I’m speaking at an HR conference in Istanbul next month, a leading turkish newspaper wanted to do an interview by email about happiness at work. They sent me some great questions, which I answered as best I could. The best part about great questions is that they leave you and the questioner wiser.
Below are the questions and my answers, which contain some of our basic thoughts on happiness at work.
John Abrams, President of South Mountain Company, tells the story of how the company became employee-owned:
In 1987 I sold my business, South Mountain Company, to my employees (and myself)… Shared ownership and control is our method at South Mountain. “Every employee, an owner” is our intention. More than half of our thirty employees are full owners. Each time another comes in, and each time a new management invention encourages more voices to be heard, we move steadily toward the goals of democracy, fairness, and transparency.
Among the advantages: Commitment, effectiveness, productivity. Read the whole story here.
It’s nice to see that Fast Company agrees with me on the values and pitfalls of metrics :o)
Here’s a current Fast Company article on the “what gets measured gets done” thinking.
And here’s one I wrote a while back, and a more recent one.
Fast Company:
In fact, the jobs that are most effectively reduced to single quantities are the ones that are the most one dimensional. The broader a person’s responsibilities, the more complex and subjective the evaluation. Measures become more ambiguous. There are more stakeholders with a wider range of needs. Evaluations come at specific points in time, but there are always short-term versus long-term tradeoffs. In the face of such complexity, do you want to motivate only what is measurable?
Me:
And this is the whole point: In all organizations, much of the work done and much of the value created is unmeasured and maybe even unmeasureable. Let’s say a person has a great day, and spreads a good mood in his department. Can you measure that? No! Is it important? Certainly! It can have a significant impact on that departments productivity… So what get’s measured is not what get’s done. There’s so much else being done that has huge impact on your organization, which will never be measured. We must learn to live with this!
Can you know something, that you haven’t measured? Of course you can. I would actually argue, that by far the largest percentage of what you know about the current state of your organization was not something you measured – it was knowledge that came to you via some other process than objective metrics. A few recents posts in different weblogs have been talking around this topic.
On Intellectual Capital Punishment Sam Marshall (via Smart Meeting Design) wrote about an article in Financial Times:
What did disappoint me though, was the quote from HP’s CKO, Craig Samuel: ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’. Shame on him for using such an outdated cliche. It reinforces the view that management is something you do with spreadsheets. He should be pushing an agenda that changes expectations about what information you need to manage, relying much more on trusting perceptions and qualitative evidence.
On Reforming Project Management Hal Macomber wrote that:
When a supervisor, manager, or organization declares measurements people will quickly adjust their behavior to correspond to their understanding of the measurements… But most organizations have too many measurements… the practice of establishing these measurements keeps management detached from the exactly the operations that they are interested in performing well. Try something else: forego the measurements. Get engaged instead.
Chris Corrigan took a more political perspective and wrote that:
How do I know I have four apples? I count them. This is notable because the subjective truths, the good and the true (in Wilber’s terms) are truths that only exist if you participate in them… To simply sit back and accept the measured approach (pun intended) is to give up responsibility for the truth, and to become complicit in the system that generates that truth from outside of its subjects.
I was thinking about this when a thought struck me that may be painfully obvious to everyone else, but seemed kinda interesting to me. I thought that there are two reasons why we measure anything:
1: To know
2: To become aware
Measuring something will ideally give me concrete, specific knowledge, but it will also affect whatever it is that I’m measuring. Remember the experiments they performed in the car industry (in the 50’s I think) where they modified working conditions to increase productivity? For instance, they turned up the lighting in an area, and that made the workers more efficient. They tried dimming the lights in another area and, strangely, this also increased productivity! What affected the workers’ productivity in these cases was not more or less light, it was a couple of guys with clipboards in the background constantly taking notes. (On a side note, the notion that you can’t measure anything in a system without affecting the system is also a consequence of the uncertainty principle in quantum physics.)
So metrics aren’t bad. Not at all. The problem comes mostly when metrics are seen as the only way to increase knowledge and awareness – eg. when HP’s CKO, Craig Samuel says ‘If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it’.
The question then becomes whether you will allow yourself to trust knowledge obtained without objective metrics and, frankly, I believe that not to do so is absurd. I would even take it one step further, as I did in a previous post and say that most of the important stuff that goes on in an organization is
a) Not measured
b) Not even measureable
Metrics are used to generate both awareness and knowledge, but to treat metrics as the only trustworthy source is absurd!
This book is Harrison Owens second book about Open Space, and it contains stories of how he arrived at the concept of Open Space, and of how it has helped and transformed various organizations.
Also, the book touches on time, or rather on our perception of it. All we really have is now. The past is over, the future hasn’t yet begun. But how long is that now? A week? A year? An instant?
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I’m currently reading Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The book is about that state of consciousness where everything just flows. Where the gears mesh smoothly, there are no distractions, you loose track of time, and it feels really good.
You can achieve flow at work or in your free time. Concert violinists and mountain climbers can find flow, but so can school teachers and assembly line workers.
In one of the early chapters, he lists the requirements for flow, one of which is “clear goals and feedback”. It’s easier to enjoy what you do when you immediately know if you’re doing it right. Which is bad news for many people in the workplace, because quite often, the actions we take in the workplace does not have clear goals or fast feedback. Often we won’t know for days or month whether what we’re doing works.
But there’s a way around that, and I think it revolves around values.
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I’ve heard it often: What get’s measured get’s done. It’s especially popular among proponents of Balanced Scorecards and similar management tools.
I think it’s wrong. Click more and I’ll tell you why I think so.
Well first of all, what does the statement mean? Most often it’s used as a reason to measure performance in your organization, so it has several meanings:
1: If you want to make sure that something is done, you need to measure it.
2: You can adequately measure results
3: You can know the state of your organization through measurements
I disagree. It’s not that measurements in an organization are superfluous – it’s just never the whole truth.
Here’s why I disagree with the statement:
If you only accept the results that you can measure (and most people who tout the statement do), then the statement becomes a tautology and thus is meaningless. It then says in effect that “What get’s measured is what we have measured”. So (and this is pretty funny) this statement only makes sense, if you accept the existence of non-measured results.
And this is the whole point: In all organizations, much of the work done and much of the value created is unmeasured and maybe even unmeasureable. Let’s say a person has a great day, and spreads a good mood in his department. Can you measure that? No! Is it important? Certainly! It can have a significant impact on that departments productivity.
Let’s say a project comes in on time and on budget. You can (and probably will measure that, as well you should). Maybe that project cost one of the key workers her marriage. Will that be measured? No! Is it important? Well, when she resigns in three months, it will be!
So what get’s measured is not what get’s done. There’s so much else being done that has huge impact on your organization, which will never be measured. We must learn to live with this!
Complexity science is appearing more and more often in business literature (and just about everywhere else). This book with the subtitle “unleashing the power of complexity science for business success” shows a better way to manage organizations than the old command-and-control way, and describes some of the tools needed to get there. It helped put me on to the “joy at work” project.
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The fifth discipline by Peter M. Senge is one of those books that truly make a difference. It is referred to in many different contexts, and it played an important role in shaping the concepts of the learning organization.
“It’s very, very good. It’s incredibly well written, full of insights, and there are exercises to improve your own happiness at work. You can’t ask for more than that!”
– David Maister, author of Practice What You Preach
“What an inspiring book. Every leader should read it. This type of leadership has been integral to our success and I know it will boost your results too.“
– Garry Ridge, CEO WD-40 Company
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