Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It_ The Results-Only Revolution - Cali Ressler [49]
Now fast-forward to a corporate setting. A senior executive suddenly needs a sales report outside of the regular reporting period. Or a director wants a quick update on a project that’s not due for another month. Or the president is walking the floor and wants to find out what people are doing.
So what happens? Fire drill! When we first joined the workforce we fell for this false urgency. Then after six months you realize that very few of these requests are real emergencies. Often it’s an executive whim, or the result of poor planning. Sometimes the request even goes away before you get a chance to respond. After a while, you can’t tell what’s a real crisis and what’s a fake one. In the worst organization, the day is one big crisis as you scramble to make up for past mistakes, or to catch up on work you didn’t get to finish because you were in a meeting about the last batch of work you didn’t get to finish.
At the other end of the spectrum is the drive-by. Executive Jill can make mountains move with her last-minute requests. Peon Joe can’t, but he sure can pop by your cube for “just a quick question.” The result of the drive-by is the same. You stop the work you’re supposed to be doing, redirect your energy and focus to Joe, take time to answer that question, and then have to change focus back to what you were doing. What were you doing again?
This Guidepost addresses planning and foresight. Think of it this way: If people are working in their own style, and not tied to the physical office, and questioning meetings, and working when it’s best for them, then everyone has to plan more, and there need to be a lot of conversations about outcomes. You can’t count on just popping by someone’s cube for a quick answer to that question you should have asked a week ago. You can’t hope to cover your ass by making a vague comment or two in the next meeting. You can’t expect someone else to pick up that ball you dropped a month ago, which you haven’t gotten around to telling anyone about. And you no longer have to bail out your boss for their lack of foresight.
It’s not that there aren’t emergencies, or that the workforce is static and unmotivated. What changes is that you are no longer in reaction mode all the time. You no longer create the illusion of working by taking care of an emergency that wouldn’t have transpired if someone had just done a little planning. You aren’t going to hear “I need this by five o’clock” because you have been communicating with your boss and your team members about when action items are due. You are no longer living in a world of unnecessary drama.
In practice this means a new way of interacting with your manager. It’s up to you to have a solid relationship with them because you have to be able to communicate what needs to get done, what good looks like, and how check-ins are going to work. There is a more open dialogue in a ROWE, and those kinds of performance-review conversations you have once or twice a year in a typical job are the kinds of conversations you have every week.
Managers, on the other hand, are forced to take more of a coaching role than a supervisory role. As a manager your job is no longer to supervise, to sit back and wait for people to either succeed or fail. In a ROWE managers take a much more active role in their employees’ success because if they can’t communicate the goals and expectations then the whole system breaks down. You can’t judge people on appearing to work; you can only judge them on the work they produce, so you’d better have a very clear idea of what work needs to get done.
For a lot of people this new focus on results and planning and foresight is one of the best