Pointy-Haired Bosses

The characters in Scott Adams’ Dilbert cartoons vividly display super-stereotypes of workplace denizens. Among them is Dilbert’s selfish, clueless, pointy-haired boss, who destroys morale and impedes progress.

We may encounter bosses who occasionally remind us of Dilbert’s pointy-haired guy, but my experience suggests that only a few self-employed business owners and a lot of tenured professors behave that badly and get away with it. Most supervisors are decent sorts who genuinely want to do a good job. They will have faults, as we all do. They will make mistakes, as we all do. Mainly what they do is supervise in their own style, doing the things that are most comfortable.

We can talk about good supervisory styles later. Some typical bad supervisory styles include micro-manager, fearful non-decider, over-delegator, under-delegator, over-demander, smoke blower, and screamer. You may enjoy some of these if your work preferences match your supervisor’s styles. For example ….

Steven sat staring at the graph paper on his desk. I could see that he had plotted one, and only one, point on the graph paper since I left him an hour ago. That was enough time for him to have completed the simple task of plotting the data table I had left him, but it was barely started. He said, “I’m ready for you to check my work.” He wanted me to check every plotted point before he went on to the next one. That day and the next, no matter how often I told Steven to do the whole job before asking me to check it, he needed affirmation of every step.

Sherri was Steven’s complete opposite. I’d sketch out the big picture for her, give her instructions for the first few steps, and off she went. When she came back, usually much sooner than expected, the task was complete, including detailed steps we hadn’t even discussed yet. Sometimes Sherri overlooked some detail that needed fixing but she got it done.

Sherri flourished under my supervision and went on to a great career. After two days, Steven went back to his old job, saying he couldn’t work for me. He was right.

It takes talent, knowledge, and effort to supervise people, resources, and projects. Good supervisors adjust their approach to account for each employee’s personality and ability. If an employee lacks the ability or self-confidence to work independently, the supervisor must provide detailed instructions, regular check-ins, and affirmation or correction. Steven, obsessed with avoiding mistakes, needed that kind of micro-managing from me. Sherri was capable, self-confident, and enjoyed getting things done with minimal supervision. She needed the freedom to work it out herself.

If I were a great supervisor, I would have given Steven the constant monitoring and affirmation that he craved. But I’m not, and I didn’t. Sherri and I worked well together, not because I was a great supervisor, but because her work style matched perfectly with my preferred supervisory style.

Next time we’ll continue an examination of bosses and look at how to manage them.

Getting Credit at Work

“Ben got promoted because he takes the boss fishing,”

The remark stunned me. I had been in the organization several months and noticed that Ben was smart and the hardest worker in our group. Did he really get ahead because he did our branch chief off-duty favors?

I heard gripes similar to Freddie’s many times throughout my career. The woman who applied for and completed a management course got a supervisor’s position but her peers said she was just lucky to have taken that course at the right time. The person who worked hard to help the boss achieve his goals was said to be brown-nosing. With few exceptions, those promotions were actually the result of diligence and preparation, not favoritism.

The psychology of comparing our efforts to others’ is well known – we humans see our own hard work and ability as key to the good things we achieve, but tend to see others’ achievements as the product of luck or favoritism. Our own failures we see as bad luck or adversity, but we see others’ failures as their own fault. It’s a natural human instinct that we have to overcome in ourselves and learn to manage in others.

A twinge of jealousy at a co-worker’s success is natural. Don’t worry about it but don’t let it contaminate your comments or your work. Saying out loud that someone else’s success is undeserved damages you, not them. Let it go.

Credit for good ideas and good work is a tricky subject. We want and deserve credit for our contributions, but seldom are we good judges of our own contributions. Memory is selective – everyone remembers offering a good idea if it succeeds but no one remembers even endorsing it if it fails. Even if it was your idea originally, pointing out that fact doesn’t endear you to anyone but does makes you seem insecure. I found that people who are most concerned about getting credit are usually the least deserving of it and often wind up harming, rather than helping their careers.

