Archive for the ‘Management’ Category

Should Americans get more vacation?

In a series of posts, called readers choice, I write on  whatever topics people submit and vote for.  If you dig this idea, let me know if the comments, and submit your ideas and votes.

This week’s reader’s choice post: What’s the impact of 60 hour work weeks and only 2 weeks of vacation on American companies? (submitted by Lynn – thx!)

The running joke at any big corporation is the phrase ‘work/life balance‘. Anywhere that needs to make a special phrase like this is by definition a place populated by workaholics. You’d never hear people talk about ‘work/breathing’ balance, or ‘work/clothing’ balance, because work never puts a supply of oxygen or a shirt on your back in question, unless you’re a workaholic naked astronaut or something.

It’s interesting how us Americans are fond of taking pride in our freedoms, yet when it comes to time off we are the least free for much of the Western world. It’s typical in Europe to get 6-8 weeks off 4-6 weeks off, commonly taken in the summer. This explains, in part, why Europeans have a deeper sense of their own culture, as they actually have time to learn, experience and enjoy the parts of life not spent in front of keyboards or in meetings.

Frankly, hours are a lousy way to measure value. If I can do great work in 5 hours, work my peers at best do in 10, that’s not my problem. I should be rewarded for results, not how much time it took me to get them. A good manager knows this. Good companies know this too. My best managers made clear they didn’t care about the HR policies for time off, or hourly reporting. They knew I’d be motivated to work hardest for them if after I got my stuff done, and had done it very well, I was free to do as I wished. (Oddly, in cultures like this, I tended to stay late and kept working because I enjoyed my work  so much).

The impact of the 60 hour work week, or any rigidly defined number of hours, is that smart people loaf around. Rather than be efficient, clever, and wise, and go home, people feel obligated, are in some cases are rewarded, to linger, to pretend, and to give pretense about how long it takes to actually do things. This is all kinds of bad. We should reward people who kick significant ass and then go home. Early. Not those who pull all-nighters for things that were never that complex to begin with. All sorts of goodness happens when managers learn to reward results, not effort. And this starts but getting past the stupid pretense of effort known as hours.

Miserly vacation limits are juvenile and short term thinking. It assumes that time off is bad for the company, and puts faith in the notion that doing things outside of work is an indulgence. God bless the Puritans, as we are still victimized by the prudish stink of their ideals. We want to be whole people, and being whole means having an identity beyond work. We are more than our jobs. Two weeks of vacation takes a bet employees won’t be around that long, so why invest in their long term happiness? If they burn out, it’s not our problem. That’s what two weeks of vacation says to me.

A major reason I quit my job in 2003 was to have complete control over my TIME. The only measure of life you can not get more of. I did not want some corporate policy, written by someone I’d never meet, defining how most of my waking hours on planet earth would be spent.  The older I got the more clear it became I’d rather make less money and take on more risk than willingly give away control over MOST OF MY LIFETIME. Especially if the thing I was spending all that time making was mediocre, forgettable and far from what I’d call reaching for my best possible work. But enough about me.

Certainly for any creative field, which many knowledge worker type companies claim they are, time away from work is where much creative growth happens. It’s away from work people have new experiences, see new places, ask new questions, and learn to appreciate the life they’re working so hard to get.When people return from vacation they are better people, not worse (explaining the wise philosophy of rock star web firm, Jackson Fish). And they bring new energy, perspective and ideas back into the company, all things that are essentially priceless.

The objections to more time off typically are:

  • I didn’t get it so why should you.  This is bad arguing. Just because something sucked in the past doesn’t justify it sucking now. A tradition of suffering and stupidity isn’t worth defending.
  • If people get more vacation our projects will die! Good managers manage. They can handle working around people’s vacations just as they do already. And of course when to take time off should always be a negotiation between the boss and the worker. Somehow in the U.S. we all know Thanksgiving to New Years is a dead zone. Yet we’re still here.
  • This will mean the end of the world! Yes, the sun will explode and we will all die someday, but this has nothing to do with how much vacation we get or don’t. In fact should the Vogons arrive after you finish reading this post, and announce the destruction of the earth, I’m certain near the top of your list of gripes would be you’d wish you had used more of your vacation, and had been granted more to use.

My bet is, in a well run company with a good manager, if you:

  1. Drop the 40/50/60 hour a week expectation. Treat people like adults.
  2. Clarify the results you want from your staff
  3. Increase people’s vacation days  by 50 to 100%
  4. But, and here’s the rub, demand everyone still do the same amount of work they already do every calendar year

You can pull this off without any noticeable decrease in performance. I’d even bet you might see some increases in work quality, as people have real motivation, are free from the pretense of pretending to be busy,  and will love their lives so much more and bring some of that love to work with them every day.  Why not try this as an experiment for a year?

