Anna's Tale

Viewing a Young Engineer's Short Career at McKinsey Through a Deming Lens

Thoughts from a Willing Worker named Ann.

A Willing Worker named Ann, after the experiment on the Red Beads came to a close, expressed to me some provocative thoughts. Please put these thoughts into writing, I pleaded with her. Please write them just as you told them to me. She did.

Here is her letter.

When I was a Willing Worker on the Red Beads, I learned more than statistical theory. I knew that the system would not allow me to meet the goal, but I still felt that I could. I wished to. I tried so hard. I felt responsibility: others dependent on me. My logic and emotions conflicted, and I was frustrated. Logic said that there was no way to succeed. Emotion said that I could by trying.

After it was over, I thought about my own work situation. How often are people in a situation that they can not govern, but wish to do their best? And people do their best. And after a while, what happens to their drive, their care, their desire? For some, they become turned off, tuned out. Fortunately, there are many that only need the opportunity and methods to contribute with.

Dr. W.E. Deming, The New Economics. 3rd Ed (pp. 113-114), 2nd Ed (pp. 163-164)

Evaluation of Performance, merit rating, or annual review:

It nourishes short-term performance, annihilates long-term planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, nourishes rivalry and politics.

It leaves people bitter, crushed, bruised, battered, desolate, despondent, dejected, feeling inferior, some even depressed, unfit for work for week after receipt of rating, unable to comprehend why they are inferior. It is unfair, as it ascribes to people in a group differences that may be caused totally by the system they work in.

Basically, what is wrong with the performance appraisal merit rating focuses on the end product, at the end of the stream, not on leadership to help people. This is a way to avoid the problems of people. A manager becomes, in effect, a manager of defects.

Dr. W.E. Deming, Out of the Crisis. (pp. 86-87)

THE AIM for this post is to revisit the topic of performance appraisals and layoffs through a Deming lens as this has sadly become the season when this antediluvean practice tends to accrue the most victims. I was prompted to think about this after watching the short video above by ex-McKinsey consultant, Anna Reich on how she lost her job and dealt with the aftermath.

Of course, the parallels with what Dr. Deming described in Out of the Crisis and The New Economics came quickly to mind, which I’ve excerpted in the block quotes above.

I feel some affinity and kinship with Anna because her experience is similar to my own as a consultant with Microsoft, and I am sure is typical of how large consultancies operate - unfortunately.

Anna’s Tale

Anna’s story begins after being hired by McKinsey as an “Operations Specialist” to meet a demand for consultants with background in the battery industry. As an engineer who specialized in the field, she was a perfect fit and would be able to apply her knowledge directly to the job — at least, that’s what she expected, or was led to believe during the hiring process.

However, as she would soon discover, this would not be the case, and instead found herself assigned to projects in unrelated fields like automotive and pharma. Sure, they were interesting, but they didn’t line up with her skills. Nevertheless, she took the work on as a learning opportunity and a desire to prove her worth.

After three months she had her first performance appraisal that was conducted by a “neutral observer” she did not work with followed by a committee review who also did not work with her. Both rendered judgment and assessed she had solid industry experience but needed to work on her consulting skills: not altogether unexpected for someone new to the industry, and she was assured that there would be support to help her for the first year. (NB: This is the first red flag that Anna missed, which slyly allowed McKinsey to meet the letter of their word rather than the spirit…)

Nevertheless, Anna came away with a good “review”, and she thought she was on the right track.

However, things would soon take a turn for the worse after Anna completed her projects, finding herself in a dry spell without work that is euphemistically known as “the beach” at McKinsey. Despite prior assurances, she struggled to find work within the internal market, and after another three months was summoned to an in-person meeting for her final performance appraisal.

Aftershocks and Aftermath

Anna described her immediate reaction to being terminated as a surreal, out-of-body experience, watching herself get fired without fully comprehending what was happening. As the reality set in, however, she was overwhelmed with emotions and began to cry in front of her assessors.

Mercifully, the executioners asked her if she wanted to take the weekened to process things and resume on Monday to learn the full reasons for her termination. To her credit, she pushed through and demanded to know then and there.

They informed her, rather pathetically, that she was being let go due to a lack of project work on her part, limited consulting skill development, and the lack of an internal sponsor to advocate on her behalf. All things that they should have been helping her to accomplish in the probationary period, as was promised.

In the days that followed, Anna experienced a range of emotions and reactions that she likened to coming out of a bad break-up, feeling a mix of sadness, frustration, and disbelief, and emerged after a week to accept what had happened with different perspective on what was important to her.

