Beyond The Stick

Over a number of years, I’ve seen different management strategies for engaging employees. At their essence, they typically amount to nothing more than the proverbial “carrot and stick" approach: Do what you’re supposed to do and you get rewarded, and don’t do what your superiors want and you get punished.

Recently, the greater demands on organizational outputs and outcomes by shareholders and other stakeholders in a highly competitive global environment and souring economy has put added pressure on management that has resulted in

the rewards drying up and the stick being more widely and liberally used.

Numerous management strategists have picked up on this trend:

For example, in the book, No Fear Management: Rebuilding Trust, Performance, and Commitment in the New American Workplace, Chambers and Craft argue that abusive management styles destroy company morale and profitability and should be replaced by empowerment, communication, training, recognition, and reward.

In another book, Driving Fear Out of the Workplace: Creating the High Trust, High Performance Organization, Ryan and Oestreich confront how “fear permeates today’s organizations” and is creating a pandemic of mistrust that undermines employee motivation and commitment.

I can’t help but reflect that the whole concept of managing employees by the carrot and stick approach is an immature and infantile approach that mimics how we “manage” children in pre-school who for example, get an extra snack for cleaning up their toys or get a demerit for pulling on little Suzy’s hair.

As leaders, I believe we can and must do better in maturing our engagement styles with our people.

Regular people coming to work to support themselves and their families and contribute to their organizations and society don’t need to be “scared straight.” They need to be led and inspired!

Monday’s don’t have to be blue and TGIF doesn’t have to be the mantra week after week.

People are naturally full of energy and innovation and productivity. And I believe that they want to be busy and contribute. In fact, this is one of life’s greatest joys!

Leaders can change the organizational culture and put an end to management by fear. They can elevate good over evil, win the hearts and minds of their people, and put organizations back on track to winning performance.

Beyond The Stick

Timeouts for Professionals—Ouch

Experts have been teaching parents for years to discipline children, when needed, with timeouts. This is seen as a combined rehabilitative and punitive method to deal with “bad” behavior. The idea is that the child has time to reflect on what they did “wrong” and how they can do better in the future. It also functions as a way to sort of “punish” the child to teach them that there are consequences to their actions, like having to sit in inaction for a period of time. Of course, time-outs also serve the purpose of a “cooling off” period for both parent and child when things are heating up.

Interestingly enough, like many things in life, adults, in a sense, are just big children. And the time-out method doesn’t end in childhood. This method of discipline is used in the workplace as well.

I have seen and heard story after story of people at work who do something “wrong” (whether as defined by objective policy or more often it seems by some subjective management whim) and they get sidelined. They get moved off into a corner—with the proverbial dunce cap on their heads—where they can do no harm. They are for all intensive purposes ignored. They are not assigned any meaningful or significant work. They are neutered.

Unlike a child’s timeout though, an adult timeout may be for a period of time or this may be permanent—no one knows in advance.

Just as with a child, the adult timeout is both punitive and possibly rehabilitative. Punitively, it is supposed to take the “problem” worker out of the larger workplace equation, and it therefore hurts their career, personal and professional learning and growth, and their self-esteem. In terms of rehabilitation, I imagine some may think that like a child, the adult will have time to reflect on what they did wrong—if they even know what they did—and commit to never doing it again—to be a better employee in the future.

Well, why don’t employers just help the employee to do better in their jobs by coaching, mentoring, training, providing constructive feedback, counseling and if necessary taking other corrective actions--why the childish timeouts?

Perhaps, managers think it is easier to just “ignore” a problem—literally—or to handle it quietly and subtly, rather than “confronting” the employee and having to work with them over time to improve.

Unfortunately, this erroneous thinking—the desire to handle it the “easy way out”—is reinforced by often-archaic performance management systems that do not distinguish between employee performances. They neither meaningfully reward or recognize good performance nor discourage poor employee performance.

Certainly, it is important to have fairness, objectivity, and controls in any performance management system, but this needs to be balanced with managing our human capital in a way that is good for the organization and good for the employee.

We cannot continue to manage our employees like children. We cannot punish people for honest mistakes at work that were unintentional, not malicious, and done in good faith and best effort in performance of their jobs.

Instead, we need to manage people with maturity. We need to identify where the issues are, emphasize where appropriate, understand what can be done to correct problems, and work with employees on how they can learn and grow.

Alternatively, we need to handle true performance issues and not bury them indefinitely in timeouts. Our organizations and our employees need to move past childish modes of performance management and handle people decisively, with measured intent, and with absolute integrity.

Timeouts for Professionals—Ouch

Change Agents--Poisoned or promoted?

Let’s fantasize for a moment about what it must be like to be an enterprise architect/change agent.

Here we go.

Our stereotypical organization, let’s call it ABC Company has a talented group of enterprise architects. They have worked hard, built partnerships, learnt the organization and its needs, and have done a remarkable job working with leadership, subject matter experts, and other stakeholders in identifying an accurate baseline, determining a promising target, and have helped the organization navigate a well thought out transition plan. The organization reaches its target—success—and the process continues.

Hooray for the architects. Praise and promotion be upon ABC company’s enterprise architects.

