Management Training: How To Treat Employees Part 1

The whole reason behind 'Stupid Management Tricks' is that managers, especially those of director level & above do not know how to treat employees. The primary evidence for this is the massive change that occurred years ago when Personnel Departments were renamed to 'Human Resources'. The pervasive labeling of people as a 'resource' begins the process of dehumanizing the employee. In short, you are no longer thought of as a person working for the company, but one the level of a desk or chair, which can be cheerfully discarded when no longer needed. But even more than that, the dehumanizing process again absolves the manager from doing something. Mainly, dealing with employee morale. I mean, a desk or chair will still function if you treat it like crap, right? During my tenure at one of the many Philips companies, a new CEO had the literal nerve to stand up in front of the massive headquarters meeting and say that he's not going to do anything about morale, you'll have to do it. This too is another abdication of responsibility as more than anything, management sets the culture in a company. Opps, forgot, desks & chairs have no culture. Gee, see how easy it works for the manager?

If you look at the great leaders of history: Alexander, Caesar, Patton, etc, one thing that distinguished them from the not-so-great was the observation that they knew their soldiers by name. This is a very powerful thing, it generates a lot of loyalty. When you have someone's loyalty, you can get them to perform virtual miracles. You can ask a lot of them...and get it.

There is one problem with this which is why so many managers don't do it. It takes effort.

A Management Model: The Baseball Team

I started talking about this before and got distracted, so let's get back to this. Teams, organizations, companies, corporations, etc, all have one thing in common--Organization. Some forms of organization work better than others. For example, the baseball team. Do you think that the Baseball Team would work organized as a Democracy? I doubt it! Democracy is geared toward larger teams where the individual conceits will not dominate. But take a look at the Baseball Team as a corporate entity. They have a product--sports, or more accurately, entertainment. In selling that product, they have to make enough to pay their expenses (player salaries, travel) and make a profit. If there's no profit, there is no reason to do business nor does the product maintain any level of quality. If you don't believe that, take a look at most non-profits and you'll see a lot of people going through the motions once the 'thrill' of doing something meaningful wears off.

Back to the baseball team, selling the product is selling entertainment. Teams are not national but local, so they have to appeal to the local populace. They make money by selling admission to games, merchandizing, TV rights. And the one thing that stands out in those areas is that they get more money out of it, they have to win. Sure there will always be hard-core fans, but ask anyone at a Kansas City Royal game how many butts are in the seats as opposed to the George Brett years and you'll find a significant difference. But the key here is that selling your product is winning and visa versa. How does a baseball team do this? It's not an exact science, but they hire the best players (who create the product, the workers) and put the best coaches over them (management).

I think you can already see where this is going. Many, many companies fail or just drag along because they try to hire the cheapest labor. Think Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Here is a baseball franchise that has finished last or next to last every year. Look in the stands, if it ain't a good team they're playing, there's very few there.

Now look at the other extreme: When the team is not doing well, what happens? Do they eliminate some of the players to make up the revenue shortfall? No way! The first thing they do is fire the manager. This should be a lesson for business. While you do need to hire the best people to make your product, you need management that will get them to perform at their best.

Sabotaging the Work

Management has only one responsibility, only one task: To make sure that the workers have what they need to do their job. It's no rocket science, except to those who actually hold the management positions. Then think of all the assistance that your typical manager has! There are reams of books, reviews of those books and, for every possible decision, there are country-wide surveys to show effectiveness. For example, there have been dozens of studies of 'flex-time' in it's various incarnations and every single one mentions increases in productivity and a decline in absenteeism. That would mean that every since company would want to jump on it? Wrong! The most prevalent response is "Well it won't work for this company (or business)". However, if management can frustrate the workforce, they jump on it immediately.

I worked at a major military manufacturer for roughly one year back in the '70's. It was a co-op job. The strangest thing I noticed there on the first day was that, although the company had provided vending machines all over all the buildings, each had the coin slot drilled out to fit a padlock. Unless you removed the padlock, you couldn't put coins in the slot! Once a day, during the lunch half-hour, a supervisor would come by and unlock the coin slot. By that time, there would usually be a line 4 or 5 deep in front of the machine.