Other variables worth trying:

  • Let employees choose salary increases vs. more time off.  I understand the cost to a company to have people on salary who aren’t working. Fine, come up with a number and let the employee decide if they want raw income increases, or time off increases. Put the equity they’ve earned into their hands and see what they do with it. Then it is truly up to them, without the bean counters complaining.
  • Or work the other way. I never understood why workers can’t give up some % of their salary for additional time off if they want it.  Un-paid vacation should be part of every serious company’s benefits plan. It’s a win-win.
  • Stop hiding behind sick days: I don’t understand the accounting, but I’m sure some bean counter has done the math. People don’t use all their sick days, so the more you can push days off into that pile, the better it is on some spreadsheet. “Personal days” and other crap are sneaky ways to attempt to influence behavior. Be on the level.
  • Sabbaticals make sense. Part of why I quit Microsoft in 2003 was I knew I needed a few months to figure things out. At one point I’d have preferred to stay with the company, at no pay, but just to give me some security and the option to stay while I mulled it all over. But this required secret handshakes with executives that I never learned. It made my choice easy: I quit.

It’s surprising, but few companies I’ve heard of have ever experimented with different approaches to vacation and unpaid leave. If you know of examples and case studies, please leave a link.

So what do you think? I’m a insane? Has being independent warped my demented brain? Or is there plenty of room for more time off without betraying the bottom line?

Related: See my essay, work vs progress.

The Winchester job interview theory

Royal Winchester is a very smart guy. He also has a disturbing habit of thinking very well about things. He recently offered me this theory on interviews.

The theory goes as follows: Interviewing is mostly bullshit.

As the theory goes, most of us make instinctive judgments on factors we don’t understand in the first five minutes, and spend the rest of the time, and the time discussing with other interviewers, back-filling logical reasons to support an intuitive response we’re largely in denial of.

Not everyone does this of course, and not all the time, but the theory suggests it’s true much of the time, or is a significant factor in interviews.

There are some contributing hypotheses to the theory:

  • Few are mature enough to sort out their biases. Very few people posses the self awareness to realize why they instinctively like or do not like someone they’ve just met. And even fewer, especially among the business/engineering crowd, feel comfortable with their feelings. It’s considered unacceptable to say ‘the guy did well but I didn’t like him for reasons I can’t explain’. It’s much easier to hide that feeling inside unfair judgments, using whatever flavor of corporate jargon can be found in the official hiring criteria (Lacked intellectual horsepower, couldn’t deal with ambiguity, didn’t know the secret handshake, etc.)
  • Talking about doing is not doing.  Most interviewers  focus on trying to extract a prediction about someone’s ability through having them talk about their ability. This is ridiculous. Could you evaluate an NFL running back by asking them questions about how they run? (e.g. “I run really really fast”, “Great, your hired.”). Better interviewers work hard to put candidates in problems and situations like the real ones they’ll face, and watch. They collaborate on real problems during the interview, as that’s what much of work is. Over time they’re able to calibrate what it means for a candidate to do well, given real problems, in an hour. But this requires  skill and patience few interviewers have. And even when they do, the candidates are in an awkward and artificially stressful environment that does not approximate real work well, unless the interviewer is diligent on compensating for these issues.
  • Interviews work better as a filter.  The job interview loop is more effective at eliminating bad candidates than identifying good ones. The bet is by the end only good candidates remain, but that’s not true. Like bacteria responding to antibiotics, strains of bad candidates that are immune to your process survive as well, and are hard to distinguish from good ones. The process can be prone to false negatives too (people who get rejected but would have thrived).
  • Recommendations are underestimated. Since interviews are mostly bullshit, it makes sense to put more weight on a recommendation from a trusted person (not necessarily the names on the candidates resume) who has worked with the candidate somewhere else. They have first hand experience on the millions of things that can only be witnessed outside of the interview room. If you trust them, and they trust the candidate, that may have more predictive ability than 60 awkward minutes in your office.
  • No one else saw what happened. Interviewers are free to lie and distort, intentionally or not. All interviewers are free to invent pet theories on which questions work best, or how good they are an extracting the value of a candidate. They are the only record of what they asked, how they asked it, and how the candidate performed. If they have bad habits that bias the candidate, no one will ever know, as the candidate has almost no ability to report on the interviewer. Every interview is a cat and mouse trapped in the room, and the mouse is motivated to do whatever it can to survive the cat, no matter how cruel or unfair the cat is.
  • We never go back a year later and evaluate. The hiring loop at nearly all companies is broken, as there is no feedback loop. No one forces you to go back 6 months or 2 years later and see: how many of the hire decisions you made worked out well, and how many of the people you rejected kicked ass at other companies with similiar cultures and needs. With no data, the value of any interview process is guesswork, not rigor.

