Gruntled Employees

The First Rule of Managerial Eptitude

A while back, we talked about our Universal Truth (you can tell it's important since it's capitalized):

Inept managers lead to disgruntled employees, which in turn lead to diminishing profits.

Ept managers lead to gruntled employees, which in turn lead to minishing profits.

To that end, we thought we'd offer up the Rules of Managerial Eptitude (again with the capitalizing).

The first one is probably the sentence I've said most often to managers during the past 15 years:

1. Write it down.

Whenever something happens in the workplace that could have future consequences, write it down. Anywhere. I don't really care where. Grab a piece of paper, put the date and time on it, and write down whatever it is. Then put it somewhere safe.

I used to say "Document everything." It sounded more lawyerly, what with its seven syllables and all. But I slowly realized that people worry more about "documenting" something than about just writing it down. People tend to draft documents, which seems like more work. Better to just jot a note. Then stick it in a private file (and not a personnel file, unless and until it becomes a "personnel document" being used to make a personnel decision.)

So why is writing something down so important?

Because it's magic.

Well, almost. Stuff that gets written down takes on a talismanic quality. (That's right, kids. Stuff and talismanic in the same sentence. Don't try that at home.) People — judges, jurors, hearing officers, mediators, arbitrators, and even you and I — tend to believe that something is true by virtue of its being written down.

Imagine we have a case against each other in court. You get on the stand and testify about my dastardly deed. On cross-examination, my crack lawyer asks you when the deed occurred. "Uh," you mumble, "sometime in the spring?" My crack lawyer deadpans, "Sometime in the spring." You look away and say, "I think." My crack lawyer says, "No further questions."

Then I get on the stand. My crack lawyer now asks me when the dastardly deed occurred. I look over at the jury box and say in a strong, clear voice,"On April 16, at 3:45 in the afternoon." Crack lawyer: "How can you be so sure?" I look at the jurors again. "Well, partly because it's my mother's birthday. But mostly because I ... wrote ... it ... down." Game, set, and match, baby. You can't handle the truth! Shepherd out.

Uh, sorry. Actually, my crack lawyer would then make a big show of producing my jotted-down (and date- and timestamped) note, and then the jurors would be all "Oh yes he did." And I'd win.

Something written is more real — more believable — than something unwritten. Sure, I could have written the note the night before the trial began. There isn't going to be any C.S.I.-style carbon-dating of my note going on. But the jury knows that people don't generally do that. If I said I wrote the note at 3:45 p.m. on April 16, it's probably because I did. Which means my side of the story is probably more accurate. Which means I'll probably win.

So managers: write it down. Winning's better than losing.

"Not" a big deal

Today's earlier post "On layoffs and leaks" had a typo in it. A word, a very short word, was inadvertently left out. (Why is it that we never do things advertently?)

Unfortunately, it was a very important word: not.

The corrected passage reads:

In my experience, surprising employees with bad news tends to increase P. For that reason, we always tell clients that an employee who is about to be disciplined or fired should not be surprised by it. Otherwise, the surprise acts as a multiplier of the bad feelings that come with the bad news, and it raises P even more.

It doesn't make as much sense without the not.

The original post has been corrected, but many of you receive this by email subscription, so I wanted to make sure I pointed out the slip. Thanks to the sharp-eyed readers who pointed out.

The fool or the fool who follows him?

In our last episode, "The billable beast of burden," I talked about the recent ABA Journal article that described Shepherd Law Group's successes in banishing the billable hour ("Taming the Billable Beast," February 2008). I also mentioned that there were naysayers about.

Tom Kane is one. He writes Legal Marketing Blog.com, a fine site with a surprisingly generic name for a marketing site. Perhaps "Raising Kane" was taken. (Actually, it turns out it was — see here — by a self-described "recovering lawyer." Huh.) Tom covers the ABA Journal article in his post "Has Your Firm Tamed That Damn Billable Hour Yet?" and commends us and the other two firms for addressing the billable hour problem. (Thanks, Tom.)

