In the 1970’s, New York City was run by a gentleman named Ed Koch, who had an interesting habit. He’d visit subway stations or popular intersections throughout the city, and ask residents heading to and from work, “How am I doin’?” This scenario became legend.
When I was a young executive in a large corporation, our president would visit various departments throughout the day, and ask employees things like, “How are you?” or “Are you working on anything exciting?” or “How can the corporation help you?”
I first thought these were examples of leaders being polite, or maybe just “attention seekers,” or maybe even managers who didn’t have much else to do. What I didn’t realize was that I was witnessing a brilliant leadership tactic.
In “Excellence in Business” (1982), author Tom Peters expands on this style, known as MBWA, or “management by walking around.” This is where heads of departments, or business owners, would walk throughout their facilities at random, speaking with employees, initiating discussions about productivity and operations. This improved morale, gave the employees a sense of purpose and comradery, and, in some occasions, actually improved the effectiveness of the department.
This was a complete 360 degree turnaround from traditional management styles, where the CEO’s would stay inside their corner office and let the employees, or department reports, come to them. Or, evaluate their success using reports from grim faced analysts who grilled employees about travel expenses being 5% over the year before.
This brings us to the big discussion around the water cooler: are analytics supplementing or replacing decision making responsibilities? As a society, we’re losing track of the “MBWA” style; we’re forgetting the value of a shared purpose, appropriate measurement standards, and an engagement in the assigned task; all of which are principles of achieving success.
Consider this:
Everyone is agreed that we need to evaluate teacher performance and student progress. However, this need has been translated into untested and confusing formulas, without clear and defined goals. The absurdity of the current effort is evidenced by the reports of teachers fixing grades and the accusations of bias in existing systems. Don’t forget the time and effort spent on preparing for tests, rather than teaching for life.- Corporate evaluation systems have experienced similar problems. In the April, 2015 edition of Harvard Business Review (Reinventing Performance Management), we read about how Deloitte replaced a very complicated evaluation systems with a much simpler process to involve the employee and provide growth for the individual. Of particular interest was the discovery that evaluations that rely on a rating system usually tell more about the one doing the rating, than the one being rated.
- Finally, customer service has become inundated with quantitative and technical tools to both improve the process and provide evaluations. Unfortunately, these efforts generally ignore corporate cultures, polices, and the need for empowerment to let staff help solve problems. For example, consider recalls of defective products when companies know the problem cannot be resolved by courteous service or surveys.
Analytics, measurement, technology, and objectivity are critical. They have led to tremendous performance improvements in a wide range of organizations, from google analytics, even to sports. However, they need to be viewed as guides and tools to improve decision making, and should not be viewed as the ultimate decision maker. A few suggestions will keep this in perspective:
- Just like the examples found at the beginning of this blog, analytics requires random observations, the interactions between the boss and the worker, and an understanding of the task at hand with all its variables.
- Organizational goals and processes are complex and require integrated solutions. Concerns like bias, cause and effect, risk and uncertainty, time frame, etc., all need to be evaluated in any objective approach.
- Most important, we need to remember the goal of analytic support, and that is to improve performance, profits, and other goals. We need to ensure that the analytics don’t become the goal (i.e., teachers teaching to fix test results), and that we measure what really counts.
Dr. Bert Shlensky is president of www.startupconnection.net and his ability, along with his team to help businesses develop integrated customer-focused marketing programs that are key to business startup success.
