Management: The Unnecessary Evil

Jason-

Thanks for the post on “Life without Management,” and glad to hear that you took a little family time. We have been squeezing in some weekend trips as summer winds down and those have kept us pretty busy as well. I have been thinking a lot about your post and I agree that accountability is a big part of the equation here, but I have decided that I am going to hold fast to my original argument. Management is an unnecessary evil.

In thinking about this issue, I keep going back to something Clay Shirky said (disclaimer: I have a huge professional crush on Clay Shirky).
“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
Management does not want accountability because then it loses the power advantage, and the hard truth of this whole thing is that we still have a philosophy of management based on power.

There is a great deal of talk about the new leadership and leadership 2.0 and yadda, yadda, yadda…you and I both know there are some of those folks out there and some of those organizations out there, but I think they are the exception to the rule. You do not have the recent financial debacle with real leadership and individual accountability…you also do not have Enrons or the recent outcomes we have seen from BP and Toyota. Hell, with real leadership and individual accountability Congress would get a little work done.

Academics and consultants talk about it like it is the reality but it is not. The business world is dominated by managers who believe in power over, rather than power with. There is no room or reward for personal accountability until management goes away.

You Are Not The Boss of Me!

Jason-

Good stuff on dealing with a bad manager. Bad managers is probably a topic that we could spend a lot of time on and our Bad Managers Suck series could probably go on for a very, very long time. I think that a big part of the reason that things like The Office and Dilbert resonate with so many folks is that as ridiculous as they often are, they are also hit very close to home especially regarding our relationship with supervisors. There are a lot of things that contribute to bad management and we could spend a lot of time and energy cracking that issue open, but what about this…

Why don’t we just get rid of it? Why don’t we do away with management as a title, as a role, as a philosophy, as a source of so much unnecessary drama? In our manifesto we tell leaders to "get out of the way"...maybe they should really get out of the way?



What would happen if did some real “re-engineering” and let all managers go? We could of course allow them to apply for other open positions within the company, we’re not complete a-holes! Would things grind to a halt? I kind of doubt it. I am sure that there would be some initial confusion, but there would also be a lot less management related dysfunction.

What would a world without management look like?

What if “the organization” became a network of self-organized teams?

What if we went to an organization and took everyone that was in a supervisory role and we changed their role from supervision to resource coordination…they would have no authority over anyone but were responsible for helping the team that they were assigned to coordinate with other teams and access to the tools that they needed to be successful…whether it be budget, training, equipment, policy change, etc. Their purpose was solely to coordinate and make available resources and support for the department or team that they were assigned to.

What about, rather than fixing management, we do away with it?
-joe

Bad Managers Suck - Chapter 4

Jason-

Enjoyed the “Chapter 3” post, and I especially like the four things that courageous managers do…I think those things are overlapping and go pretty well together.

My inspiration for this post comes from a comment on your post by Chris Fleek:

This is a good series of articles - well done Jason. The question is, will the managers who need to read these articles the most see them? And how can an employee tactfully direct their manager to them?

Good question. Really good question. It often seems that it is the folks most needing some additional insight, awareness and development that are the least likely to seek it out.

The sucky management practice I’d like to shed the light on in this post is “Expertise.” I am not speaking here of any actual kind of technical expertise that could be of real value, but rather the belief that you do not need to be actively learning and seeking out new ideas, models, examples and candid feedback.

A couple of my favorite quotes speak to this well:

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
-Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

“There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all argument, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance. This principle is, contempt prior to examination.”
-William Paley, Anglo-Israel

It seems to me that if you are serious about a body of work (whether it is management, farming or pottery), you have be committed to being a student of that work…for as long as you do it. When you stop being a student of your work, you stop learning about your work (and yourself in relation to your work) and then things start to get stagnant and dysfunctional.

A big part of this as a manager, is seeking out honest, candid feedback about yourself. This is probably one of the Jedi mind tricks for great managers and it requires a fair amount of courage and humility...which is probably why it tends to be fairly rare.
-joe

Bad Managers Suck - Chapter 2

Jason-

Bad managers…a favorite topic of mine. I got spoiled early in life by spending four years in the Marine Corps where not all, but most of the leaders I worked with were very good and a couple were off the charts amazing. I have not since seen a work environment that has as favorable a good vs. bad management ratio.

I have seen my fair share of the silent treatment that you mentioned and another one that I see frequently is the illusion of interest.

