Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
A listing in reverse chronological order of articles by:
The Mars Rover is an incredible reliability story. And as you may know they have decided to permanently shut it off. A friend recently sent me this email when he saw an article on it.
Hey Adam,
The Opportunity rover was supposed to last 90 days, and instead lasted 15 years.
Is that due to remarkable engineering, or was the machine really supposed to last that long and the scientists blew their calculations as to its “lifespan”?
Mark,
My response:
I introduced my new program tool “Program Risk Effects Analysis” (PREA) at the RAMS Conference in Orlando this week. It’s a great tool to assist in accessing if program schedule or resource should accommodate found design risk from testing or analysis.
-Adam
“Use Case 7” is a concept I am rolling out. Use Case 7 is the way a customer may use your product in a manner that is way beyond anything you expect.
Examples:
Happy New Year! And thank you for letting us break your stuff to improve your design in 2018. This is a story of when I was NOT invited to break things but did anyway.
Alright … this needs a lot of context. English electronic music artist ‘Fatboy Slim’ released his ‘You’ve come a Long Way, Baby’ album in 1998. Its cover art was a photograph of an attendee at the 1983 ‘Fat People’s Festival’ in Danville, Virginia. And perhaps due to its ‘heritage,’ the album’s cover was changed to an image of a bookshelf for North American listeners. But the rest of the world got to bask in its magnificence.
So what is particular about this photograph? The subject is a larger than average human (as you would expect noting where it was taken). And he is wearing a shirt emblazoned:
I’m #1 so why try harder?
I am not writing this as a commentary on human value versus instinctive stereotypes. Far from it. There are plenty of people who are ‘better than all others at something’ that do not have sleek chiseled physiques.
The shirt’s wearer looks like a fun dude. And no doubt there is a deeper sentiment to his wardrobe. Maybe the underlying message is that that all one needs in life is to be happy for themselves. Not to be happy for or because of you (the bystander). This is liberating and empowering. But it is not good if your organization is the one wearing that ‘hypothetical shirt’ at a Fat People’s Festival.
I am writing this article to start a conversation on the characteristics of organizations who suck at reliability. No matter what industry, people who make reliable products tend to do the same (good) things. And people who make products that break and otherwise disappoint the customer tend to do the same (bad) things.
So returning to the male model who appeared in Fatboy Slim’s 1998 album cover. Why is it fantastic that he is wearing that shirt, but it is certainly not fantastic if an organization thinks that they are ‘#1, so why try harder?’
Because organizations who make things need to make their customers happy. Not themselves.
I have been involved in many organizations throughout my career. In many instances, this has been as a reliability subject matter expert to help organizations improve their approaches to reliability. And there are many things that I have seen that are both good and bad. And trust me, organizations who think that they are already ‘good’ so there is no need to try harder always struggle when it comes to reliability.
One such type of organization is the one where people say (and believe) things like:
We make a reliable product.
Firstly, organizations who make reliable products tend to never say this. They are so focused on making whatever they have now even more reliable means there is no such thing as a ‘reliable’ product. There are only products whose reliability is improving. It is never where it needs to be … it just keeps going.
Those organizations who think they already make a reliable product more often than not are not trying to make it better. Why would you? It is already reliable. Making it better is a waste of resources. But who is making the call about whether the product is reliable or not? It is the organization – not the customer.
But (I hear some say), we don’t have complaints from customers. So we must be making a reliable product? Right?
Hell no. Customers who are not satisfied with the reliability of your product have either moved to another product, or never bought your product in the first place because someone else told them that your product is unreliable. Don’t believe me? Have a look at a consumer electronic product for sale on Amazon which has a number of two or fewer ‘star ratings.’ Prospective customers may not even click on your product to see how good it is because of these stars.
In my experience, organizations that think the products are already ‘reliable’ because they aren’t getting customer complaints (or the complaints they are getting are within ‘acceptable’ levels) tend to always have no idea about how their ‘reliable’ product became reliable in the first place. That is, they have no idea if or where their reliability guidebook is, who is responsible for reliability, or what Design for Reliability (DfR) tools should be applied at different stages of the product developmental life cycle. They also tend not to know what their product’s reliability is.
It happens all the time.
