Don't Cover Your Ass

Good to see you again!

I'm sure you have known people, who work hard to cover their asses. This is done so often and by so many that CYA has become a common acronym. There are managers, who put so much armor around their asses that they have trouble walking around and getting things done.

In corporate environments ass is one metaphoric piece of human anatomy that is best left uncovered to discourage defensiveness and build trust. Defensiveness and spinning are ginormous waste of time and insulting to customers, investors and other stakeholders alike.

I've another acronym. Leave open your ass (LOYA). How can you and I start practicing LOYA? Well, I'll share my tips with you, if you will share yours:

1. Listen attentively and take notes when someone criticizes you in a meeting. This is good stuff. Thank your colleague after the meeting and request him or her to continue to provide feedback in future.
2. When you feel regret for not covering your ass, openly accept your errors and move on.
3. Create transparency into what you are working on using frequent corporate communications, status updates, project management tools, task lists, design documents, marketing collateral, et cetera.
4. Stop e-mailing FYI to your boss as a CYA. You are just wasting his time.
5. If you are a senior executive, build an organization that is error-friendly and error-tolerant. Error-friendly organizations are more resilient. Such organizations allow people to quickly recognize, recover and learn from errors.

I believe LOYA is critical to building trust and initiative in a team. Now since I've written this blog, I'm going to try it first.

See you soon!

Challenging Organizational Entropy

Sometime back I came to know from an old friend of mine that his medium-sized firm located in San Diego had decided to drop a product line with almost five million dollars of annual revenue because the management found the product line unprofitable. The product line required 50 full-time employees to generate sales, maintain the website and provide customer service at a direct cost of about $4.6 million per year. In addition, the product line was paying $800,000 as internal chargeback for the use of company-owned data center and corporate office. Clearly, it was not hard to notice that the company was losing $400,000 per year on this product line. At an offsite meeting it made a lot of sense to the company executives to shut it down and layoff 50 employees. As you may have already guessed, the company ended up losing $400,000 per year.

It is not surprising that such misguided decisions continue to be made more than five centuries after the invention of accounting. The issue here is not understanding of cost accounting. The problem is with corporate dysfunction, which when not kept in check by the top leadership, creates an environment in which facts are twisted to serve the interests of powerful coalitions, information is colored, personal agendas are advanced at the cost of creation of customer value and no one rises to challenge conventional wisdom.

In traditional organizations, only executive leadership is capable of challenging and stopping this tendency of organizations to become dysfunctional. What does it take? It takes candor, honesty without insensitivity, openness to inquire into thoughts that are contrary to one’s beliefs or conventional wisdom and a healthy dose of ego-suppression syrup. What are the alternatives if you are not at the executive leadership level? Candor, honesty and openness will still help you stay above the organizational dysfunctions and contribute effectively. Just remember, it is important to be nice. Don’t be rude, even if you are right. As Peter (Drucker) used to say in his class that organizations were bodies in motion and politeness was the lubricant that kept organizations working without friction.

Have a nice day and will talk to you soon!