5 things about people management

by Nick Charney

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Let me start by saying that I love managing people. I find it one of the most professionally rewarding things I've done in my career to date. That said, there's a number of things I'm still figuring out:

• How much information to share. Ideally you want to give people enough context to understand the environment within which they are working without overburdening them with superfluous details or distractions. In practice I tend to share much more than was ever shared with me when I occupied their positions, my team seems to value it, though it has definitely led to a handful of more difficult conversations. 
• How to balance individual needs with the needs of the team. Not everyone has the same work style or preferences, optimizing the work environment to get the best out of of everyone isn't easy, especially when some team members may feel as though they are either benefiting from or being held back by a more laissez-faire approach. 
• How to best manage interpersonal relationships with people outside work. I'm a social being and bring my whole self to the job, but being a manager naturally creates a degree of professional distance that can be difficult to navigate in healthy and productive ways. I recall a conversation I had with a Deputy Minister who told me that the worst thing about their ascension was how the tone always shifted whenever they entered a room. I'm not there by any stretch, but that story still weighs heavy. 
• How to measure success. It's not too difficult to evaluate whether or not you are delivering on expectations with respect to the work. You can ask simple questions, are we meeting deadlines, or are we meeting expectations? However its nearly impossible to evaluate whether or not I'm managing effectively with respect to the people. I have little to go on other than overall satisfaction / engagement of my team and the quality of their work. Moreover, we don't help people learn how to give constructive feedback. We are all kind of meandering through. 
• How to turn good habits into practice. I keep telling my team that we need to build our practice up so that it can endure any shifting winds -- new hires, departures, re-organizations, change in mandates, etc -- and I'm mostly doing this by trial and error right now. I'm not even sure where to look for support on this and its always the first thing to fall off whenever duty calls.

Where is the conversation about thoughtful people management happening right now? 

It's got to be happening somewhere, I've been doing some reading but surely there's a place where there's a more active discussion about people's practical experiences.

Someone connect me to the conversation?

Collaboration takes time that organizations don't have

by Kent Aitken

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A couple years back I wrote about a vicious cycle of centralized decision-making and the what it meant for executive attention on important issues. I don’t think there’s a single major issue in large organizations that doesn’t, at some level, stem from the meta-problem that the demands on executives’ time are incredible. At some point in the dissection of every systemic issue you could include “And executives don’t have the time for it.” Every major new initiative includes, as a factor for success, “senior executive support.” 

I’ll recreate the same model because I think it’s still interesting. Today I’d add organizational design and I’d probably fingerpaint it, but I think it mostly holds up.

The long story short is that more time spent on content means less time on process, including coaching, big-picture thinking, and organizational design. Which ultimately leads to the need for even more centralized decision-making in the absence of experienced delegates and effective governance. 

The compounding problem is that executives are structurally hamstrung from recognizing and correcting this pattern. Throughout an organization, there will be some sub-organizations with a manageable workload where everything gets dealt with. However, from the top, those organizations will look the same as those where things are falling through the cracks. Some issues that would otherwise be important will remain invisible because there’s no time to make them visible. And your delegates will start curating demands on executives' attention on their behalf out of sheer practicality - and from a smaller-picture lens - removing the ability for pattern recognition.

That is, for someone running at 100% capacity - as in, an actual maximum at, say, 80 hours per week - they’ll never know if the amount of work that should, given current systems, require their attention would actually add up to 120 hours per week. The extra 40 hours of work is impossible to see.

From the ground floor, this often results in issues that are paradoxically so important that they can only be resolved by [X] level of executive, but so unimportant that they won’t possibly make it to that level in the absence of good luck or a media article that catalyzes attention. 

When this problem exists in an organization, people probably don’t - and can’t - know the extent of it. 

Right now I'm doing work on digital-era governance, and there are recurring themes: collaboration, systems thinking, user-centricity. But collaboration takes time - particularly when we're talking about formal, long-term collaboration between organizations or even orders of government - and time is already an incredibly stressed resource, in ways that are very difficult to fix.

Slack

by Kent Aitken

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This isn't a thorough exploration of slack's role in organizations, just a few things that were on my mind recently. Would love to hear your thoughts.

But first, an aside

I've been living in Ottawa for seven years, while most of my family lives on the east coast. My mom's side of my family usually has a mid-summer and a Christmas get-together each year, and I haven't made it back east for either in years. It eats at me. It'd be worth my while, but every year I run quickly into the limits of my vacation days and travel budget, especially when it's a given that I'll be going back to PEI to visit my dad, and Newfoundland to visit my farthest-flung brother.

