Three reasons why managers don't do people management

This morning I read this neat little posting on "Three Star Leadership Blog" entitled Three reasons why managers don't do people management. I like it because it cuts right to the essentials. Here's my favourite part:

"Since we don't select people to be bosses based on their ability to do the work that bosses do and don't give them the tools to do it, it's no wonder they find things like confronting poor behavior or performance to be very uncomfortable. And when things make us uncomfortable, we tend to avoid them."

I have attended quite a few meetings on PS Renewal, and it is quite obvious that one of the key findings that will come out of the consultations held in Departments and the regions will be that managers are ill-equipped to properly do people management. While this is true, it's only a portion of the problem. The real source of the problem is that most managers were not appointed because of their people management skills, and now dread doing the most difficult part of their job (with managing poor performers ranking high on top of the list). The lack of adequate training is not helping, but it's not the cause of poor people management.

Have a look at it!

My “Personal” PS Renewal Vision

Whenever I’m walking on the street, strangers often approach me and ask: “What’s your vision for PS Renewal?”

Well… maybe not ;-) But on a couple of occasions, some federal public servants have asked me what I would see as priorities for PS Renewal. Here’s my personal vision.

First, in order to determine priorities, we have to set some criteria. My criteria would be:

• It must have a long-term, sustainable impact: There are more potential projects than what we can reasonably undertake. All of them would undoubtedly be a lot of fun to work on, and most would probably generate quite a bit of excitement… at least for a little while. Then the initial enthusiasm would wear off, and we would most likely end up forgetting altogether about these nice projects we delivered. What PS Renewal needs in order to be successful are initiatives that may have only a moderate impact in the short-term, but if sustained over a long period of time, might ultimately have a lasting and more profound effect on the public service.
• It must address the source of the problem rather than the symptoms. How often have I seen public servants – including managers and senior executives – confuse the symptoms with the problems and consequently opt for “quick fixes” that only took care of the symptoms but left the source of the problems unaddressed. One recent example I can think of are the long delays in external recruitment campaigns. Many managers say – rightfully – that we need to shorten the delays in external recruitment in order to hire the “best and brightest”. In order to address this, quite a few managers have suggested that they should be able to make “on-the-spot job offers” to students at job fairs. While I agree with the fact that we need to drastically reduce the delays in recruitment campaigns in order to attract top talent into the public service, the real source of the problem is that too many managers still rely on traditional / long / cumbersome assessment processes and tools to do external hiring. If we would go to the source of the problem and opt for different recruitment processes and tools, the delays in recruitment campaigns would be significantly reduced as a result. We would then address both the symptoms and the source of the problem. (Furthermore, if we innovate with our external hiring methods, perhaps we could also use these methods for internal staffing processes as well!)
• It must foster personal responsibility and individual ownership. One aspect of the public service culture I have a real hard time with is the fact that so many people are simply not willing to take any responsibility for their own actions, let alone for their destiny. These people would rather point the finger at someone else – even if it doesn’t solve the problem – than take any ownership. I have witnessed this exact phenomenon during the e-polling session at the 2008 National Managers’ Professional Development Forum in Vancouver. The answers to two questions in particular proved my point. The first was the question where 42% of the middle managers said that in order effectively manage poor performers, they would benefit most from senior management leadership to provide the support and resources they need to effectively deal with poor performers! The second was the one where 69% of all middle managers disagreed or strongly disagreed that their organization was adequately preparing future managers to replace employees who retire. The result itself wasn’t really surprising, but when Ruth Dantzer took the mic and suggested to the middle managers that they could take some simple steps to adequately prepare future managers, like bringing some of their employees to meetings in order to expose them to things they wouldn’t see otherwise, it was met with a resounding silence!! (I personally wanted to stand up and applaud Ruth Dantzer because she was inviting managers to take some ownership of the problem!) That’s why I believe that the most successful initiatives to support PS Renewal will be those where managers – and even employees – share at least some of the responsibility for success.