And for ninety-nine organizations out of one hundred, this is because these people are confusing general effort for specific outcomes. That is, designers work very hard designing a component that meets all the customer requirements, correctly dimensioned in CAD drawings, is made out of cutting edge materials, is reviewed up to ten times by other engineers and is manufactured in an ‘ISO 1 million’ certified workshop.
All this effort, and none of it focused on how it might fail. Failure is not an option for something that is the fruit of so much labor. Because all this labor …
Focuses on building something that can work. Not something that will work.
If your organization is like this, you have a problem.
Think of all the people who are truly #1 at something. People like Lebron James in basketball, Rory McIlroy in golf and so on. The one thing they never stop doing is trying. These people are the ones who train like no one else. The ones who take rehabilitation and injury management more seriously than anyone else. Quite simply, they will try anything to make them better at doing the thing they are the best in the world at. They are never satisfied. And unlike our male model above, the measure of their success is based on a bunch of external rules they don’t control. Much like the laws of physics that govern how things fail.
So what can you do as a reliability engineer in a ‘Fatboy Slim’ organization? Be in no doubt – your job is very difficult. Because now you are dealing with emotions more than science.
The worst thing you can do is start by telling everyone that they are wrong.
No one takes this well. It is like a parent being told their child is no good. Engineers spend years and years building something, perhaps optimistically marvelling at how good it is, perhaps having a supportive network reinforcing to you how good it is, only for some reliability engineer to throw an ‘opinion bomb’ from a cubicle in an office where no component has ever been designed.
The first thing you (as a reliability engineer) needs to do is win management support. They too may be drinking the same coolade as everyone else. They too may do the easy thing and think that their product’s reliability is ‘good.’ So you need to be careful with them as well.
However, there is an upside. The management team focus on business strategy (or at least, they should focus on business strategy). So tailor your pitch to them accordingly. Perhaps you can demonstrate the monetary benefit of improving reliability performance from where it is now. And not just say that we will make money. Give figures.
When you do, it is imperative that you do your homework. Make sure you have spoken to everyone (from finance through to a worker on the workshop floor). Work out what company initiatives exist for ‘continual improvement.’ Describe what steps your organization can do right now to start walking in the right direction. And show how you have exhausted all avenues you have available to fund these initiatives. And finally, articulate exactly what the manager needs to do for you to execute. They will appreciate the effort you have gone to.
And when you structure this conversation, perhaps break it down like this:
Once (if) you have management buy-in, then sell your message to the masses. Instead of language that focuses on saying how they have failed up until now, talk about why they can benefit from improving. Talk about commercial realities if necessary. Competitors are always improving, so why aren’t we?
If you truly have management commitment, you will also have resources to enact change. Management commitment that is nothing more than verbal shows of support is not commitment. Speeches by themselves do nothing more than allow managers to convince themselves they are taking reliability seriously (when they are not).
You, as a reliability engineer, must come across as being someone who is there to help. Not someone who is there to lecture. This means that the pitch we talked about above needs to support workers and engineers. Not critique them.
This is not straight forward, and a detailed discussion on the topic is well beyond the scope of this article.
But it is always necessary to know where you are before you plot a course to somewhere better. And if you know that you work in a ‘Fatboy Slim’ organization, that is at least a start.
When something is working it is easy to just keep going forward. But how do you know things will keep chugging along? Is it worth stopping and asking “Why is this going well?”
I like lock picking “Lock Sport.” Of course I do. It’s a mechanical puzzle. It can also make you look like James Bond when someone forget’s their keys. I continue to challenge myself by getting progressively harder and harder locks. Throughout the years lock designs have come up with some great features to resist being picked. But there is still not one out there that is “pick proof”, so there is always a next level. I would say I am a mid-intermediate in the world of Lock Sport. So any lock that actually has good picking defenses can give me a good struggle.
As a reliability guy I love seeing how stuff works. Was recently given an opportunity to mess around and compare a new product to it’s siblings in a field I love, welding. I recently provided some input on an article release by Superiorglove about types of insulation and heat conduction. Superiorglove is a glove manufacturer that makes about every type of glove you could imagine, many are really impressive industrial applications gloves. I like how much they get into the science of it. In our discussions I used an example of how my TIG welding gloves protect against conductive and radiative types of heat transfer. They informed me that they had a TIG welding glove line and would love if I would review four of their models. I happily accepted because I love to weld, check out how things work and …free gloves.