Managers who want to appear to be interested in what you have to say, but they actually could care less. For example, the manager who comes to visit with you about a pending change to “get your feedback,” but the decision has already been made. Or the manager who solicits input, but then explains away or disagrees with everything that is offered up, never really considering or exploring any options.

I personally am in favor of banning those managers from society, but that is probably going to be viewed by some as extreme.

The actual solution is probably a bigger piece of work. I think this is actually one of many symptoms of an underlying problem, and that is that we are still using a 20th century approach to management in the 21st century world of business, which is very, very different.

How we create value has changed, how we communicate has changed, how we organize resources has changed, but very little has changed about our understanding of and approach to management. There are some exceptions, certainly, but you and I both see a lot of command and control, manager as parent type of organizations.

Most managers are not truly interested in the ideas and perspectives of their employees because they have somewhere along the line bought into the belief that being management means that they know best.

Managers rarely know what is best. They might know the inside scoop from the board room and they might know the latest budget numbers, but they rarely know what is best. It is almost impossible for managers to know what is best because they are further removed from the front line products and employees.

If you are any good at hiring people, you will end up with a team that together knows far more than you do. This is just reality and you should not pick a fight with it or pretend other wise.

Managers that are not willing and able to really tap into and value the perspectives, ideas and questions of their employees will eventually quit getting any of them and that is horribly wasteful.

-joe

Making Space for the Truth

Jason-

A follow-up to my last post.

So here is the dilemma…

Organizations (like any social group) require a certain amount of conformity. There are certain rules and policies and norms (implicit and explicit) that you need to follow in order to have membership. The more conformist an organization is, the less it is able to utilize the intangible assets that it has access to…things like the curiosity, creativity, ideas, questions, experiences, perspectives, diversity, passion, etc. that live within its workforce. These things make people stand out and so in a more conformist environment they tend to stay buried.

So.

If an organization wants to minimize conformity in order to harness its intangibles and maximize its ability to learn, adapt, innovate and evolve, how does it do that? Here are some thoughts.

Look for and expect dissent. If you are talking about anything of substance and there is not some disagreement, you should be very concerned. As General Patton said; “If everyone is thinking the same thing, someone is not thinking at all.” This can be a significant blind spot when we are in a position of leadership though, because we start out thinking pretty highly of our own ideas and when everyone around us agrees with them, who are we to see that as problematic?

Teach people how to disagree respectfully. Talk about this starting in the interview process, include it in job descriptions and in performance evaluations, provide training and feedback. Make it a normal and central part of the culture.

Create and support a different kind of leadership. A big part of why this is a problem to begin with is that we have a way of leadership/management that is largely built on being right and owning the truth. This stands in the way of candid conversation, challenging assumptions, and questioning decisions...all of which can be incredibly valuable for an organization.

Crush politics at every chance. The validity, value and necessity of organizational politics are greatly overrated. We have organizational politics to the extent that we do because that is what we tolerate. Be less tolerant. Organizational politics come at great cost as employees end up with truncated identities and trade their passion and ideals in for the rules to the game.

I think the "how do we do it?" question probably has a lot of different answers, but I think that these are a good start.

-joe

HRevolution - The Beginning

Joe,

First let me say that you were missed in Chicago. For me personally, I was trapped in my own personal purgatory of explaining where the hell you were over and over again. Not sure why people like you so much . . . clearly, they've never visited your garage. But I digress.

HRevolution was an experience, that's for sure. There has been a lot said about the conference, so I'll try not to rehash the experience, but rather try to share what I took away from the event. While I certainly brought my Talent Anarchist game to this gathering, I found myself coming more from the perspective of the corporate HR leader in the conversations, trying to provide the perspective of a person who was living in the work on a day to day basis.

As others have said, the participant base came from all corners of the HR world--vendors, consultants, bloggers, speakers, publishers, and even a few practitioners. The value of the experience for me came from the connections and conversations I was able to share with these bright, passionate people. But, a connection is simply a beginning, it's what happens next that truly matters. Here are my prevailing thoughts as I left the event:

• Ideas are cheap. Everyone has ideas. They are everywhere. What differentiates the best from the rest is execution--taking those ideas and turning them into results.
• If HRevolution is truly about evolving the discipline of HR, we have to find a way to engage more practicing HR leaders in the conversation. It has to continue to evolve from a gathering of social media savvy HR folks to an event that promotes ideas that serve as the foundation for a new reality in the work of HR.
• Talking does not equal change. HR transformation isn't going to happen in blogs or unconferences. It will happen when a new kind of leader and practitioner emerges who execute their role in a different way that creates breakthrough results for our organizations.
• Social capital and influence are, in my opinion, at the center of what top performing HR people need. I worry that some of the practitioners at the conference are spending too much time blogging and engaging in the twittersphere at the expense of building and developing the relationships they need in their organization to take their game to the next level.

