TEAM
Some years ago I was watching a TV piece about marine corps ranger training, and one part still sticks with me.
The marine training was comprised of two teams of five members each. The individual teams were always together and the members never intermingled. Team camaraderie had grown from this relationship and a friendly rivalry between the teams began while running the obstacle course. This competition was not encouraged or discouraged by the drill instructors. One obstacle they faced was to push a Humvee up a hill. No matter how hard each team tried, they could not push the Humvee up the hill. The Humvee was just too heavy and the hill too steep. The drill instructor yelled at them that they were failing. One of those on the team said that it would take more than five people to push the vehicle up the hill. The drill instructor again yelled at the individual, “You just solved your problem soldier, this is ONE marine corps.” It dawned on them that if both teams got together, 10 people could push the Humvee up the hill and then would team up to push the other Humvee.
How many times have you worked for a company that preached teamwork but practiced something completely different? There have been numerous books written in this apparent anti-team technique and it has been taught in business schools as management by objectives (MBO). I am not espousing to get rid of this concept as it is definitely useful, but its application has to be considered carefully. In one of his 14 points of management, W. Edwards Deming states, “Eliminate work standard (quotas). Substitute leadership. Eliminate management by objectives.” This is one of the most difficult of Deming’s concepts for managers to accept.
How do you produce anything in an organization without some target figure? If you determine that the consumer demand, you want to ensure that you produce to that number if you have the capacity. Deming was not so much opposed to the initial ideas behind MBO but was opposed to the way MBO was being implemented. Pushing down that concept to the workforce was destroying innovation and motivation. You produce to that number and succeed or you don’t reach the number and you fail. If you want to produce X number of widgets you will need to manufacture X number of widget components. You can’t easily just say produce what you can and leave it at that. This is true but the MBO concept evolved or deteriorated into something else.
Some examples
You see this mostly in sales such as car dealers awarding the salesperson who sells the most cars in one month. That sounds reasonable, but at what cost? My wife and I walked into one of those dealerships years ago and it was like ants coming out of a hole in the ground, sensing a sugar cube nearby. Sales people swarmed out of every office and crevice in the building. We immediately felt we were under attack and took the first door out of the showroom and quickly ran to our car and drove off. There have been times when I wasn’t so adept at foot and was engulfed in the sales clamor. I felt trapped and uneasy. Is this how a customer is supposed to feel? This may force one capitulation sale, providing the customer with the only means of escape, but at the expense of future business. As a customer you would not want to go through that experience again so you avoid the situation and the business.
I just read a story of a plant manager, let’s call him John, who met or exceeded all the annual goals set by top management but the performance of his plant lagged behind that of another plant. John was instructed to find out why that plant was excelling even though both managers met the same goal set. What he found out was that although the other plant manager measures the same set of metrics as John, the goals were not the driver. The philosophy was that goals inhibit behavior.
If a stretch goal is not reached your appraisal was downgraded and if you reached your stretch goal, the goal was too easily obtainable. This is a no-win situation. Instead of trying to meet an arbitrary goal, the concentration was on the plant’s rate of improvement — not a number but just improvement over time. If a goal is not reached, it tends to have you seek an inward solution or an external cause, which reinforces the silo effect. If you look at the plant’s rate of improvement, a negative rate is typically caused by a restriction in the process and you seek a more universal solution. (There are more details to the story than this but you get the point.) Top managements goals are still being measured so they are getting the data they want, but operationally the plant is run as a unit and not as a set of individual components trying to meet individual goals. The problem I see in looking at the rate is defining a metric for performance and if that metric is too broad it will lose data sensitivity. A rate is a lagging indicator and if there is a large loss in data sensitivity, a negative turn will not be detected quickly enough. This necessitates a larger effort to make corrections.
The misuse of MBO is not relegated to just sales and manufacturing but has spilled over to other sectors. I worked for one airline that awarded the midnight shift aircraft maintenance supervisor who cleared the most deferred items and publically humiliated the supervisor who had the least deferred items cleared. You had a dual motivation set up but behaviorally we are more prone to avoid pain than seek adulation. If you know the rudiments of statistics, you know that for any group, unless they are completely homogenous, will take the shape of a bell curve (a small group at the ends and the majority in the middle). In this scenario there will always be a loser and always a winner, no matter how well or poorly the group as a whole does, but that didn’t matter. This also encouraged hoarding of resources and even resource theft. If you couldn’t be the best, making someone else last at least saved your bacon from the fire.
