Chapter 9
The Wrong Policies and Procedures
One of the responsibilities
Harvey had, as a rookie psychologist working for the government, was writing
policies and procedures manuals (P&Ps) for groups out in the field.
Ninety-nine times out of 100, his
group wrote serious, sober, usable policy books. Every full moon, however, they
succumbed to the impulse to create a manual of complete gibberish, full of
elliptical provisions that no team in their right mind would follow -- mad,
foolish, twisted, bureaucratic stuff. And, figuring no one read the books
anyway, they sent them out.
Imagine their horror to discover,
on field trips many months later, that these policy and procedure manuals were
being treated as though they had been handed down on Mt. Sinai on stone
tablets. People actually went out of their way to try and make the absurd
nostrums work, wasting time and productivity along the way.
Harvey was not only ashamed that
he had had a hand in contributing to the delinquency of our government, but he
was angry at the lemmings who blindly followed obviously the idiotic policies
he had scripted.
The lesson of this shameful
episode -- Harvey still bursts into tears at odd intervals, just thinking about
it -- is that some balance has to be found in the area of policies and
procedures.
On the one hand, organizations
and teams themselves must create policies and procedures that are credible.
Credibility means that the information in the P&Ps, those vast and weighty
tomes stashed in the credenza, must parallel reality.
Too many companies and too many
teams live a double life -- their life by the book and their real life. When
the book and reality diverge too sharply, they acquire separate lives. People
who perform well in the actual organization go with the flow of the
organization; people who perform better "by the book" will cling to
it, chapter and verse, stifling their own growth and creativity.
Those who snicker at policies and
procedures manuals are really snickering at their corporate culture. The
company may say these binders describe the company -- but people know better.
Their organization, and they themselves, are living a lie. The gap between
credenza and real life is too great. Bad rules have a corrosive effect on the
bond holding teams and entire enterprises together.
In business after business, we
see the same thing happening: people blindly following P&Ps that may have
been relevant at one time, but are now clearly outdated. It may take the form
of new product introduction steps ("You must follow all nineteen
steps"), procedures for the procurement of products or services -- even
elaborate, trade-marked models for the corporate decision-making process, that
all decisions at all levels are supposed to follow.
Manuals become the fiefdom of
certain, otherwise powerless, centralized functions, like personnel. These
departments occasionally make a religion out of the big book, because it is all
they have. Sections are individually dated, amendments are marked, reprints are
shipped out once a month -- at times one wonders if the true purpose of the
organization isn't to maintain up-to-date policy manuals.
Mike once served as a corporate
director of communications. The first day on the job, he was escorted to his
new digs. He was shown his desk, his phone, his in-box -- and then, with a
flourish, he was shown the office credenza. It was a black cabinet about five
feet wide. Its three shelves were piled deep with successive versions of the
company's employee manuals -- at least sixty three-ring notebooks, each page of
each book noting its date of publication and the page number it was
superseding. "These notebooks are our past, our present, and our
future," his superior said. "Respect them."
Mike stared at the credenza,
open-mouthed. What had he got himself into? In retrospect, it would have done
that organization a world of good to heap all those manuals into a pile and
light up the western sky with them. Manuals are "paper supervisors,"
a holdover from the pre-team era. Do we still need them at all?
Some kind of on-paper guide to
corporate life is necessary. We believe a proper manual should include the
basic things team members and other workers need to know about working at a
company: its mission, what is expected of employees, and what is promised in
return by the organization as a whole. If there is a chain of command, workers
need to know what it is. If there are procedures for filing grievances, that is
necessary information.
But for heaven's sake, try and
keep the manual short. "Manual" after all, implies it should be
liftable with a single hand; many of these three-ring P&P frankensteins
require a fork-lift to raise off the ground.
Make sure that any P&Ps teams
are asked to abide by are relevant and timely. We suggest that teams put
expiration dates on policies, just like medicine. On the expiration date,
policies are re-examined for relevance. If not relevant, they are flushed, like
old penicillin. If they still make sense, the policy prescription is refilled.
Good teams constantly evaluate
all their processes, and that includes the rules they follow to get things
done. They get rid of (or don't follow) irrelevant ones, modify others as
necessary, even create new ones of their own to achieve more effective, more
efficient outcomes.
In addition, during the sanity
checking of P&Ps, good teams take a stab at identifying barriers (people,
processes, structures) which may be getting in the way of achieving desired
outcomes. They continuously identify and strategize ways around these barriers
as a regular way of doing team business.
There is nothing wrong with the
idea of policies and procedures. But they should be guidelines, helpful ideas
to turn to in time of doubt. Not a needle's eye to squeeze the actual
corporation through.
Ideally, we should see them as
snapshots that fade over time. Instead, we have little Stonehenges that never
go away. At the bottom of every page in the binder you'll see one of two dates.
There's the "effective" date, which is often something from the
twilight of corporate time, like 1/1/68. And there's the "revision"
date, something only a little less antedeluvian, like 9/30/72.
Here's an idea. How about a third
date -- the "expiration" date. They have expiration dates. for eggs
and milk -- why not for things that really go stale, like organizational rules?
After 1/1/2001, the idea goes
bye-bye, unless consciously reimbued with life. Every idea should be reviewed
every 2 to 3 years. Modify and extend those that deserve it -- and deep-six the
remainder. Particularly if you notice team members systematically going around
the rule to do their jobs -- sure sign of a rule that should not be.
Remember that it's easier to ask
for forgiveness than for permission. More good things happen when you are
willing to bend the rules.
Sometimes, of course, the perfect
solution for too many rules is a nice roaring fire. This is essentially what
happened at the two big American car success stories of the last decade, Ford
Taurus and GM Saturn. Ford and GM looked at its baseline, decided it was too
screwed up to build upon, and so built entirely new divisions, and made a
fresh, honest start in the policies and procedures area. The fresh start gave
both of these "skunkworks" projects terrific vitality, and a
head-start toward success.
Policies and procedures are supposed to
serve the team, not the other way around.
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