But he also takes a shot at something I said in the article, and I feel the need to respond. Here's Tom:

One troubling point mentioned in the article relating to the Shepherd firm. And that is the statement involving CEO Jay Shepherd that “he denies secretly keeping track of hours spent on each case.” If the firm doesn’t do so, IMHO, it is being foolhardy based on the following simple reasoning:

• You can’t make a profit on fixed fees unless you know what your costs are;
• You can’t know what your costs are unless you know how much time (and other dollars) are consumed by the matter; and
• There is no way to know how much time is being spent on matters if you don’t keep track of hours!

Duh!

So, either they are guessing which means they don’t have a clue what their profit margin is either, or the firm has some other means of determining costs that I am unaware of.

"Duh," indeed! Wow. We're being foolhardy to the point of being duhed. (New word; pronounce it "dud." Think of me when you use it. "Hey, Mom! In school today my teacher duhed me.") So I was all set to roll up my sleeves and explain how Tom's "simple reasoning" (IHHO — in his humble opinion) was flawed, when I learned that the Godfather of Value Pricing had already done so.

Ron Baker is the founder of VeraSage Institute, a think tank dedicated to helping professional-service firms rid themselves of archaic billing practices. He is the author of Professional's Guide to Value Pricing, which is the ultimate hornbook on the subject. Having Ron publicly defend your billing practices is like having Martha Stewart compliment your table setting (only without the whole jail thing). Here's Ron in his post "He Who Says 'A' Must Say 'B,'" responding to Tom's "duh":

No, not Duh. There are over 500+ firms worldwide, across all professional knowledge firm sectors, from advertising to CPA firms and law to IT consulting firms, that don’t do timesheets.

This doesn’t mean they don’t know their costs, it’s a question of WHEN do they know their costs. With timesheets, you only know them in arrears. With our methods, you know them BEFORE you do the work.

What good is it to know your costs if the client doesn’t like your price? This is known as price-led costing; Toyota has been using since it was founded in the 1880s, and Toyota does not have a standard cost accounting system (nor do they do timesheets).

In the real world, value drives price, not costs. Price actually drives costs, so it makes sense to know value and price before you spend a nickel on any costs....

I just wanted to set the record straight. If the Shepherd Law Group is smart — and they are  — they will trash timesheets. [Thanks, Ron. Already have. — JS] They are the cancer in the professions; it is just a matter time before they will be buried.

Ron also says that timesheets "keep professionals mired in the mentality they sell time." In another place, Ron has written one of the best arguments against timesheets ever:

So what good is measuring hours logged on a timesheet? Do you think you can measure the value of a Picasso, the deliciousness of a meal prepared by a five-star chef, the splendor of a building designed by an architect, or the acting ability of an actress, by looking at the hours they work? As they say, it’s easier to count the bottles than describe the wine. You remain mired in counting and costing the bottles, while we are interested in the quality, taste and subjective value of the wine.

Knowledge workers aren’t inspired to track every six minutes of their day. No one entered this profession with the objective of logging the most hours. Not only is it the wrong theory of value, it’s also demeaning, demonstrating a lack of trust, treating them like children.

Oh, snap! I really couldn't have said it better myself.

No, we don't track hours spent at Shepherd Law Group, secretly or overtly. Other lawyers often shake their heads knowingly and then ask me how I know whether my associates are working. "Uh," I reply, "with this crazy new thing called management." (They usually shake their heads some more and wander off, muttering.) Our associates work hard because they want to help our clients and they want to do a good job. That's why we call them professionals. Professionals don't need an annual billables goal to make them work hard.

Now I don't want to dis Tom too much; he's written some good things against hourly billing. And he went to my dad's alma mater, the Cross, so he can't be all bad. Still, he may think I'm foolhardy for trashing timesheets, but there will soon be many other "fools" following our lead.

Ept managers lead to gruntled employees

Seventy-seven percent of Americans hate their jobs. This from a Gallup poll reported in TIME's Work in Progress blog by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen. (I first saw it in Diane Pfadenhauer's Strategic HR Lawyer blog.) Not a good statistic.

