Cubicle Warriors Know They Are Succeeding
April 10, 2009 by Phil Gerbyshak
Filed under Business
This series looks at the challenges of managing Cubicle Warriors, the people who not only survive, but thrive working in cubicles. Their management challenge is they are productive workers and need good management to reach their best work. Patrick Lencioni guides us on how to manage these workers by identifying The Three Signs of a Miserable Job. I take a look at each and apply them to managing Cubicle Warriors. Today’s look is Immeasurement.
Immeasurement isn’t a real word, but it could be. Here’s Patrick’s definition: “Employees need to be able to gauge their progress and level of contribution themselves. They cannot be fulfilled in their work if their success depends on the opinions or whims of another person, no matter how benevolent that person may be. Without a tangible means for assessing success or failure, motivation eventually deteriorates as people see themselves as unable to control their own fate.”
“Unable to control their own fate” is the key phrase here for Cubicle Warriors. Without the ability to discover independently how their work is making a difference, Cubicle Warriors lose a critical feedback method to help them improve their work. Here are some management suggestions:
- Goals should have individual measurement. Not department or team measurement, but measures that individuals can readily see how their work is making a difference. This is not easy as most companies don’t have the right reporting to show individual achievement. But they need to.
- Choose goals where the person has control and influence. Setting up a goal for a programmer to “achieve revenue increases of 5%” gives no ability to the person to influence the goal. Drink 5% less coffee? Don’t take critical training? What was the baseline expense for this person originally? Setting up no-win goals is just that: no win.
- Connect the goals to the people served by the work. If we need relevance to our work by connecting the work to people, then set the goals to have measurements that connect to the same people. Notes Lencioni: “Failing to link measurements to the relevance is illogical and creates confusion among employees, who are left wondering why they aren’t measuring the most important parts of their jobs.” Yup.
- Artificial metrics is worse than no metrics. Yes, quantification is important. But making up numbers that don’t accurately reflect the customer makes the goal a poor one to drive performance.
This sign is the most difficult to manage, I think. Companies rarely build individual measurements. Plus, managers and employees don’t know how to build good measurements.
All three of these signs – anonymity, irrelevance, and immeasurement – can sink the employee engagement companies and Cubicle Warriors need to succeed in achieving their goals. Managing to beat these three signs of a miserable job will help make our work meaningful.
About the author: Scot Herrick is the owner of CubeRules.com, a site dedicated to on-line career training of knowledge workers who mostly work in cubes. Scot has a long history of management and individual contribution in multiple Fortune 100 corporations.
GOALS courtesy of Urban Data
If the person is not happy with his work, then this whole measurement thing is meaningless. So, first of all, the most important thing is not assessing one’s progress but knowing what one’s condition is, what is his/her current position and how much he/she could improve from there. They should have a clear idea about this whole thing. After this comes measuring one’s progress and contribution in the work.
I think this applies to all workers – not just Cube Warriors, but telecommuting contractors too, particularly when hired on an ongoing basis. It truly does make a difference in employee engagement, but also in the manager’s ability to reach the larger goals. For instance, an individual goal to “make 10 extra calls per day” directly ties into the manager’s larger goal of increasing revenues by 5%. How do you eat an elephant? One individual goal at a time!
This is precisely the point of the three attributes to managing Cubicle Warriors — because they are not anonymous and know their work relates to people they are more engaged in the work. The two previous articles note this and it directly addresses, I think, how a person knows what one’s “condition” is and what the position does.
But without the measurement aspect of the work, they cannot tell how they are doing and will lose the engagement.
I also think that one can make the argument that “engagement” is more important than “happiness” in the work. It is probably slicing the meaning of the words, perhaps, but I know that I can be intensely engaged in work and that produces great satisfaction in the work done. I suppose that happiness then follows. However, I’d take engagement and satisfaction — it is much more than most people working in cubes get today.
I consider telecommuting people Cubicle Warriors! There is knowledge work getting done through telecommuting and, in fact, additional challenges to overcome the lack of a physical presence in the workplace that managers tend to use as a judgment of one’s work. Getting to results through goals is very important for telecommuters to overcome this “physical presence” bias in the workplace.
Your example of a manager having an increase of revenues by 5% translating into goals of making more calls by individual contributors is exactly how a manager can make the goals more focused for the individual.
The reality is that most individual contributors need to take the (poor) management goal given to them and determine themselves what activities need doing to accomplish the goal. Most don’t know how, don’t think it will make any difference or don’t have corporate reporting available to easily track their progress.