by William Barclay | Jan 11, 2023 | Management, networking
Networking – Do You Chooze the Scmooze?
Is networking slimy? Is it an effective behaviour in the workplace? Is it ethical? Is it right to schmooze? The issue polarises opinion.
Networking means developing and maintaining contacts with other individuals within the organisation and without the organisation in related business activities. It can be regarded as incorporating two very different behaviours: maintaining acquaintanceship and employing schmooze. Acquaintanceship means periodically keeping in contact with individuals for mutual information sharing that may assist both parties and their organisations. Schmooze means interactions with others that are apparently friendly and supportive but which are designed to impress and manipulate them in order to gain personal favours.
Acquaintanceship is based on a wish by individuals to improve their performance by receiving information and advice. It is open and honest; manipulation is absent. It can simply involve periodic phone calls or emails or other communications – not necessarily in person meetings. It can provide a wider information base for individuals to use in their work, reassurance, and ideas for overcoming difficulties. It is not used politically to disadvantage others. When organisations identify mentors – trusted advisors – to support individuals it becomes a formal process. Mentorship can be powerful but unfortunately skilled mentors are not easy to find. Acquaintanceship provides wide benefits. Individuals who find it difficult should resolve to try to develop an aptitude for it.
Schmooze choosers are interested in organisational politics. They are fully accepting of a view expressed by management professor Kathleen Reardon that talent and hard work alone do not get people to the top. They seek out individuals, usually senior staff, who exercise power and influence and provide them with unconditional friendship and support with an ulterior motive of gaining personal advantage. The contacts are used to pursue personal objectives and often to weaken the position of others who have less supportive personal relationships. Skilled schmoozers are possessed of antennae sensitive to the schmooze receptiveness of others allowing them to focus their activity.
From the personal perspective of those doing it, schmooze often works. It can result in a variety of rewards including promotions, appointments, bonuses and the awarding of special responsibilities. Its proponents may not often speak of their motivations but may believe that in organisations with an existing schmooze culture in which advancement is influenced by relationships as much as abilities they are needlessly disadvantaging themselves by not participating. However there are real risks. Organisational change may result in future rewards depending on individuals who disapprove of schmooze. A conspicuous schmoozer may be unpopular with her peers and damage trust and cooperation. There may exist staff members who regard it as unethical and are repelled by it.
So when it comes to schmooze, you do have to choose.
by William Barclay | Nov 23, 2022 | Management, performance gaming, Popular, Targets
Has the Law of Unintended Consequences ever been better illustrated than through the use of management targets? They continue to have widespread use in both public and private enterprises. Ingenuity has no bounds in applying them to different aspects of performance: profit, efficiency, return on capital, timeliness, customer retention rates, staff retention rates and staff attitudes to mention just a few. And the use of targets appears frequently to encourage changes in management approach in a directive and often aggressive direction. There is no shortage of reports of dire consequences for individuals, team and business functions who have allegedly failed to achieve their targets. But this culture is now sufficiently long-lived for a panoply of negative impacts to have become apparent. Let’s consider some of them.
Targets may:
* be misaligned with desired outcomes and as a result misshape and degrade productive effort
* give rise to a variety of gaming approaches resulting in significant dysfunction and degradation of staff culture
* damage the standing and reputation of leaders and managers whose use of targets does not accord with their espoused values
* give rise to levels of stress far above those that might be normal in working life causing lowered morale, increased sickness absence and higher staff turnover rates
* diminish motivation amongst public services staff for whom the public service ethos has meaning
* lower the status of the front-line production/service delivery function relative to other functions within an organisation whose staff are not subject to such a harsh environment
Management-by-targets carries an assumption that the targets can adequately represent real priorities. But resources may be diverted to those aspects of activity that carry targets, damaging other areas of activity. Furthermore it can be more difficult to assign targets to the quality of outputs than the quantity.
