making your people feel happy and valued.

As readers of this blog know, Scot has plenty of opinions. Do they always get listened to and acted upon? Nope, but at least through this blog, he can make believe people are reading, agreeing with, and acting on everything he writes! 🙂
17 April 10
Only you can prevent needless fires!

A colleague sent me a link to a John Hersey blog post about the role of a leader. He argues an effective leader is not one who can come in and solve problems single-handedly, leaving people wondering how this miraculous solution was enacted so quickly. No, a real leader/manager is one who sets up his team to solve (and I would add prevent) their own problems. The manager’s job is to make sure the right problems are getting solved, but not to go in and solve each one directly, even though she may be very capable of doing so. A true leader does not try to appear the hero, but sets up her team to be successful themselves.

One bit of Hersey’s post that rang a few bells was the following:

It is very common to hear managers talk about the quantity of emails and voice mails they receive, about the amount of projects, meetings, and endless hours they work, and one never knows if they are bragging or complaining. One thing is certain though, these managers get trapped into this vicious cycle because it makes them feel important, because it puts them in the heart of the action, because they are making things happen. They depend on the adrenaline rush that comes with solving urgent problems, on being the savior of their poor and ill-fated team.

Boy, have I seen that before! Particularly in institutions that have not yet made the transition from construction and commissioning to operations, which describes nearly every astronomy institution I’ve been involved with – even those that should have clearly been in an operations mode already!

Getting projects up and running on time and budget while pushing the frontiers of current technology, doing what none have done before, is exciting stuff. The rush from being completely absorbed in your project and heroically solving the latest challenge is addicting, but it’s not a sustainable way of being and it’s certainly not for everyone. At some point, in addition to (or perhaps rather than, in some cases) bringing new capabilities online, you have to stop and make what you already can do more efficient. You have to stop to smooth the rough edges and establish a system that doesn’t require regular heroics to operate. While you want your key innovators to be working on that next project, you want their previous projects to become stable and operable by mere mortals. In other words, you need a staff for construction, commissioning, and innovation, and you need a different staff for regular operations and maintenance. (You may need another staff to make that transition for you as well.)

If you don’t make this conscious shift in staff and their organizational roles as your project matures, you end up with just the kind of bravado Hersey describes. You end up with staff that continues to find rewards mainly by finding (and sometimes even creating) fires so they can then heroically swoop in and put them out, when what you want is a staff that predicts what fires might occur and works behind the scenes to prevent them before they ever have a chance to start. Being a hero for answering 300 emails a day and solving 6 problems at the last minute may be far removed from the challenges of bringing a new facility to life, but a real fire fighter lives to fight fires, wherever they are, or can be created!

In a typical project, the stars from the project’s start-up phase end up being promoted to managerial positions by the time the project should be switching to a more sustainable operations phase. But this approach clearly results in a classic mismatch. Managers trained to, and rewarded by, putting out fires end up trying to manage a team that isn’t designed or made for fire-fighting. The newly-hired operations staff will not be the fire-fighting innovators that started the project (people like that would never take an operations job), but they are often managed by those that are. Unless these managers make a very purposeful effort to switch gears, a fire-fighting culture and generally unhappy employees will be the result. Much better to give new projects to your innovators and hire (or train) new managers to run a stable operations staff.

Having helped set and put out several fires of his own, Scot spends most of his time these days trying to predict and prevent trouble before it bursts into all-out flame. It’s perhaps less noticeable work, but personally, very rewarding.

10 April 10
Learn from your mistakes

I was recently sitting in on an oversight meeting of Gemini management. Most of the meeting was spent in executive (ie. private) sessions, but during one of the two public sessions, one main topic was to explore how and what we have learned from past mistakes. This discussion made me realize that learning from mistakes is not an easy thing to do for many institutions. I’m not saying here that Gemini is doing all these things wrong, but I have seen all these issues first hand at various places, including Gemini. I’m sure that if asked, most people would say that they, personally, learn from their mistakes. Yet, institutions and corporations often don’t. Why not?