So, while I completely agree with you that Curiosity, Critical Thinking and Courage are critical to participating in this (r)evoution, the list isn't complete. I have a couple others to add.

• Accountability: Leadership means giving away credit when things go right and accepting more than you share of the blame when things go wrong. In HR, it's amplified by 100 times. There was a lot of discussion about what HR should and shouldn't take responsibility for. If you want to be a revolutionary HR pro, take responsibility for it all, even if you only influence a small part of the result. We have to completely stop this blame assignment game and just step up. Yep, management may be "who" is supposed to be growing and developing people. If they aren't, raise your hand and take responsiblity for it. Then, go make it better.
  
• Execution: I've already mentioned this point. Ideas by themselves don't do anything. You have to be able to turn those ideas into results. Trish and Ben, the founders of HRevolution, are great examples of execution. They could have stopped at the discussion of this idea, but they didn't. Two unconferences later, they have started a movement. Another example--I have heard and read a lot of criticism by attendees about there not being more HR practitioners at HRevolution. If they really feel that way, then when this event roles around next time, they will work hard to get the other HR leaders from their network to attend. The vendors who came might even pay for some of their HR clients to be there next time. We have to stop our complaining and realize that we own the solution if we'd just step up and do it.
• Influence/Political Skill: The stark reality that most of us in corporate leadership aren't prepared for as we get promoted to larger roles is that our effectiveness becomes less and less about what we do and more about what we can influence others to do. HR leaders must become students of human behavior and political systems. We have to understand how things get done, who the players are and how those players make decisions. We need to be able to navigate in the shark tank without being eaten. This means studying things like power, sales techniques and social capital. Start here.

Thank you to HRevolution and the planning committee. It was a remarkable event and I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to participate. It has definitely stoked the fire for me. Up with the revolution!

Jason

HRevolution 2011 in my garage?

Jason-

I hope that you had a miserable time in Chicago this weekend, I was home with the kids and watched about 47,000 hours of Curious George. Being a grown-up can be downright brutal at times.

The HR blogosphere (which, fortunately for me, happens to be just around the corner from my house) has been abuzz about a couple of things the past few days. Lots of folks talking (and whispering and tweeting and blogging and screaming) about HRevolution and about China Gorman leaving SHRM, and about what these things might mean to the future of this work.

I do not know China Gorman, but some people that I respect think pretty highly of her and I did see her doing a good job of providing a face for SHRM where it did not really have one. It clearly reflects well on her that so many folks are disappointed to see her go, but part of what I hear in this conversation is concern about the role and direction of SHRM.

In the noisy, “pay attention to me” intersection of HR and social media, SHRM is the easiest target in the world for anyone that wants to find a large credible “friend” or a large credible “enemy.” I think that people who are legitimately about moving this work forward know that SHRM is not the problem or the solution, but contains elements of both as it is a reflection of the craft, and not its creator. I like to throw a stone or two at SHRM from time to time myself. It is fun, easy and safe, especially since the people at SHRM have real jobs and are not likely to have the time to pay any attention to me. I also enjoy being invited (and paid) to speak at SHRM events local, regional and national and the interwebs are chock-full of hypocrites like myself.

We love to throw stones at large institutions, but large institutions (SHRM, the auto industry, congress, Big Bacon) are a product of what we did (and what we did not do) yesterday. Stop worrying about what SHRM is doing. Change your organization, tell your story and help someone else change their organization. If you do these things, you will be moving the profession forward in a very real way.

I personally do not have an organization so I am probably just going to lie down. Talking about change wears me out.

And then there is HRevolution. This was kind of hard to miss because the people that were there spent all last week talking about it on Twitter and on their blogs and in their sleep, they talked about it all weekend, and they are still talking about it right now…as far as I can tell, they are really an annoying bunch of self-obsessed, self-promoting jerk offs and I am filled with rage, bitterness and jealousy that I was not able to spend the day with them on Saturday. I am going on record right now saying that I will be at HRevolution 2011 if I have to host it in my garage and provide the play doh myself.