Why did this happen? Nobody seemed to know. But where there is a will, there is a way and people will get their coffee. Catering trucks would pull up in front of each building and the people would stream out. Even the management would send their secretaries out to get coffee.

This would not last. A memo from someone on high (if I told you the name, you'd know the company) setting forth a new policy that nobody was allowed to go out of the building to get anything from the caterers. I was a young kid that knew very little at that time, so this struck me as absurd. So I responded to the 'someone' with my own memo. However I wasn't so stupid, I added a line that caused 5 levels of management to quiver with fear. I added a line to the effect that maybe they should be looking at those managers that have so little to do that they are watching people out the windows. Even then, I heard nothing for a long time. Since this was a co-op job, they waited until the last day before I went back to college. Then I found out that the guy I had memo'ed was 5 levels of management above me. I was interviewed by each manager on the way up, including Mr. Upper Management. The main question they all wanted to know was "Who was the manager with nothing do?". I would like to note that every manager I talked to, had a cup of coffee in their office.

But when I finally got to the top of the management ladder, I found out why they locked the slots on the vending machines. It seemed that the military branch they built stuff for, had done a survey on productivity at that location. They had seen a number of people drinking coffee. As soon as management saw that in the report, they acted with alacrity! Maintenance was out there drilling immediately.

If you've ever been in an engineering environment, a cup of coffee doesn't slow down productivity, but rather enhances it. But as you can see, as soon as they have even a whiff of a reason, they're overly willing to make things worse for the workforce.

The Art of Self-Deception

When I mentioned the Voluntary Separation Plan, we've already encountered the almost desperate need of managers to deceive themselves. In that instance, since the world was cosy and rosy for them, then everyone must be happy. I believe this need for self-deception results from the infusion of something that should not be in management--the ego. Sorry to get religious on you, but the Bible states that "Whoever would be great in the kingdom of God, would be a servant to all." Despite the origin, if you look at management with that in mind, you begin to understand where 'THINGS WENT WRONG". To put it plainly, it is the responsibility of any manager in your organization to make sure that you can do your job. Think about it, that would include everything: Equipment, workspace, safety, etc. However, once ego enters into the equation, things fall apart. Ego is reason that managers self-deceive. "If I'm promoted to this position, how can I do anything wrong?" Then the fantasies begin.

At one company, the structure was very simple, they had production & engineering. Production had it's top tech as supervisor in Final Test and a manufacturing engineer. When all else failed, then engineering was involved. It didn't take an act of Congress, all they had to do was come over and get us.

Then we got a new production manager. A woman from a major aerospace manufacturer. The key here is not the woman part, but the 'major' part. The larger the organization, the more it relies on the managerial 'buddy-buddy' system. That is another subject. However, back to the situation....the problem arose when the production supervisor (one step below the lady) and his group leader decided that they were tired of getting beat on for late shipments. The solution was easy, blame Engineering! When a unit got tied up in final test, it was immediately marked as moved to Engineering for debugging, even if Engineering never heard of it or got it for a week later. Now our manager was getting beat up. However the lady had a great idea! To solve the problem, all she had to do was get a few of those lazy engineers transferred to production, problem solved!

Here's where the self-deception occurred: One of the techs that was going to be transferred was going to be put in the position of customer support (answering the phone). This particular guy was at the company for a few years. First he was a final test tech, then he really, really wanted to get into engineering. He was going to school at night, etc. There was an opening for an Engineering Tech, but someone talked him into taking on the customer support job. After a year, we had fought to get him into engineering and now, 3 months later, this lady wanted to move him right back into that position AGAIN. He even told her he did not want that job, to which the lady replied that if he didn't take it, she didn't know if there would be a position for him.

As you notice, this lady, despite being told the situation, refused to believe it because it conflicted with her idea. Roughly 6 months after the transfer, this guy left. When the lady was told that it was because of the transfer, she responded that he was going to leave anyways! As you notice, there was no compulsion to actually believe that she had done something wrong.

The big key here is: If you can't admit your mistakes, you can't learn anything!

What Should a Manager be doing????

