Every few years, a management book or philosophy emerges to change our thinking about the best ways to lead employees.
From The One Minute Manager to Who Moved My Cheese?, new and revived leadership concepts have shaped the way we organize, evaluate, inspire, and reward team members. With so many competing management theories in the mix, some ill-conceived practices were bound to take hold—and indeed, many have. Here's our list of the 10 most brainless and injurious:
1. Forced Ranking
The idea behind forced ranking is that when you evaluate your employees against one another, you'll see who's most critical on the team and who's most expendable. This theory rests on the notion that we can exhort our reports to work together for the sake of the team 364 days a year and then, when it really counts, pit them against one another in a zero-sum competitive exercise. That's a decent strategy for TV shows such as Survivor but disastrous for organizations that intend to stay in business for the long term. What to do instead: Evaluate employees against written goals and move quickly to remove poor performers all the time (not just once a year).
2. Front-Loaded Recruiting Systems
All the rage in the corporate hiring arena, so-called front-loaded hiring processes require candidates to surmount the Seven Trials of Hercules before earning so much as a phone call from your HR staff. Those trials can include credit checks, reference checks, online honesty tests, questionnaires, sample work assignments, and other mandatory drills that signal "We'll just need you to crawl over a few more bits of broken glass, and you may get that interview." Don't be fooled by job-market reports—talented, creative employees are as hard to snag as ever. Insulting and demeaning hiring practices are a big reason. What to do instead: Dismantle your Kafka-esque recruiting system and give hiring power back to your hiring managers. They'll thank you for it, and the quality and speed of your recruitment will skyrocket.
3. Overdone Policy Manuals
You know who's making money for your employer right now? Workers who are selling, building, or inventing stuff. You know who's spending the business's money right now? Other employees (most easily found in HR, IT, and Finance) who've been commanded to write, administer, and enforce the 10,000 policies that make up your company's employee handbook. Overblown policy efforts squelch creativity, bake fear into your culture, and make busywork for countless office admins, on top of wasting paper, time, and brain cells. What to do instead? Nuke one unnecessary or outdated policy every week and require the CEO's signature to add any new ones.
4. Social Media Thought Police
It's reasonable to block Youtube (GOOG) in the office because of the bandwidth it consumes. The recent e-mail message I received from a worker who'd just been informed of her employer's "no LinkedIn profiles permitted" policy sets a new low for organizational paranoia. Memo to your general counsel: Human beings work in your business, not robots or replicants. People have lives, brands, and connections beyond your walls, and those human entanglements are more likely to help your business than to hurt it. What to do instead: Treat people like babies only if you want them to act like babies. Let the rest of them update their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter accounts appropriately, and if they're not getting their work done, deal with that problem on its own.
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