It looks like nothing was found at this location. Maybe try a search or browse one of our posts below.

In the person-to-person enterprise, smart leaders avoid specific policies whenever possible, stating instead the principles they wish to embed in the corporate culture.

“Person-to-person” is the phrase introduced in my upcoming book, Lewis’s Laws (IDG Books, due on shelves next March), to describe how businesses will operate in the emerging post-process era. It means business success depends on how well individual employees connect with individual customers. A person-to-person business puts employees in the middle and views processes and procedures, information technology, knowledge-sharing systems, along with the telephone and office furniture, as nothing more than resources each employee may use to be more effective.

As for IT standards … the policy-ridden centerpiece of many IT organizations’ relationship with end-users … in the person-to-person enterprise these are defined and managed to make employees’ computing environment better, not more restrictive.

The following story, related by a regular reader, did not come from a person-to-person enterprise:

“My wife manages a help-desk call center. The IT department in her company is responsible for, among other things, maintaining the telephones. During a recent week, the telephones went down six times, for a total of about 7-1/2 hours. This was a very serious problem. My wife had one of her people create a simple Microsoft Access table listing the date, time and duration of each outage and sent it in an email to the IT manager. She asked the IT manager to fill in columns listing the cause of the outage and the corrective action taken in each case.

“When the IT manager received the email, she called her staff together. However, rather than talk about the problems with the telephones, the discussion centered solely on how to stop users from using an application (Microsoft Access) that wasn’t supported by that IT group. The telephone problems were completely ignored.”

Please pay close attention. In the person-to-person enterprise, the proper response to a reported problem is a root-cause analysis, not a shot aimed at the messenger. A crash-prone phone system does not promote employee effectiveness. When the problem persists, end-users have every right to ask what’s being done to fix it.

All is not lost, though, because the same IT department prides itself on monitoring the quality of its (internal) customer service. As evidence, my correspondence offers the following, related by a director within the IT department:

“The IT department sent out an electronic survey to the users within the company asking how the department is doing. When all of the responses were received, the IS department threw out all of the bad responses. Then, to partially offset the obvious bias caused by doing that, they also threw out the “really” good responses. (I’m not sure what criteria they used to define “really” good.)

“Evidently this is the practice that they have been using with this survey for a number of years.

“When the company CEO asked the CIO about the results of the survey, the answer was: ‘We are above average. The results are really the same that they have been for the past few years.'”

In a person-to-person enterprise, the goal of end-user surveys is neither self-congratulation nor self-flagellation. Surveys are a tool for finding opportunities to help employees become more effective.

In the person-to-person enterprise, employee effectiveness is the name of the game.

Frisbees and hula hoops both came out when I was a kid, and at about the same time.

A year later almost nobody seemed interested in hula hoops, while Frisbees have thrived as a perennial favorite for forty years or so as a cross-species success. (Memo to Frisbee Corp: Invent new model made of diaper material to absorb canine saliva.)

Some management “fads” are more durable than others, too. One in danger of following the hula hoop is employee involvement.

The idea of employee involvement is pretty simple: If you’re making a decision that affects someone, they may have intelligent ideas to offer, and you’ll benefit from hearing them.

There’s a useful adjunct to this idea. If you’re making a decision that affects someone, asking for their ideas is a matter of simple courtesy.

If I’m reading the tea leaves right, this thought process has started to lose its luster among managers at all levels. Based on what I’ve been hearing, there seem to be two basic reasons for disenchantment with it.

The first reason — the one managers emphasize — is that it’s inefficient and wastes everyone’s time, including the employees we’d been involving. Even worse it causes unnecessary anxiety, leading employees to worry about what might happen when instead they can toil away in happy ignorance until management is ready to tell them the answer. (For the record, I’ve never once heard any employee thank a manager for keeping him or her out of the loop, but I’ve heard quite a few managers congratulate each other for this fine logic.)

Management’s retreat from involvement probably comes from our having made it a panacea. Many of us applied it indiscriminately to every possible decision. Worse, we confused it with consensus decision-making, so every departmental decision took time away from work and took a long time to make.

There is, I think, a second reason managers have started to retreat from involvement, and it isn’t pretty.

Many who aspire to management do so because they desire power. Wanting power (that is, the ability to influence events and outcomes) is neither good nor bad. It’s why you want the power that matters. It doesn’t take a psychotherapist to realize many managers want power because they were bossed around earlier in life.

These managers want their turn, and having to involve employees in decisions takes away from the emotional satisfaction of making decisions and making them stick.

They want to be the boss because they want to boss people around. It’s their turn.

This group of managers either washed out during the empowerment and involvement fads of the past decade, or they learned to paste a smile on their faces, getting even with everyone by instituting the appearance of involvement while actually ignoring every idea offered to them by employees.

The survivors are removing their velvet gloves, revealing their rusting iron fists and unpleasant personalities.

They’ve mistaken Frisbees for hula hoops. Right now we’re dealing with the best employment market in twenty-five years, at least as far as employees are concerned. Unpleasant managers will retain only those employees too inept to be hired by good companies or too afraid to start looking. Companies that allow these managers to dominate their ranks will slowly crumble as their best talent leaves for better working conditions.

Involvement doesn’t have to mean holding hands and singing Kumbaya. It’s more a matter of simple courtesy, asking peoples’ opinions before making decisions that affect them.

So in the cold hard world of commerce, simple courtesy gives your company a big competitive advantage.

Is this a great country or what?