For one, you first have to be willing to acknowledge the mistake. This step can be a key roadblock for some. If you don’t have an atmosphere where honest inward looking thought and speech is encouraged, mistakes get covered up, denied, assigned to something else, and not brought out as potential lessons and means for improvement. If you believe in hiding bad news in an (ultimately futile) effort to look good, then you will never learn from mistakes.

Second, you need an environment where the mistake is viewed in context of the system that allowed the mistake to happen and that allowed its effect to be as big as it was. What you don’t need is an environment of blame – where mistakes are dealt with admonishments of “don’t do that again”. What you need is a faultless exploration of what in the system could be changed to prevent future similar mistakes. Making and acknowledging mistakes is not about placing blame, but about fixing the system. People will always make mistakes, but you want the system in which they work to be as fault-tolerant, and fault-preventive (if I can coin a new compound word) as possible.

Mistakes will be made as a natural part of the learning and improvement process. It’s what you do with them that is important. Are your mistakes opportunities for improvement, or shameful things you hide and ignore?

Finally, you have to really broaden your horizons and fix the system, not the symptom. To make up a hypothetical example, if an instrument is damaged because a heating circuit failed (OK, the event is not so hypothetical, but the implicit bad response outlined below is), you could simply decide to remove the heating circuit from the instrument when it’s repaired. That fixes the symptom and you certainly must address the symptom, or you look really foolish if the same accident happens again, but you can’t stop there. What allowed this single point of failure to exist in the first place? What allowed the failure to occur unnoticed? Was there real-time monitoring? Was anyone overseeing the project? Was anyone contacted? Was there a timer on the heater? Are other possible single-point failures being identified and backed up and/or isolated by a fail-safe or some other subsystem? If you don’t start asking yourself these types of questions, there will be no learning from your mistakes. On the other hand, if you are not afraid to take a rigorously honest look at what other similar vulnerabilities might exist, if you are willing to go beyond placing individual blame and look at how the process allowed both the single point failure to exist in the first place and for the eventual failure to go unnoticed and un-contained, then you are probably on a continual course of improvement and empowerment. Isn’t that a better place to be than only a few instances of bad luck away from a repeat of a mistake you chose not to learn from?

Scot remembers several bits of advice he received about mistakes. His water-skiing cousin told him if he wasn’t falling, he wasn’t trying hard enough. His graduate advisor told him “wisdom is that sinking feeling that you’ve made this mistake before.” He learned from these people and others that making mistakes is part of life. Making the same mistake twice, doesn’t have to be.

27 March 10
The CEO of the Container Store on the vital nature of open communications.

A colleague sent me a link to an interview with Kip Tindell, Chief Executive of the Container Store. In the interview, Kip describes how important it is to his company to have a policy of full disclosure, open communications, and transparency with his employees. It helps promote team work and motivates the best employees. Here’s a small excerpt from the interview:

The way we create a place where people do want to come to work is primarily through two key points. One of our foundation principles is that leadership and communication are the same thing. Communication is leadership. So we believe in just relentlessly trying to communicate everything to every single employee at all times, and we’re very open. We share everything. We believe in complete transparency. There’s never a reason, we believe, to keep the information from an employee, except for individual salaries.

I always make it a point to give the same presentation I give at the board meeting to the staff, and then that trickles down to everybody in the company. I know that occasionally some of that information falls into the wrong hands, but that’s a small price to pay for having employees who know they know just about everything.

This concept has nothing to do with astronomy management, unless you consider that astronomers and other staff members are usually people, too, and that Kip Tindell’s approach is about getting the most out of people and forming the best team you can with the people you have.

I wonder if I could find similar articles confessing the benefits of hiding information and keeping secrets from employees and customers. I bet not, but it would be an interesting exercise.

Anyhow, you can read all the interview here.

17 March 10