I am frequently asked to review engineering reports and documents. And I am continually baffled with how many engineers want to ‘take their reader on a journey’ as opposed to getting to the main point. These engineers write documents where you have to read every single word to work out what they are trying to say. But having a final reveal is never a good thing in any technical document.
Why?
People watch movies to be taken on journeys.
Managers read reports to get information.
This is not to say that you shouldn’t try and make engineering reports as ‘enjoyable’ as possible. You should. But you need to understand the audience – which is not a typical movie-goer. And while you may be proud of your research and analysis, no one wants to read your four month diary on how you got there.
Getting reports and documents right is important. Managers will quickly work out which engineers give them the best information in the easiest way. And these engineers are the ones that managers remember (when it comes to promotions, special assignments, raises et cetera).
So here are some tips and guidance to help you to write better reports. Trust me … this will eventually pay off for you.
Simple question … right? But I am constantly amazed by how often this crucial question is seemingly forgotten by engineers.
A report is written to give information about a decision that needs to be made. If this is not the case … the report is a waste of time. A manufacturing company may (for example) need to decide whether to extend the warranty period of a consumer product (or not). So lets break this down into what information the manager making the decision needs to know:
That is pretty much it. Writing this out helps make it clear in your mind as the author. But it is still too ‘high-level.’ What information feeds into this? We need to break this information requirement down a little further:
Now we are getting somewhere. These are the key factors the meet our ‘high-level’ information need. But we need a little more:
How many additional units will sell based on an increased warranty period?
Now you are cooking. You could go down further if you wish, but you see what I mean. By doing this, you know the hierarchy of the information that needs to be in your report. You will need this later.
This is the first thing that makes a good engineering report a ‘bad movie.’ You don’t go to a movie to help you make a decision. Movie-goers are not looking for information that will help guide their lives. The movie audience’s focus is the movie. But … the focus of the manger who reads your engineering report is a decision he or she needs to make. Not the report. Remember this.
Haven’t I just worked out what I want to say in the previous step?
No. Everyone wants to say something regardless of who is listening. It is human nature. This is where you get introspective. Because you need to work out what you want to say … and keep it out of your report if it isn’t what the reader needs to hear.
For example you may want to:
But I can hear many of you saying that we need to have things like formulae and historical reviews in reports for due diligence. And you might be right.
But put these things as annexes or appendices.
Don’t make your reader have to read all of this stuff to get your point.
As with everything in life, there is a balance to be struck. But knowing your own tendencies is very helpful for making sure you don’t make the report ‘all about you.’
Don’t be the Hollywood director who has a story to tell.
BLUF stands for:
bottom line up front.
It means that the reader knows exactly what you are recommending after the read the first page … or ideally the first paragraph.
It took until the final scenes of ‘The Sixth Sense’ for the audience to realize that Bruce Willis had actually died and was a ghost (apologies for those yet to see the movie). This makes a great movie. But leaving everything to the last paragraph in an engineering report won’t help a manager who is pressed for time and needs to constantly make quick decisions.
Everyone is busy. And while your report may need to be ‘long’ to contain all the information you identified in the first step, the manager who is reading it may not have that time.
The BLUF needs to address the high-level information requirement.
In the case of deciding to extend the warranty period for our consumer product, this needs to answer the question ‘How much money will this decision make (or lose) for my organization?’
If this is not clear in your first paragraph … make it clear.
Too many executive summaries have come across my desk explaining the sections of the document it covers. These executive summaries say (for example) that the engineering report includes a literature review, followed by data analysis, and then recommendations. But it does not include what the report is trying to say!!
The executive summary should be complete enough for the manager to be able to make the decision. If it can’t … you need to redraft it. Hollywood trailers may leave you wondering if the four teenagers will survive their weekend alone at Murder Lake. Executive summaries should not. (The teenagers all died horrible deaths by the way).
When it comes to writing a technical document (… and lets face it, they are not ‘fun’ reads) don’t use lots of or big words or long sentences. The simpler the better. For example:
It can be concluded based on analysis of historical and actual test data that the median estimate of the increase in profit based on extending the warranty by 1 year will be 15 per cent.
