Life without Management

Joe,

I am sorry for the radio silence lately.  Thankfully, I got to take a time off to spend with the family.  I'm now back in the saddle and ready for action.

Thank you for the tasty post last week where you posed the question: What about, rather than fixing management, we do away with it?  It is a great question and it seems to be an idea that resonated with a number of people.

As I've thought about the notion of eliminating the role of people supervisors, I realized that by doing that, we'd do away with a number of other things that we know and love:

• Performance Appraisals. There would be no one to administer them.  No loss here because I can't seem to find any real evidence that they work.  
• Management Development Programs.  Perhaps now we can re-task our training folks to develop individuals on interpersonal and influence skills.  
• Management Meetings and Retreats.  No more golf outings or long days trying to stay awake in a hotel conference room.  
• Strained one-on-one Meetings.  Instead, we can meet when we have a reason to meet.

Imagine all of this recaptured time and energy.  I have to admit, it does sound appealing.  

I think that there is one major problem with this concept.  If we do away with management, each employee must become more personally accountable for their own performance.  And, from what I'm seeing these days, if there's one thing we like less than management, it's being held accountable.  BP didn't admit any responsibility for the oil spill until they had no other options and no one left to blame.  In politics, it seems that the strategy for any situation is always deny any wrong doing and blame the other party.  Being held accountable or (gasp) accepting accountability is treated like the plague.  

In fact, if each individual chose to be more individually accountable, we might help minimize our current management crisis (if we don't eliminate the profession).  Individually accountable employees help their managers to be successful by owning their own results and experience.  Individually accountable managers embrace their impact on others and realize that their job is to facilitate others' success.  

Maybe instead of a management issue, we have an accountability issue.

-Jason

HR and Empowerment

Joe,

We have a spent a fair amount of time here discussing how HR can transform itself to be the business leader we are called to be. And, in your last post, you touched on a topic where I think HR needs a change of perspective.

As we discussed personal accountability of the employee, your comments quickly turned to how the organization bears the responsibility for making it "safe" to confront bad management. That's a bit like choosing not to play a game unless you are certain you will win before you decide to play. There isn't much accountability or responsibility in that equation on the employee's side. The reality is that any environment where it's "safe" to confront bad management probably has pretty decent management already. We, as employees, will get the management we tolerate. Granted, you can't always confront a bad management situation in a way that doesn't jeopardize your job, but you also have the ability to take your career into your own hands and get the hell out of dodge at that point. At the end of the day, the employee always holds the cards on whether they decide to leave, show up and not do much, or show up and kick ass.

Here's where I get to the role of HR in this whole equation. HR, when it comes to employees, seems to have taken the approach that their job is to solve employee and manager problems for them. We in HR have decided that great customer service means fostering bad management and lack of accountability across the board by solving these problems for managers and employees. This makes our managers and employees happy in the short term, but it perpetuates the problem long term. In more HR departments, if you have a problem with your manager, HR will hear you out but probably tell you that we really can't do anything. If a manager has an employee with an attitude problem, we will go talk to the employee for them. How is this cycle ever going to change if we continue to step in whenever things get a little sticky?

Human resources needs to change their approach. We need to adopt an approach of teaching and empowering others to solve their own problems. We can facilitate the process and help lead them to the outcome they are looking for. Take the example above, if I have an employee who has an issue with a manager, I should be first helping them to understand clearly what the real issue is. Then, I help them explore what they might be contributing to the problem themselves. Finally, I coach them on some approaches they might take to tackling the situation on their own with the manager. If they are successful, I now have an employee that is empowered to help their manager manage. The same approach would be equally as effective with the manager with the punchline being that the manager ends up empowered with the tools to handle her own employee without HR jumping in the middle.

This is how the change happens, one person at a time. But, if HR doesn't both encourage and expect personal accountability and responsibility from employees and managers, we will continue to see the same thing: employees complaining about how bad managers are ruining their lives and managers complaining about employees who don't get it. It's up to us to break the cycle.

-Jason

Hey HR, Less Finger Pointing

Joe,

We have both railed on this blog at time about why human resources isn't living up to it's potential to be a leader for business. One of the key problems, I think, is the type of questions HR is asking. I think that if HR pros would change the questions we ask, we could transform HR.

Example 1:

Question being asked:

• Why doesn't HR have a seat at the table at my company?

Questions you should be asking:

• What can I do to earn a seat at the table?
• What am I doing that is keeping me from the table?
• What relationships do I lack that might be critical to being viewed as an executive leader?

Example 2:

Question being asked:

• Why won't managers follow the rules?

Questions you should be asking:

• What about these rules might be difficult for managers?
• How can we make it easier for the manager to comply?
• What reasons might our managers have for not following these rules?
• What are we doing in HR that might make it harder for managers to follow these rules?

I'm sure you see a trend. HR needs to spend much less time worrying about why others do what they do and focus instead on their own role and accountabilities. HR needs to start thinking about what they can do rather than pointing fingers at everyone else. By simply changing the questions being asked, we can change our whole approach.

Jason

Personal Responsibility #4

Joe,

I think that you are right when you said that we may have a crisis of personal responsibility on our hands. I've seen the symptoms of this manifested in a number of ways. When I think about this issue, I quickly jump to the question, "How did we end up like this?"

I don't know if we've even had a culture or time in history when personal responsibility was not a challenge. The big question is why? It seems that it is part of human nature to reject responsibility and accountability as a way of protecting ourselves. Accepting responsibility for our actions and the consequences of thos actions can lead to some pretty uncomfortable, sometimes downright painful, conclusions and outcomes. It's easier and safer psychologically to believe that it's some one else's fault that I failed. Or that someone else holds the key to whether or not I succeed. It's for this reason that I think organized religion has such broad appeal. When you "give yourself over to God," and put your life in God's hands, it relieves you of a large degree of personal responsibility (in many religions). Whatever happens, good or bad, is God's will; not the direct consequences of our own choices or behaviors. It's a very comforting feeling to know that someone else is watching over you and making things happen. Now, before I start a riot, I know that not all religions are the same. My point is that human nature seems to drive us towards opportunities to avoid or transfer responsibility for our actions and that religion is just one place that I believe you can observe this.

