I spoke at an HR leadership event. An earnest young man was waiting for me when I came down the steps from the stage.
"Great talk!" he said. "Very inspirational."
"Thanks!" I said. "Now I need a cup of tea."
"I'll get it for you!" he said. The young man was very sweet -- bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, as we used to say.
He came back with the tea and said, "I love what you said about leadership and culture. I work for a company that sells a leadership tool."
"What kind of tool?" I asked.
"It's a software product," he said. "It tells a manager which websites his employees have visited and how long they spent on each site. That way, if someone is spending too much time on web browsing, their manager can coach them on it."
"That's a leadership tool?" I asked. "How does the software work?"
"When people spend too much time on YouTube or Facebook, it tracks all that," said the young man. "At the end of every day the manager gets a report that shows him or her every employee's web browsing for the day."
"OK, I understand," I said. "That's not a leadership tool. It's a sneaky Big Brother-type tool that lets managers bust their employees for taking mental-health breaks. Any manager that is paying attention will see his employee's results. If the results are great -- if the employee is getting their work done -- who cares how many YouTube videos they watch? If a great employee takes a YouTube break every five minutes, then YouTube is part of their recipe for success."
"But if a person is spending too much time not doing their work, a manager needs to know," protested the earnest young man.
"A manager who is paying attention will know if a person isn't doing their work without your company's software," I said. "People need breaks. I certainly do. I take breaks all the time. I'd hate to think that if I had a boss, that person would be snooping on my web-browsing activities. Either my manager trusts me to get my work done, or they don't."
"It's easier to trust people when you have the information my company's software provides!" said the young man, beaming.
"That isn't trust," I said. "That's fear-based control."
A lot of people are confused about the difference between managing through fear and leading through trust. If you have to snoop on your employees' web-browsing habits, you don't trust them. If the software existed to monitor an employees' brain activity and create a daily report of their thoughts, I'm sure a lot of managers would buy it!
We have a crime-and-punishment mentality about employees and their activities. The mindset springs from fear. Fearful managers wonder, "What if one of my employees is goofing off?"
We are always ready to pounce on anybody who isn't "doing their work" although it's almost impossible to tell what constitutes doing your work or not doing your work these days. We are in the Knowledge Economy now.
When we worked on assembly lines, it was pretty easy to say, "That person is asleep" or "That person has left their station." Nowadays the lines are not so clear-cut. If I'm staring at the ceiling, I might be thinking about how best to help a customer coordinate their order with their big sales promotion. I'm looking at the ceiling but I'm doing my work.
Photo: Liz Ryan
If a person on your team is watching YouTube videos, they may be getting the battery charge they need to tackle the quarter-end report package they'll put together this afternoon. We are not machines. We need breaks and distractions. Snooping software is not a leadership tool -- it's a crutch for weak managers.
Here are four other popular crutches that weak managers rely on and strong managers don't need:
• Keystroke-counting software that knows every time your employee types into their keyboard. Weak managers use this "leadership tool" to rank their employees from the person with the most keystrokes during the day to the person with the fewest. This software package can't help you when the person at the top of the speedy-fingers ranking gets carpal tunnel syndrome, needs surgery and ends up costing the company a fortune.
• Software that tells you when an employee is logged into the company network and when s/he isn't. Weak managers believe that whenever someone isn't logged in, they're watching TV and eating bon-bons. These managers get grudging compliance from their employees. Strong managers get enthusiastic problem-solving, innovation and collaboration -- the things that drive organizations forward. Which manager is smarter?
• Forced-ranking or "stack ranking" programs that pit employees against one another in an idiotic exercise that only makes everyone feel unappreciated and judged. Stack ranking programs are the worst management idea ever devised. They have no purpose except to keep people on edge and destroy the fabric of trust among your employees.
• Software that monitors your employees' time on each phone call and dings them if they spend a minute too long on the phone with a customer. Call center managers use this kind of software to make sure their employees aren't hesitating, even for a few seconds, to collect themselves between the end of one call and the beginning of the next one. Time is money! If people get burnt out and quit and the company has to hire and train someone new, doesn't that cost money?
We are stepping out of the factory age and into the Human Workplace, but some managers are far behind the curve. They'd rather sit in their office poring over reports that show them how whether Sally or Joaquin has the lead in the daily keystroke competition.
Who cares about that? Are Sally and Joaquin delighting your customers, supporting and helping their teammates and generally rocking their jobs?
Our obsession with pointless metrics is a sickness. That's not leadership, and it never will be. Strong leaders tell their team members, "Here's the goal. We're going to hit it, because you guys rule. How can I help you get there? Let me know what you need and I'll get it for you. I'm at your service!"
