Nine Lies About Work by Buckingham and Goodall

I worked in places where I followed every rule, did my tasks to the best of my abilities, worked to get along with all the different personalities, and cared about the future of that place. I was reasonably open to feedback, and even solicited it for improvement and would adapt accordingly.

Sometimes these strategies worked, and sometimes they did not work.

In hindsight, everything depended upon the ethics and sanity of the management. It seems that a new employee’s first and only job is to determine those two things, while camouflaging themselves as a ‘typical’ associate in whatever specific environment, as best as they can ascertain what ‘typical’ is.

OTOH, an ethical business owner may well consider this book.

“I have the chance to use my strengths every day.” Yep. I have always sought jobs that used my training and aptitude, and tried (unsuccessfully) to avoid jobs that I had no aptitude for.

I have often been pushed toward middle management positions, which I had no aptitude for (I’m a nerdy introvert). At one job I was hired as a process engineer yet assigned to do payrolls, inventory, and purchasing, none of which I had the slightest aptitude for.

I used to read Peter Drucker as a kid (my dad was a plant manager & had Drucker books in his library). I only remember one thing that Drucker said, something along the lines of “if an employee is not right for a position, then instead of giving him a hard time, move him to position where he is right. If you don’t have such a position, then create one!” God I wished my employers followed that advice.

Agree with Ian on employee reviews — complete waste of time that mainly served to stress people out and create hard feelings.

Besides being assigned to misfit positions, my pet peeve at work over the years was the “company culture.” It was all about how you fit into the culture (I rarely fit in). At several companies that meant having beers with coworkers after work. At another company that meant cutting firewood with coworkers on days off. The employees who drank beers and cut firewood were treated better than employees who did not. I did not like that.

At my last “real” job, my supervisors never once stopped by my cubicle to say “How’s it going? Anything I can assist you with?” Instead our interaction was limited to formal team meetings where they lectured to us like students, or at the dreaded annual performance review. I, on the other hand, made a point to drop by my peers’ cubicles every single day to ask “How’s it going? Anything I can assist you with?”

When applying for a job, they always ask how much you expect to get paid, and my answer was always the same, that what was important to me that my pay was fair — the same as my peers and more than my subordinates (I’ve had jobs where I was paid less than my subordinates!). I did not care about the absolute amount, as long as it was fair.

One place I worked paid every worker in a particular job category exactly the same. The only way to get a raise was to move to a different job category or else for the entire workforce to get a bump in pay. Conventional wisdom says that employees need financial incentives to motivate them, yet there were no financial incentives there and worker motivation levels were just the same as any other company I worked for — most people still did the best job they could do simply because they took pride in their work and because their coworkers would look down on them if they didn’t pull their weight. It made me rethink what I thought I knew about capitalism & employee compensation. I have evolved to the point where I pretty much believe every worker in America should be paid exactly the same, with perhaps a small increase for jobs that are particularly dangerous or unpleasant. I guess that would be communism, wouldn’t it?

One boss, who lured me inside as “a friend”, stole my ideas, stole from the company, cheated on her husband on company time, fired good people seemingly for sport, and gossiped me into a position of ‘lightning rod’ for associate ire and scapegoating after she suspected my increasing disloyalty, never quit me after I quit her.

In other words, she salted the ground behind me and poisoned my prospects long after I quit. I spent far too much time with soul searching, researching and counseling before somebody older and wiser finally told me that I was actually just a regular guy who’d encountered a workplace psychopath.

My advice is to always be careful how you quit the bad boss. And know that even if you quit gracefully and well, your boss may still be calling you “Sloppy Steve” long after you’ve left. Here’s my current example for the bad boss situation. Many of these acquired nicknames after dismissal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Trump_administration_dismissals_and_resignations

We have two things going on. First, there’s the growth of middle management, all the layers between practical decision makers and first line workers. Second, there’s the professionalization of management. Both these factors play into a range of beneficiaries. College and university business schools, graduates of the business schools, specializations in human resources, middle managers with the valued credentials and the need for something actually to do for their paycheck, upper management preening on how many people are in their work responsibilities.

