Making decisions is at the heart of what managers do.
That’s why one of the big things that gets all-too-many managers into trouble is NOT making a decision when one is desperately needed, as so many Yahoo workers discovered during the disastrous reign of CEO Jerry Yang. Yang was a terribly indecisive general who fiddled around and failed to make the kind of basic management decisions that the troops needed to help move the company ahead.
But this gets to another management truism: You gotta have a strong heart, supreme confidence and some pretty big balls (as they say on the TV show Wipeout) to make your decisions in public, where everybody and their brother gets to second-guess the call.
“Just when you thought the 2009 postseason umpiring couldn’t get any worse,” says a Yahoo Sports blogger named Duk (and so much for transparency in the media cesspool known as the blogosphere), “Tim McClelland goes ahead and makes what ends up as the worst call—or non-call—of all time. Yes, you read that right. The worst call of all time. Not just this postseason. Not this entire season. Not this decade. Not this century. I challenge you to think of one that was worse.”
Blogger Duk goes on to eviscerate umpire McClelland for the better part of 15 paragraphs. And as a sports fan who gets tired of the histrionics of arrogant, overpaid referees (Who goes to a game to watch them preen and overwhelm the action on the field?), I believe McClelland, the crew chief of this group of umpires, deserved it.
However, this made me wonder: How would you manage if every decision you made was televised to millions of people and analyzed endlessly by an army of pundits?
This is what paralyzes the Jerry Yangs of the world. It’s the inability to make a tough decision, or sometimes, any decision at all. Yet decision-making is one of the core functions of a leader and critical if the goal is to get the maximum out of the workforce.
“Decisions … are not made well by acclimation,” said the late, great management guru Peter Drucker, although Drucker also said that you needed healthy disagreement to really make sound decisions in the end.
I don’t think Drucker had Major League Baseball umpires in mind when he wrote that, but he’s right. The best decisions aren’t made by a committee, but rather, by a smart and insightful manager who takes in all the relevant data before ultimately making the call.
Still, most managers don’t make that call on national television for all to see. It’s why making big decisions in the public eye isn’t for the faint of heart, and it’s why major-league umpires like Tim McClelland gets paid as well as they do. It’s a thankless job on a public stage, and how many managers would want to submit to that?
That’s why I welcome Bartz’s challenge to a longstanding management task that long ago seemed to outlive its usefulness—the annual performance review.
“If I had my way I wouldn’t do annual reviews,” she told The New York Times, “[especially] if I felt that everybody would be more honest about positive and negative feedback along the way. I think the annual review process is so antiquated. I almost would rather ask each employee to tell us if they’ve had a meaningful conversation with their manager this quarter. Yes or no. And if they say no, they ought to have one. I don’t even need to know what it is. But if you viewed it as meaningful, then that’s all that counts.”
I’m with Bartz on this one. I am not a fan of the annual review process, mainly because of the focus on the “process.” The discussion with the employee isn’t the problem, but rather, what you must go through to get to that stage—the inflexible forms, the manual process and the lack of a good follow-up system that makes the evaluation truly meaningful.
I might feel differently if I had access to some slick software that automates the process—and I’m told by my HR vice president that it is coming in 2010—but in the meantime, it’s more about the process than it is about the communication with the worker.
The solution that Carol Bartz suggests—an ongoing process of discussion, review and coaching with the employee—makes a lot of sense but also takes a lot of time. That’s in short supply for a lot of managers as they cope with the effects of the Big, Bad Recession, but I think that Bartz has the right idea.
A just-in-time system for regular employee feedback might go a long way toward helping keep workers engaged as we all struggle with an economic environment that makes it tough to keep workers’ heads in the game.
“People should understand that they will learn more from a bad manager than a good manager,” she told the Times. “They tend to get into a cycle where they’re so frustrated that they aren’t paying attention actually to what’s happening to them. When you have a good manager things go so well that you don’t even know why it’s going well because it just feels fine. When you have a bad manager you have to look at what’s irritating you and say: ‘Would I do that? Would I make those choices? Would I talk to me that way? How would I do this?’ When people come to me and say, ‘I can’t work for so-and-so anymore,’ I say, ‘Well, what have you learned from so-and-so?’ People want to take a bad situation and say, ‘Oh, it’s bad.’ No, no. You have to deal with what you’re dealt.”
That’s the trick in life, isn’t it—“to deal with what you’re dealt.” Those are words of wisdom that all managers need to live by, in good times and in bad, because they are the very essence of what it takes to be a successful and effective manager.
There’s one thing for certain you can say about Google: The company has been built on making decisions that seem to leave everyone else scratching their heads.
“Google … holds a prime vantage point from which to observe economic trends,” the Times’ Steve Lohr wrote. “And Google, though perhaps not a stand-in for the economy as a whole, is starting to see a recovery. The company recently began hiring again and is looking for companies to buy—both activities that had been held in check for the last year.”
In other words, Google feels so confident about the pace of America’s economic recovery that the company is putting its money on the table and taking a roll of the dice.
However, from Google’s perspective, this is hardly a risky gamble.
“The worst [of the recession] is behind us, and we’re seeing aspects of recovery,” CEO Eric Schmidt told a group of reporters Wednesday, October 7, at the company’s offices in downtown Manhattan. “We’re increasing our investment and hiring rate in anticipation of a recovery.”
