How Companies Can Get The Best From People

Work is not really that complicated. We make it complicated, often in the interest of serving our own relevance , but it’s not that complicated. We’ve had a zillion and five discussions about “The Great Resignation” over the past six months, and a lot of those are colored by specific ideologies and beliefs about what work should mean to people, but most of the discussions miss the point.

To wit, here’s some end-of-year research on work , and in calling up another article, good points are made:

Similarly, the authors of Research: What Do People Need to Perform at a High Level? leveraged survey data from more than 14,000 U.S. workers to determine the practices and cultural norms that help organizations best support their employees. Their analysis revealed that people perform best when firms provide clear expectations, are open to questions, don’t have too many rules, support creative problem solving, reward strong performance, acknowledge employees’ emotions, and provide a clear sense of purpose.

Let’s unpack this a little bit.

“Provide clear expectations”

What you’re talking about here is transparency not being a buzzword, and managers communicating well about priorities and goals. Neither is that common at most organizations, although a few superstars do shine in these regards. Only 8% of managers can successfully align strategy and execution , and I’d argue where the other 92% fall on their face is in providing clear expectations. Even if you do a 20-minute check-in on M, W, and F morning … you can start to chip away at this.

“Are open to questions”

This is hard because managers typically end up being “answer guys,” i.e. “Don’t bring me questions; bring me fully-cooked answers.” Also, questions are a nuisance to a lot of managers. They claim it’s because they are so busy and can ‘t stop down to answer questions from subordinates, but the real reason in many examples is that the manager doesn’t actually know the answer, and that scares the manager, so they deflect and say they “don’t have time” for questions. In reality they don’t want their staggering lack of intel about the business to be exposed. This is hard to solve unless you promote the right people, not the flashy people who are similar to the existing bosses.

“Don’t have too many rules”

Process is very important to managers in the name of scale, and process is essentially a bunch of rules for how work gets done. As a result, organizations tend to have a lot of rules, not a small set of them. And, in fact, look at this:

The fear of creating this very situation, executives explained to us, is why so many of them focus on the tangible instead of the human. Having an open dialogue around important strategic issues simply feels too risky. “We feel like we would lose control,” they told us. “Resistance to our plans would surface.” In fact, psychology and experience tells us, the reverse is true: A lack of genuine, reciprocal interaction and the feeling of imposed change increases employees’ anxiety and resistance.

Rules are important to managers because they provide comfort and certainty that things will get done in the appropriate way. As a result, rules are a big f’n deal. They don’t go away in most orgs, even though we have decades of research about how they inhibit growth, not endorse it.

“Support creative problem solving”

The problem with this one is that no one really knows what “creative problem solving” is. It’s one of those business terms that is coded for “make money.” If something makes money, it will be seen as a creative approach to a problem. That’s it. Period, full stop, done. Most managers don’t want a “creative” solution — they want a task-oriented, process-followed, nearly-immediate solution. I’m not even sure how this would be measured, honestly. This feels like one of those things they always sneak in on business journalism surveys and no one bothers to ask, “Hey, how specifically was that calculated?”

“Reward strong performance”

Many organizations believe in their bones that they do this well. In reality, what they usually do is they reward specific metric-driven performers, i.e. sales guys or operations people, and they advance them salary-wise without ever stopping to ask, “Hey, could this person manage other human beings, who have lives of their own?” We advance the high performer based on a narrow set of metrics, and it often bombs and drives turnover below the new boss. But if that new boss is seen as a junior version of an existing boss, or there’s a golf ecosystem, or whatever else … good luck fixing this one up.

“Acknowledge employees’ emotions”

This started getting popular as a thing to say in biz articles around 2015, and in those seven years I’ve never seen it put into action anywhere I’ve worked, and I’ve worked with a lot of companies as a freelancer since then. Usually being emotional at work dooms your career, and bosses typically don’t want to discuss emotions at all; they want to discuss tasks. If anything, they run from emotions, despite how integral emotions are to people processing the work in front of them. I think this is a good thing to say in articles, but the reality isn’t there whatsoever.

“Provide a clear sense of purpose”

The purpose for the people ostensibly setting the purpose is “make money,” but they don’t want to say that down a chain, so they come up with fancy-sounding bullshit about how their widgets change the world. In reality the goals are, in no particular order: money, market share, control, status, relevance, did I mention money, feeling successful, feeling big, and, oh, money. Those are the true purposes at the top of most organizations. What we say in all-hands isn’t usually the truth.

So, all in…

The problem becomes that the documented ways to get the best from people are not remotely in line with how organizations want to move the pawns around the chess board. And it makes sense: anthropologically and sociologically, work is not set up in a logical way, at all. And yet we keep arguing about what’s behind the “Great Resignation…”

Takes?