Controlling what people do (part 1)

How to use money and other levers to steer people towards your goals

One of the top challenges managers face is to make people do what they want. Yes, yes, I know, good managers dont tell people what to do, they set a direction and people should be smart enough to find the way, fine, but sometimes you need to make sure people do something precisely, for example, comply with certain security policies, regulatory requirements, quality guidelines or simply because you are trying to influence people that don’t even report to you.

The naive mindset

Unexperienced managers think that by saying something in a meeting, writing a nice policy doc or sending an email things will happen, and it will not… why?

• people don’t agree but don’t say it

• don’t report to you or they have more than one boss who doesn’t agree also

• forget or are lazy

• are incentivised to do the opposite

• don’t know how to do it that way

• are anarchist

• want to get fired

• …should I continue?

This problem is also proportional to the size and footprint of the organisation, where you believe that you can manage a team in another continent just by sending some emails… take a plane please… This is specially evident in managers in holding or global roles that all the sudden start owning things 14 hours away, where timezones overlap maybe 2-3h a day, with different cultures, languages, priorities, ways of working and more. Also is depressing to see managers with many reports falling to their comfort zones by putting more attention on the teams that speak their same language or that listen more instead of focusing on the real priorities, like they don’t exist, it’s human nature…

What do you want to control?

Honestly people do a lot of things and depending on your mission the majority are irrelevant. There are some hardcore examples but they are so bizarre that you will think it’s a joke, but anyway, I once saw a manager with more than 40K employees trying to control where they physically sit!, I’m sure it makes sense for a 10 people but 40.000!! Can you imagine that? do you have time for that?

Instead lets think about control by imagining a very sick person, I don’t know, Cancer, that just had a car accident (bad things come in two’s, look at this), would you try to solve first the Cancer or the bleeding from the accident? Obvious right? well, this is the same simple question many managers fail to answer by putting so much focus on the “stock” of problems instead of the “flow” of new ones.

“This feels like trying to dump water off a boat while another person is filling it”

Lets say that you are in charge of designing the processes of a company, for example, how clients pay or subscribe to certain things, and the company is executing hundreds of projects each year that create or change some of them. Would you try to fix the thousands of issues in the stock or would setup your team in a way that you can intercept the flow of new processes to design them in the right way? Another techie example is the adoption of new technologies, companies for example are spending millions to move old systems to the cloud instead of first learning how to do projects natively in them. Of course, at some point you can start treating the Cancer, there could be a powerful business case to redesign people intensive process, but that should come after.

On the extreme, you can potentially “ride” the flow of new things to transform the stock

Some companies expend so much money in new projects that sometimes is enough to just “ride the wave” to start impacting the stock. For example, if this manager goes and asks for 10MnUSD to fix many old processes the CEO will probably say no, but if he tries to “embed” himself in all the projects that are tweaking the legacy processes he might end up fixing many things literally for “free” (paid by the project).

OK but I still dont know how to control people

In the next post (every Sunday and Thursday) we will discuss where and how can we use money (e.g.., budgets, monetary incentives) and automation to steer people in the right direction.