On occasion I am asked to read and review new books that are just about to be published. I enjoy doing this and often learn a lot about management topics. Recently I was asked to read and review Oops! 13 Management Practices that Waste Time and Money by Aubrey Daniels.
The simplistic review of this book would be to point out that just about everything we do as managers is poorly thought out, or even distracting to our goals, from employee of the month awards to how we review and rank employees. Daniels looks at most of the management tools and techniques that we use on a day to day basis and describes why many of them actually inhibit the behaviors and outcomes we want.
From Employee of the Month to Jack Welch's "rank and yank" to promotions, many "tried and true" programs that we use are not valuable. I think that Daniels often overstates his case, but you'll get the point from one of my favorite examples in chapter 5, entitled Rewarding things a dead man can do. His point is that we often expect or reward things that a dead person can do. For example: are you at work a lot? Did you avoid having accidents? While these are things we reward and value, Daniels argues quite successfully that a dead man can spend many hours in an office, and never has an accident. Rather than reward for avoidance, reward for specific accomplishment.
His investigation into the "rank and yank" philosophies of Jack Welch are also insightful. Many organizations that employ this approach have simply "assigned" rankings to employees and ensured that low rankings get passed around, so no one is ultimately hurt by one low ranking. Additionally, the concept is based on the expectation that the employee pool is a normal distribution. What if your team has successfully hired an employee pool skewed for success? That means your "lowest" performers are probably better than what you'll find in the prospect pool!
Daniels looks at 13 management practices that he thinks should be changed or avoided all together, and I think he is on point with many of them. His examples and focus seem to be more valuable for mid level managers and for managers who work in discrete, measurable tasks. Given that many white collar jobs are difficult to measure or to define specific, valuable outcomes, some of his suggestions don't seem to align to a knowledge worker, white collar workforce.
However, it is good to question the managerial tools and techniques that we use. Too frequently we simply adopt tools that have been used before, rather than question their effectiveness and the outcomes we are trying to achieve. Daniels does a good job breaking down the risks and consequences of a number of very heavily used management techniques, and any manager can learn from this book.
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