Many examples of targets giving rise to gaming have been reported, in other words modifying working practices so as to give an apparent improvement through target metrics but not an improvement experienced by clients. This includes re-assigning resources to target-bearing outcomes to a degree that is bound to degrade non-target-bearing outcomes. Processes may be changed to produce an apparent improvement in timeliness but only by artificially making job start times later or finish times earlier. ‘Working to a target’ can result in deliberately slowing activity once a target has been met – the threshold effect; or continuing activity but not recording it until the start of the next reporting period. The reported staff capacity of a work centre may be artificially lowered when targets are proportional to staff capacity.
Failures to meet targets can be associated with sanctions against teams and individuals, sometimes as serious as dismissal. Management theorists
who claim that fear is a poor motivator are wrong. It was no surprise when a survey by the Chartered Institute of Professional Development in 2018 identified stress as the single most important factor for long-term sickness absence in the UK public sector.
There are likely to be more operational pressures in a targets regime on direct delivery staff than on staff in support functions. This is a likely cause of discontent for operational staff. A possible consequence is that operational staff seek moves to other functions damaging delivery capabilities.
The public service ethos can be eroded by a targets culture. It means motivation from a sense of working for the public good, and fulfilment from following principles of thoroughness and neutrality. These personal impacts can be suppressed by a targets culture that produces a commoditisation and narrowing of service provision.
The impact of targets on employees is compounded by league tables – performance data published periodically through which different workgroups can be compared. This is likely to add a new and particularly keenly-felt type of pressure. There are four possible combinations of outcomes depending on targets compliance and league table positions:
Targets failure – League position poor – Calamity
Targets failure – League position good – Comeback
Targets success – League position poor – Comedown
Targets success – League position good – Clover
Low positions in league tables are often more impactful than targets failure – they are seen to be an indication that it is possible for the workgroup to perform better but they have failed to do so. This can depress morale and accentuate rivalries, damaging organisational culture. If the behaviour of leaders and senior managers does not support an espoused culture of support and cooperation, trust can be damaged or even destroyed.
Experience shows that targets can have a place but they need to be few and true. When employed they need to be small in number and carefully related to the real priorities of the organisation. And they should be used sensibly, with an understanding of their impact on staff, and kept fully in alignment with the espoused organisational culture.
by William Barclay | Oct 16, 2022 | Management, Training and Development
Staff Training – Do you Like It or Hump It?
Staff training and development has its champions and many dedicated practitioners. But in many organisations their messages are still to take hold so as to create a critical momentum. There is no shortage of evidence of the benefits: increased productivity, better customer service, reduced employee turnover, and improved company culture. Turbulence in the working environment is resulting in new opportunities and challenges: the digital revolution is allowing much more flexible and tailored training delivery; the pace of change is creating a need for more frequent upskilling; and the recognition is increasing that training can be a competitive differentiator as a means of attracting talent. So why are training and development still not more frequently central in operational strategies? It’s necessary to take a step back and consider fundamental prevailing attitudes. The inconvenient reality is that many managers starting in the job possess little enthusiasm for it. It can be said that there still exists the ‘Training Hump’ – attitudes that have a variety of causes. Training can be taken to imply accountability: managers might fear that putting in place training schemes makes them more clearly accountable for the capabilities and performance levels of the workforce. They might worry that training others might in due course create an enhanced risk to their own position. They might perceive that they have achieved some personal success despite having received only limited training so why should it be different for others? They might question the effectiveness of formal training or have concerns about the cost. The possibility that time and money will have been wasted if trained staff leave the organisation might be a further concern. These attitudes can often be demonstrated in the Staff Performance Review Skew – the process is often much more taken up by appraising other staff rather than with the identification of their future training and development needs. This attitudinal underbelly exists and persists but is not acknowledged by managers themselves or the organisations they work for. It may not even be recognised. But the inability to develop staff capabilities in line with needs is a route to failure. Whole-organisation skills strategies require the development of an emphatic training and development culture having advocacy from senior management and widespread ownership. If significant attitudinal resistance exists, particularly on the part of first-line and middle management, it needs to be strongly addressed. The message is clear: training and development – like it, don’t hump it!
by William Barclay | Sep 22, 2022 | Management
The Introvert/Extrovert Debate – Let’s Have the Intro!