Wait. Not so fast. Let’s back up. Rewind and see what often really happens when architects or anyone else for that matter tries to change the status quo:

R—E—S—I—S—T—A—N—C—E!!

Research shows that change agents are often scorned by their organizations and their peers. In immature organizations that do not embrace constructive change, change agents like enterprise architects are often not looked upon favorably.

Remember what happened to Socrates more than two millennium ago (and countless others innovators, inventors, and thought leaders since)?

Strategy + Business Magazine, Issue 53, has an article called “Stand by Your Change Agent.”

The article states: “research shows that most transformation leaders go unpromoted, unrecognized, and unrewarded. And their companies suffer in the long run.”

In a study of 84 major change initiatives at Fortune 500 companies between 1995 and 2005, “some 70 percent of executives who led these major transformations went unrewarded or were sidelined, fired, or spurred to leave.”

Why are change agents treated adversely?

The research shows that “deep down, a great many people and organizations fear change. People do not like to move out of their comfort zones. Powerful institutional forces help maintain the status quo. In such companies, change simply has no constituency.”

In these change-averse organizations, change agents often “find their efforts impeded, undermined, or rejected outright. Change agents may also suffer from the delusion that others see the urgent need for action just as they do, and may be frustrated to discover how little key stakeholders care about the initiatives and outcomes they hold dear.”

What is the impact to companies that treat their change agents this way?

Both the companies and people suffer. Change initiatives remain unfinished. Investments do not see their payback. Highly talented change agents are lost. And worse, other potential leaders will think many times over before taking on a change effort that “could derail their careers.”

Well, which companies did best with change?

“Companies that scored highest in leadership development and embracing change were most likely to improve performance.”

The lesson is clear: If companies want to grow, mature, and improve performance, then they need leaders who are visionaries and change agents to step up to the plate.

Those organizations that recognize this truth will embrace their change agents—encourage, recognize, reward, promote, and retain them.

Talented and motivated change agents (like enterprise architects) are an organization’s best hope for innovation, energizing creative potential, and long-term organizational success.

Change Agents--Poisoned or promoted?

Brand and The Total CIO

David F. D’Allesandro, the CEO of John Hancock insurance group has a bunch of wonderful books on building brand and career, such as “Brand Warfare”, “Career Warfare” and “Executive Warfare”.

All the books have three things in common. One, they are about the importance of brand. Two, they are about moving ahead in the corporate world. And three, they all end in “warfare.”

Brand is critical for building value. Brand is our reputation. It’s how we are known to others. It’s what people think and say about us. It’s a representation of our values and integrity.

We all know corporate brands such as those from consumer product companies and fashion designers. Those that have a “good” brand, tend to convey a higher status and cost a premium. We trust those brands and many people wear the brand labels as a status symbol.

We all carry a brand. Like a mark of “Grade A” or “Prime Beef” seared on a side of a hide of cattle, a brand is mark of distinction for us.

At work, we are branded as honest or not, fair or not, hard working or not, team players or not and so on and so forth.

As the CIO, it is imperative to have a brand that synthesizes the best of business and technology for the organization.

On one hand, many view the CIO as the technical leader for the organization; the wang-bang guru that leads the enterprise through the often confusing and fast-changing technology landscape. In this role, the CIO can make or break the future of the organization with wise or poor technical decisions that can put the enterprise on the cutting-edge, build competitive advantage, and increase revenue/profits, market share, and customer satisfaction. Or the CIO can lead the organization down a technical sinkhole with failed IT projects that jeopardize mission, alienate customers, drive out good employees out, and waste millions of dollars.

On the other hand, many like to say that the CIO is not and should not be tech-focused, but should be about the business—understanding the business strategy, operations, and requirements and then driving an IT organization that is responsive to it. Taken to an extreme, the CIO may not be required to have a technology background, an IT degree or even a technical certificate. This person may be from the business side of the house and could almost alien to the CIO organization and therefore, may not easily garner the respect of his more technical people.

The true successful CIO melds business and technology together. Their brand is one where business drives technology and where strategy is paramount, but operations is a given! This CIO is someone who can be relied on to make wise technical decisions today that will enhance the strategic success of the organization tomorrow. The CIO is a leader who manages not only upward, but who reaches across the organization to build partnership and understanding; who inspires, motivates, trains, recognizes, and rewards his people; and who conducts outreach and brings in best practices from beyond the strict organizational boundaries. This CIO is loyal, dedicated, hard-working, smart, and has the trust and confidence to get the job done!

So what with the “warfare” part in the books?

Well, unfortunately not everyone wants us to succeed. So, we must work on our brand to build it and make it shine, but at the same time, there are others inside and outside the organization who for various reasons would like to tarnish our brand: perhaps, they are jealous, competitive, nay-sayers, change resistant, oppositional, confrontational, troubled, or just plain crooked.

What D’Allesandro says is that to be successful, what sets us apart, is our ability to build relationship with others, even when it is challenging.

To be a successful CIO, we need a terrific personal brand, but more than that we need to have courage and conviction to stand by our beliefs and the vision and the ability to articulate it to guide and influence others to advance the organization’s long-term business and technical success.

Brand and The Total CIO