106th Edition
Mind-freeing exercises
I’ve written several blogs in the past about the decline in trust within our country and the growing dependency on technology. I’ve suggested that these two trends are correlated. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal, “Bosses Don’t Need a ‘What Did You Do’ email. They’re Already Tracking You,” added additional support to a causal relationship between increased use of technology, or nano-managing, and a decline in trust within corporations. In the article, Deidre Paknad, CEO of WorkBoard, boasts that by utilizing technology, “companies have moved on from weekly status reports and into real-time accountability.” Really? Is real-time accountability a good thing? Today, most young parents I know use baby monitors. They can monitor what their babies are doing in real time. Why does that seem reasonable? Because they are babies and are years away from being self-sufficient and responsible for themselves. I’m guessing Miss Paknad’s employees have advanced beyond that stage…
When I was managing equity portfolios, some of my best investment ideas came to me while I was working out. I’m not sure why, but it happened routinely. Twenty minutes on the stairclimber, or six sets of hexbar deadlifts and an answer to my investment dilemma would suddenly appear. I can only wonder, what message a real-time accountability monitoring system might have sent to my boss during these my mind-freeing workouts…
I guess in a mindless job, a real-time accountability system might be beneficial. I’ve had those kinds of jobs before. During one summer in high school I worked on the town roads and public areas as part of the town maintenance department. One day they dropped two of us off several miles outside of town to mow the grass in one of the oldest cemeteries in the county. In no time at all, both of us ran over 18th century gravestones that had fallen over, breaking the blades on each mower. There was no way to fix the mowers, no way to notify our boss, as this was way before cell phones and out in the hinterlands there wasn’t a pay phone in sight. We could have used a real-time accountability system, but they didn’t exist at the time. Stuck in the cemetery with two broken mowers until the foreman came to pick us up at the end of the day we did what any teenage boy would do… We ate our lunch and took a long nap.
For jobs that take some thought, which require creativity, or an innovative mindset, a different approach makes more sense. Corporations that have been successful in fostering creativity and innovation have fewer controls and absolutely zero real-time accountability systems. What they do have is trust and a common vision. With both of these in place, there is no need for monitoring, certainly not real-time. However, it is necessary to offer occasional encouragement, collaboration, personal interaction, discussion and debate. Servant Leadership promotes all these things. Conversely, nano-management, or management-by-metric, tends to foster distrust, gamesmanship, and insincerity.
There is an exciting new book coming out later this year by retired Brigadier General Mark Towne titled, “Build Trust First.” It will be a must read for all corporate leaders. In the meantime, I thought I would offer a few ways managers can determine the productivity and efficiency of their employees without destroying trust.
#1 – Set realistic long-term goals that are consistent with the overall vision of the organization. In many cases, the best way to be successful in the short run is to focus on the long run. In most situations, setting daily, weekly, or even monthly goals is counterproductive.
#2 – Trust is a two-way street. If you expect people to trust you, then you must be trustworthy.
#3 – Anyone who proves to be dishonest must be let go immediately, no matter how important they are to the firm’s bottom line. Keeping them for economic reasons will destroy trust.
I thought of all this without using ChatGPT. More on that once I figure out what it is…
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Michael Kayes
*These views are my personal opinions and are not the viewpoints of any company or organization.