Despite my affinity for this theory, I believe groups that take interviewing seriously, and leaders who reward interviewers for putting more time and careful thought into interviews, end up with better teams. The choice to hire someone is the most important decision you make that month, or year and the wise know this. At a start-up it can make or break the company.  And the more seriously people take the process, even if it’s flawed, the higher the odds they’ll recognize the natural shortcomings above and invest in minimizing them.

While I don’t think all interviews are a crapshoot, I agree with the Winchester theory – in most interviews, most of the time, it’s mostly bullshit as a tool in truly evaluating how well a person would perform in the job, even if the people doing the interviews don’t intend it to be.

The real story is in who you recruit to interview in the first place. Better candidates in, better candidates out:  see my essay how to interview and hire people.

What is your take on interviewing? How do you work against the Winchester theory?

How to stop overcommunication

Spolsky’s latest piece is about Brook’s law, and how adding people to projects can make them worse.

For those unfamiliar, Brook’s law states that when you add a person, you geometricly increase the amount of communication people of the project have to do, suggesting it’s a bad idea.

While I agree with the law, there are important exceptions I’ve identified -  depending who the person in question is (elite or bozo), how good they are at jumping in tough territory (ninja or bozo),  and how much they already know about the project (familiar or bozo newbie).

Spolsky’s points are generally sound, but I believe there’s a deeper cause for overcommunication.

The reason committees suck is authority is distributed across a large number of people. This makes everyone feel like everyone needs to know about everything. And worse, people fight in the backroom to obtain control over the committee, so the visible authority and real authority can be far apart.

Overcommunication is a symptom of lack of clarity over power.  If you want better communication, clarify the following:

  • Who is the single person who has decision making authority for decision X
  • Who should have input into that decision
  • Who should be informed when the decision has been made

This sets everyone’s expectations for who needs to know what.  It reduces endless forwarding of fyi material on the hopes someone might need it.

The person with decision making authority should be collaborating with others, and can delegate their authority, but no one should ever be confused that they have the power to make the call.

45 people can not effectively make a decision together. But 44 people can council one wise, empowered person to make a more effective decision.

Like Spolsky, I agree things would be better if there were 5 people in the room, instead of 45, but the clear distribution of power is the problem I’d solve first.

How to create great work environments

(Note: In a series of posts, now called readers choice, I’ll write about whatever people submit and vote for.  If you dig this, let me know if the comments, and submit your ideas and votes).

The actual question submitted was:

How to create environments that encourage people to make mistakes and learn from them?

This is easy. It goes on every day in every decent classroom around the world.

What this question is really asking is how can the person in charge create an atmosphere where learning is rewarded.  Nearly every manager or leader talks about this, but rarely is it true.

There are four things people get wrong that makes this seem harder than it is.

  1. The person in power defines the culture through their behavior. If the bossman fires people for making a small mistake, people will hide mistakes and obsess about avoiding them, making creativity and innovation unlikely. If the bossman instead sees failures as learning moments, and takes time to teach solutions, or asks the mistake maker what they learned and how it can be avoided next time, people will feel there is room for them to learn. Many people in power are not self-aware enough to see the gap between what they say, and what they do, despite the fact people respond only to the later. Most managers are more punitive and risk-averse than they think they are.
  2. Everyone must understand the different kinds of mistakes.   The word mistake is loaded. We’re taught to believe mistakes are bad, and people who make them are evil and horrible. But if you are asked to solve a challenging problem you won’t solve it on the first try. Or second. Or maybe even your 50th. Your first few attempts will naturally fail. This is a kind of mistake, or failure, but a necessary one, and one no customer will see. This is useful failure. It represents an opportunity to learn, or eliminate a reasonable possibility others would eventually try. The person in power has to communicate the difference between interesting or necessary mistakes, and useless ones, and their responses have to be appropriate.
  3. The person in power has to care about employees long term.  If I expect to manage you for 30 years, I want you to learn. I want you to grow. I want you to be as potent as possible in the long run, and I’d be willing to make short term sacrifices to make that possible (Paying for training, for books, coaching you, pushing to get you interesting assignments with the VP, etc.) If I don’t expect you to work for me for long, or see zero potential for you, then I’d never be willing to make that sacrifice. I’d always think you were already at 100% of what you are capable of, and have ZERO new to learn. Part of what defines the culture around a leader is their answer to this question: how good do I think the people I manage can possibly be? And how much do I care about getting them there? If they behave with long term care, odds go up everyone will teach, and care for, each other as well.
  4. Everyone has to properly set expectations.  An easy question I ask as a consultant, when people tell me of a problem they’ve having with someone at work, is this: Have you talked to them about it? 60-70% of the time they say no. If you feel your boss doesn’t let you learn from your mistakes, it’s up to you to ask for more space, making the argument you’ll be more productive/smarter/creative or whatever he wants from you if he treats you differently. And promise to prove it. Perhaps you can negotiate for only certain tasks to be freer than others. But if you never give the feedback, or never explicitly state what you want, odds are slim you’ll ever get it. If your manager is unwilling to ever give you what you want, then accept it or move on.