This is a horrible sentence. There is no need to say things like ‘based on analysis.’ Of course anything you say is based on analysis. Instead, try:
Extending the warranty by 1 year will likely increase profit by 15 per cent.
Hollywood movies tend to be 90 to 120 minutes. There is no such guidance for an engineering report. If you can say all that needs to be said in 1 page … do it!
Simple rule here and it follows from the previous point. If your manager knows the consumer product well, you don’t need to include a detailed explanation of its design. Even if your manager doesn’t know the product well … will explaining to them the different modules help your argument about extending a warranty period? It might make your report feel more ‘complete.’ But as Obi-Wan Kenobi says to Luke Skywalker:
Bury your feelings deep down.
Including material that makes you feel better dilutes your key message.
Engineering reports are not textbooks. You are not trying to educate the reader (in many cases). You are trying to help them make the right decision.
Where Hollywood scriptwriters can elicit audience responses based on dramatic pauses and so on … this doesn’t help your report. Remove the dialogue!
This is where step 1 is important. A reliability engineer may not understand how warranty periods impact sales. We know that products with longer warranty periods are more attractive to customers. But how many additional sales will this translate to? This is where the marketing department needs to help. But lets say that you are a reliability engineer tasked with writing this report, but can’t speak to the marketing team in time.
You need to make it easy for the manager.
For example, you might be able to work out:
Increasing the warranty by 1 year will likely need an 8.8 per cent increase in sales to be cost neutral.
Brilliant! This means the manager knows that if his marketing team estimates a 12 per cent increase in sales … he or she should extend the warranty period. Conversely, if the estimate comes back at 4 per cent, then the warranty period should stay the same.
You could also include a basic chart that plots potential profit versus increase in sales, which would then communicate all the information you have. The manager can not have his or her task made simpler for them.
While many Hollywood franchises are trying to create the need for sequels … your engineering report should not. If you don’t have all the information, then make the ‘sequel’ short and clear by focusing on what you need to know … and now how to interpret it.
As a rule, movies need to end with a definitive resolution on something. We need to know if the romantic leads could work through their issues and live happily after. Arnold Schwarzenegger has to always beat the bad guy. And there needs to be no doubt about this.
This is not always possible in the real world. Reliability engineers in particular have to deal with uncertainties. We will never know the true reliability of a consumer product because we don’t have a lot of data. We don’t throw our hands up in the air and walk off set.
So we need to communicate it. We may need to say things like:
Increasing the warranty by 1 year will likely need an 8.8 per cent increase in sales to be cost neutral.
A 9.1 per cent increase in sales is needed to be 95 per cent confident of cost neutrality.
So now we have uncertainty covered as well. It is simply not good enough to include your ‘best guess.’ The decision maker needs to understand what chance there is of losing money.
Well not all the time. Movies that have had their screenplays reviewed and redrafted are typically better for it (unless the reviewer is the lead actor who is trying to increase their screen time … see Tom Cruise in ‘The Mummy’).
So get your report finished one week before it is due. Then don’t think about it for a couple of days. I will guarantee you that when you look at it again, there will be parts you can’t believe you wrote. Go through all the considerations above. And once you have done this, get someone else to read it. Someone who is not an expert on the topic.
I know that in my first drafts, my sentences tend to be too long. It is important for me to write down the gist of what I am trying to say, so I don’t worry about sentence structure straight away. I don’t want a focus on sentence length to interrupt my train of thought.
Sentence structure comes later for me. And I continually astound myself at how stupid I sound in my first draft of anything (my wife doesn’t get astounded by my stupidity anymore … but that is for another article/counselling session).
Gary Player is a former golfer who once said:
The harder you practice, the luckier you get.
Player did not come up with the quote – it has existed in one form or another since at least 1900.
Don’t shy away from practicing. Don’t shy away from having your work reviewed by someone who is better than you at writing. And don’t be devastated by constructive criticism.
I get it all the time. Mostly from my wife. And I am getting better at not being devastated by it.
I had the unbelievable pleasure of piloting a retired 1953 T-34 Air Force plane. The plane is owned by a friend and it has recently undergone a full restoration. A few year ago this model was grounded by the FAA due to an unusual issue. After the investigation the fleet was cleared to fly and the root cause was ruled as “mis-use.” Something many of use may not consider enough when creating our own products.
