Doing the Job


My approach to business has always been that you take the business responsibilities that you are given and that you do the best by them and for them that you can. I can say this unabashedly and with some amount of pride. Sometimes you are given big jobs, and sometimes they can seem relatively small. There have been times when I may have questioned the relative value of some of the aspects of the assignment. This feeling usually stems from the apparent increasing focus and effort associated with the process and format of the reporting of the job verses the effort and focus on what is actually getting done. Regardless of what you are asked to do (within the boundaries of legality and conscience of course) and what you may think the relative value is, in business it has been my understanding that you have the responsibility to complete the assignment you are given.



My question now is: When did this change, and why didn’t somebody tell me?




I try not to be a complainer even though I seem to be sounding (at least to myself) more and more Andy Rooney-esque on some of my topics and in some of my approaches to business. I hope Andy Rooney will forgive me for the comparison. I don’t purport to have either the quality or talent that I feel he had. What I hope I do see, and hope perhaps others may see as well is some sort of fleeting similarity of the common sense approach to the issues and topics that I choose to write about.




What I am discussing here is the idea of why it sometimes seems that can’t we get people to do their jobs, regardless of what their jobs are, in business. Having a job, any job, is not a right or an entitlement. It is a privilege. With the possible exception of our elected officials and representatives (who don’t appear to be answerable for their performance to anyone other than themselves – great gig if you can get it), we must all work at our jobs, and if we hope to continue to work and even advance we must meet certain levels of expected performance. This is a fact of life. We all report to people who have the responsibility to sit in judgment of our performance. Individual contributors report to managers. Presidents report to chief executives. Chief executives report to boards of directors. And ultimately boards of directors are accountable to the stock holders. There is a responsibility chain.




I am not going to delve into any esoteric examination of generational work ethics (Baby Boomers verses Generation X verses Generation Y). I am not going to address cultural differences associated with the relatively capitalistic verses the relatively socialistic environments and economies that businesses must deal with. These may be contributing factors, but I think the underlying issue is that we have allowed our business compass to drift from leadership to management, to the point where we now accept management as a substitute for leadership. We seem to be more willing to manage problems instead of doing what may be necessary, or even called for to deal with them and to solve them.




I have been on conference calls (I have probably been on too many conference calls) in the past where if the topic of the call is boiled down to the basics, the net purpose of the call is to figure out how to get certain people or teams to do their assigned tasks or jobs. These types of conference calls seem to have been occurring with greater and greater frequency over time. Perhaps there is a relationship between the seeming increase in conference calls and the apparent decrease in task completion responsibility. I’ll have to think more about that one, but I digress. My point here is that we actually had multiple people on a call trying to figure out how to get specific groups to perform the tasks that they had been assigned.




Now those of you that know me understand that I am a relatively quiet and un-opinionated person. The rest of you must now understand that if any of the people that really knew me actually read that last statement while drinking anything they would now be cleaning up the results of the coughing fit that the statement induced.




Getting back to the previously mentioned conference call, I couldn’t help myself when it came to the discussion on how to get people to do their assignments. I piped up:




“Did you ask the specific individuals to perform the task?” I asked the group.


“Yes” they said. Okay, this is good.


“Did you tell them what they needed to do, and when it needed to be done?”


“Yes” they said. This is also good.

“Okay, they know what they needed to do, and when it needed to be done and they didn’t do it. How do you feel about that?”


“We are angry and frustrated.” They said.


“So what are you going to do about it?”
“We are going to escalate and have the Sr. Vice President send them an email telling them they need to do their job.”



Now wait a minute. People are acknowledging not doing their job so the solution is to escalate and see if someone else can get them to do their job? When did this shift in management responsibility happen? Leaders don’t escalate or ask others to handle their problems. Leaders take care of their own problems. I was in this deep in the conference call, so I carried on:




“Did anybody tell these people that if they did not perform the requirements of their job that they would be terminated?” I asked. There was a prolonged silence on the call.
“Well, we don’t want to threaten them. We would prefer to take this approach first.”



Wow. In a business world where the speed of change approaches that which would have been considered the stuff of science fiction in the past and the ferocity of competition rivals the descriptions of the battles contained in those science fiction novels, we are at a point where managers must ask their senior managers to take this sort of time and effort to get their people to do what they are supposed to do.



There will always be those people who would prefer to do less instead of more. Fortunately there are also those who would lead and actually do more than is expected of them. The issue here lies in what sort of message is sent to the future leaders when they see that there is no disadvantage to those who prefer to do less. I have discussed incentives in the past and have mentioned that there must always be a metaphorical “carrot and stick” associated with upside and downside performance.

I am a big proponent of carrot or positive incentives to influence people’s actions and activities. On the other hand leaders cannot shirk their responsibilities when it comes to unacceptable performance. Assignments given are meant to be fulfilled. The time to question the assignment is when it is assigned. Once that period has passed it becomes a question of execution. Failure to perform must be reviewed and understood. Once it is understood, it must be dealt with. These are the “stick” incentives. As much as I may dislike them, I understand that without them you risk the building of a business culture of entitlement and management, instead of a culture of leadership.

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