Author Archives: Tom Foster

About Tom Foster

Tom Foster spends most of his time talking with managers and business owners. The conversations are about business lives and personal lives, goals, objectives and measuring performance. In short, transforming groups of people into teams working together. Sometimes we make great strides understanding this management stuff, other times it’s measured in very short inches. But in all of this conversation, there are things that we learn. This blog is that part of the conversation I can share. Often, the names are changed to protect the guilty, but this is real life inside of real companies.

What Has Been Missing?

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Goal Directed work is a basic feature of all life. -Elliott Jaques

All life. Not just humans, all life.

What is work?

Work is an organism’s judgment in making decisions to reach a goal? -Elliott Jaques

Work is not pushing the red button. Pushing the red button is not the goal. In the orientation, we made it a point to tell the technician that his job was to push the red button. Maybe that is the job, but that is not the work.

The goal is to produce a specific quantity of material at a specific quality standard by the end of the day. The work is not to push the red button. The work is using judgment to make decisions to produce the goal.

There are staging decisions, decisions of speed and pace, decisions about work station organization and cleanliness, decisions about scrap, decisions about machine noise, machine funny noise, maintenance engineering. Do I lubricate now, or make three more cuts, then lubricate? Am I behind in my task assignment or ahead in my task assignment? Did this last piece meet the quality standard? Pace and quality, pace and quality?

Arlene’s desk was clear. Her arms were folded. “Yesterday, I had a discussion with a recent hire, two months, asking about her experience with us so far. Her response was, two weeks vacation wasn’t enough, would like to take lunch at no set time, and doesn’t understand why no Christmas bonus.”

“What has been missing in this young recruit’s career?” I replied.

Why 40?

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Hassan started this the other day looking for Reasons People Work. Here is Elliott’s take:

From Social Power and the CEO: -Elliott Jaques
People want work in which they can have the opportunity to exercise their full potential capability, to spread their wings widely, to receive a fair compensation for that work and to be recognized and understood as not needing artificial carrot and stick treatment on order to get on with that work.

By work, I mean an organism’s use of judgment in making the decisions necessary to reach a goal. Goal directed work is a basic feature of all life.

All humans need to do work that not only benefits oneself, but is, at the same time, of value to others.

It may be noted that, not only do millions gain work opportunities by becoming engaged in employment, but need something on the order of 40 hours per week of such engagement. That is what explains the fact that the employment work week, which came down to 40 hours during the first half of the twentieth century, has gone no lower. Any smaller number of hours is not sufficiently fulfilling. Indeed, people who work on their own, routinely spend many more than 40 hours per week.

Tomorrow
What is Work?

A Lump of Work

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Yesterday’s question: Reasons people work? brought some very thoughtful responses. You can see them all here.

Many of you subscribe by email so unless you follow the link above you are going to miss this one, from Ozzie Gontang, a good friend and Vistage Chair in San Diego. You can visit his blog Mindfulness.

From Ozzie on Reasons People Work:
As social animals, since we are herd or pack animals, there is a drive to contribute, to find meaning and purpose in what we do. Work allows us to challenge what we are capable of becoming.

The word competition means to “seek with” so work is a way of measuring one’s value to community and to oneself. Since the measure of performance is performance, work allows us to measure ourselves against our best performance in being the unique world class human I can create and instrument myself to be.

It is interesting that the word “job” which is Anglo-Saxon and means a lump was presumably used at the beginning of the industrial revolution meaning that someone could not do a job/lump of work. What one needed was the bigger picture in which the piece/job/lump existed. The old story of laying brick or building a cathedral.

Two hundred and fifty years later we are afraid of losing our “lumps” and also that in our global economy we are brought back to the fact that we are and always have been: interdependent.

Tomorrow
More thoughts on this subject from Elliott Jaques.

Reasons People Work?

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From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Hassan writes:

Good day Mr. Tom. I really appreciate the service you are providing. I’ve got a business studies assignment to create 20 reasons why people work. Could you please help me out with some reasons?

In response to Hassan’s request, think about why it is important for people to work. Hint: It’s not for the money. Please post your comments and we will debrief tomorrow.

To view comments as they are posted, please visit the site www.managementblog.org.

Essence of Accountability

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The past couple of weeks, we have been looking at teams and accountability, some great comments.

Don writes:

Team responsibility is a nonsensical theory developed by academics that have never functioned in the work place. No one is ever responsible for the ultimate outcome of the group or the damage done to the company. Every major crash in American business can be tracked to every level of management claiming they were never informed of a problem by their “team”. Group rule equals wasted time in the form of unproductive meetings, unrealistic goal setting and the pushing of responsibility to the lowest level. If American businesses doesn’t wake up, this team business format will be called the predecessor to economic depression.

