I have accumulated a list of proverbs over the course of my current employment. There are six: three negative (examples of what not to do) and three positive (examples of what to do). I work for a very large employer and when an organization gets to be a certain size it ceases to be a scrappy profit hunter and starts to become a slow, ungainly quasi-government. The negative proverbs are borne out of cynicism and repeated disappointments, the positive proverbs are borne out of lessons learned the hard way. In my future career, I intend to make use of these proverbs to explain my management philosophy if/when I am in a position to have to explain that. Without further ado about nothing:
1) “More of the Same Forever“
Periodically my company announces sweeping new reforms and the end result is a different brand name on the same thing. The best example of this is our annual performance evaluation. When I first started at this organization, annual evaluations were a five page questionnaire our managers filled out, and annual increases were more or less unrelated to the results from that. They rolled out a new system which promised to allow merit-based pay scales and detailed conversations with our bosses about our performance and our goals. The result has been that it is essentially the same process with different corporate graphics to advertise it to us. Instead of merit-pay, we are shoe-horned into a bell curve and the top 5% get maybe a 1% higher annual increase, and the bottom 5% get maybe a 1% lower annual increase, and for the 95% of us in the middle, we get what we’re given. To express our resignation to this process, my colleagues and I started saying “More of the same forever”. Now we use this predictively for future initiatives and changes in leadership. The remedy for this is a culture of transparency. Leaders should not promise what they are not giving; employees should be able to ask for what they want. Leaders don’t necessarily have to give it to them, but it is helpful to know what people need and desire. If a leader starts to hear the same thing over and over again from different people, they will start looking for actual solutions.
2) “Too Big To Succeed”
As a large, slow, ungainly quasi-government, there are a lot of big picture strategic shifts under way at any point. There are also a lot–a LOT–of micro-scale problems. What ends up happening is the Macro-problems get a lot of attention while the micro-problems get ignored. This creates a situation where, by analogy, the external facade of a building can be resurfaced multiple times but the moldering carpets and frayed wires of the interior don’t get updated. The remedy for this is a corporate culture where line managers are broadly able to address problems that they see, and can discuss them with higher managers and advocate for their teams. Managers and Executives that are too far removed from the front lines genuinely have no idea what is going on, and it is not really their fault. Communication needs to happen candidly up the chain for them to know, if the leaders aren’t going to intentionally come down the chain to see for themselves.
3) “Consistency over Accuracy“
I’ve written about this before. The most hilarious example was when I reported financial results that were an order of magnitude higher than they normally are. My boss messages me and says “This line item is too high“. It’s funny because the number was not too high, it was the correct number. What really happened is that it was unusually high, relative the rest of the year. It is OK to ask about numbers–in fact, when I was an auditor, I was trained to look for things that stick out and seem unusual. But the starting point can’t be that it is wrong–it must be that the explanation is unknown, and allow that maybe the explanation is that it is wrong.
4) “Everything is Fixable“
In accounting, nothing is final until the end of the fiscal year. This means on January 1 you can make a mistake, and until December 31 of that year, you can fix that mistake for financial reports. It is not good to let a mistake sit on the books for a year, but it isn’t irreparable. Everything is fixable, and every error identified ought to bear this in mind. The source of the error is the most important part, because you want to prevent future errors of the same variety. It is good to approach work with the attitude that everything is fixable because it builds trust with employees and allows them to feel comfortable sharing their errors. A punitive corporate culture encourages people to hide their errors, and so the errors are compounded and become entrenched. An emphasis on Consistency, as noted in #3, will encourage you to repeat the error in the future so the error establishes a trend and no one will notice. This is all bad for business and careless accounting: Fix the problems when you find them, and understand that everything is fixable.
5) “Going Outside the Process is How Things Break”
Processes exist for a reason, especially in large, slow, ungainly quasi-governmental organizations. The processes help ensure that every step has been followed and the output you receive today will be the same as the output you received yesterday. When working fast, when trying to make shortcuts, there is a temptation to go outside the process. This can be OK if you discover a new efficiency–then the process should be changed and documented. This is not OK if it creates errors or opportunities for errors for future employees who fill your position after you leave. Following processes helps provide predictability and regularity. The absence of processes creates unpredictability and instability. Stabilize your team by understanding the processes as quickly as possible.
6) “Take Ownership of Your Work”
The employee who says “This work is mine and it is my responsibility to do it well” will succeed for more often than the employee who makes excuses or passes blame. Likewise for leaders. The leaders who cannot make a decision for fear of taking a stand are weak and ineffective and slow down an organization and contribute to it’s quasi-governmental behavior. Leaders who take initiative and seek to get the most out of their team will be successful and see stronger results. This is all a corporate culture thing. A punitive workplace will lead to blame and excuses and doing everything you can to be the hapless cog in the machine which was fed a bad input. It is far better to enable employees to use their brains, to look at the data they are working with, and to ask questions of the people they receive data from and those people they send data to. Leaders who view their team as their personal responsibility and not a collection of inputs to be managed will likewise see better results.
This has been: Corporate proverbs. I hope you enjoyed!
AMDG
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 