Your boss will often claim credit for your contributions. Let her. First, as your supervisor she is responsible for both your successes and your screw-ups, so get used to that. She may chew on you in private, but a good supervisor will defend you to others when you fail. A great one will shoulder the blame in public. Sometimes it’s politically important that a boss get more credit for an accomplishment in order to give it the significance it needs for wider acceptance. Sometimes she needs the credit in order to advance you and your organization.

People generally know who did the good work. If you get an insecure supervisor or co-worker who consistently claims credit for success but puts blame for failure on you, observe what happens. Do others in the organization recognize your contributions? If you are in an organization or with a supervisor that consistently undervalues your true contributions, you are in the wrong place. Leave it. If it happens everywhere you work, you may have a distorted view of yourself.

Who Needs Math?

After 22 years working as an engineer I went back to school to try for a PhD. My wife and colleagues, fearing that I was too domineering to act like a student, reminded me to be humble around the professors. I figured that humility could be faked. It was relearning math that terrified me.

Engineering students take lots of math courses – geometry, trigonometry, calculus, and differential equations. Those who find math easy romp through those courses. I plodded through them, proving that persistence can often make up for smartness deficiencies.

As most graduating engineers do, I soon discovered that few workplaces actually use advanced math. Many of us never use calculus after graduation. So why did we study calculus? Is it a waste of time?

I didn’t have a good answer to that question until I taught engineering classes. Students without a good grasp of calculus floundered when I taught open channel flow, sediment transport, and numerical modeling. Even if the equations were simple, the concept of representing a continuum by discrete parts baffled them. The instantaneous slope of a curved line (a derivative) drove some students crazy. “There’s not a real line there, it’s just a point!”

Recent research has shown that the brain actually rewires itself in response to studying math and physics, laying down new neural connections that facilitate mathematical understanding. That helps explain what I saw in the classroom and partly explains why engineers tend to see some things differently from non-engineers. (Differently, not necessarily better.)

A knowledge of geometry, algebra, and calculus, and perhaps the brain rewiring, is essential to many concepts in engineering analysis. Open channel flows, foundation design, and stresses on bridge members all require that understanding in order to properly comprehend the physical processes and the equations we use for analysis and design.  

One of my professors said that using an equation you don’t understand is like playing Russian roulette. He was right, I’ve seen too many people blindly apply the wrong equation to a problem because they didn’t understand the math or the physics behind that equation. Grabbing an equation out of a handbook without understanding it can destroy a career.

Math, science, language, and humanities classes can seem like an utter waste of time when we’re trying to get through engineering school, but they are not. They form the underlying structure of ideas and thought processes that we need to be successful in the workplace. So bear down and learn them to be a good engineer.

The Goldilocks Job

Which type of job sits in the Goldilocks zone of “just right” for you? Government or private? Large or small organization? Service or manufacturing? It’s an important question for job satisfaction.

For many folks, the question is simply, “Where can I get a job, period.” Engineers usually have more options and finding your Goldilocks engineer job requires investigation and discernment. The correct fit depends on your personality, habits, and goals in combination with the culture of the workplace. You can find out for sure only by working at a specific place, day-in and day-out, but here are my general observations.

Large organizations, both private and government, share some characteristics. They have lots of rules (policies) on how to handle various situations, which can limit flexibility and creative solutions. They also have lots of resources, so if you encounter a tough problem there will probably be someone who can help. Large organizations can afford some less productive members. That can be good – providing some valuable expert that is needed occasionally – or bad – allowing poor performers (deadwood) to hide their lack of productivity.

A common occurrence in large organizations is that employees get slotted into a narrow specialty and do the same thing over and over again. I’ve known some people who loved that and others who hated it. Getting wider experience requires a policy that ensures rotational assignments or that the person aggressively seeks out new project types within the organization.

Small organizations offer a mostly reversed image of large ones’ characteristics. They are much more flexible and creative. Readily available skills and knowledge are limited to existing staff. If you encounter something new, you will probably have to look outside the organization for help. A small staff often means that everyone needs to be a generalist, able to take on a variety of project types. You don’t get pigeon-holed into one type of project but your ability to become really expert in some specialty becomes limited. Personality conflicts that might be tolerable in a large organization can be impossible in a small one.

