Tuesday, March 12, 2013

GITTIN' 'ER DUN!

As most of you know, it doesn't take a whole lot to get me irritated. And if you read yesterday you know I want to comment on stuff I saw in the paper on Sunday. One of my largest irritations is the way business relationships are managed. As a disclaimer I am probably writing about this because it's safer than writing about personal relationships. But I can acknowledge that whatever dysfunction exists at work also happens at home.

I have no direct experience with any of the people involved in what I read so all I'm writing about is what I read and how it affected me. No quotes or attributions, just my responses and of course my judgements about how this is universal bad acting on the part of everyone in business.

Okay, no more disclaimers. I have been in work relationships in which theoretical agreements are made. That's the kind of agreement the boss offers and asks words to the effect of, What do you think? As though I have options. Other than relinquishing expectation of receiving my next paycheck.

One of the guys I read about said his organization has goals everyone has agreed with and the results are published to the entire company every month. The way my mind works, the negotiations about goals included a set of guidelines (with numbers) from the top. This is followed by an expectation that group and individual goals would fill in the blanks to make those numbers happen. Gitti' 'er dun! And then he goes on to say the organization is driven by metrics that are rated on a scale of 1 to 5. One of which is Gittin' 'er dun! He's even proud about expecting that at the interview level, and continues through everything they think about.

I don't know about you, but I have a history of not getting things finished that I was dedicated to finishing. And, yes, the first reason is that I just put it off for some reason, good or bad in my eyes. And I suspect everyone does or has doen that in their lives. Here's where the rubber meets the road for me. Since this is such an overwhelmingly common occurrence. making it a metric is guaranteed to be deadly. It's going to assure that people will hit the mark, but not necessarily meet the real expectations.

I did it, but is is any good? Or as good as it should have been? Am I and my team proud of this? Have we re-negotiated the outcome as we proceeded? Have we stewarded our process or have we filled in the blanks.

Management is all about efficiency, so they love to check off, Got 'er dun. But how often do we need to do it over? Or have an unhappy customer.?

Tomorrow about moving up the ladder and being human at the same time.

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