This has been a powerful dynamic in my life for the last half-decade. Every time I book a trip I'm both excited and conflicted, aware that I'm making tradeoffs, aware that some people - that I think very highly of - will go unvisited in a given year.

Collaboration and relationship-building (or, policy and communications, and never the twain shall meet)

To segue somewhat: last week a speaker was asking where the communications people were at a public administration conference. Some people pointed to general tension or misunderstanding between the two worlds, and I threw in a more functional reason, analogous to the above story. We are, as they say, in "an era of fiscal restraint," with tight scrutiny on travel, conference, and training budgets. We all understand that the lines between fields such as policy and communications are blurring, that there are inter-dependencies, and that collaboration is incredibly important. But for an given practitioner, staying informed about their field is still the primary concern, and they're naturally going to maintain relationships with their core community first.

Economically, it's like an artificial cultural ceiling on the supply and demand of public servant relationship-building and collaboration. The question is whether that ceiling is appropriately set in pursuit of broader system goals.

It has become en vogue to ask about communities and conferences, "Who else needs to be here? Who else should we be talking to?" Which is a good question, but if you can't get to their communities, and your community is a few bullets down the priority list for them, it's impractical to expect anyone to bridge that gap.

Creating slack, in this case, would be treating relationship-building with core communities as a given - creating room on the margins to better understand the peripheral players that influence our portfolios.

Innovation

Google's 20% innovation time doesn't work for everyone. We were all excited about it five years ago, but if it doesn't square with culture, if innovation isn't actually a core goal (which is often appropriate), or if your work doesn't progress through that style of idea generation, it's a silver bullet with no gun and no werewolves.

Since, we've matured in our debate about free time and innovation. Is it slack in the system that generates innovation? Or pressure? It's hard to say, and the only true answer is probably "it depends". However, a recent research paper adds an interesting thesis to the debate (h/t). The short version of the paper: school breaks lead to a sharp increase in Kickstarter ideas being launched and funded because it creates time for mundane tasks.

Their conclusion is that slack time does indeed lead to innovation, but not for the reasons we thought. Instead of allowing creativity and the generation of ideas, slack time allows people the time to execute and move their ideas forward.

However, many public administrators opt for the pressure approach, or are limited to it as an option. In an age of "do better with less", I've seen a worrying trend of people being forced to rush the "better." These are ideas that might work, given the time to do it right. But when people are asked to Innovate right now!, pressure gets the better of rigour.

Slack

Slack, as it's traditionally regarded, is expensive. However, it seems probable that it's often worth it, albeit in hard-to-measure ways. If that's true, we have two options: create slack, or re-define activities like relationship-building, idea-sharing, focus-grouping, assumption-testing, and the like — those intangibles often first in line for the chopping block — as part of the job description, as part of the ongoing pressure. 

Risk Aversion in Hierarchies

by Kent Aitken

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This is essentially a two-year delayed corollary to Where Good Ideas Go to Die, about the nature of hierarchies and how they influence decision making. I'm not suggesting that either model is an ironclad rule - they're simplifications with much room for exceptions, but hopefully worth considering as food for thought.

A central feature of large organizations is delegated authority: establishing a mandate and structure within which officers can exercise authority on behalf of the organization. For instance, one might have authority to spend money on certain things, up to a limit, without additional approvals.

That said, not much "big" stuff is left to delegated authority. It may be for reasons of accountability or importance, or because "big" stuff either impacts different parts of the organization or requires cooperation for implementation. So many proposals get approved at each level, then continue up the chain of command.

However, refusals are almost always left to delegated authority. That is, if a level of management decides that a proposal should go no further, it stops. The level above does not necessarily hear about it. So a given level of management makes very few final "go" decisions on behalf of the organization compared to the number of "stop" decisions. For instance, an executive will know every employee's proposed training plan, but not what was struck off the plan by the level of management below.

False positives (poor ideas that get recommended) get caught by the system, by a higher layer of management. False negatives (good ideas that get stopped) don't.

Accordingly, false positives result in feedback for the person who recommended approval. That is, proposing an idea up the chain of command and getting a “no” provides information on which to base future proposals. Those who are too risk-tolerant will get reined in. However, false negatives get no such feedback. Managers who are too risk-adverse, wrongly making “stop” decisions on behalf of their organizations, will remain so. This also means that senior executives will systemically underestimate the level of risk aversion in their organizations.