So, this leads me to conclude that accepting personal responsibility is a set of learned skills and behaviors, that most of us don't come by these naturally. So, what are those skills/behaviors and where should we be learning them? That seems to be the next question and it seems like a pretty complicated one.

Here are a list of some of the mindsets that I think people must learn in order to accept personal responsibility:

1. The only thing you control are the choices you make and how you respond to what happens around you. We tend to focus on changing things we can't control (i.e. "If only my manager would stop treating me this way, I could do a better job."). I can't control what others do, I can only control what I do and how I think.

2. Every choice has a consequence, positive or negative. There are no neutral choices. Every thing you eat or drink has a positive or negative effect on your body. Every word you speak has either a postive or negative effect on those who it was spoken to. If we begin to understand this idea, we will think more carefully about the choices we make every day. When you own this concept, you own that what happens as a result of your choices is your doing. Hence the birth of personal responsibility.

3. It's okay to want things, even big elaborate, crazy things. It's critical to have goals and dreams. These things will give you a reason and a context to make choices. It also gives you a reason to care about the consequences of those choices because you've made the stakes higher for you personally. One of my personal goals is to attain financial independence for my family. That means that we can live well and have the things we want and not have to work for anyone else to have or maintain them. This is a loftly goal, but it definitely shapes my choices. When I make a choice professionally or financially, I deeply care about the consequences of that choice because of my goals and dreams.

Well, I'm not sure if this gets us any closer to a way to help people learn personal responsibility. What are your thoughts on how to teach or build personal accountability in people?

Jason

Personal Responsibility

Joe,

Lately, as like most of my corporate HR peers, I've been spending a lot of time working on the problem of rising healthcare costs and the resulting impact on the cost to insure our workforce. As we look for solutions that would help us in this effort, it seems that the best approach is an agressive wellness (health management) strategy. Most of the research suggests the a vast majority of healthcare costs flow from medical conditions that are behavior related (i.e. they are caused by choices the individual is making) and are largely preventable.

If that's the case, then the best way to control healthcare costs for comapaies (and our country) apprears to be to incent and mandate healthier coices on the part of each individual. This could mean higher health insurance premium costs for smokers or the overweight. It could mean mandated health behavior interventions programs.

The things that strike me about this entire issue is 1) how quickly and fervently many people reject that an employer (or anyone else) should be able to tell them how to make lifestyle choices and 2) how little responsibility people will accept for their own health. On the one hand, most people will agree that smoking is a choice made by the individual that can or should be penalized. However, when you start talking about weight or physical activity, the excuses start to fly. It seems that we can somehow rationalize that we shouldn't be penalized for eating fast food for lunch every day.

If someone drinks too much and makes the choice to get in their car and drive, most everyone I know would agree that the person should be held responsible for their actions and punished for that decision. If another person makes a choice (like leaving their child in a car on a hot day) that endangers a child, we'd want them held accountable and punished as well. So, why aren't we willing to be responsible for decisions that are affecting our health (particularly considering how high the stakes and the costs are)? Why don't we feel that the over-eater should be held accountable?

I have some theories, but I was interested to get your opion on a couple of topics:

• How do you feel about employers mandating healthy behavior (i.e. the has been at least one company that will not employ smokers)?
• What do you think is going on as it relates to personal responsibility and the behaviors impacting our health?

I look forward to your thoughts.

Jason

Lead, Follow or Get out of the Way

Joe,

I've lately been spending a lot of time thinking about the accountability we have for our own situations. Part of it is coming from my observations about how the country is reacting to our current recession. I guess I've just encounted a number of people lately who aren't actively participating in their own futures. They are content to feel powerless and out of control. It drives me insane.

I think even two of us are guilty sometimes for villainizing the "leaders" within business and the greater community as being the root of all evil when there were a lot of people around those leaders who contributed as much to the situation as the leader him or her self. Take the AIG bonus situation as an example. If you had been one of the eleven or so folks who were offered a multi-million dollar bonus this year, would you have turned it down? We hope that we would have done the right thing, but it doesn't appear that any of the eleven or so at AIG did . But, it's not them who have to get skewered in front of congress, it's the CEO. Where were these eleven leaders when it was time to help their leader avoid a collossally bad error in judgement? It would seem that they were looking out for number one. I'm sure that they rationalized it away somehow, but they are as much to blame as that CEO for taking money they knew wasn't rightly theirs.

It has become popular to blame our manager or leader for our situation when we aren't taking any action to improve the situation for ourselves. We have to accept that we are 100% responsible for our own lot in life. If you find yourself in a situation with a poor leader, you can chose to help them lead, you can leave, or you can become part of the problem by doing nothing and whining about it. I, for one, have heard too much whining. It's time for people to control their own destiny by taking actions to improve their circumstances.

This might be a crazy thought, but I think that if we all took more responsibility for our own actions and consequences, we wouldn't have the "leadership crisis" we see around us. It might just be that effectively leading people who spend more time whining than being accountable for thier own actions is really hard, even if you have decent leadership skills.

So, maybe it's time to evolve our role as leaders to teaching individuals to be personally accountable for their own results and outcomes, to teach them that there are real consequences (both positive and negative) for each of their actions. They need to see that it's not the leader's responsibility to advance their career or to make decisions for them, it's up to them. This can be a painful process, but I think it's the place to start.

I look forward to your thoughts.

Jason