On the other hand, 90% of managers think they're in the top 10% of performers. This from a BusinessWeek poll of 2,000 US executives and middle managers (article here, poll results here). (Rob May's Businesspundit.com turned me on to these results.) Most of these respondents are, of course, wrong — and suffering from the Lake Wobegon effect.

Taking these two polls together leads to some conclusions. Most managers think they're swell (and executives are even worse — 97% put themselves in the top decile). But they can't all be that good. And if more than three fourths of their employees hate their jobs, then most of the managers must really stink.

Universal truth: Inept managers lead to disgruntled employees, which in turn lead to diminishing profits. (And employee lawsuits, of course.)

Parallel universal truth: Ept managers lead to gruntled employees, which in turn lead to minishing profits. (And fewer lawsuits.)

Now ept may be no more real a word than gruntled (or minishing for that matter), but your managers won't notice because they're too busy patting themselves on the back (and their employees are too busy working on their résumés). Focus on making your managers more ept (epter?), and you'll end up with fewer employees hating their jobs.

What you can measure, you can manage

Not surprisingly (at least not to me), some of the best ideas in this blog come from readers who take a few minutes to post a comment. This happened again following yesterday's post, "Gruntled" on prime time, where we noted the use of our favorite pseudoword ("gruntled," of course) on NBC's "The Office." Scott McArthur, a people-management consultant in Cheshire, UK, thought of the blog when he heard the "Office" reference. That's good for NBC, and good for "Gruntled Employees."

(Ponder this for a second. "The Office" was originally a British sitcom, successfully imported and remade into an American hit, apparently being enjoyed back in the UK.) (OK, you can stop pondering now.)

Anyway, Scott has a great blog (now added to our Worldwide Blogroll — which sounds like a bakery item, but whatever) called "McArthur's Rant" where he talks about the kinds of topics that Gruntled readers care about. In his comment, Scott makes this terrific suggestion:

What we need now is the gruntled employee index on which we can base HR strategy and measure progress.

What a great idea! I've been wrestling with the concept of HR metrics and ways to measure the effectiveness of managers, HR professionals, and employment lawyers. (Some of the books on the right side of this page talk about these concepts.) Under the Peter Drucker rule that you can't manage what you can't measure, we need to find a way to assess our performance.

My plan then is to take Scott's great idea and develop the Gruntled Employees Index. I have some ideas, but I'd love to hear yours. What are the things that we should be measuring?

"Gruntled" on prime time

I didn't see it myself — I was busy driving to New Jersey, which would make anyone gruntled — but apparently "The Office" took a page from this blog last night. (Spoilers follow if you missed it.) In an episode entitled "The Negotiation," Roy attempts to attack Jim (your typical office-romance-love-triangle-workplace-violence story) and gets pepper-sprayed by Dwight. Later, Michael is discussing the incident with Jan:

        MICHAEL
It was a crime of passion, Jan, not a disgruntled employee. Everyone here is extremely gruntled.

If TV says it's a word, who am I to argue?

Not just another lawyer

Once again we drink from that font of wisdom: network television.

Last time we did this, we learned about plain English on "24." (See What would Jack Bauer do? Use plain English.) This time, we turn to NBC's "30 Rock."

At the end of last week's episode, a man walks into Liz Lemon's office to explain that he was the one who had mistakenly sent her Valentine's roses. When she asks him who he is, he explains:

         LAWYER
I work up in Legal, and —

         LIZ (interrupting)
You're a lawyer?

         LAWYER (shaking his head)
I prefer ... law stylist.

At first I wrote this off as just-another dig at lawyers, showing that they're so embarrassed by their profession that they don't even want to use the word lawyer. Heck, even I've done that.

But then I thought that maybe there was something more to it. What if instead of just acting like lawyers, we tried acting like "law stylists," using a little creativity to surprise and delight our clients? Just another thing to think about while we're looking for the remote ...

Useful is to useless as beautiful is to ... ?

