"Robert Bacal" <dbt359@freenet.mb.ca> comments on low standards:
>My experience is that staff don't adopt low values--but they DO
>experience huge frustrations when management won't enable them to do a
>GOOD job.
>
>Employees have pride in their work, and don't necessarily sink to the
>level of lousy bosses.
I have been on both sides of this equation. Let me take the "lousy" boss
side for argument's sake. We were doing the product and market planning
for a $3 billion/year manufacturer. The staff complained that they did not
have enough money and time and tools to do their jobs to their own
standards. We invested in databases and workstations and drove enough time
into the process to do a good job. They were happy at doing a professional
job and proud of their results.
Quality went up initially after the first six months, then levelled off,
then declined marginally by about two years into the program. Then we had
to "harvest" the best practices that had developed and institute them in
the new standards. One of the best practices was an established arbitrary
deadline to limit analysis and get the best shot from the planners
experience and intuition. Our results got dramatically better and stayed
there. But the staff did not like the strict new standards.
Eventually we evolved to an "unfreeze-refreeze" approach to keep the rate
of improvement going. This was a balance between standards and innovation
that worked. Certainly some people thought this was stifling their
creativity but my obligation was to produce the best results with what I
had to work with.
Although this not exactly what is being discussed, I also have seen
"lousy" bosses doing what they thought was best for everybody. It's just
that their judgement and creativity limited what they tried and how they
involved their people in that process.
Remember that bosses are people too. Often with less relevant training and
lots of mixed messages from above and below. The problem is not lousy
bosses. It is good people trying their best in a bad system. The problem
is that no one designed the system. Often the architects do not even
acknowledge that they have a system.
One of the most powerful change approaches is to document their current
management system including the political unwritten "laws". When they see
it in black & white, after the ususal period of denial, they can then
start to work on the design of a real system! ....Keith
--Keith Cowan <72212.51@CompuServe.COM>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>