I was presenting at the Aerospace Conference earlier this year, where something astounding happened. I was talking to the audience about ‘organizational culture’ and my experiences working with a small satellite manufacturer to help them improve their product’s reliability.
At the end of my talk, I was asked the following questions (which I have done my best to remember verbatim):
How do you accommodate the young engineers of today, who will only stay at one organization for a couple of years before moving on? Research has shown they typically leave within three years – so why should we invest time and effort into them?
If you are a team leader or manager that is searching for the answer to this question, I have some potentially bad news for you:
It is not them … it is you.
Millennials (and young employees more broadly) do not have some genetic mechanism hardwired into their DNA that means they get itchy or sick if they stay in the same place too long. Millennials don’t have non-maternal biological come workplace-specific clocks. Millennials can be some of the most committed employees you will ever have. They can be as smart as anyone else.
And according to Sarah Landrum, a contributor to Forbes Magazine:
Job-hopping millennials are more likely to earn a higher wage, develop their career on a faster track and find a better fit in work culture by changing jobs more frequently. The stigma is lessening as the positives are revealed.
So why is this happening now and not years ago? Well we know that:
millennials demand more of their employers than older generations did. And that is a good thing.
But is it really a new phenomenon? NO!
Henry Ford was faced with the same issue when he first introduced the assembly line in his factory at Detroit in the early 1900s. Workers went from working on an entire car to just making one (very monotonous) part. And while he was paying a fair hourly rate, he was losing employees. In one year, he hired over 50 000 to maintain a workforce of just 18 000.
What did he do? He introduced the $ 5 a day wage. This was more than double what it used to be. You can read more about it here. But instead of lamenting the fact he could not maintain a workforce, he understood that he had to make his company and workplace more appealing. It was on him. And he knew that doubling the wages was in the long run much less expensive than covering the costs of finding, hiring and training a new employee. Employees are free agents. They owe their employer ‘nothing.’
This whole ‘millennials never stay at my company’ is not a new issue. It might be new for you. But complaining that it never used to be this way is both wrong and unhelpful. Why wouldn’t a young employee move from job to job if they are likely to earn a higher wage, get promoted faster and so on?
For those of you who disagree, and perhaps believe that millennials have goldfish-like attention spans consumed by social media and ‘branding’ that drive their job-hopping, then you need to explain something:
why would a young (or old) employee ever leave a job they enjoy?
And by enjoy, I mean that they feel intellectually challenged (in a good way), like the culture, are happy with the other people at the organization and are adequately remunerated.
If anyone loves working at any organization (and have no domestic reason to leave) – they will stay. You are delusional if you think otherwise.
But all too often, I hear blinkered managers at organizations with high staff turnover say things like:
young people don’t understand how this organization works, and what they need to do if they want to succeed here.
These managers have already failed. Employees will work harder when they know what their role is, what they need to do to be considered ‘outstanding,’ have the time and resources to be ‘outstanding,’ and understand where they consider themselves to be three, five or ten years from now.
This article does not go on to explain why millennials appear to demand more things from their employers. But the fact of the matter is that people do not leave jobs, organizations and cultures if they don’t want to.
So if your organization routinely complains about how young people readily leave (and laments the amount of money and resources invested in developing these temporary residents of your company), I will bet a substantial amount of money that your organization is one of the following types.
This organization is listed first for a reason … everyone knows a boss who could never tell you what they wanted at the start of a project or task. But these same bosses were only too happy to tell you if they were not happy with what you did after it was done – in the absence of clear initial guidance.
There are thousands of variations to this theme. There is the boss who says nothing ‘bad’ to you when they review your work. They then present your work to their boss or a client. And after they do, they will blame you if it is not well received. You try to say ‘hay – you reviewed it and thought it was OK!’ But the boss focuses on how it is not their job to ‘babysit’ or (insert next generic excuse here).
There are some instances where bosses deliberately limit guidance to subordinates if they are trying to teach them to be comfortable thinking for themselves. But there comes a point where bosses must interpret what is needed and what they want from those who work for them – that is a key part of their job!
Many bosses can’t do this. Some see their role as one of seniority versus true leadership. Others are lazy. And others are insecure about being challenged by their subordinates when they try and dissect a task at hand. They risk showing their own incompetence or lack of grasp of the situation. So they walk away and don’t say anything until they see something to review.