I'm sure that like me, you've looked at the useless protoplasm known as 'your boss' and wondered how the hell they ever got into that position. In some cases it's fairly obvious, like MacDonald's, the quickest way to get to be manager is just to be there for more than 6 months and not be blindingly stupid.

Let's consider what a manager is supposed to be. If you are going to criticize something, it's best to know why you are criticizing it.

The first step is to establish that management involves responsibility. The manager, essentially manages something or somebody. In a sense we all manage things in our lives from our time & money, up to our family. Now a family is not a good analog to a business. The family includes blood relationships which do not (or rather should not) impinge on the business atmosphere. However, a good analog is, essentially, the baseball team.

Consider a baseball team. Obviously the main focus of the baseball owner is to make money. While a team can make money without winning ('60's Mets), it doesn't generally happen. The fans come to see success. So as in business, success means money. The baseball team has it's upper management - Team manager, coaches, etc and it has it's workers - The players. Notice that, should we even consider the general management of the team, that the structure is quite flat. There are only 2 or 3 levels of management. This is important because communication is important. Frank Herbert in the novel 'God Emperor of Dune' put it very succintly "Sometimes the most important information is that something has gone wrong." So here we're already getting at part of the failure of American Business: They don't know when something has gone wrong. It will take a long time for that information, that something has gone wrong, to weasel it's way to the top, especially if you are considering the company with 5 or 6 levels of management.

Does that information actually need to go up all those levels? Actually not! If the managment is good, then someone along the line will make a decision. It's as simple as that, someone has to make a decision. That, given the poor quality of the people who generally rise to management positions, is very difficult. Frank Herbert again addressed that when the God Emperor himself said that bureaucrats will delay a decision (by asking for reports, etc) until the problem is uncorrectible. The American Management Association, back in the '70s, did a study on the most effective managers and discovered that effective managers only made the right decision 10% of the time. Do you know what that means? It means that all you have to do is make a decision and you can be effective! This also means that you can evaluate your decision and make another decision to correct it.

We'll get back to the baseball team in the next post.....

The Origin Of Policies

I was once told by someone in the auto industry that, if you want to know the why behind some feature of the car, just say "It's cheaper" and 99% of the time you'd be correct. Think about that in relationship to the policies in your workplace and you'll notice that the same applies. "It's cheaper!"

Management is almost always about doing things easier, or at doing the least amount of work. If a manager has to dig through the numbers to find out real costs, he will most likely not do the work. For example, and in engineering we see this a lot, we can do a lot of calculations in Excel. However, many times we need something like Matlab which will yield better results faster. In most companies, everyone gets/has Excel. Matlab costs $1200. This is an easy decision for a manager. He says no to the expenditure, because they're getting by with Excel. He makes no effort to discover how much time is wasted using Excel over the course of a year or two. That would require work.

For example, at my current workplace, they made a grand effort to get people to turn off their computers at night, rather than let them run. At the end of the year, they trumpeted how they had 'saved' over $100,000 on their electric bill. We set about and did a quick calculation as to how much time is wasted waiting for the computer to boot & be usable. Given the number of employees & an average salary, we calculated that, in productive time, roughly it cost the company about $2 million waiting for the computer (over the course of a year). Notice how the easy, obvious stat is grasped onto without any thought as to the hidden costs.

Note that with this calculation we did not screen out those functions that don't really accomplish anything even if the computer was up (like HR, Finance, Contracts, etc). So the number might be lower.

Now consider something we encounter everywhere--Labor grades. Have you ever sat down to understand why we have labor grades at all? Here is a system that takes a few people to maintain and the benefit it gives is....??? The only justification I can perceive is that it sets a structure on what job deserves what pay. But that's a moot point in the days of Internet and surveys. If I want a specific type of engineer, I can consult all the job sites on the net and get a good idea, for the job and the location, of what that engineer will cost me. Then with that as a guideline, I can interview people and then negotiate a pay rate. As you notice, the labor grade does not enter into this at all.

What labor grades are designed to do, is to artificially limit the amount of money they pay an employee. Most labor grades have a maximum range, when you hit that, well, sorry you can't get a raise unless we promote you. The more devious way is to begin to limit the max raise as the person gets up in the range. It saves money!!! At my current job, my raise was reduced by 25% because I was at 65% of my labor grade range.

