Some Lessons Are Never Learned

 

I’ve worked with some truly inspirational and brilliant executives over my career, and have spent considerable time thinking about what that highly disparate group of people had in common. As different as they all were in age, background, education, culture, and personality, they did have the following three attributes in common (which, taken together, would become Hatfield’s Rule of Management #12):

• They genuinely cared about their people, either on their project teams or in their line organizations (if you are reading this to glean tips on how to advance into executive management, and you don’t really care about your people, then do us all a favor and enter a profession that does not require managerial leadership to advance. You can only fake this attribute for so long).
• They consistently figure out the optimal technical approach to the problems facing the organization, or else readily recognize when someone else has done so. This attribute is a tricky mix of expertise and willingness to accept input from others, as evidenced by the payoff matrix below:

Note that the only instance in which the so-called communications management people and their unending urging of “engaging all of the stakeholders” represents an appropriate response is the bottom-left-hand payoff scenario. In another instance such urgings are superfluous; for the remainders, they’re flat-out wrong.

• Once they have arrived at the optimal technical approach to either pursuing the project’s scope or resolving a technical issue, they execute their strategies with passion. I like to use the example of American World War II General George S. Patton, (I’m pretty sure) should he be parachuted in to Northern Europe by himself in 1943, would not have waited around for the rest of the 3^rd Army to arrive before he started attacking Nazis.

Of course, one does not have to be a good manager to be successful, and even really good managers will experience failures at some point. But when it comes to maximizing the odds of the successful outcome of a given endeavor, the people who demonstrate these three attributes can be expected to consistently out-perform those who do not. And it is those who do not whom I wish to discuss today.

I have noticed a consistent trend among those managers who are either weak or void in the first two attributes I listed, caring for their people and arriving at the optimal technical approach. Recall Hatfield’s Rule of Management #11: the 80^th percentile best managers who have access to only 20% of the information needed to obviate a given decision will be consistently out-performed by the 20% worst managers who have access to 80% of the information so needed. I believe that most of the managers who have a hard time discerning the optimal (or even sufficient) technical approach to a given problem know this, deep down inside, and will present as constantly hungry for information. The competent manager knows the precise nature of the information streams needed for project success, and how to set them up and keep them running. The manager to avoid will flail in a sea of data, some necessary, some irrelevant, and not know which is which.

This brings me to a list of the symptoms displayed by the managers who don’t know the optimal technical approach to their jobs, and really don’t care about their people. One sure-fire tell that you are dealing with such a manager is that they will insist on setting up and maintaining a database of the things that they need to pay attention to. Such systems have a variety of names, such as “Action Item Tracking,” or “Issues Management” systems, among others, but their purpose is the same: to inform the sub-optimal manager of the things that need their attention. Don’t get me wrong – institutional issues management systems can and do provide a vital information stream to execs several levels removed from the projects’ trenches. No, the systems I’m talking about seem to be always predicated on a model that includes a central repository of data, surrounded by input/output nodes. This “poll” is, of course, an invalid management information system structure, since it has absolutely no ability to differentiate between subjective or objective data, nor information that is feedback-based as opposed to feedforward. It also has the drawback of displacing legitimate systems, such as those predicated on Earned Value or Critical Path methodologies.

Add to the existence of these invalid information systems a tendency to call multiple meetings designed to simply check on what everybody is doing (or else, more insidiously, some confidant spying on what everyone is up to), and there can really be no doubt: the person you are dealing with can’t benefit from any legit lessons learned analysis, since they have a poor concept of which information streams are relevant to the successful pursuit of the technical agenda at hand.

So it all comes down to this: if a given manager is incapable of discerning relevant and irrelevant information in the here-and-now, why should they suddenly be able to discern it from lessons learned reports?