Based on the criteria above, and the long reflection that preceded my active involvement in PS Renewal, my vision for PS renewal would consist in the following:

1. Put in place a mechanism for employees to provide ongoing input and feedback on the issues that matter to them. It is one thing to be invited by the Clerk to “get involved, speak up, make suggestions, become part of renewal, be proud and make a difference”; it is quite another to have a mechanism or forum to do so. Although public servants like me and the guys at CPSRenewal.ca have taken the Clerk’s advice to the letter by launching our own blogs (actually we didn’t even wait for the invitation!), it must be stated clearly that we operate on the fringe. We “get involved” mostly on our own personal time – not our work time – and even expose ourselves to some risks in doing so. (I can’t speak for my friends, but I would much rather be able to blog on an official government site, be allowed to do it on my work time, and do it without fearing to be treated as a criminal for expressing my opinions, than blog from home late at night with the constant anxiety of not knowing what surprise awaits me at the office the next morning.) Federal departments and agencies must be willing to provide a “feedback loop” to employees and take their input seriously if they want to address the concerns of staff without getting blindsided.
2. Make “people management” an overarching theme for the next five years. If there’s one thing I am proud of, it’s that I feel I have contributed to put “people management” on the forefront of the PS Renewal agenda with my paper “An Inconvenient Renewal”. While the awareness that ensued is a nice starting point, it is not nearly enough to bring about the behavioural changes the public service so desperately needs. One way to get there is to centre the best initiatives around an overarching theme for an extended period of time. Only then may new habits become part of “the way we do things”. “And just what those initiatives should be?”, might you be asking. Well, here’s the (my) answer…
3. Focus on the on-boarding experience of new employees during their first year in the public service. One inherent danger of setting specific priorities and objectives for PS Renewal, is that we may pursue them at the expense of equally important factors that might impact the end results or even cancel off all our efforts. Such is the case with recruitment. There’s no question that shorter delays in external recruitment campaigns are critical in order to get the “best and the brightest”. But assuming we can get them in, how long will they stay? If the public service keeps welcoming new hires the way it currently does, maybe not that long… If you think the public service does rather poorly when it comes to recruitment, here’s a news for you: it’s generally downright awful when it comes to the on-boarding process, i.e. the first few days, few weeks, few months they experience inside the public service. If we want to have the slightest chance of retaining the recruits we relentlessly worked to get through the door, we better take them seriously once they are in. That means welcoming them into the organization “as if they mattered” (because they do!). It means giving them all the tools they need to be the best employee they can be (because that’s what they expect!), giving them in the first few weeks all the training they need to do their job properly (because that’s what they want!) and giving them all the performance feedback they may or may not wish to receive during their first few months in the public service. Why? Because if you are their manager, managing their performance is YOUR JOB!!!
4. Make performance management a top priority. Oh… did I just implicitly alluded to the “P” word – performance management? I’m sorry… I know you’re already under a lot of stress and pressure. You probably think you deserve a break, and you’re partly right. But unfortunately one thing that won’t get off your plate is your responsibility to manage the performance of your staff. If I was the boss of you, the annual performance of your staff would be minimum requirement. For your new recruits, I would require mandatory performance appraisals every three months. Why? Because not so long ago, I was a new hire too. I received the feedback I needed, mostly because I asked my manager to give it to me. And it was most helpful. I knew what I needed to change, what I needed to improve, and what I should keep doing. Most importantly – and because I had good managers – I also received the positive feedback I needed to keep me going and get better.

Well, there you have it. My personal PS Renewal vision. Does this vision makes sense? Does it speak to you? Am I totally off-track? Please take a moment to take the poll on the top right-hand of this page and vote for the priorities you feel are the most important.

On Values and Ethics

(UPDATED, July 3, 2008)

My favourite source of information on PS Renewal is the blog CPSRenewal.ca. I even subscribe to the RSS feed so that every day I have instant, up-to-date information about matters relating to PS Renewal. Recently, the authors of the blog have started to write weekly columns. The topic of their very first column was values and ethics. This was a pleasant surprise, since I have been thinking for a few months about writing an article on values and ethics in the federal public service.

