Canada's productivity challenge has been known for some time. Put simply, we place 17
th out of the 24
OECD nations, and the fact that we are so high can be explained more by our inexhaustible supply of natural resources during a time of resource
undersupply than it can by the efforts of those going to the workplace. We either don't work very hard, or the hard work that we do do is not efficient. As usual, I suspect that the answer is somewhere in the middle.
But, on Tuesday I came face-to-face with Canada's productivity problem. I was on the GO
Train's Lakeshore West line going from Union Station to
Oakville at 1:43pm in the afternoon and the train was...packed to capacity! At 1:43pm in the afternoon. Many of them looked like office workers on the way home from the office.
After I'd been sitting for awhile, waiting for the departure time, the train started to fill up.
A jovial fellow sat down next to me a few minutes before the train was about to leave, remarking about the "full house! It looks like nobody works anymore!". How right. He smelled like alcohol and had a red face. He looked like a middle management type. He then got on the Blackberry, as many middle managers do these days, and started wheeling through e-mails, making random phone calls about whether or not this or that person had received his e-mail, and intertwining this with personal phone calls (whose nature was made obvious to most people on the train). By the time I got off at
Oakville, he hadn't left the Blackberry alone once. He was still on when I had to get off.
And when I got back to
Oakville, I stopped off at Toys R Us on the way home. I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
Managers on their Blackberries doing what looked like "working while shopping". I'm sure most of these were "working from home". What other explanation would they give? You can't be an effective manager like this. It just doesn't work. And it's not good for employee morale when you see the manager clock off at 1pm while you're stuck in the office striving toward the unrealistic deadline they've rammed forth that was in no way based on your thoughtful input, and mostly based on the fact that they knew 1 month ago that it was due, but forgot to tell you until a week prior and hadn't done their part of the work effort by that time, either.
So, is this what "work" has come to? Forwarding e-mails and then making sure that the recipient received them? If it is, I can't really say that I'm all that surprised (beside an initial, brief "click" of shock when I realized that the problem was more widespread than I thought), because I've seen it myself. "Management" in a lot of places has become little more than attending mysterious meetings, not divulging much of their content to your staff, and spending as little time as possible with the people that you manage. While the traditional role of management was to shield employees from the bureaucracy of the organization so that they could be more efficient in getting their work done, much of this administration is now downloaded onto the staff. And you're not supposed to ask the obvious: "what do these people do?". I've tried it before. The response is usually something along the lines of "things that we don't see", coloured with accents of discomfort and "don't go there".
It's disappointing, because management is such a valuable role when done well. Managers and project managers, when they are good, can inspire and invoke admiration often and easily. I've felt that inspiration before, and it's a very hard job to do. But, I don't see it done well very often: many gladly take the title but don't have any interest in the responsibilities that go along with the rights. More often than not, the manager's unbridled personality is applied to a situation -- brain still in the
shrinkwrap -- they dub it their "management style", and that's that. Essentially, you're witnessing a natural
genius at work. As with the monarchy, they are simply genetically superior for the job. It's so painful to watch if you've seen a genuinely good manager at work that applies thought, forethought, and careful direction of the things entrusted in their care.
So, what do I consider to be a good manager? I'm not an expert, obviously. But I think that managers should ask more questions, and listen to their staff when they reply. Not just nod and "yeah", but actually process what's being said and imprint it on their map. They should ask questions. They should recognize that they are often not the experts of the details, and that not understanding something is not a reason to deem it "simple" and therefore easily accomplished in 1/5
th of the time you suggest, or "too complex" and therefore not valuable. All too common are the managers that have no clue what their employees are actually doing.
I also think that, rather than just forward e-mails, managers should interpret them and add a bit of "what does this mean to us?" to the mixture. Anything they have to say is worth telling because you have no idea what questions it will answer for who. But, nothing, or cryptic
addendums that are only meaningful in your inner circle are not helpful. We don't need that because a computer can a better job of it. As is their traditional role, too, they should also be shielding their employees from the bureaucracy of the organization so that they can focus on their work.
A good project manager does not schedule a project implementation for the first long weekend of the summer and then, a few days before the implementation is set to go ahead, advise his project team that he won't be available that weekend but to go ahead without him anyway.
Good managers also fight for their teams. They fight for reasonable recognition of those that do well and ensure that people on their team are treated fairly. When something unreasonable is downloaded onto them, they risk their own position to tell the delivery boy that what's being asked is unreasonable and that it needs to be reconsidered. They first have to know that this is true, of course, which is usually the first challenge if you don't know what your team is actually doing. And someone who will agree without knowing is not likely to be someone that will go back and say that they made a mistake for that reason. They don't want to attract attention, either, because the deeper failings may become more obvious. Another thing good managers don't do is to pit team members against each other and create a culture of distrust so that the only one you'll trust will be them. It never works.
And a lot of managers don't do these things above. I'm sure you can tell, by inference, that they do the opposite. And those that get to replace them will be most accepting of this.
They will aspire to the day when they can treat their employees the same way that they were treated when they had a manager like that.And those that aren't accepting of this, but are of genuine benefit to the organization, will leave. Slowly, one by one, they'll trickle out the front door. It may take 10 years until you notice the absolute effect of this. I assume there's a tipping point when so many good people leave that the ability of the organization to operate as a going concern becomes genuinely at risk. But I haven't witnessed such a thing in my life so far.
So, aside from the obvious fact that these people are being paid large salaries and don't appear to really be doing anything (which is a drain on productivity -- a measure of the amount of work accomplished per dollar spent), when managers employ the
anti-management practices derived from the above, they also make the teams that they manage less productive. They cause confusion, create mental friction, and throw all kinds of related and unrelated things in the way of their employees being able to concentrate on their jobs with clear, focused, and willing minds. In this, too, lies a more severe productivity drain.
From two angles, you see, when we are talking about productivity, it would be better if they were not there at all.
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