Alternatively, instead of it being different managers' styles, it could be individual managers who propose too much in some areas and too little in others. A manager could be risk-adverse on communications but overly ambitious on staffing requests. The latter would get corrected, the former would go unchecked.

I'm sure that when a decision-maker is uncertain, they'll often check in with their management. But given the scale of organizations, the desire to minimize demands on senior executives' time, and the sheer volume of proposals moving on a given day, there's room for error. In a large enough organization, over enough time, tiny breakdown rates still mean a lot of breakdowns. Small asymmetries in the forces influencing decisions add up.

Boundaryless Problems and the End of the Elevator Pitch

by Kent Aitken

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I've always been terrible at elevator pitches. My stock answer to most questions is "It depends". When people ask me "What do you do?", I tend to respond with a couple questions to gauge their level of familiarity with government. Providing succinct value propositions has never been my thing.

Last year a handful of us organized a talk and facilitated workshop with Joeri van den Steenhoven, Director of the MaRS Solutions Lab. While bouncing the idea off people, we were asked "What's the desired outcome?" My response was that it would be a combination of outcomes, and that it would be different for different people:

• learning about social innovation
• learning approaches to tackling problems
• practice teaching and facilitating
• meeting potential collaborators
• generating ideas for follow-up

Which, I think, is reasonable. But we still ask for elevator pitches, and still demand a blindingly obvious causal link between solutions and problems. It's one of the 10 Tricks to Appear Smart During Meetings: asking "What problem are we really trying to solve?"

To be honest, I think it's an incredibly useful question - but perhaps insufficient. For public policy, the likely better question is something like "What environment are we trying to influence?"

In the interest of pragmatism, when someone asks you for an elevator pitch, you should probably have one ready. But I think it's in our best long-term interests to move away from that fiction about policy. This world doesn't actually exist:

It's more like this*:

Except:

• the bubbles are all constantly moving around
• the bubbles are always changing size and shape
• not everything on the environment side is a problem
• not everything on the effects side is positive
• this diagram looks at least slightly different to every different player who cares about these problems and solutions

Last week Canada 2020 held a Big Ideas session, at which former Deputy Minister Morris Rosenberg pitched a governance rethink as a Big Idea, citing problems and solutions without clear boundaries in time, space, or definition as the burning platform. Don Lenihan's recap is worth a read.

This prescription isn't easy. Governments have duties pushing from the other direction, including to prove the success of their interventions, and to communicate accessibly with citizens - there's friction against wonkspeak about complex problems. But we can at least stop reinforcing the false expectation of easy answers by asking for and providing them, and recognizing the red flag when we hear them. 

*Venn diagrams are one of the other tricks to appearing smart.

Note: nothing I write on CPSRenewal exists in a vacuum. In this case, thank you to John Kenney, Blaise Hebert, and Abe Deighton for the conversation and ideas.

Another note: there are some parallels to this post on short- and long-term thinking; the issues stem from overlapping incentives for government.

Short-term Thinking and Why Communication Can't Defeat Silos

by Kent Aitken

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I'm wary of efforts to carve the world into types of people, but let's imagine this rough divide: those who focus on the direct impacts of their decisions, and those who can imagine a cascade of effects. In other words, those who see only a single link in the cause-effect chains they start, and those who know that it continues into the distance.

Businesspersons who burn bridges to make deals, networkers who abuse relationships and trust to make contacts, and managers who step on employees fall into the first category. Mentors teaching others, collaborators giving their time to others' projects, and leaders who ensure the long-term health of their workplaces are examples of the second.

We might adopt Adam Grant's nomenclature, and call these people Takers (or Matchers) and Givers. The research in his book, Give and Take, bears out the truth of these causal chains: those who take the What's in it for me? approach lose out to the altruists in the long term. Appreciating the long-term and indirect impacts of decisions (or at least, understanding that long-term and indirect impacts exist in the first place) creates healthy systems and workplaces, engenders trust, and allows positive-sum games that benefit more people.

However, there's a anomalous third type of people: public servants.

Collaboration and Institutions

The population of public servants probably breaks down into the above types proportionally to the public at large. But within their environment, they are paradoxically incentivized to take on Taker and Matcher identities.