Chris Baker, Deputy Minister with the province of New Brunswick, explains in an interview with the magazine Canadian Government Executive:

“The debate is about whether the actions of public servants ought to be defined by rules, or defined by values and ethics. […] Given that you have highly skilled, highly trained people employed in the public service, doesn’t it make sense to involve them in the process of creating ideas, testing ideas and implementing them? Don’t you want more than compliance? You want them to be active, proactive and thoughtful. […] It’s really exciting to hear from public servants themselves on this issue. It’s giving us a chance to know what ideas and values people bring to work with them that you might not pick out of a textbook.”

I agree 100% with the thinking. However, there is a significant gap between the rhetoric and the reality. Here's why...

I have had the chance to experience public service values and ethics firsthand. Shortly after I released my now infamous paper “An Inconvenient Renewal: Are Public Service Managers Ready to Change the Way They Manage?”, someone, somewhere, filed a complaint to the values and ethics branch of my department. An investigation followed and ultimately concluded that I had not breached the Values and Ethics Code for the Public Service. However, the way the whole investigation was carried out confirmed some impressions I entertained about how values and ethics are currently applied in the federal public service.

Before I share my impressions on values and ethics, I should explain how I felt during the investigation. It was a very difficult experience that caused me undue stress. I felt my character and integrity were called into question when I was labeled as being “disloyal” and when it was suggested that I was criticizing a government program. While I used PS Renewal and the federal public service as a backdrop, the problems I discussed in my paper can be observed in many organizations - public, private and not-for-profit alike. If you've worked in a large private organization, chances are you've probably witnessed or experienced much of what I describe in “An Inconvenient Renewal”. Nothing I wrote was a secret. I merely said out loud what most people think quietly and know to be true. Anyone who took the time to read my paper for what it was meant to be understood that the real criticism was not against PS Renewal or the federal public service, but rather against bad managers and poor people management. But I digress…

The point I want to make today is that what we call “values and ethics” in the federal public service currently boils down to wrongdoing. The main focus of the investigation I was subject to was to prove that I had done something wrong… anything really! Although the breach to the Code was labeled a conflict of interest, the exact nature of my offense was unclear. In fact, it was fascinating to see how many different avenues the investigators explored and how far they went to demonstrate – without success – that I had done something wrong. It was as if I was guilty until proven otherwise. It had all the characteristics of a witch hunt, only it was done under the cover of “values and ethics”.

The investigation was only concerned by what I may have done wrong, and it never considered for a moment what I had done right (in short, blamability at its very best!). I was never asked what were the underlying values of my paper, what was my intention in writing it, and what I hoped to achieve by releasing it. If I would have been asked these questions, the investigators would have found out: how deeply I value respect for people and their dignity; how strongly I feel about good management and the importance of the role of managers; and how I hoped that my paper would be the starting point to a conversation on what needs to change in the public service so that we can improve it.

In a way, my paper directly supported and reinforced a number of values described in the Values and Ethics Code for the Public Service, such as:

Professional Values: Serving with competence, excellence, efficiency, objectivity and impartiality.

• Public servants should constantly renew their commitment to serve Canadians by continually improving the quality of service, by adapting to changing needs through innovation, and by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of government programs and services.

People Values: Demonstrating respect, fairness and courtesy in their dealings with both citizens and fellow public servants.

• Respect for human dignity and the value of every person should always inspire the exercise of authority and responsibility.

As Joseph L. Badaracco Jr. explains in his book “Defining Moments: When Managers Must Choose Between Right and Right”, matters of values and ethics can not always be boiled down to right versus wrong. “Difficult questions like these are often matters of right versus right, not right versus wrong. Sometimes, a [person] faces a difficult problem and must choose between two ways of resolving it. Each alternative is the right thing to do, but there is no way to do both.”

By over-simplifying the investigation to a matter of right versus wrong, the Values and Ethics investigators surely made their job easier and probably thought they were fulfilling their responsibility to the government. But in doing so, the investigators’ inability to elevate the dilemma to a matter of right versus right resulted in a failure to answer a more difficult question, i.e. holding two equally right values conflicting with one another and assessing which right value has the greatest importance.