Then again, why would you want to limit the pay a person could get except for the fact of 'saving money'? The plain fact is, that if you have someone doing excellent work, you should 1) Want to retain them and 2)Pay them enough so that they don't want to leave.

I believe that this sort of reasoning is foreign to those in management. But this will lead us onto the change from Personnel to Human Resources and what that change really meant, other than a name change. Next time.

Short-sighted Managers (Oxymoron)

If you have even worked one year in a corporate environment, it's easy to relate evidence of management short-sightedness. This does not say anything good about American management. In the next day or two, I'm going to try to create a mental model of what a manager should be and do.

Most, if not all, evidence of managerial short-sightedness is the result of being overly worried about money. Or rather worried about money in the wrong way. I've seen management throw all sorts of money into partitions, floor plants, even re-doing the all-important lobby, but when faced with a drain on their skilled people, will refuse to devote a penny to keeping them.

One business fact that a lot of managers (and their clueless support functions such as accounting, contract management, etc) miss is that there is a cost to doing business. Yes, there is such a thing as spending too much money to do business, but there also is a threshold over which 'efficiency' in spending is counter-productive.

A case in point: In the mid-70's (just out of college for me, I'm old but not that old ;-), I worked for a manufacturer of medical ultrasound equipment. At that time, they were the leaders in medical ultrasound. They owned the market. Unfortunately due to management decisions, by the early '80's they were shutting the whole plant down and getting out of that business. The factory was structured such that assemblies were built and tested, then assembled into the unit which was tested and calibrated by final test. Final test consisted of perhaps 15 to 20 test techinicians of various capabilities. One of the things that this manufacturer did that I applaud is that they hired most of their test technicians from the local electronics schools. They trained them on-the-job. What they didn't do, and, of course, this was to 'save' money, they would not increase their pay sufficiently as their skills increased. The obvious resulted. The good technicians would soon discover they could make a lot more working for someone else and be gone. The poor technicians would remain knowing that they wouldn't be able to deal with a different job. As a result, this company had a 'hard core' of incompetent techs supplimented with a revolving door of good techs who were just passing through.

So what was the result of their attempts to 'save' money. Between the training new techs just to have them leave & the deadwood left behind, it essentially cost them more money than they would have spent to keep their employees. But the critical clue here is that that loss of money was not directly visible. You would have had to dig a little to see the loss.

This is right in line with the law of management that we've already enumerated: A Manager will do what is easy. Since the loss of margin from poor technicians was not directly evident from glancing at a spreadsheet, management did not see it.

Dominant Management Philosophy: Shirk Responsibility!

I think that anyone who has been working in corporate America generally gets truly surprised when a manager takes responsibility. As engineers, we have a tendency to get noticed by and have more contact with corporate management. Then you truly see the mental contortions that managers go through to blame things on someone else.

One of the biggest and best methods of shifting the blame is called 'employee empowerment'. This is trumpeted as the savior of corporations by shifting much of the responsibility of improvements to the people doing the work. If you look at it superficially, it sounds great. We finally get a say in the company! But if you think about it, if we're researching how to improve our products and organization, what the hell are the managers doing? Simply sitting there and taking the credit.

Here's a few examples form my experience.

In my first job (another medical manufacturer), they instituted a program to reward those who come up with cost saving ideas. I don't remember what the amount of the reward was, but it was peanuts as compared to what the company could save. At the outset, their suggestion box was filled with ideas. As policy put it, they would examine each idea and get back to the employee within two weeks. One employee (not me, but a poor smuck on the production line) came up with the idea that the backplane for this system should be translated to a PCB motherboard instead of hand-wiring it as they had been doing for years. Two weeks went by and he heard nothing. He went to Personnel (back then they hadn't made the dehumanizing change to Human Resources) to inquire. He was told that they were going to do that anyways, so he didn't qualify for an award. The information got around very quickly. Soon no ideas were coming in and the program died of neglect. Classic case of a stupid management trick. Even if they were 'already' going to do that, would it have hurt them to reward him anyways? Just think, though, they SAVED a couple of hundred dollars.