Government organizations have much in common with large private companies with near-monopolies, including inertia. In fact, the differences between large and small organizations tend to be greater than those between government and private. Some people disparage government workers but I’ve seen just as many conscientious, smart, and hard-working people in government as in the private sector. One major difference is that the clients of private organizations are usually the ones providing the funding, i.e., buying the product; whereas, government is funded by political bodies, not the clients (i.e., the public). That affects priorities within the organization.

One notable difference between private sector and many government jobs is the notion of billable hours. Many engineers really hate having to generate funds for, and then account for, every hour of every day, which is pretty much standard in the private sector. It also happens in some government offices. New hires aren’t expected to generate their own funding but someone has to give them permission to charge to a project. I found that it helps keep people focused on what they were supposed to be doing but I do agree that billable hours can be a distracting burden.

Which one works best for you? 

Tribes at Work

“Nobody on this hallway would steal anything but those other hallways are a bunch of crooks.”

I thought he must be joking, but the man was serious. Everyone in the building worked for the same organization, all were technical professionals assigned offices almost randomly. Yet he truly thought that some magic had placed only honest people in the hallway where his office lay and landed dishonest people in every other hallway.

My investigation: find out what had happened to a missing portable generator. Multiple people had seen it the previous week in a storeroom. Then it was missing. Was someone legitimately using it or had it been stolen? [Insert NCIS theme song here.] Spoiler: It had been stolen and I recommended that the investigation be turned over to the police.

I never heard if they found the culprit or not. But that investigation and a dozen others taught me something terrible about us humans. Thousands of years after we grew beyond small hunter-gatherer tribes, we are still tribal beings. Now we identify with cultural tribes, trusting our tribe members and distrusting other tribes, convinced that the trust is based on facts.

Every person I interviewed that day expressed similar sentiments, although less bluntly than that first man. Every hallway distrusted every other hallway with a few exceptions for friends sharing other tribal bonds. Subsequent investigations produced similar patterns, a solid belief among interviewees that no one in their tribe would be careless or steal.

We also see the tribal effect in sports, where fans ferociously identify with the Saints, Barcelona, Atlanta, or Team USA even when fans don’t play and don’t personally know anyone on those teams. In politics we label ourselves and others as Democrats, Tories, Conservatives, Pro- and Anti-something, ad infinitum. In the workplace we label “Us” and “Them” by function, discipline, or even by hallway. Once labeled, we vilify the other labeled tribes as not just different, but stupid and dishonest. Sigh.

What advice can I offer in the face of such instinctive behavior? First, recognize tribalism for what it is in yourself and others. Work hard to prevent it from contaminating your work relationships. Go out of your way to cultivate friendships across the labels. Demonstrate a willingness to listen to contrary ideas from “Them.” But be aware that some bosses’ turf protection often hinges on tribalism. I once was caught between my supervisor who refused to defend his own turf and his boss who became furious when we tried cooperation before attacking competitors. Double sigh.

Performance Appraisals Stink

Most employee performance appraisals fail to improve performance and damage management credibility. Good performance appraisal systems in the workplace are like the abominal snowman, rumored to exist and sightings bragged upon, but never actually seen. Most supervisors and most employees dread the practice. Why? There are four obvious problems.

Problem 1. Management misuses them.

Most organizations SAY that appraisals are intended to improve employee performance but use them for other purposes. The ideal system allows supervisors and subordinates to communicate about needs, goals, and ways to improve performance in a collaborative process akin to coaching. However, management screws it up by using the results for pay raise and promotion decisions. Making a person’s pay depend on his or her performance rating changes the process from collaboration to a competition between supervisor and employee. The supervisor, under pressure to prevent ratings inflation, points to the employee’s deficiencies. The employee, seeking to increase income, points to strengths and makes excuses. The dynamic is no longer about improving performance. Then there’s the “ratings inflation” issue. The U.S. Army famously destroyed the objectivity of performance ratings by keying them to promotion decisions. Decent superior officers didn’t want to ruin their subordinate’s career with anything less than a top rating; while malicious ones deliberately downgraded those who disagreed with them. The result was massive “ratings inflation” and loss of many good officers. There are many such examples of misuse.

