The Truth About Best Practices

I was a wet-behind-the-ears HR bunny when I first heard about Best Practices at an electronics-industry HR conference. I listened to the speaker talk about Best Practices and tried to make sense of the idea.

“So evidently you keep track of all these different metrics and use them to compare your company against other companies in your industry,” I told my boss when I got back to Chicago. “They call it benchmarking. You benchmark yourself against other companies and you use these Best Practices — or at least that’s how I understand it.”

“The heck with that,” said my boss, only without using the words “The,” “heck” or “with.”

“Who has time to do all that? The best practices will be obvious because they’ll come out of our situation. The last thing I want our people doing is spending their time figuring out how other people do inventory management or product development so we can do things the same way. The second-to-last thing I want is to have them stopping and measuring everything. We have products to ship. We don’t need any more reports. We need people with their eyes on the ball.”

My CEO had heard about Best Practices before I did, at a conference for tech-industry CEOs. You can see why tech companies would be all over Best Practices and benchmarking, the goofy idea that creating common yardsticks and processes to share across firms and using them to grade ourselves on standard dimensions will somehow strengthen and power up our businesses.

A lot of tech people are very into the formulaic, algorithmic and left-brained side of business, sadly, because it turns out to be the right-brained and gut-brain stuff that matters most.

My boss had gotten wind of and rejected the Best Practices dogma before I’d even heard the term.

“The big yardstick in our industry is Revenue per Employee,” he told me.

“So what do you do, get rid of people in order to push that number up, or hire fewer people, or what?” I asked.

“I have no idea,” said my CEO, “and no desire to find out. Who cares? The question is, ‘Are we making money? Are we gaining ground or losing it?’ It isn’t rocket science.”

Business has nothing to do with Best Practices, but far too many sad and fearful process worshippers cling to the dogma nonetheless. We are addicted to yardsticks in the business world. We have adopted the religion of yardsticks so fervently that we’ve forgotten we made up the yardsticks and can shift, tweak or abandon them any time we like. Once a business yardstick is in place, we treat it like a sacred object.

In order to satisfy the gods of standardized and mechanized human process — an idea so foreign to human experience and physiology that it resembles a form of torture – we contort ourselves and people around us into pretzel shapes every day. We design processes to be uniform and routine, as though we believed that humans and machines worked the same way. A lot of them get labelled Best Practices and shared far and wide.

I remember when the Quality movement was in full swing, twenty years ago. A chipper young man would race from department to department every few days, replacing pages in each department’s Quality Procedures binder.

“This is your job description, to run binder pages around?” I asked the poor fellow. “It’s a foot in the door,” he said.

Every few days, old pages came out of the dust-covered binder atop my filing cabinet, and new pages went in. I told him “I’ve never looked in that thing.” He said “Everyone says that.”

Quality by 4-inch D-ring policy manual is no quality at all. It’s an insult to people, trees and young men in running shoes, because it pretends that by sticking pages in a binder somehow an organization magically makes better products or more money for shareholders. That is not the case. Anything that impedes energy in an organization slows the business down and costs it money.

Mindless process and any policy that doesn’t directly make an organization more responsive and more human does the same thing. It sucks energy (read: cash) from a business more effectively than our competitors ever could.

God bless Malcolm Baldridge and his dear sister Letitia, but any formalistic, policy-bound, left-brained view of quality is an inhuman travesty.

We should be teaching people what a perfect product looks like, talking about what a sent-from-heaven customer service calls feels like, and challenging them to find their own personal and inimitable ways to deliver those top-flight results. When we demote people from human status to machine status, we can give up hope that they’re ever going to rise up again on our watch.

That’s because when we demote people to process machines, we’ve already told them what we value: the absence of independent thought.

Best Practices are one more part of the toxic Godzilla structure of protocols, rules and policies that sucks the life out of businesses, government agencies and not-for-profit agencies everywhere you look.

People are smart and creative. They can’t be reduced to process-fulfillment machines, and no one benefits when they are. Any person who is happy repeating the same tasks over and over again all day is not someone who can galvanize your business. Repetition is great for computers and horrible for the brilliant human beings you employ.

As a CEO, what do you care how many sick days your neighboring employers give employees, or how many inventory turns your competitor has?

Your competitor might kick your butt in inventory turns while you steal market share and run away with your category.

Picky process measures are fear-based, because they give process worshippers a reason to say “Look how well I’m doing!” based on a bunch of measures that have no bearing on anything important.

They give fearful managers a way to say “You’re not measuring up” even when the yardstick has jack-all to do with pleasing customers or improving the organization’s fortunes in other ways.

You need your managers and your team focused on finding the right answers for your organization, not anyone else’s. You need them tuned in to your actual customers and the real marketplace, not working to hit goals that exist only on a spreadsheet and nowhere in real life.

The Best Practices/Addiction to Yardsticks mentality has so taken hold that a fellow wrote to me to say

“It’s good we have yardsticks and measurements at work. They give people something to work toward, and something to feel good about when they hit a goal.”

Let that statement sink in for a second.

That mindset is truly sick. It’s pathological.

People feel good about themselves naturally when they’re growing and learning in their own way.

Every kid feels good when he or she tackles a new skill or overcomes an obstacle.

I remember watching each of my kids learn to ride a bike. We told each kid “Great job!” but the kid felt terrific without any praise.

Every human being knows or is capable of discovering where his or her power source is. Connection to your own power source is what we should be promoting at work, not feel-good-because-someone-praised-you yardstick worship.

We evolved on this planet. We know how to do things. We know how to feel good through our own accomplishments. We’ve all had that feeling of pride in ourselves a million times.

We don’t need someone else’s gold star and pat on the head to make us feel good! But how powerful would the person be — or the reptile, in the case of our friend Godzilla – that got established as the person or reptile handing out those gold stars and pats on the head, co-opting people such that they forget their own creative power and brilliance and getting them to focus on the yardsticks, gold stars and head-pats, instead?

Wouldn’t that be the power play of all time?

Business, like everything in real life, is a matter of context. Any metric, measure, rule, practice, rubric, scheme, protocol or SOP applied because it is The Policy is useless garbage. Problems viewed in context and attacked on the ground by people who value their intuition and gut-brains as highly as their formal knowledge are always surmountable – and how much fun it is to surmount them!

Best Practices, like the rest of the Godzilla infrastructure, will never get us to that mountaintop.

============================================

THANK YOU Jeff, Gregg, Merja, Pat, John, Dodie, Amit and Caty for recovering this story when it was lost earlier today! You each have a Human Workplace care package coming your way! -- Liz

==========================================================================

Our company is called Human Workplace, and our mission is to reinvent work for people.

That means re-designing processes so they work for people, and taking away the barriers that keep working people disconnected from their power source. It means rewriting communication materials with a human voice, and teaching people what fear and trust look like and how to start a conversation about fear, trust and energy at work.

JOIN Human Workplace as a Friend, Individual Member or Employer Member here!

If you want to send me a LinkedIn invitation at [email protected], please send a joke or a palindrome in the invitation. Don't forget to JOIN the Human Workplace group on LinkedIn and LIKE us on Facebook!