Colleen writes:

I work for an internet marketing company with team members all around the U.S. We’ve never even met in person, know very little about each other, but somehow we accomplish a lot together. I guess it’s about the quarterbacking, huh. Just a matter of doing the task you’re assigned and letting the quarterback do the coordinating.

The essence of accountability. The manager is to be held accountable for the performance of the team. This simple concept is a game changer. -TF

Not a Group

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“At first, this group dynamics stuff looked interesting, you know, everyone together under a team incentive bonus. It sounded exciting in the seminar, but in real life, this is painful,” Naomi explained. “The worst part, is we’re not getting any work done.”

“So, who is accountable?” I asked.

“I think everyone has to take a small part of the responsibility for the team not cooperating,” Naomi replied.

“No, I don’t mean who is responsible for the mess. I mean, who is accountable for the goal?” I insisted.

“The goal? We’re not even talking about the goal. We are just talking about cooperating better together, as a team.”

“Perhaps, that’s the problem,” I suggested. “You are spending so much time trying to cooperate as a group, that you forgot, we are trying to get some work done around here.

“Is it possible,” I continued, “that you have been misdirected to think more about shared fate and group dynamics than you have about your team. A team is not a group. A group may be bound together by shared fate, but a team is bound together by a goal. Stop thinking about group dynamics and start thinking about the goal. That’s why we are here in the first place.” -TF

Resentment

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“Well, the bonus was designed to promote teamwork. At the end of the year, if they made their team goal, everyone would get the same amount of incentive from the pool,” Naomi explained.

“And?” I prompted.

“And, it turns out that some team members feel like they are doing all the work and that other team members are not contributing at the same level. A little resentment. And it goes both ways, the others say they are doing their best, but circumstances are preventing the team from reaching their goal.”

“And, what is your role, as the manager?”

“My role? I am trying to stay out of it. The consultant said to let the team work it out. This group dynamics stuff, you know.”

“And how is that approach working for you, as a manager?” -TF

Teambuilding With Ropes

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Naomi had several sheets in front of her, spread out like a game of solitaire. “I don’t understand,” she remarked. “I thought I had this group nailed together.”

I dug deep into my bag of diagnostic questions and asked, “How so?”

“Our company has really been working hard this year on teamwork. We know that higher levels of cooperation and cross support make a big difference on our output. I thought I had this team dialed in, but sometimes cooperation seems to be the last thing on their mind.”

“What makes you think you had this team dialed in?” I asked.

Naomi was quick to respond, “Oh, we started out this year with a big retreat, back when we had budget for it. It was a great team building experience. We had a ropes course and we did group games. I mean, we didn’t sing Kumbaya, but, you know, it was a great weekend. Everyone came out of there feeling great.”

“And how long did you expect that to last?” I probed.

“Well, the consultant told us we needed to create some sort of team bonus, you know, where every one depends on the rest of the team to get a little something extra at the end. That way, if one makes it, they all make it. Shared fate, he called it.”

“I see. And how is that working out for you?” -TF

Group vs. Team

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From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:

What’s the difference between a group and a team?

Response:

It may seem nitpicking, but, this difference is extremely important to every manager. Wilfred Bion defines a group (other than a group of people standing around) as a collection of people who have, as a common bond, a sense of shared fate. What happens to one, happens to all.

A team may be a group (or not) whose common bond is goal directed behavior. It is this singular focus on achieving a goal that distinguishes a team from a group.

Individual team members may not be subject to shared fate, indeed, what happens may significantly impact the life of one team member, with smaller effects on other team members. They remain a team, not from shared fate, but on their pursuit of a goal. -TF

Target Completion Time

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Sondra finished her project over the weekend.

“Last week, you assigned this task to Dale, but you ended up doing it,” I observed. I could tell she was very pleased with the project result, but miffed that she spent the weekend working when Dale had all of last week to work on it.

“I thought a lot about what you said about being more explicit about my deadline. Next time, I will try to remember that,” Sondra replied.

“More than that, the target completion time is essential to the task assignment. Dale gets all kinds of assignments. To complete them, he has to use his own discretion, primarily about pace and quality. Most of the decisions he makes are about pace and quality. Without a target completion time, he has no frame of reference in which to make his decisions. His ASAP will ALWAYS be different than your ASAP. ASAP is not a target completion time.”

Sondra smiled. I took a look at her project. It was really very good. She will make her client meeting today and life will go on.