Takers in the public at large are the product of the failure to appreciate the long-term, indirect impacts of decisions. And it's neither good for them, nor the people they interact with.

In a public service, the same result is created both by A) the failure to appreciate the long-term, indirect impacts and B) the much more common failure to convince others to appreciate those impacts. In their roles, public servants make decisions on behalf of, and in consideration of, many actors.

These could be hierarchy superiors, colleagues, watchdog groups, citizens, journalists, anyone. The result is the same: public servants become largely limited to those actions which directly and immediately benefit their specific mandate, in the manner intended. This is antithetical to the give-and-take nature of collaborative relationships, in which one can help others without any guarantee or timeline of reciprocation.

The mere ability to communicate between silos, to be aware and to coordinate actions, is not the sole prerequisite for tearing those silos down. 

Keeping Score

It's impossible to completely understand every way in which our actions reverberate. This world defies measurement. And the world simply works better  when we're not always keeping score - we help, we look for mutual wins, and we build relationships. Yet, we live in an era that is as much about high standards for government as is it about transparency and accountability. I would never suggest that we sacrifice either, but the typical approach to this tension will do that on its own.

Unfortunately, instituting the typical approach alone - checks and balances, rigourous measurement - is a neat, tidy, single-link cause-effect decision itself, and is therefore defensible.

The Value of People

by Kent Aitken

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Editors have figured out that there's more going on in documents than people can adequately, reliably process all at once. The standard practice is to take multiple passes, each time looking through a different lens. I was taught to take three cracks at important documents:

1. one for logic, coherence, and ideas
2. one for conciseness and the removal of extra words that add no meaning
3. one for spelling, grammar, and punctuation

The field of business administration teaches something similar, providing frameworks and guidance for how to think about problems: SWOT analyses, risk matrices, etc. My first manager looked at every new problem through the below framework, thinking about the needs and constraints from each lens:

The decision-making lens I tend to advocate for is the more humanistic one: starting from a position of trust, looking for positive-sum outcomes, and appreciating soft and long-term benefits from actions. But in actuality, there is a different lens I would make mandatory for every decision, ever. It would be taking a moment to go completely cold, rational, and economical, and to think of the people within organizations as dollar figures. Just for a moment.


If You Like It Then You Shoulda Put a Value On It

Statscan put yearly salaries for professional/knowledge worker jobs around $62,000 in 2014. Between benefits and pensions I think I can conservatively put the total compensation cost at $80,000 as a working estimate*. 

Some examples in which this lens may be enlightening:

• Consider a productivity-enhancing piece of technology with a price tag of $400. If you get a 0.5% productivity increase, it pays for itself in a year. If it lasts for a few years, you can get away with a 0.16% productivity boost, or, a few minutes per week. To say nothing of the fact that an open mind towards such investments may keep employees around longer, when losing such an employee costs $16,000 in lost productivity (which is the lowest figure I've encountered for turnover costs).

• If you're responsible for convening a working team or meeting, try occasionally working out the labour hours involved. Ten people for two hours is half a week's work: at $80,000/year, about $750. This isn't to say you shouldn't do it; rather, that you should consider what level of planning and communication on your part respects that investment.

• I've used this example before, but the IRS provoked a scandal for $50M in conference spending between 2010 and 2012. But divided over the three years and approximately 100,000 staff, it's $166/employee. The real question is how much their employees are worth, and whether that spending made them at least a half a percent or so more effective. Triangulating a few different sources (average HR costs for companies relative to budget**, my compensation cost estimate), the low end of the range is likely ~$4,000,000,000 worth of annual investment in people. The IRS has a ~$11,800,000,000 budget, and $50M is a pittance of their people cost.

• Lastly, consider a manager with half a dozen staff. We rarely consider the idea that they're responsible for almost half a million dollars in annual investment. And that $500,000 machine's performance can easily vary by ~20%, depending on how it is managed.

One Lens

It is easy to view human resources as sunk costs: past expenditures that should have no bearing on present decision making. It is not so. We should be building decision frameworks that encourage us to consider our stewardship role for the people behind organizations - at least for a moment, as one lens of several. Then taking other passes over problems, with other lenses. Editors give documents this level of respect.

TL;DR: discussions about people and spending need denominators.

*This assumes that the average employee creates at least their compensation cost in value to the organization. In actuality, in any sustainably profitable business the average value created must be greater than their compensation cost, and so these examples would be shorting employee value.

**For the Canadian public service, it's 38.1%.