And then these people who can’t tell you what they like, have no problem in telling you what they don’t like. In the most extreme cases, they feel they must criticize just so they can convince themselves that they were an integral piece of the process.
Why are these bosses in positions of authority in the first place? Who looked at their performance and were impressed enough to promote them?
If your organization has one boss like this, chances are there are many others. Why would a young employee hang around? The smarter the young employee, the more quickly they will realize how organizationally incompetent you and your management team are. And you will be left with the dullards who don’t get it – or the dullards who don’t have options anywhere else. These are not the people you want to stay, and quickly become your ‘inadequate’ bosses of tomorrow. A never-ending cycle of successive generations of dullards is born.
In this organization, people are considered for internal promotion primarily on how long they have been there. Membership and conformity is valued over competence and innovation. This is a weird form of nepotism, like a perverse form of the reality TV show ‘Survivor.’
Millennials will quickly realize that it doesn’t matter how good, smart or competent they are. The smartest and brightest employees will have a competitive advantage in other organizations that value smartness and brightness. And (again) because they are smart and bright, they will realize this before you do. They will quickly realize they are disadvantaged by staying with your organization – and why would anyone stay where they feel disadvantaged?
Experience matters, so it is up to managers and leaders to identify young talent and expose them to different roles as quickly as possible. But if your organization rewards those who have been there the longest, not working hard becomes the rational thing to do. It takes less energy, and there is no point in trying to excel.
Soon you will have a group of mediocrity, with no one doing anything ‘exceptional.’ And so you are left with questions and perhaps anger, as those left behind continue to accrue time on their ‘sentence’ hoping for the sweet taste of parole that is promotion. And what culture do you think those few people who have decided to stay will perpetuate? Your organization is now a sea of dullards (get the theme?)
Say you are told you must do something which makes no sense. This thing is a clear waste of time, or it is not the best way of solving a problem. But when you say there is a better way, your boss shrugs their shoulders and says:
well everyone else had to do that when they were in your position.
What this means is your management team had to suffer these ordeals many years ago when they were the young employees of that organization. They once had to do tedious tasks, complete perhaps unnecessary personal errands for their supervisors, work extra hard to accommodate a breakdown in planning and cohesion, or simply work all hours of the day and night to get what was assigned to them done.
Who would want to stay in a place like that? The uninspiring boss who just shrugged his or her shoulder is that person – and is now reverting to the only management style they know. Just shut up and do it.
Do you think there is hope for spontaneous cultural change? Hell no. Ordeals these bosses had to endure were once their former boss’s shortcomings. If today’s bosses had options elsewhere, they probably would have left. But they didn’t leave. They suffered ordeal after ordeal, until attrition saw them the only ones left behind. The ones who can’t lead, schedule or plan. And why? Because they expect their subordinates to suffer the same ordeals in lieu of them being a good boss.
These bosses now think this ordeal-centric approach to management is ‘fair.’ They had to endure these things – so it is not unfair to expect subordinates to endure them as well. And they are likely surrounded by other people who have the same opinion. And all a crazy idea needs to survive is an echo chamber of complicity.
Now we have an inefficient organization that is staffed by long term employees who have no options elsewhere, and short term (more competent) employees who cannot wait to leave. The dullards will take over … it is just a matter of time.
There are plenty of organizations that are building a ‘great’ device or system – but the management team have internally competing ideas of what that thing might be from the perspective of the customer.
With technology moving as fast as it is, the same device could conceivably be sold, leased or operated by the company that built it – particularly if that device produces valuable data. Or perhaps the device could be a ‘backbone’ that allows specific components or devices of other organizations to be installed and operated on it.
It is not uncommon for managers of an organization to not agree on how their device should be sold to the customer. One manager might favor selling the entire device. Another manager might favor keeping the device and selling its outputs. Another may favor leasing it.
And it is also not uncommon for these differences to go unresolved. Perhaps because there is no single leader in the organization, and a consensus driven approach never resolves the discrepancy. These companies may be led by inexperienced entrepreneurs with minimal leadership skills. Or perhaps when there is a single leader, they are not strong enough to fix the situation.
