August 2008 Archives

I'm fascinated by the way people choose to communicate. I watch people, try to find out what  they communicate and how, and how effective their way of communicating is. I know the way I communicate is a bit blunt. I guess that's a nice way to put it. I'm the person you don't ask if you're hoping for a specific answer. If someone looks like hell, and that someone asks me how they look, I'm going to say "Like hell". I don't know how I missed the lesson in social fibbing, but I'm just not very skilled in that particular art. Now, I'm quite good at finding lots of ways to say "Wow, that was a really bonehead thing to do!", some that leave the bonehead unsure of whether *he was just insulted or complimented, but I usually feel that the truth is better and much more simple. It's easier to remember I think that red shirt is really ugly than to try to recall if I said I liked it last time I was asked.

At work, there seems to be an unspoken code of interaction that suggests being nice (fake?) is more important than being honest. I've sat in meetings where people are flat out lying about the way something went down, trying to cover their collective asses, trying to save face. Most of us know they're full of it, but we don't call bullshit on someone lest we leave hurt feelings or humiliation in our wake. And when I say "We", I do mean a "we" that rarely includes me. I've been in meetings where I said "WHAT?? That isn't what happened." When someone tried to gloss over an inconsiderate, rude glory grab, I was happy to be the one to say it was a really rotten thing to do and that an apology was in order. I've also put out calls to go over a project that went bad, to see where it could be improved, but I rarely got any response from the "nice" people who feel that being polite is better for business.

I don't think it's better for business. I think when something goes wrong, it's better to admit it. I'm the first person to raise my hand when I screw up. And I sure do raise my hand a lot. I'm not sure how we can find flaws and fix weaknesses if we don't admit to mistakes, analyze what went wrong, and find ways to do better next time. I make a lot of mistakes. We all do. Thankfully most of my mistakes aren't of the make or break sort, and none are life and death. But every mistake made is a chance to do something better next time, and I want people to tell me how to do better. Perfection is such a high standard to live up to, and it's a real energy suck. All for something unattainable. I see no point.

Maybe it's just laziness. Maybe I'm just too lazy to try to remember all of the little white lies and the covers I had to make up to keep people from noticing I'm human. Or maybe I know how much more respect I have for people when they say "Whoops, goofed, sorry". And perhaps I don't care if those people who can't respect me for being human do or don't. I'll hang with the rest of the mere mortals and leave perfection to someone else.

I probably won't get feedback on my final paper for a few days, but on Tuesday (day before it was due), I decided to figure out what score I needed on the paper to still get an A in the class.  It's a fun exercise and one I've done in many classes. I ask the question "If I completely blow off this last assignment, what grade will I get?"  It stems from an adolescent psych class I took as an undergraduate. I got a funky stamped image on my journal and the prof said to come to the front of the class when class was done for the day. Those of us who got the stamp didn't have to take the final because it wouldn't change our grade. Every class since then, I've figured out what grade I could get if I just didn't do the last thing. In the case of this class, I would have gotten a B. Having kept a high average throughout the semester, a B wouldn't be acceptable, so I did the assignment. Would I have skipped it had I been able to get an A without? Probably not. I like to write papers anyway. I just wish these assignments would have required real research, with citations and bibliographies, the way most social science papers do.

I think it freaks some people out, being cavalier about assignments. The discussion the other day from LDSC08 about what the point of college is, someone mentioned it might not actually be the learning. I know, big hairy shocker. I hate sitting in classes with traditional students anymore because so many of them are there for the degree, not for learning. I'm really not cavalier about assignments. I just think it's fun to see if I could blow it off. Not that I ever actually would. I'm a dork in every sense of the word. I like taking classes, and even better, I like taking really hard classes. For me, the end result is not the point of classes. Not even when I was an undergrad. Even then I meandered through my college experience, taking extra classes because they looked interesting, because I liked the professor. I dropped my advisor when she said "Why don't you just take what I tell you so you can get out of here?"  That just never has been the point for me.

So while I wait for my grade, I'm pondering this course and how easy it was for me and wondering if it was worth the money I spent. It was a good class. There was really good material.  It was just not what I expect when I take a 400 level course at a university like PSU. I expected a few nights of pulling my hair out trying to find that obscure reference and pacing to commit some of the details to memory. I've been told I'm nuts for doing this and for thinking about how education is delivered, how the delivery mechanism impacts the class, but considering that there is a lot of talk about this kind of thing right now, I'd really love to hear what other people think. Is my post-class ponderance really a waste of time?