“I would hope we’re a leading indicator,” Schmidt said, and I think most everyone who understands that you really need hiring and job growth to truly get the economy going again would agree. Of course, this isn’t the first time Google has done what I would call anticipatory hiring, and that sort of thinking is, well, what makes Google so different from just about any other company anywhere.
But is it the sign we seek, the one that signals that the recovery is here? Who knows, really. I hope that Google’s actions are the start of something big, but one company starting to hire again does not mean the recovery is nigh.
Still, I like Google’s track record on stuff like this. Here’s hoping that Eric Schmidt and his gang in Silicon Valley are as skilful as economic prognosticators as they are in building a killer Web-search business.
If they are, I think they have a future in Washington, perhaps helping a guy named Ben Bernanke at a place called the Federal Reserve.
Here’s a new survey that is worth noting but that will not surprise any manager or executive who has a pulse: The deep cost-cutting that so many employers have been making to deal with the current economic crisis have “contributed to a sharp decline in the morale and commitment of their workers, especially top performers, according to an annual survey by Watson Wyatt, a leading global consulting firm, and WorldatWork, an international association of human resource professionals.”
Yes, if you have been managing and awake at all during this Big, Bad Recession, you know that A) organizations have been slashing budgets and cutting costs in order to survive; and, B) that such large-scale cost cutting tends to have a highly negative impact on the most critical part of your organization—your workforce.
According to the 2009/2010 U.S. Strategic Rewards Survey, “employee engagement levels for all workers at the companies surveyed have dropped 9 percent since last year and close to 25 percent for top performers. Additionally, 36 percent of top performers say their employer’s situation has worsened in the past 12 months and the number who would recommend others take jobs at their company has declined by nearly 20 percent. Compared with last year, top-performing employees are 26 percent less likely to be satisfied with advancement opportunities at their company. They are also 14 percent less likely to want to remain with their company versus take a job elsewhere.”
In addition, the survey found that “high-performing employees are 29 percent less confident in management’s ability to grow the business. And 41 percent believe that pay and benefit changes made by their employer in the past year have had a negative effect on work quality and customer service.”
“The fallout from the actions employers have taken in response to the recession is now coming to light, and it is significant,” said Laura Sejen, global director of strategic rewards consulting at Watson Wyatt, in what seems like a bit of an understatement. “Having less engaged and committed workers is a major concern for employers. This could have a long-lasting and detrimental impact on productivity, quality and customer service, as well as an increase in the risk of companies losing their best employees.”
From my perspective as editor of a publication that closely follows how organizations manage their workforce, this survey simply puts a spotlight on what many have seen for some time: that there is going to be a long-term impact on organizations due to the sometimes cavalier, sometimes ham-fisted and often less-than-skillful ways that some businesses have chosen to cope with the worst economic downturn in 75 years.
I’ve argued recently that businesses everywhere need to truly engage workers and help them get past the bad feelings that so many have about their organizations and their jobs. With a possible economic recovery on the horizon, it is time for America’s business leaders to step up and start helping America’s workforce out of its funk.
The Watson Wyatt/WorldatWork Strategic Rewards Survey should be a wake-up call for all employers that there will be fallout from all that has happened during this downturn long after we are back in a strong recovery mode. And as bad as the results of this survey are, here’s something to keep in mind: The survey was conducted in May, more than three months ago. My guess is that these survey results would be much, much worse had they been taken in July or August—and if you’re a manager, that’s a scary prospect to contemplate.
Never let it be said that I like to dwell only on bad news. As a longtime member of America’s workforce, I’ve been zinged, zapped and zipped by the Big, Bad Recession just like everyone else. And that’s why I am grateful for whatever positive workforce-related news that I can find.
Here’s what I’m talking about, courtesy of global consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide and its latest survey on the “Effect of the Economic Crisis on HR Programs”: The number of employers planning to reverse salary cuts and freezes and restore matching contributions to 401(k) plans has increased in the past two months, according to a survey that was conducted this month with 175 large, U.S.-based employers.
Key findings include:
• Some 33 percent of employers that froze salaries plan to unfreeze them within the next six months, up from 17 percent two months ago.
• Forty-four percent say they plan to roll back salary cuts in the next six months, compared with 30 percent two months ago.
• Twenty-four percent of employers plan to reverse reductions to 401(k) match contributions in the next six months, versus 5 percent in June.
• Seventy-one percent of respondents have made some changes to their 2010 health care plan because of the economic crisis. The most commonly reported changes include increasing deductibles, co-pays or out-of-pocket maximums (41 percent) and increasing the percentage of premiums paid by the employee (40 percent).
In other words, although salary freezes may start coming off, increases in employee costs for health care benefits this year are probably going to stick around.
“Some employers are seeing the light at the end of tunnel and feeling optimistic about the prospect of improved business results,” said Laura Sejen, global director of strategic rewards consulting at Watson Wyatt, in a news release about the survey. “However, even as some of the program cuts are rolled back, many employees are facing smaller raises, lower bonuses and higher health care costs.”
That’s a sobering reality to keep in mind. Yes, there are signs that the recession has bottomed out and that things will start getting better, but it is going to be a long, slow climb back. We will all continue to feel the pinch for months—and as I pointed out yesterday, perhaps even many years—to come.
= Member Only