And what does this mean? A broken business plan among other things (if there is no agreement on what you are selling, how can there be any agreement on how to make money?). But from a young employee’s perspective, you now have multiple bosses and people to report to. People need to decide who to keep ‘most happy.’ It is impossible to keep every manager happy when they all want different things. Perhaps the most charismatic or strongest willed manager will ‘win.’ This marginalizes the others, and before long you have a breakaway startup that is now a competitor, potentially taking a good deal of your talent with them.
And this will ultimately cause stress, confusion and employees feeling like they aren’t valued when they keep being told what they are doing is wrong, and to change it to another paradigm.
Leaders really earn their pay when dealing with issues, problems and challenges. There are times when a boss’s experience, inter-personal skills and everything else associated with being a leader is needed in a time-sensitive, high-intensity environment. These times are when the ‘crises’ or ‘spot fires’ are running rampant.
But there are plenty of bosses who are impossible to find when the going gets tough. And this is particularly frustrating to employees who are forced to deal with these catastrophes within a leadership vacuum. They feel devalued. Why are they subordinate to (and most likely getting paid less than) the boss who is now impossible to find?
Sometimes bosses go missing for other reasons. Avoiding or delaying decisions can have severe ramifications for subordinates. If a boss has all the information they are ever going to have about an issue, there is absolutely no need to delay making a decision. Especially if this decision is hard or ‘bad.’
There is an adage that ‘bad news does not get better with age.’ And what that means for a boss who struggles to make quick decisions is that the time afforded to subordinates to do their job rapidly disappears when they dither over making a decision. And if the decision involves delivering bad news, giving people as much time to deal with a difficult situation is a good thing.
There are plenty of examples of bosses who are become paralyzed by the decision-making process and require the ‘shear terror’ of an immediate deadline to do something productive. That is, everything gets done in the last 48 hours. Painfully.
Young (and old) employees hate this – because it impacts on their ability to do a good job, their time, and the feeling that they matter. And if they can make decisions or solve problems their bosses can’t … they will (rightfully) find an organization that values their skills. And chances are it isn’t yours, because you promoted the ‘Harry Houdini’ who only reappears once the crisis has been resolved.
Don’t tell me where your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money and I’ll tell you what they are.
This was said by James W. Frick, who was the first full time ‘fundraiser’ for the University of Notre Dame. He is venerated to this day by his alma mater due to the amount of funds he was able to raise. Highly passionate, articulate and intelligent, he paved a path for many across the world to follow.
And his quote is as true today as it has ever been. Whether it be for personal or commercial finances, people spend money based on what they prioritize.
Many consultants can tell you about ‘that one company’ that asked them to improve quality, reliability or anything else without incurring any additional costs. This is crazy. And then there are organizations that have massive field service departments – because there are so many field failures. Which means that this organization prioritizes fixing failures over preventing them.
Joseph Juran (who is kind of a big deal when it comes to quality and reliability) talked about ‘exhortation.’ This is what management teams do when they want to feel like they are prioritizing something without prioritizing it. They may say things like ‘quality is our number one goal’ or ‘reliability is what we do.’ But only pay bonuses when the product is shipped on time. Eventually, quality and reliability will revert to a level of zero priority. Why? Because focusing on quality and reliability (in this example) makes it less likely for something to ship on time. Which is where the money goes.
So what does your organization prioritize? Don’t think – just look at what it spends money on. And no matter what you say to your workforce, millennials will probably realize what you (the management team) prioritize before you know it yourself. It had better align with the sort of organization you want the talent to aspire to. And if it doesn’t, then think about the people it would attract. And sooner rather than later, they will be there.
When you think of a psychopath, you probably imagine a serial killer or some other sort of criminal. There is a growing body of evidence that psychopaths initially do well in organizations before ultimately causing irreversible harm. Professor Clive Boddy writes in his book Corporate Psychopaths: Organizational Destroyers that these ‘corporate psychopaths’ leave organizations with cultures of bullying, conflict, stress, staff turnover and absenteeism, reduction in productivity and diminished social responsibility.
Does this sound familiar?
Among other things, psychopaths are good at mimicking emotions (pretending to be someone they are not) and have little empathy. This sees them uniquely set up to be whatever their boss wants them to be, and to think nothing of using their subordinates as mere resources – not people with emotions who are valuable to the organization and need to be nurtured.