The intro/extro debate goes on! What are the relative merits of extroverts and introverts as managers – always with a subtext of ‘can introverts really be good managers?’ But the fact that it’s still being discussed so frequently reveals a big truth: the value of introverts as managers is grossly underestimated. In many workplace situations they perform more effectively than extroverts. Here below is the reality from my experience in the English public services – not a scientific survey but conclusions based on many years’ wide professional experience.
Whilst many features of performance are not unique to either personality type there are some aspects that are more strongly associated with one rather than the other. Of course personalities can change with age and staff may behave differently in different workplace situations. But some major differences do occur, so to consider them let’s think about those individuals whose characteristics lie in the top thirty per cent at either end of the introversion-extroversion scale.
Introverts are likely to possess these advantages:
- a more consistent focus on the task in hand, and a willingness to persist in the face of difficulties
- more interest in the design and development of processes and workflows, something that extroverts may find a little tedious
- a disposition more likely to inspirit trust in others
- better judgement of the character and abilities of others, a particular weakness of some extroverts
- a deeper analytical approach to general workplace issues
- a lesser tendency to allow ‘Dark Triad’ characteristics of narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellism to impact on others. Such impacts are more likely to result from the behaviour of extroverts.
Extroverts are likely to posses these advantages:
- better performance in representative roles when dealing with peer organisations, clients and outside bodies
- a wider breadth of perspective on organisational issues with likely fewer blind spots than introverts
- more effectiveness in dealing with short-term projects, recovery situations and emergencies
- a greater propensity to belong to formal and informal networks within the organisation potentially assisting business coordination and benefitting their own careers. There may be a marked opposite tendency for introverts
- a greater tendency to make necessary trade-offs between pressing exigencies and over-formal compliances.
Of course these characteristics have been selected as those for which the most marked differences are apparent. Many others will be common to both introverts and extroverts. But there is a very clear key message: introverts can provide many important contributions that extroverts cannot. In particular – and contrary to much generality of opinion – they can be excellent managers of people. They can provide strengths in strategy development, business process and efficiency programmes, and organisational cultural improvement. Any organisation that consciously or unconsciously is suppressing the involvement of introverts in management is likely to be depriving the organisation of skill sets that can directly impact on top-line performance. So it’s time for the debate to end. Extroverts and introverts – they are both needed in management. But in the face of some apparent attitudes at the present time it’s necessary to emphasise – Let’s have the intro!
by William Barclay | Sep 19, 2022 | Teamwork
Team leaders need to possess creativity. Creativity in the setting of team roles and the appointment of staff to them is the single most important determinant of team success. Maintaining teams is not just a procedural matter – creativity needs to be continual. Key abilities for leaders to possess are the design or modification of team roles and the fitting of individuals to them. All too often team leaders stick to historic role structures and staff placement policies. Roles must be regularly reviewed in the light of the performance metrics of the team and the softer feedback gained from team members. When areas of underperformance are identified, elements of workgroup processes can be redesigned and new appointments considered. Mapping business processes can assist. Where are difficulties and bottlenecks occurring? What is not being done that needs to be done? Is there scope for transferring certain small workflow tasks common to many staff to single members of staff to achieve a better focus? What causes frustrations? What do team members complain about? Complaints from team members about other team members may be a roles issue. What can you discern that team members are concerned about even if the views are not openly expressed? A further step is that in some situations roles can be designed on the basis of the particular skills and interests of team members – so long as the roles so can be effectively integrated with others. In making appointments, team leaders need a good understanding of team members – their skills, their attitudes and interests, and crucially their potential. A good team leader should not be afraid of making role appointments that surprise others. Of course the duties and responsibilities of the roles and where they begin and end must always be made clear to all team members. And the great thing is that even small changes to roles and appointments can refresh a team and produce real benefits: small change-big win situations are often looked for but not so often found. Team leaders – you have got to role with it!
More about the development of teams can be found in the book ‘Targets and Terror – England’s Public Services Management Revolution’ by William Barclay www.amazon.co.uk/Targets-Terror-Englands-Management-Revolution/dp/1916035388