The company I am currently with, had purchased a rival company just before I was hired. This rival was functioning, making a profit and my company was envious of the contracts they were getting from the Government. So they bought them. Management invaded that company in force, instituted all the functions, processes and software that they HAD to have. Since that point, 4 years now, that small company has not only ceased to make a profit, but has been a money-sink. Do you think that one manager might have gotten the idea that maybe they did something wrong?

Finally, from a incident that occurred while I was in college, I realized that the art of shirking responsibility is not new to management, but is a carry-over from the art of confidence men and swindlers.

During the end of my college years, I would bring my car to school, find a place to park it and basically let it sit until I used it to go back and forth to home. Once in this big city, I bought gas at a station just down the road from the school. I had a gas credit card then and gas was only about 30 cents a gallon (well, I did tell you I have been working a LONG time ;-). This was the old days when they had the rollers to frank the receipt which you signed. They would frank the receipt with the cost, then write it in. Being slightly inattentive, I didn't look at the franking and just signed based on the written-in number which was $4.00. When I got my monthly statement (back in the days when you actually got the receipts with your statement), the receipt showed a $14.00 franking and the copy had a nice one written in. Obviously I complained as my car couldn't possibly hold $14.00 worth of gas back then. I received a nice letter rolling the charge back to $4.00 and mentioning how the gas station owner had fired the employee responsible. What? Think about it! If the employee boosts up a charge, how is he going to profit from that? Not a bit! He must have been told to do that by the owner and, when the feces hit the rotating blades, took the fall for the owner.

Now you know where managers get that philosophy.

The Voluntary Separation Plan (VSP)

I was employed by a major medical equipment manufacturer for close to 17 years. I used to quip that I was looking for another job for 16 1/2 of those years. I hired on there simply because I needed a job and they offered one. I got a good indication of how this company felt about it's employees at the interview. At the end of the interviewing gauntlet, I asked the HR guy to see the benefits package. His response: If we give you an offer, then you can look at the benefits package. The strange, or at least what I thought was strange at the time, thing was that everybody complained about this guy, but no move was made to remove him until he left on his own.

The particular place of employment then proceeded to have a layoff once a year. They always scheduled the layoffs for either Thanksgiving or Christmas to give their employees that warm feeling.

One year, instead of their typical layoff, they did something different. It was dubbed the VSP and basically was a program that allowed you to lay yourself off in exchange for essentially very little more than a typical layoff. You would get the typical 2 weeks for every year of service severance, but as an added bonus, they paid your medical benefits for roughly 3 months after layoff. So in other words, if you could do it, you could find a job, tell then you'd start in 2 or 3 months and make a bunch of money. That is exactly what a few people did. In fact a lot just took the package to get the hell out of the place. Upper management had estimated that about 25 people would take the VSP. In reality, 180 did.

Then came the interesting part. Of the 180, quite a few were key people they couldn't do without. A few came back as consultants. A few even rehired after the consultant stint. On the whole the entire VSP program was a flat failure. Sure it did reduce head count, but, as always, it was the key people that left, leaving the deadwood who couldn't find another job.

Even more interesting is Upper Management's reaction to the results of the VSP. Despite all the evidence that the place was so bad to work at that all people needed was a small incentive to leave, Management had its own rationalization. They believed that they had made the package too attractive. And they never had another one.

The point? Well, as you can see, it's pointless to reason with management. Here they did not want to admit failure and, because things were so cozy for them, they refused to reckon with any idea that people didn't want to work there.

"I didn't know what you've been doing, so I gave you average."

The above is an exact quote from a manager I had very early on in my career. The reference was obviously to my yearly review. That would not have been a bad thing if I had been taking the typical managerial stance by spending the whole year waiting for someone else to do something. But it wasn't. I had spent the year redesigning the backplane for a system that had been originally designed way before my time. During this period my days consisted of getting in and the next thing I would know, everyone would be going home. In those days, PCB design was done on paper, there were no personal computers.

Now the manager in question used to be one of my co-workers. He was one of those types, yeah, you've seen them, that like to dress up really nice. He would even leave his keys on his desk because he didn't want them to make a hole in his pants pocket. He had started out as an engineer on this project, transferred to marketing (you saw that coming, didn't you?) then returned as our boss. Somehow he had convinced someone that he would be the savior of the project.