There's an educational movement among homeschoolers, small but strong, called unschooling. John Holt was a great advocate of unschooling. He was a teacher who called for educational reforms in the public school system. He realized that the public school we had, and still have, is the public school our country wants. He finally left teaching to advocate for serious reforms to schooling, becoming a big proponent of homeschooling, and then finally, unschooling. If you go to a mainstream education site, you can find a whole lot of rhetoric about unschooling equating to kids not learning anything, about parents who don't teach their children, about kids without schedules or boundaries. You can read all about kids who play video games all day, or watch television all day, who stay up all night and sleep all day. Or you could read some of John Holt's books and talk to an unschooler to find out what it is that really happens in a typical unschooling family.  We unschool (in case you haven't figured it out). I usually describe it as child led learning. It isn't that my children don't learn anything. They just get to determine what they learn, how they learn it, and how much of it they learn.

The first year we unschooled, it was pretty boring stuff. They wanted the four major subjects, workbooks even, wanted me to assign them homework, tell them what to do. Then as they got further and further away from the schooling mindset, called deschooling, they began to find the entire world that's out there. They went from asking for "history" to asking for prehuman history and then asking for books on evolution and Darwin. We went from "science" to biology, astronomy, and now physics.  And Latin. I don't know Latin. How am I going to help my son learn a language I don't know? I'm going to learn it too. The coolest thing about unschooling is grown ups do it too. From the day I sent my oldest to first grade (she didn't attend K), I knew something wasn't right with the situation. My children went from curious knowledge seekers to inactive knowledge "targets". Schools tell kids what to learn, when, in what order, and probably the worst thing for my kids, schools told them when they had learned enough. My children learned to become passive learners, taking in only what they were given, no longer questioning what else there might be to know.

I was scared to death when I pulled my kids from school. Scared. To. Death. I knew I wanted to unschool. As soon as I learned about the philosophy, it just made so much sense. So I got my kids out of school and began this quest, feeling very much at first like I was going to turn my kids into idiots. What if they never started directing their own education? Would I be able to direct it for them? Would I even want to? After a year, the number of hours spent in passive mode decreased. After the second year of workbooks and assignments grudgingly handed out by me, something clicked and they've been off and running ever since. It's sometimes tough to keep up with them. Between Doestoevsky and physics and Latin and epidemiology, I spend a whole lot of time answering questions about things I don't know a lot about until I look it up. But there is nothing as cool as having a talk with your 15 year old about the religious humor in Waiting for Godot and knowing that he actually got the play, that he understood the statement it was making about the human condition. And knowing that many adults can't even get the nuances of that play really tells me that I made the right choices in letting my kids learn the way they need to.

What does all this have to do with work? After reading all the stuff on Twitter about LDSC08, about methods of teaching and letting people learn in their own way, I kept thinking how much it sounded like unschooling. And unschooling is a way of life, a way of thinking about learning. It's not limited to legal school age, like some proponents of unschooling like to say it is. It's learning without walls, using the as much of the world as you need in order to gain the understanding you seek. It's been so amazing watching my sons regain that spark. I think it would be even more amazing if we could help college students get that spark back as well, by not making them sit in 8 am classes, or in an auditorium with 1200 other kids in various states of dress (or undress). Why not let them learn in ways that benefit them most? What are people so afraid of when it comes to this?

Now that I've written a book (or so it seems), let me tell you this. It's 10:40 pm and my four year old is still awake, as he is almost every night at this time. My soon to be 16 year old ( another hour and a half!! ) stays up until he wants to go to sleep and sleeps until he wants to wake up. My 17 year old is an early(ish) to bed and early to rise kind of guy, and it works out. When we all need to be up and out the door, we are, but when we don't have to be, why stick to a rigid schedule? They are allowed to watch as much television as they want, they play as many video games as they want for as long as they want. It's amazing how little they actually want.

Did you ever hear one of those old cliches and just roll your eyes? You know the person using the cliche doesn't really believe it, but *he says it anyway, thinking that perhaps if *he says it enough, people will believe *he means it.

I roll my eyes a lot. One of my favorite cliches about management comes from micromanagers. I have yet to meet a micromanager who will admit to micromanaging. Recognize this - "I don't micromanage. I believe in hiring good employees and letting them do their jobs their own way."  If someone has to tell you they don't micromanage, chances are good they're trying harder to convince themselves than they are you.

Love means never having to say you're sorry, and not being a micromanager means letting your staff do their jobs, sometimes in ways you won't really like, and sometimes in ways that are less efficient than you believe your way to be. Kind of like a mom who remakes her kids beds trains her kids to never make their beds, a micromanager who is always micromanaging trains h** employees to never make a decision on their own.