Had the Values and Ethics investigators held values such as “loyalty” against the professional values and people values I quoted above and made an effort to determine which elements had the highest importance, the investigation could have shifted from a bleak quest for wrongdoing to a unique opportunity to make a powerful statement about the public service values, i.e. people management matters! The investigation could also have used my case as a reminder that “Public Service organizations should be led through participation, openness and communication and with respect for diversity.”

But none of this happened. (Instead, the investigation turned into a technical analysis of my paper, my blog, my peripheral activities at work and even some of my professional relationships – I kid you not! Oh! And the icing on the cake? I didn't breach the Code because I was "exercising my right of freedom of expression"!)

Badaracco argues that:

“Right-versus-right choices are best understood as dealing moments. These are decisions with three basic characteristics: they reveal, they test, and they shape. In other words, a right-versus-right decision can reveal an organization’s basic values. At the same time, the decision tests the strength of the commitments that an organization has made. Finally, the decision casts a shadow forward. […] Defining moments shape an organization because they cut through all of the finely crafted pronouncements about what the company aspires to and reveal instead what it actually does. These episodes set precedents and create expectations that shape a company for years even longer. They define the purpose of the organization and at the same time how the organization will pursue its purpose. […] Defining moments also indelibly color the image that employees others have of an organization and its leaders. Clearly, defining moments are high-stakes episodes.”

My experience with being investigated for allegedly breaching the Code of Values and Ethics has taught me a few lessons which I hope will make their way to Senior Leaders who champion Values and Ethics in the federal public service. On the top of my list, I would suggest the need for a clear and urgent interpretation of the following statement taken from the Code of Values and Ethics: “In the Public Service, how ends are achieved should be as important as the achievements themselves.” This statement can indeed be interpreted in many ways.

One interpretation is that in order to comply with the Code, both the means and the end must be “right”, and the Code is breached if one uses the wrong means to achieve the right end, and vice-versa.

However, another interpretation assumes that if the means and the end are equally important, then the decision is not guided by the means or the end themselves, but rather by their underlying values. This implies looking at the values the end supports and weighing them against the values the means call into question, and let the values that have the highest priority guide the final decisions. If the values called into question by the means are more important than the values supported by the end, there may be a breach of the Code. But if the values supported by the end are more important than the values called into question by the means, then there may be compliance with the Code because the values with the highest priority are not only respected but reinforced.

Based on my experience, the gatekeepers of Values and Ethics in the public service are no yet equipped to deal with that kind of thinking, for a number of reasons.

First, if we elevate a values and ethics investigation to a matter of right versus right instead of an over-simplified matter of right versus wrong, we have to accept that the situation we are looking at is not entirely wrong but not entirely right, neither black or white. To most people, this is difficult and discomforting, and that is why they would rather find something wrong and close the case.

Second, it implies that the decision resulting from the investigation will be imperfect, conflicting, and most likely fallible if subject to the Globe and Mail test (and therefore open to challenge, criticism and public scrutiny).

Third, it means there will be no one-size fits all, each situation requiring to be studied on a case by case basis. Consequently, Values and Ethics advisors and Deputy Heads alike will have to rely on their own personal values and make very hard choices which will undoubtedly shape the Public Service of Canada and, in turn, its values. No question about it: it’s a tough call that requires a lot of courage! But courage is the difference between having principles and living by these principles. Courage can make or break a leader.

Fortunately, I received outstanding support from my managers during the investigation. Moreover, a number of public servants – including many senior officials – saw great value in my paper and took some risks in circulating it and increasing its visibility and accessibility. They were able to look beyond “right versus wrong” and they took actions that affirmed what they personally valued and how they wanted to live the Public Service values.

Another thing I hope to see in a near future would be a check and balance system to:

a) Protect public servants against prejudice caused by false / unfounded accusations of breach to the Values and Ethics Code (similar to what many suggest is required to protect employees against false / unfounded accusations of harassment, which can permanently hurt the accused's reputation and career); and

b) Protect public servants against excessive zeal (or downright abuse of power) in the application of the Code (a sort of equivalent to the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act - but reversed!)

As long as values and ethics are synonym with wrongdoing, a real risk will exist... Unless, of course, values and ethics leaders are willing to consider "right-doing" and balance the equation.