Since I was not there, my perspective on this unconference is probably the most insightful one and you are all welcome for my insightfulness. And my humor. And my good looks. I would also like to take this opportunity to make it clear that this is technically an unpost on an unblog. I do not know what HRevolution was like and obviously cannot speak to its value, but I do know there was a lot of sharp folks there that are very passionate about this work. But in the spirit of evolution (and revolution) there are a few traits that I believe are becoming increasingly important to those wanting to help create the future of this body of work.

Curiosity: I think that we need to ask more question and do a better job of seeking out information from different places. Questions are powerful and can determine the direction of our growth. Are we asking good questions, big open-ended questions? It can be easy to talk about all of the stuff that we do know, but to wonder about the stuff that we do not yet know is different. Are we looking outside of our networks and our profession for new ideas, new archetypes, new models, new language?

Critical Thinking: Social media is a tricky thing because if we are not careful we can use it to just replace the old talking heads with new more hip talking heads with iphones. Are we using our new tools and new connectivity to distribute power? Are we putting more power in the hands of the practitioner? Are we developing greater discernment? HR has been very susceptible to fads, so called “best practices” and shiny new metrics…even those measuring nothing that matters. Are we getting better at making the decisions that are right for our organizations?

Courage: If you want to help create tomorrow you have to be willing to walk out to the very edge of today and that can be a scary place to be. I would imagine that this topic showed up at HRevolution either formally or informally because I know that there were a lot of smart folks there with a lot of knowledge and expertise. And when you know your stuff it eventually becomes a question of courage. Are you willing to tell the truth and help your organization to tell the truth?

Maybe we can dig into these themes a bit more of the next week or two, I know that you will have some interesting perspectives as an internal practitioner.

-joe

Getting Messy in HR

Joe,

You were absolutely right in your last post to call out courage as a critical marker of the progress we are seeing in HR. The courageous are leading the way.

There is one more thing that I'd like to add to this discussion. It occurred to me as I was having an email conversation with a friend of mine about a project we are undertaking together. Here's a snapshot of how the conversation went:

My Friend: "It's good to have you back in the game on this thing."

Me: "It's good to be back in the game. Let's go make a mess and get something started."

My Friend: "I've been a slow learner, but I've come to realize that I need to make more messes. I now know that not everyone is going to like me all the time, and so I need to be willing to get more messy. Plus, what good is amassing this political capital if I'm not going to use it once in a while? It's not worth anything anywhere else."

Progress is messy. Change is messy. Revolutions don't happen in orderly, comfortable ways. Most of the time, we have to let go of the old ways of doing things before the new way emerges. We have no guaranty of success when we start, so we have to put ourselves in a tough position sometimes. Talking about the future, about change, makes people around you uncomfortable and when people get uncomfortable, they begin to resist. I'll say it again, progress is messy.

You know what's not messy?

• Status quo
• Complacency
• Irrelevance

All very orderly and predictable. All very widely embraced by those around us because it allows them to stay in their comfortable existence without interference.

So, this is another reason why an event like HRevolution is so important. It's an "unconference" so it's bound to break many of the rules we've come to expect for conferences. It will allow for conversation and even encourage discourse. It should press us into discussions that feel unsafe and wildly uncomfortable. It's built around creating social capital and furthering ideas, not selling products. It might just make us change our views on things.

It's going to be messy. That might be the best lesson we can learn from this experience. Less order, more chaos. This is HR for the future.

Let's go make a mess.

-Jason

Rally 'round the Family

Jason-

Nice post and good points.

I completely agree and feel that it is important from time to time to remind ourselves and each other why we do this stuff. We poke and prod and stomp and shout because we love this body of work and we love its potential to change the world. If it were not for that love we would not care and we would find something else to stomp and shout about.

I am going to add one more thing to your list...

Courage. I see more and more evidence that there are courageous people stepping up to move our flag forward. I see more and more:

• people that are not willing to wait until someone in charge of something will decide how things are supposed to be done
  
• people that are less interested in what worked yesterday
• people that are less interested in asking for permission
• people that are quite happy to go make stuff up

Case in point, HRevolution 2010

I am not saying that it takes any courage or us to attend or participate in this event, but I do think it takes some courage to make something like this happen. Truth be told, there are about eleventy wazillion of us that have been complaining about the shortcomings of traditional conferences. Almost all of us eleventy wazillion talented complainers did nothing more than complain. A few people actually did something. They decided to try something different.

I think it will prove to be extremely valuable to this profession that there are people now having different kinds of conversations about different kinds of things, and they are doing it online and they are doing it with different kinds of events.