So regardless of the way you want to look at it, those people who are charming to those above them but abusive to those below them have psychopathic tendencies. And this never ends well – particularly if their charm earns them promotion.
There is a continuum of corporate psychopathy to be sure … but perhaps the first inkling that this may be an issue in your organization is when there is someone who is ‘do as I say, not as I do.’ That is, they demand their subordinates to things they were never prepared to do themselves. This can be things as basic as office etiquette, or something more sinister that involves lying or misappropriation of funds.
And ‘not knowing’ about this behavior is not an excuse for upper level management. Knowing is their job. Turning a blind eye or not looking hard enough is not.
Do you think a young employee will want to stay in an organization with a culture of bullying, conflict, stress, staff turnover and absenteeism, reduction in productivity and diminished social responsibility?
Micro-managers tend to be blissfully unaware of their condition. When you micromanage, you tell your subordinates:
You don’t matter.
The best and the brightest will start wondering why they are here at all if they are simply doing everything precisely the way their boss says to do it. This is painful. And the only people who enjoy this situation are the dullards who have no idea about how to do it. Dullards need prescriptive guidance. So they are happy(ish), and will remain happy(ish) once the high performers have left.
You will soon have a workforce that is conditioned to not take the initiative when they need to. During the Piper Alpha Oil Platform fire in 1988 (which killed 167 people), staff on adjacent platforms continued to pump oil to the raging inferno even though they could see the flames rising over the horizon. Why didn’t they turn the oil supply off to the fatal inferno? They didn’t think they had the authority to do it.
There is always an unhappy marriage between the (micro-manager) boss and the (dullard) workforce. The (micro-manager) boss becomes convinced that they must ‘do everything’ because their workforce is full of dullards. This marriage is now ‘divorce-proof’ as we have an unhealthy form of co-dependence. The dysfunctional party always needs the other.
So why do this? Some bosses just feel good by being part of the process. Others cannot tolerate errors or mistakes at the lowest levels. But without errors or mistakes, no one ever learns or makes risk-based decisions. This is bad all around.
There are other organizations I could have included here, but hopefully you get the point. And there is one thing all these organizations have in common: denial. It is very hard for management teams (who have no doubt expended substantial blood sweat and tears for that organization) to critically look at themselves and genuinely identify if any of the organizations described above is like their own.
But if you are scratching your head, wondering why millennials quickly leave your organization, you need to drink a large glass of humility. It is almost certainly your organization that is at fault. And if you think that these millennials don’t get it, then you may feel a bit better about your predicament which is a common by-product of kidding oneself. But at the end of the day, you will be left with a low-performance workforce that only stay with you because they aren’t talented enough to pursue any other option. Get used to dealing with dullards.
There are plenty of organizations that get this. Google is famous for making its workplace accommodating for its staff. I recently went on a tour of Riot Games headquarters in Los Angeles. I didn’t want to leave! It had its own relaxation rooms, bars, food hall, exercise areas, free parking (and the list goes on). All these things were tremendously expensive (they were built in the converted Fox Studios). But they can attract and keep young talent. Isn’t that what you want to do? (Riot Games’ League of Legends games earns approximately $ 2 billion annually, several times that of its nearest competitor).
So always ask yourself: what would make me want to stay ‘here’? What can I do to make this a desirable place to work? Alternately you can micromanage, berate, devalue, be a psychopath or whatever it is you do that will forever hold your organization back. Blaming ‘millennials’ is your delusional security blanket.
I just returned from a great conference in Stuttgart called “Reliability Days.” I presented on some new concepts and techniques with regard to assessing and improving reliability culture in the product development process. Enjoy the presentation.
-Adam
I was recently talking with my colleague Fred Schenkelberg from FMS Reliability (this conversation can be heard here), about a plane that he had never heard of. Most of the world hasn’t heard of it. And there is a reason you probably haven’t either. The plane in question is a case study on how to design something to fail.
I have heard that “Reliability and Quality are kissing cousins” and also that “Reliability is Quality over time.” Neither of these definitions ring true to me. To be honest I’m a smidge offended because both of these terms diminish the value of the objective of reliability. I would state that reliability is “The design of a device or system so that it works as intended consistently over it’s defined use-life.” To me the key differentiator from my definition and the previous two descriptions of reliability is the word “design.”