Post-Breakup Clarity

While processing her emotions, Anna came to realize that the reaction she had was because she had tied too much of her self-worth to her work. After further reflection, she decided to reframe her dismissal as a positive fork in the road and with no excuses left to hold her back, decided to take one less travelled and embark on new projects, including her YouTube channel.

For Anna, being let go was probably the best thing to happen to her.

Deming Lens Analysis

For the managers at McKinsey, Anna’s termination was just another day at the office: regrettable, but them’s the breaks, as they say. She wasn’t McKinsey material. For Anna, this was a damaging blow to her psyche and sense of self-worth.

From a Deming perspective, we could see this coming a mile away. We’d understand from the Parable of the Red Beads that the majority of performance belongs to the system, not the individual, and would advise first looking into how our processes were failing Anna. We’d well-understand the destructive forces aligned against the inidividual in our society and not seek to contribute toward them.

We’d also know that we could avoid abusing people with process by understanding they all differ in their skills, talents, and dispositions, and appreciate the most important act a manager could take, ie. to discover what is important to an individual so as to help them enjoy their work. This is the work of continual improvement.

However, as noted in the excerpts at the top of this post, McKinsey’s management isn’t in the business of improvement, but managing defects. In this case, because they don’t understand even the rudiments of viewing their operations as a system, they arrived at the conclusion that Anna had to “sink or swim” on her own, perhaps even as an unspoken test for “fitness”. Rather cruelly, instead of helping her establish a support network to be successful, management designed a system to put this out of reach, outside of the probationary period. It is quite literally custom-made to destroy, not help people.

I identify with Anna’s plight because it mirrors my own with Microsoft Consulting Services around 2009 where I found myself “on the bench” (our version of McKinsey’s ‘beach’) due to lack of work. Within an eight month period I would go from winning the CTO’s Community Award for my work on wiki to share knowledge among consultants in the field to being put on a PIP and choosing to preserve my reputation by exiting before I could be terminated.

While consulting is, by nature, a feast-or-famine business, if you have expressions for downtime like McKinsey or Microsoft do, and no real strategy for how to help people navigate them, then you’re in the business of managing defects and have a much bigger problem. Consider: if your first reflex is to put someone on a PIP or to game them with false promises for help that never comes so you can make the bottom line look better, what are the consequences? Who are you allowing to walk out the door? What intellectual capital is going with them? What reputational damage are you doing to yourself without knowing?

ProTip: Never, under any circumstances, sign any PIP paperwork: it’s a legal acknowledgement that you’re assuming responsibility for faults baked-in to the system. Seek out an employment lawyer ASAP because you’re being lined up for termination.

Rx?

Imagine a consultancy where new recruits are onboarded with good training and mentorship from the start, with “tutorial level” projects that step the candidates toward higher levels of mastery of critical skills to become successful. Progress would be assessed based on evidence through four stages of a Learning Capacity Matrix, as proposed by David Langford and Myron Tribus:

• Information: I have heard of this and can answer simple questions about it.

• Knowledge: I can explain this in my own words and relate it to other things.

• Know-How: I can apply this and know when to do so.

• Wisdom: I know why this is so, and can apply it in new/novel situations, as well as teach it to others.

As the consultant progresses, they meet regularly with their mentor to check-in on their progress and where gaps can be closed with further training or support. The AIM isn’t to turn them into little billable coppertops, but as future trusted advisors with a deep well of skills to help customers solve problems.

If, as a result of this process, it’s discovered that the candidate isn’t well-suited to the role, an investigation is made to determine where they could contribute in the organization. If the mentor and managers have been attentitive, this should be apparent.

Unfortunately, this proposal is incompatible with the current state of consultancies under the prevailing style of management where it’s all about billing and being billable rather than helping customers. The first step is for leadership to recognize there’s a problem and to begin learning what to do instead.

What do YOU think?

Consider Anna’s tale and the excerpts I’ve quoted from Dr. Deming above: how would you have approached a similar scenario? Was it Anna’s fault for not doing more to advocate for herself? Should she have been more accountable for her career at McKinsey? Did the management at McKinsey perform their due diligence? Did the system perform as intended and weeded Anna out from a career she wasn’t suited for? What do you think could have been done instead? How could the onboard/probation process be improved?

Have you had a similar experience? How did management treat you? What were the effects on you personally? What happened next?

Share your thoughts and stories in the comments below.