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." Continue reading
