Flip Chart Fairy Tales

Rob Briner is on HR’s case again in this week’s People Management. He posed some questions to students on a masters programme:

To get things going I posed some questions. What is currently a real priority for you in your job? What tasks are occupying your thoughts and demanding effort and time?

Their responses were perhaps not too surprising. They told me that important policies and initiatives were being rolled out. Crucial systems were being aligned across business units. Key practices were being standardised and pushed down the line.

I then asked another question. What difference does what you do make to the performance or well-being of your staff or organisation, and how do you know if you are having an effect?

What would your answer be? There was a fairly consistent response from the students. They either didn’t believe that they made any difference or, equally worrying, they simply had no way of knowing whether their work was having much of an impact on important individual or organisational outcomes.

Instead, their activities were based on complying with various business demands: to get new stuff going, to tidy up, sort out, consolidate and streamline.

To be fair, you would probably get similar results from groups of managers in some other functions. It is not just HR people who have lost sight of the purpose of their jobs. Organisations are full of people beavering away on things that seem very important but which have a tenuous connection to performance or profit. The larger the company, the more people there are in this situation.

The less clear people are about their overall objectives and how they fit into the organisation’s aims, the more likely they are to just find something - anything - to do. The brighter people are, the more complex the systems and processes they set up to keep themselves busy. For example, I recently heard about a person being employed just to make sure all the projects in an organisation were using the same methodologies and standards. A good idea, I’m sure, but did the outcomes really justify his salary?

When I first started work, I assumed that people in positions of power ran things on some sort of rational basis. However, as I watched what senior managers actually did, I realised that they were driven as much by vanity, status and the desire to protect their own positions. The cleverer ones were also good at using logic and reason to justify their actions after the event.

Rob is right to call for management practices to be more evidence-based but I wonder how many senior people in organisations would really want to have their empires scrutinised to that extent. Do they seriously want to have to prove that their activities contribute clearly and effeciently to the corporate goals? Wouldn’t many of them prefer simply to collude with each other to maintain the fiction?

I won’t ask too many questions about what your department does if you don’t ask too many questions about mine. That way, we can all draw big salaries and bonuses and leave the company with fat payoffs before anyone finds out what we’ve been up to.

The idea of evidence based management is fine if we assume that an organisation works in the pursuit of a small number of compatible goals. If so, we can measure everything against how far it contributes to those goals.

If, on the other hand, we accept that an organisation is actually a ragbag of competing interests, how easy will it be to measure the effectiveness of what people do. When we ask what something contributes to the bottom line, whose bottom line are we talking about?

OK, so perhaps I am being cynical but I wonder if a more evidence-based approach to management will simply be used to provide a post hoc rationalisation for empire building by powerful executives.

If evidence-based management catches on, clever executives will doubtless learn to use it in the service of their own ends.