And all that turns management from a job into a status. What you need to maintain a status is power and ritual rather than results.

authority and hierarchy and bad bosses
There once lived a guy named Balthasar Gracian. Now, how a 17th century Jesuit priest who didn’t make it past 57 wound up being (IMHO) the best ever aphorist about worldly wisdom for the regular guy, is beyond me. Yet somehow he managed. His Art of Worldy Wisdom is cryptic reading but fits in quite well around here with others who’ve read literally thousands of far more modern books and come up with similar conclusions about human nature.

Firstly, in it he implies that while victories over one’s competition breeds hate, victories over one’s superiors is foolish or fatal. Besides the ‘they have more power than you’ thing, superiors may have more street moxie than you. They may be better cheats, meaning, they may have more weapons, allies and other tools which they can get away with using without detection, than you do. If all other things are equal, they’re more likely to win the war.

Second, he implies that most people are fools. They prefer to cater to their own emotional welfare, meaning defending themselves psychologically against the knowledge that the world can be a vicious and dangerous place including hunters expert with camouflage. They want/need for their chosen superiors to be worthy of superiority and project qualities or get easily suckered.

Third, he says that most people are born followers. Authoritarian enablers. If your evil boss is a clever cheater then he’ll likely have an army of foolish followers who’ll attack you on his command.

I’m sure there’s a lot more (been a while since I read it) but that’s off the top of my head. My evil boss had behaviors similar to Ellen DeGeneres. Kiss up kick down and expert at acting contrite. And then when nobody was looking… watchout. You’d think that Trump would be easier, being so public. But look at all the obfuscators we have just around here.

There’s been a fair amount of research on effect of financial incentives. In short, it’s found that external incentives work on a very, very simple task. Pound a nail as often as possible, you get more hits on the nail but you can’t care whether it’s driven in straight or doesn’t rip up what you’re pounding it into. At any even minimally complex task, the incentives are counterproductive. They produce what’s incentivized, like number of hits on the nail. The business response has been that they simply haven’t found the right incentives yet. The myth that high pay produces better work justifies the exorbitant upper management loot.

The people most interested in maintaining the belief that incentives are necessary for good results, the Gates Foundation, set out to prove it. Their large, expensive experiment produced bad results, just like previous experiments. If you read the Forbes article linked to, you will note the writer’s insistence that all the ideas are really good; don’t give up on them just because they don’t work!

We’ve know this for over a hundred years. In World War I, the first great industrial war, Great Britain decided to produce more armaments by giving bonuses for additional shells. They got more shells. But if you want to aim, fire, and hit something (preferably not your own soldiers), you need shells that have the same firing characteristics. They didn’t get that.

Also to paraphrase Shakespeare, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the MBAs”.

A common scenario where the right feedback from the front fails to inform the decision makers is “Hidden Goal Conflict”.

Basically you have an organization with Goals and that are at odds with each other but the conflict between them is hidden/denied by decision makers.

Everyone at the front and most of the people in the middle know the conflict is real but they cannot resolve it, they can only choose a side (normally the one closest to their paycheck).

If you are at the front of the information chain or in the middle (these two groups are where 90% of us would be) then you have to be extremely careful with what information you share.

Having lived through that scenario for a decade I can tell you that your best course of action is to leave. You can’t fix it and you can never be careful enough, it’s a high stress nightmare.

\”apparently people would rather be criticized than ignored\”

Well, yet another way in which I seem to be a mutant. I\’ve already had enough criticism to last my entire life.

I don\’t see how #7 is a lie. It seems to me that if you can get someone to do better (whether by rating them or incentivizing them or whatever) then yes, they do have potential.

Nihil obstet, have you ever heard of Goodhart\’s Law? It says \”when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.\”