At the point when my review was due, he had been with the project roughly 3 to 4 months. Do you know what an engineer can do in a period of 3 to 4 months? Then witness how much this manager had done in the same period. He had not even figured out what his workers had been doing! Although we should qualify that, because he was a manager, he probably didn't want to or didn't care what I was doing. It was much easier to give me 'average' than to actually find out what I was doing.

His stupid management trick worked very well. Within a month I was gone to another job. Incidentally, I got a 20% raise to change jobs.

You would actually think that eventually even the dimmest manager would figure out that their tricks backfire 99% of the time. But managers have a built in defense mechanism that saves their pride when they cause something bad to happen. We'll explore that next time when I tell the story of the Voluntary Separation Plan.

A Manager Will Always Do What Is Easy

Don't get me wrong, there are good managers out there. After so many years, I've realized that to be a good manager, there are very few things you have to know and do. The primary and most important are: 1) They have to work; and 2) They have to know what their company does.

We'll deal with the latter later (always wanted to say that ;-), as there is a heresy which has become gospel among managers is that a manager can manage anything. Well, that applies only if you want a bad manager.

But now we'll talk about work, something that is anathema to a large majority of managers. The work that managers are supposed to do varies with the level of the position, but in these days of slim staffing and accelerated deadlines, it is very important that your manager be right there to roll up his sleeves and assist when things get crazy. When deadlines are looming and things are not working, a manager can delegate all he wishes, it won't make a damn bit of difference. Even on what is called a 'fully staffed' project, all you need is for one of the project members to walk and the project is in serious trouble.

To really demonstrate why work is so important and so infrequent from managers, you just need to look at a company going through a slump. Sales are down and the cash flow is not good. In this type of situation there are actually a lot of things that upper management can do to reverse the downward trend. First, they can increase market penetration. This involves hiring more sales personnel in the right areas to just sell more. This does require a good knowledge of your markets. Second, the company can roll out new products. Again, you need to know your market and clear away obstacles to development. Third, you can become more efficient. This is more than just laying off people and trying to make one person do the work of two or three. This involves looking closely at the way the company does business and getting rid of unnecessary work. Unfortunately the author of 90% of unnecessary work is management itself. Finally, the last way to try to turn around a company is layoffs.

Think about all these methods. Which one is the easiest? Layoffs! Which one do you see happen the most? Layoffs!

The next time you get a really stupid pointy-haired boss announcement in your company and ask yourself why. Just remember, it was the easy.

"If I do this for you, I have to do it for everybody"

This phrase is usually used as a last-ditch effort to say 'No' when a manager can't logically argue with you. When confronted with this response, the first thing to remember is, please, don't laugh out loud.

I've heard statements referred to as 'lies from the pit of hell'. This was qualifies as a 'lie from the pit of stupidity'.

Obviously this is a lie because in any organization there are those privileged few who garner 'perks' that not everyone can get.

For example, take a look outside at the parking lot. See that the VPs and even low-level managers have assigned parking spots. Did they have to do that for everyone? NO! And let's talk about bonuses. When the company does well, do all share in the bonuses? No, again.

At one job that I had years ago, every year they would have a 'sales meeting'. This would take place at a convenient location, for example, Bermuda or Hawaii, where the sales force and upper management would engage in 'team-building' activities such as golf, shopping or a trip to the casino. Now the obvious question is who was invited to these important company-paid activities? Not the people that do the work, of course!

Which brings us around to probably the first and most important law of managers: A manager will do whatever is easy.

Think about that 'til next time.....didymus7

In the beginning...a start

I've been working in corporate America for over 30 years from the perspective of an engineer. This is a level high enough to see what upper management is doing but low enough to get hit with the crap that comes from that level. It really amazes me that management, especially upper management, makes the same stupid mistakes over and over again. We all read Dilbert and laugh, but what are CEO's, VP's and directors doing when they read Dilbert? It's enough to accuse them of not being able to read.

Over the years I've compiled the 'Laws of Management' and when I get some time I'll post them all and let everyone argue about them.

Next post - "If I do that for you, I'll have to do it for everybody."