Keeping in mind that this blog is named for a word that isn't but should be, there's a group of words having to do with quantities of qualities that are missing their natural opposites. For example:

• someone can be beautiful, but not beautiless
• mindful is not the opposite of mindless
• being a lawyer can be gainful employment; can't it also be gainless?
• my painting is worthless; why isn't Picasso's worthful?
• she has boundless enthusiasm; why isn't mine boundful?
• sometimes I'm clueless about something; I'm never clueful
• I'm also sometimes hapless, but I've never been hapful
• this blog can be playful, but it is rarely playless
• you can try to be masterful; if you fail, are you masterless?
• witless but not witful
• childless but not childful
• fitful but not fitless

Who decides this stuff anyway? Send me comments with other needful words and their apparently needless counterparts.

Happy is to sad as angry is to (blank)

This blog is named for the opposite of disgruntled, which should be gruntled — but really isn't. The dis- in disgruntled is not the same as the dis- in, say, disfavor. ("My boss disfavors me. That's why I'm so disgruntled.")

Instead, this dis- is used as an intensive. The gruntled comes from the Middle English gruntelen, meaning "to grumble." The intensive -dis means you're grumbling more when you're disgruntled. Ann from Esmerel.com has a nice explanation of all this here.

So while we're speaking of feelings and their opposites — like happy and sad — why the heck is there no opposite for angry? Recently we talked about how anger leads to the Dark Side — no, wait, that's something else — how anger leads to employee lawsuits (see the post on "Retained Dignity"). If we should be worrying about angry employees, what do we call them when they're not angry?

WordNet (via Answers.com) lists unangry as an antonym for angry, but that's sillier than disgruntled. It's completely made up. The word mavens at Oxford Dictionaries certainly don't buy it: otherwise, there'd be a solution for the old riddle of the three English words ending in "-gry" (along with hungry and, of course, angry). (There is no third word.)

What's the big deal? you ask. Well, I submit that opposites are important. For proof, there's the classic bit on The Simpsons where Dr. Nick literally pours gasoline on a fire, while reassuring bystanders, "Don't worry. It says Inflammable." After the explosion, Dr. Nick says, "Inflammable means flammable? What a country!"

What a country, indeed.

Let me introduce you to "you"

True story: I went to the brand-new Starbucks next door to my office yesterday — its first day open for business. (Mind you, it's about 300 yards from my usual Starbucks, and less than 100 yards from the one that closed a year ago.) I go in. There's a guy finishing his order in front of me, a couple of others waiting for their coffees in front of him. No one behind me.
The guy in front of me finishes and shuffles over to wait for his drink. The young woman at the register is all smiles. She's the type that probably gets sick of being called "perky" all the time. And then she says, still smiling, "Can I help the next person?"

Just to be sure, I turn to look behind me. There's no one there. I'm absolutely the only person who could be "the next person." It's not like she wasn't sure who would be next, and didn't want to offend someone who really should have been next. It's just me. And she was looking (and smiling) right at me.

So why didn't she just say, "Can I help you?"

I have a theory (and, at long last, a point): People are afraid of saying "you." As if referring to someone in the second person is somehow too informal, or too imprecise.

Lawyers, I'm sorry to say, are the worst offenders. How many employment contracts have you seen that address the rights and obligations of "the employee (hereinafter referred to as 'Employee')"? This of course leads to preposterous pronoun proliferation: "Employee will be allowed to take his/her personal day as long as s/he has worked his/her shift the previous day."

(Please don't do that. Real English words don't have virgules — slashes — in them.)

Unfortunately, HR professionals often drink the same Kool-Aid the lawyers do. Personnel handbooks and policies often contort themselves to avoid saying "you." But there is nothing clearer than saying, "You need to do this. You can't do that." The reader knows who "you" is.

The French have two verbs that mean "to use the second-person-verb form": vousvoyer and tutoyer. English doesn't have one that I'm aware of (little help from you linguists out there?). Maybe we need a "youify" or a "youate." Whatever we call it, lawyers, HR pros, and perky baristas should start doing it.