If nothing else, remember back to the best learning experiences you had, in school or in work. What were those environments like, and what did the teachers or bosses do that others didn’t?  Leave it the comments  – I’d like to learn about them :)

Also see:

Why do big companies suck?

(Note: In a new series of posts, now called reader’s choice, I’ll write about whatever people submit and vote for.  If you dig this, let me know if the comments, and submit your ideas and votes).

Before thinking about companies, it’s worth noticing that many things suck. For movies, books, websites, the bar is pretty damn low. Suckage is everywhere. And this is true regardless of size – many small companies suck and medium ones too.  The real question then is why, if at all, do big companies suck more than smaller ones?

I have to say, I’m not sure that they do, certainly not when I put my selfish consumer hat on. I own a Honda Civic, an Apple I-Pod and a Black & Decker cordless drill, three good products made by three very large corporations. These products are relatively cheap, very well made, and part of what I’m buying is faith the company will be around in five years if I need repairs or other support for these things.  A smaller company probably couldn’t provide low cost, high quality, products and promise they’d be around in the future.  When I fly I’m glad my airplane is made by Boeing or Airbus, and not some local startup company run by people working from their garage.

I’m not a fan of big in general, but there’s a case to be made that many excellent products come from big companies, some of which could never be made by smaller ones.

But there are some things that tend to happen when companies get big that are bad – and that’s what I’ll explore in the list below.

Why big companies suck:

  • The soul has left the building – All big companies start as small companies. But by the time a company hits the 500, 1000 or 50000 person mark, many of the people who made the small company successful have left, and their spirit left with them. You can have a financially successful company that is mostly banking on the ideas and successes of people who left years ago, but whose middle-managers take credit for what was mostly inherited the day they were hired. When things go bad, none of the ‘leadership’ has any of the tools required to fix, rebuild, or recreate the pattern of success that started it all.
  • Obsessive Optimization – When you have 5000 employees, or $500 million in revenue, fractions become significant. A .5%  increase in revenue is not a small thing, it’s a big thing. It can be bigger than many companies’ entire revue. And as companies age the culture looks to optimize and refine, eventually to a point where the good things that led to all the success have been whittled away. Managers at big companies often have more incentives to minimize costs, than to find new business or develop new ideas since minimize costs or optimizing an existing process are cheaper wins that show results in the short term. In an optimization centric culture, the myopic love of short term wins can makes long term improvements, which often require short term sacrifices, hard to pull off.
  • Addicted to bureaucracy -  I travel a great deal and visit with companies of all sizes. It’s fascinating to visit places where there are 20 people doing work I know is done by 3 or 4 at one of their competitors, often with better results. It’s bizarre to see smart, senior people who have forgotten it’s possible in this universe to make things happen without talking to a committee, filling out forms, or doing extensive market research. The bigger a company gets the more dependencies there are between decisions, which makes it natural for committees and approvals to grow in number.  I get that. But it’s typically easier to add processes than it is to remove them. Over time bigger companies accumulate process, it gets inherited, and no one can even imagine a world that’s lean or efficient. Big companies should have dedicated process simplifers, senior people who just run around, point our areas that can be leaner or simpler, or where line level employees should be more autonomous, to keep this tendency in check. Or once a year every manager should be forced to
  • They believe their own bullshit - Any large group of people functions because of shared beliefs, but ther are both positive and negative kinds of belief. The negative kinds are the ones that involve lies, distortions of truth, and a lack of perspective.  Company all-hands meetings can feel like politica rallies, where  a reality distortion field prevents any valid questions of the company from being mentioned, and all bad news or mistakes are whitewashed away. When you’re banned from using competitors products, even when they’re better, or not allowed to critique and criticize decisions even when they’re dumb and bad, it gets harder and harder for good ideas to rise because real thinking is prevented. When the party line is BS, the wise start to keep their mouth shut, and look for other jobs.
  • The Peter Principle – When you have several layers of management it’s entirely possible the manager isn’t contributing much, and the line level employees are mostly self-sustaining. If a manager inherits a successful team, a team self motivated to improve, and it does under his management, he may very well be promoted for simply being around at the right time.  There are many bad reasons people get promoted, and it’s more likely to happen in bigger companies, where there is more ambiguity about who is contributing what.
  • It’s hard to fire people - Big companies get sued more often because they have more money. And on the day a small company gets it’s first law suit for wrongful termination, or discrimination, everyone runs the numbers and concludes it’s cheaper, on paper, to prolong the process for firing people and increase the amount of paperwork about employees managers must create, than it is to lose lawsuits.  Performance evaluations, mid-year reviews, and all of that are heavily (but of course not entirely) motivated by lawsuit prevention and defense.
  • Corporations can be psychopaths - In 1886 the U.S. Surpreme court ruled that corporations were entitled to the same protections as people. This was a big deal. It made it possible for executives to make decisions on behalf of a corporation that were illegal, or ethically questionable, without being directly liable for them, and gave constitutional rights to entities that were not people.  Combined with the motive for profit, there are lines big corporations are lead to cross that no indivudal ever would, since the entity of the corporation is held responsible, and not necessarily the individual leaders.
  • Status quo / Follower mentality – The bigger a company gets, the more it’s main attractive power for new employees is job security, rather than opportunity to grow, learn or take risks. The Innovator’s dilemma is real, and leaders who have big sucess are often the last to recognize when it’s time to move on. For anyone interested in progress, risk taking, change or growth potential, a large company is incredibly frustrating, as the dominant psychology is one of play it safe and political correctness. A running joke at Microsoft used to be that the best way to get a product idea to ship at Microsoft was to have a competitor do it first.