Middle ground feeding frenzy
However, this middle ground, the safety zone, quickly deteriorated to where everyone except the top performer was partially admonished at the morning briefing. This soon turned into everyone getting a tongue lashing in the morning as clearing 100 percent of the deferred items became the only acceptable goal. This meant at the beginning of the shift, seizing the prime aircraft, those that had the least deferred items with the easiest to clear. It was like watching a feeding frenzy. Resources for certain fleet types were scarce so those aircraft were avoided. It got to the point where if you were stuck entirely with that fleet type and couldn’t clear any deferred items because of lack of parts, supervisors would rob parts from another supervisor’s aircraft. This tactic was disguised as acceptable by ordering parts for the robbed airplane but one knew the part was unavailable. This would not improve the overall deferred count but it would provide a cushion for the supervisor who robbed the part to clear at least one deferral. It also pushed the other supervisor into the spotlight as he/she now had to create a deferral to release the aircraft and creating a deferral was the highest of infractions, worse than not clearing any deferrals.
There was one supervisor who was always at the bottom of the list and always being humiliated at the morning briefing. It wasn’t entirely his fault as he had rarely participated in the pre-shift feeding frenzy and was typically stuck with the left overs, the fleet type with the least available resources. What eventually happened was that almost all the supervisors got together and started to swap aircraft before the morning briefing so we had very similar differed counts. The supervisors who did not participate in this swap-o-rama were those who had a good deferred count and sharing would diminish their numbers. However, when their numbers weren’t so favorable they wanted to participate in the swap but the other supervisors would not cooperate. This swap meet didn’t last long before upper management figured out, or someone told them, what was going on and began to watch what aircraft were assigned at the beginning of the shift and ensuring that you reported only on those aircraft.
A-holes are everywhere
I have often been told that there is no “i” in team — but if you look at the heading to this article, there is. It is in red and it’s in the a-hole. We are imperfect people living in an imperfect world dealing with imperfect situations. No matter how hard we work at building a team, eventually you are going to run across an a-hole who is out for himself or herself and mucks things up for everyone else.
I fall back on statistical probability. When flipping a coin, the probability is 50-50 that you will flip heads or tails. If you flip six heads in a row, what are the chances you will flip another head? Fifty-fifty — the probability didn’t change. If a basketball player can hit 50 percent at the three point line, what is the probability of shooting another three pointer if he has been shooting six three pointers in a row? Is he on a hot streak and this will continue? Or is the streak going too long and he will probably miss the next three point shot? The probability doesn’t change; it is still 50 percent. In order to improve, you need to move the average, not the outliers.
Practice isn’t going to improve your coin flipping without manipulation. One basketball player improving his three-point shooting prowess isn’t going to improve the team unless it improves the team’s average. Having people concentrate on individual goals will distract from concentrating on improving the organization. The plant manager concentrated on rate of improvement of the organization and not the bits and pieces. In the movie “Moneyball,” the Oakland A’s improved the team performance by trading their top home run players for those that were undervalued but had a high on-base percentage, a rate. They improved the average performance of the team; the bell curve got taller (fewer stars) and it moved to the right (improved mean). In the airline scenario, if upper management were smart they would have seen the camaraderie that was created amongst the supervisors for self-protection and capitalized and built upon that effort to move the group forward. It is really difficult to build a cohesive team and it was there at their doorstep but it was squandered and crushed by management.
Into each life and team, some rain must fall. Every well-run team will eventually get their share of a-holes. In the long run, with persistence, winning and losing streaks will smooth out, and a-holes will have minimal impact. Because of the theory of regression toward the mean, progress must be measured by moving the mean, not one or two of its subcomponents.
Myron’s Perversity Principle:
Dr. Myron T. Tribus, an American organizational theorist, director of the Center for Advanced Engineering Study at MIT from 1974 to 1986, said “If you try to improve the performance of a system of people, procedures, practices and machines by setting goals and targets (and incentives) for the individual parts of the system, the system will defeat you every time and you will pay a price where you least expect it.”
Patrick Kinane is an FAA-certificated A&P with IA and commercial pilot with instrument rating. He has 50 years of experience in aviation maintenance. He is an ASQ senior member with quality auditor and quality systems/organizational excellence manager certifications. He is an RABQSA-certified AS9100 and AS9110 aerospace industry experienced auditor and ISO9001 business improvement/quality management systems auditor. He earned a bachelor of science degree in aviation maintenance management, a master’s of science degree in education, and a Ph.D. in organizational psychology. Kinane is presently a senior quality management systems auditor for AAR CORP and a professor of organizational behavior at DeVry University.