I think that this is significant not only to our profession, but also to business in general. I think that we continue to get evidence that the courage to do what needs to be done is often lacking and that courage just might be showing up in the craft of Human Resources.

See you in Chicago.
-joe

In Defense of HR

Joe,

Since we do work that flies under the heading of "Human Resources," we've always treated HR like family. Because we love our family, we are typically overly critical of them. We want our family to do well, so we dish out the feedback and share ways that our family members can get better. And, like most families, we don't tell those closest to use that we love them enough. That brings me to the reason for my post.

Human Resources, as a profession, is evolving. We started out from a disadvantaged position from our very creation and have been clawing our way to respectability ever since. In many places, HR is still clinging to past at their own expense, but I also see a lot going on within HR that makes me really proud. And, if I was a business school graduate coming into the corporate world today, I don't think you could find a more exciting place to start your career than in HR. Here's why.

1. Self-awareness. We teach leaders all the time that self-awareness is the foundation of leadership. If this is true, then HR should be developing great leadership skills. I don't think that there's another profession out there that spends as much time talking about what it means to be in it's own profession than HR. We know how we are viewed (there's seemingly a new survey punching us in the face with it every week). We know that we need to get better because our business peers don't seem to have any problem telling us when we suck. There's a lot out there about where our gaps are and how we need to get better. And, I think that HR has largely embraced this feedback. What we do with it is the key.
2. Commitment to Development. I am floored every day by how many blogs exist out there that are written by smart HR professionals who are sharing their war stories and lessons learned with the whole world. We spend a lot of time not only talking about our own profession, but also sharing information and taking in information to try and get better at it. This sharing and learning dynamic is closing the HR skill gap quickly.
3. Momentum. While some may argue that HR hasn't changed all that much in the past 20 years, I think they need to take a closer look. In HR, we didn't need a change, we needed a revolution. We need a complete paradigm shift from viewing ourselves as managing the personnel side of the business, to leading the strategy of the organization. A revolution doesn't happen overnight, it's starts with a few courageous visionaries and a groundswell starts from there. There's a lot of evidence that this is taking place within HR. If you peek in on the conversations between HR pros on Twitter, you feel the movement. You also see gatherings like HRevolution beginning to happen where the purpose of the event is to bring those on the fringe together to weave the social fabric required for a revolution (I'm proud to say that we are involved in this event).

We aren't always the nicest when it comes to our HR family. We poke and prod, we challenge, and we criticize. So, today I want to be very clear. HR, we love you. We believe in you. We know that you are up to the enormous challenges we are called to meet. That's why we are so tough on you.

Okay, now let's get off our asses and go make it happen. There's work to do.

-Jason

Social Technology: Best/Worst Thing Ever?

Jason, I hope that you are enjoying the shift in weather. Spring is a favorite season of mine, it always feels like a fresh start on things…especially after this winter.

On to the business at hand.

Thanks for your post teeing up social technology…there is so much noise about this issue out there. I guess I have a paradoxical view regarding social technology, I think that social technology is very underrated and very overrated. That works for me, because as you like to remind me, I am a consultant and I do not have to make sense!

Getting on LinkedIn is not going to build social capital for you. But you can use LinkedIn to more effectively build social capital. Getting on Twitter is not going to build social capital for you. But you can use Twitter to more effectively build social capital. Having 17,374,981 “friends” on Facebook does not mean that you actually have any social capital. I guess I view the rapidly evolving world of social technology as similar in nature to steroids. Steroids alone will not make you a great athlete. You still have to be a really talented to play professional sports, but steroids can make you even better (although there is clearly a number of bad aspects to using steroids, so not a perfect analogy).

I think that new social technologies are absolutely changing the way that we interact, and some of those changes are good and some of them are bad. You and I as friends, as collaborators and as business partners communicate with each other in a variety of ways. But the vast majority of our really important and serious conversations still happen face to face. We use texting, e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and this blog to complement an already very real relationship. That is a wonderful thing. But when social technology is used to replace, avoid or simply create the perception of a real relationship it is bad news…whether we are talking about a 1:1 relationship or the relationship between an organization and its workforce or its customers.

So, I think that the most important question that is not being asked is what kind of relationships do we want to have? As employees, as employers, as HR leaders, as business leaders, as citizens, parents, friends, neighbors, consumers…what do we want those relationships to be like?

I look forward to digging into this further.

-joe