The list can go on I’m sure – what did I miss?

  • By Scott Berkun on December 23rd, 2009
  • 24 Comments »
  • Making things happen

Everything is a project, even this

As often happens in life, when I meet people at a party or some work thing and they ask what I do, I tell them I write books. They ask what kind of books, and when I mention I wrote a book about project management they get all condescending. Why would you write a book about something as boring as project management? They ask.

To which, I often say.  Everything is a project.

And they say, what?

And I say, again, Everything is a project.

How did you get to this party? I ask. Well, that’s a project. How did you plan and deliver the last party you threw for others? That was a project too. The making of your home, the delivery of electricity and water to it, and the earning of wages to pay for all these things are all various forms of projects, or consist of activities roughly comparable to any definition of a project.

Then I say the kicker, project management is only as boring as the thing being managed.

On a good day, they they look at me for a long moment, frozen in that curiously goofy look of actually thinking that all of us make now and then, and then they say “Huh”. And then I ask them what they do, successfully completing the project of changing the conversation with a stranger at a party.

On a bad day, they conclude I am even more boring than they thought, and despite their full Martini in hand, excuse themselves to the bar to get a drink.

I wrote awhile ago about why project managers get no respect, and that’s because people who make a big deal out of the project-manageryness of their work, as opposed to the domain of the things they make (homes, software, films, cookies) come off as a kind of weenie, a pm-weenie if you will. They appear to be people who are more interested in schedules, budgets and methods than the results those tools help achieve, which is kind of weird.  It’s like the director of a bad movie who talks only about his fancy zoom lenses,  or that the film came in under-budget. They miss the point.

But the best project managers, including those people who do lead or manage things yet never use the pm title, somehow know instinctively that everything is a project. They know there needs to be a driving force of thinking, a constant source of social energy, a list or a table or a spreadsheet, that makes it easier for everyone to push their own small decisions forward, increasing the odds with every single effort that the results will be good. Good project managers aren’t even necessarily very organized, they know many ways to drive people forward and hold them to commitments, even without a GTD brain implant.

There are many ways to look at all that we do, but the project-centric view is quite potent. Everything in work, and many things in life, have a a goal, a set of constraints, some design challenges, a schedule, a few dependencies, some key relationships, etc.  And it’s hard  to be good at managing, leading, teaching, creating, making or building just about anything if you have absolutely zero skills at project management. To me, anyone who is a writer, a VP, a salesman, a film-maker, a teacher or an athlete does project management of a sort nearly all the time.

When I get stuck, at work or in personal life matters, or I see someone else who is blocked, I say, out loud, everything is a project. If I’m blocked, what are my goals? What are my assets? What are my liabilities? How can I divide this big thing I’m stuck on into smaller pieces, one of which I might be able to tackle? And sometimes just realizing there is a simple easy way to reframe anything into the form of a project is enough to get things moving again.

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