Responsibility? as long as I work... Quote A. Dumas

"I have been told," said the count, "that you do not always yourselves understand the signals you repeat."

"That is true, sir, and that is what I like best," said the man, smiling.

"Why do you like that best?"

"Because then I have no responsibility. I am a machine then, and nothing else, and so long as I work, nothing more is required of me."

Le Comte de Monte-Cristo

Alexandre Dumas

Captured from Seth Godin's blog: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

Squaring the circle

The way performance measurements work sometimes completely misleads the original objective.

A friend has been confronted with the following situation:

- Complex procurement process combining auctions and proposals for hypothetic projects: his company passes and gets in the database.

- The professional buyers of the company that request the service have an interesting performance measurement criteria: the more they manage to get discounts on the original quote, the best performance reports they get.

Poisoned system: what is really happening is that they sort of encourage the vendors to provide them with high quotes in a first instance (lets assume it's not completely conscious) and then they negotiate and get discounts. Approved vendors know about the situation or rapidly find out about it.

The original objective of putting in place this performance criteria is completely corrupted by the system in place. Prices are actually not getting lower but higher.

We have to be careful with the kind of rewards and performance criteria we set up.

This reminds me of the story (would love to remember where I heard this) of teachers being rewarded based on the percentage of students that passed a particular exam. Teachers tended to ignore the best students (they were going to pass anyway), ignore the worse students (they were going to fail anyway) and simply concentrated on the mid-level students to help them get the level of passing the exam. The reward and performance measurement criteria, just like in the first example, had of course a very different intention: encouraging teachers to make a better job.

Alternative Job Interview Technique

Surprised by job interview technique from a successful web entrepreneur I talked to yesterday.

He claims he is more than happy with the employees he has hired after he started applying this technique: (Account Management roles and alike. Note his company is small enough not to need a candidate portal or database. )

- he himself screens emailed CVs like almost everybody does, but pays more attention to format than content.

- he asks potential candidates to bring their own laptop.

- he tries by all means to make the candidate comfortable and tries to find questions that would make the candidate share the laptop with him.

- and then... he pays attention to things like:

- Destop icons: Is it clean? is it organized? are there too many icons or files on the desktop?

(I wouldn't pass this one :-) )

- Taskbar: What icons does she or he have on the taskbar? What order? (specially interested in seeing if email client is the 1st icon or not - he likes NOT having it as the 1st icon).

- He asks them to remember something and send it to him just after the meeting: Is the candidate opening Word, takes the note on notepad (much quicker to open), does he use another tool or method?...

And that's it...he decides based on that input.

Interesting. Not sure if his method is fair, even if it's completely legal (looking at someone else's personal laptop could be controversial)... but it seems to work fine for him.

Agree on a strategy and then...deliver

Too often, we put the focus on the wrong things. The more complex the organization (note I'm not saying big... I've seen big organizations very clearly organized and carefully parceled in extremely efficient working units) the easier it becomes to hide behind administrative activities that do not contribute to main objectives of the company or organization.

But the most frustrating for team members that work with a deliverable in mind, is when those who opt for the administrative, non delivery focused activities, get the recognition. I see this specially in volunteer and political associations where, sometimes, simply "showing up" can count more than created output.

For me this is an important sign that the organization is not putting the right emphasis on the right things. Time to rethink and reset the target.

In other words: Outputs and efforts need to be aligned with a strategy, but the strategy cannot become the output.

Sales Strategy Analysis

When auto-analyzing performance of certain activities during the past 2010, a thought on some clients I did not win, and did plan to win during the year, came back in the analysis a few times.

Of course the overall strategy is, and has to be, to enjoy work by sharing, consulting, learning... BUT... sometimes this part of the job is too fun, too enjoyable.

And there are some projects that we could have won, by dedicating just a little more effort on really selling. I definitely not the most pushy salesman, and actually happy not to be (I'm sure some of the projects and clients I did win this year wouldn't be working with me if I was). Still, it is important to analyze and get conscious that, in occasions, having done one more follow up, one more call, just that little extra effort that would have made me pass the edge of my own confort zone, could have brought an extra project or an extra client.

I'm sure this applies to many of us. Let's not forget, no matter how deep we are concentrate in production, that we are all salesman of our own services after all.