I'm wrapping up the organizational psych course I've been taking this summer. I have one paper left to write, application of one of the theories we've learned to a case study. I enjoy organizational psychology and management theory, but this stuff isn't exactly difficult to grasp. It's a whole lot of common sense and it's very easy to slip into the language used in organizational psych.

The problem isn't with the theory, though. It's with the application of these theories. People are different from one another, and sometimes people change their minds. One person may want lots of money today, but tomorrow, autonomy may seem more valuable. That same person may be perfectly willing to give up autonomy in return for a lot of flexibility in scheduling. From my experience, it's much easier to make employees unhappy in that global, all encompassing way. If I could give advice to managers, I certainly would.

Micromanagement is one sure way to upset everyone. Even micromanagers hate to be micromanaged. If someone holds a job that requires more thought than "Would you like paper or plastic?", chances are really good that micromanagement is not desirable.  Having someone watch every move is a suffocating experience. Being questioned about every detail is frustrating, especially when the details aren't relevant to the conversation.  Moodiness is another trait that is very difficult to deal with from an employee perspective. A really good manager can separate emotions from work. In a bad mood because your dog made a mess and you stepped in it? Leave it at home. Got into a fight with a man at the coffee counter? Don't drag it to the job. If an employee does something to bother you, say so. Don't stew in your juices all day. Confront the problem and resolve it. Employees aren’t mind readers and no one benefits from stony silence.

If you want to really make your workplace suck for your staff, I can help you. Don’t be clear. Don’t set goals. Don’t give feedback. Clarity only leads to the ability for employees to know what it is you’re expecting. That makes it entirely too easy for them to do their jobs, and we all know that challenge is usually one of those things employees say they want. Give them a challenge. Make it a game to guess what your expectations are. It will be great fun.  Certainly don’t allow anyone to set goals. That might lead to lower workload because something might get done. Boredom is often a complaint at work, so the less headway staff can make toward reaching a goal, the longer they will be busy. If someone has an idea, squash it, especially if there’s a deadline attached to it. A deadline makes an idea look suspiciously like a goal. Feedback I think goes without saying.

I had a phone interview with a guy at Cornell a year ago. He asked me what my management style is. I told him the truth. I don’t have a management style. I figured out what I wanted in a boss and conducted myself accordingly. I emulated the behaviors I wanted in my idea of a perfect supervisor. I think all managers should try that. Just picture the perfect boss and do what *he does. It’s really simple.

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What motivates people to work hard, to do the best work they can? If I could answer this question, I think I'd be rich.  If companies knew what to do to get the highest level of productivity, real task persistence, and high quality, a lot of researchers would have to find something else to study.

Old school management used the stick method of managing. People were under threat of losing their jobs if they didn't do what the boss told them, even if it meant doing things that were ethically shaky, even if it meant "put out or get out". And people listened. People weren't assets. They were just another resource and they were expendable and replaceable.  Times have really changed. Anyone can work an assembly line. Strategic thinking is a much harder skill to master. Thinking in terms of change and change management is almost impossible for many people who are already busy doing their jobs. People who can do these things, who can produce work and think forward far enough to plan the next set of changes, aren't expendable. They aren't easy to find and they really aren't easy to replace.

Now that we're firmly entrenched in the times where information and knowledge are as important as product, it's not as easy for companies to keep employees with thinking skills. The carrot method of managing won't work. Money isn't enough to keep the most skilled people at a company. It takes more than the promise of a treat being dangled at the end of a proverbial stick to get people to really do the best work they can.

Today's workers want to be interested. They want to be doing work that excites them. They want to feel like what they do contributes real value to the company and possibly to a more far reaching audience. Autonomy is important. Challenge is important. This is an incredibly tall order for leaders to fill, especially when there is work to be done that involves less than exciting tasks. The mundane is always there, waiting for some poor sap to toil away.

There aren't easy answers. Each person is different and what motivates one person will have another person scouring the want ads for a better place to be.  The best leaders recognize that there is no "one size fits all" approach to managing any longer. The best managers have the ability to not only lead but also to read the people they're charged with supervising, the ability to switch tactics at the drop of a hat depending upon the person and the situation. Flexibility is key. I wonder where these leaders are, and who is raising the next batch of real leaders.

I'm taking an organizational psychology class about work attitudes and motivation. In the words of a former co-worker, it's a bit like learning French knowing you'll never go to Paris. There is so much research regarding how to keep employees motivated as well as what happens when employees aren't motivated, when they don't like their jobs, when they don't feel valued.
How is it so many people in management don't know the basics? I know there are awesome managers here, but there are so many who aren't, so many, especially those a few steps removed from the "working class", that have no clue how to behave in ways that keep employees motivated, that give any reason for doing excellent work.  When mediocrity is rewarded, mediocrity is what they get.