I've traveled around a lot of organizations, and seen some wonderfully-creative ways they can be disabled in their intent to improve or to achieve their goals. Here's a recipe from a cross-section of organizations I've seen over the past few years:
- Identify a staff function, e.g., HR, Improvement Team, etc., and give them the goal to enforce compliance to practices that they themselves create for line management and employees to follow.
- Set aggressive goals that are unchangeable, no matter what happens during the year. Enforce those goals by tying bonuses to graded percentage-of-compliance audits conducted by the staff group. Set an arbitrary compliance value, say 91%, and enforce it rigidly.
- Compare senior managers to each other, so everyone knows who's slacking off. Focus on "getting the compliance score up."
- While you're at it, once a year force rank every employee, from top to bottom. Reward the top 50. [Hmm, can you think of a better way to demoralize 90% of your employees?]
- Discourage active feedback from the line organization on more effective or efficient ways to implement the activities you're asking them to perform.
- Implement an annual employee survey. Have managers hold improvement meetings until employee ratings improve. Tie employee bonuses to the ratings they give, rather than any behavior or managerial practice that the questions may describe.
There are other things we could do, but this is depressing enough. That's especially true when we can all recognize some or most of these things in our own organizations. It's a rare manager who, when he sees some dysfunctional employee behavior, will stand aside and ask, "Hmmm. What am I contributing to this?" Next time, what we might do instead.