Problem 2. Management insists that ratings fit a distribution.

Applying an artificial distribution like the bell curve to performance appraisals is management malpractice. The bell curve (Gaussian Distribution) exhibits a bell shape with a few high values, a few low values, and a bulge of most values around the average. I’ve seen senior managers and Human Resources types draw a bell curve to explain how performance ratings should be distributed. (They weren’t laughing when they did that, so they were either liars or math dunces.) I’ve been told that I had given too many low ratings or too many high ratings and instructed to change some of them in order to achieve a bell curve. That’s total and absolute nonsense. Bell curves apply only to large numbers and to some random variables, including dice rolls and the length of peoples’ fingers. Any measure that people can manage is not random. Consider the high jump in track and field. If we pulled people off the street at random and got them to jump, we might get a bell curve of maximum jump heights. But if we look at the statistics from a high jump competition, we see instead a skewed, tightly clustered distribution (a gamma distribution with low k value) because those athletes have trained and been coached to do well. Similarly, people train to do their jobs and are coached by supervisors to do them even better. Whatever the distribution is, it isn’t a bell curve and never will be. Further, it will progressively shift toward higher average performance (i.e., rating inflation) if management is doing its coaching job and not destroying productivity with ill-conceived policies. 

Problem 3. Appraisals are too infrequent.

Most appraisals are conducted once or twice a year because it’s a convenient schedule. Unless someone has kept meticulous notes, it becomes a struggle to remember who did what and how many times. Any serious attempt at quality improvement in manufacturing or customer service is applied continuously, not in once-a-year retrospectives, and so it should be with performance appraisals. 

Problem 4. Different supervisors rate differently.

Some supervisors grade hard (think Steve Jobs’ abuse of his employees, even the great ones) and some grade easy (think Elwood P. Dowd in my post, “Plays Well with Others.”) A few rating systems use the supervisors’ overall average rating in previous appraisals to normalize them for comparison. That doesn’t solve the problem, since it neglects the coaching effect that good supervisors use to boost performance. A great supervisor gets great performances and eventually gives more superior ratings. Why should an average performer on a great team get the same normalized rating as an average performer on a mediocre team? Nonsense piled on nonsense.

Solutions? I have ideas on how a performance appraisal system should work, but would like to hear your thoughts first. In your experience, what works? What doesn’t? Comment below.

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A Good Excuse is Dangerous

When our grandson was about 5, he would ask to play with my “dangerous tool” (a Leatherman multi-tool). It was almost harmless but gave him a thrill because he knew he shouldn't be playing with it.

The “most dangerous tool” for any career is The Excuse, even if it’s a good one. Some examples:

One of our daughters suddenly started getting terrible math grades. Nothing we tried helped until one night she blurted out in frustration, “Girls aren’t supposed to be good in math!”  “Are you insane?” I politely asked. She had seen a TV comedy in which the girl was bad at math and had adopted that bad idea because it relieved her of the responsibility to work hard. To correct her misconception, her mother told her of female math geniuses starting with Hypatia of Alexandria. She led our daughter through the ages to Ada Babbage, Grace Hopper and our good friend and famous engineer Mary Kendrick.

I have heard dozens of people say about someone getting a promotion or a raise,  “She’s so lucky, being in the just right place at the right time,”  or “He only got that job because he takes the boss fishing.” From where I sat, it looked like the "lucky" ones had positioned themselves for success with extra education and hard work over months and years. But for these complainers, it was easier to slack off and complain because they had bogus excuses of bad luck or a refusal to brown-nose the boss.

Even good excuses are dangerous. I worked with a woman engineer who had a serious lisp. It made her seem even younger than she was and would have doomed her to a minor role. Instead of wallowing in "it's not fair." she refused to let her lisp define her, taking speech classes, joining a Toastmasters public speaking club, and learning to express her ideas forcefully. She soon became a lead engineer.

What’s your excuse?