Making Good People Do Bad Things

How the Faulty Practices of Management Lead to Inevitable Conclusions

The present style of management is the biggest producer of waste, causing huge losses whose magnitudes can not be evaluated, can not be measured. The aim of this chapter is to identify the most important sources of loss (waste), and to offer suggestions for better practice.

— Deming, The New Economics. 3rd Ed. (p. 17), 2nd Ed. (p. 22)

Effects of the present style of reward. The accompanying diagram (Fig. 10) shows some of the forces of destruction that come from the present style of reward. and their effects. What they do is to squeeze out from an individual, over his lifetime, his innate intrinsic motivation, self-esteem, dignity. They build into him fear, self-defense, extrinsic motivation. We have been destroying our people, from toddlers on through the university, and on the job. We must preserve the power of intrinsic motivation, dignity, cooperation, curiosity, joy in learning. that people are born with.

— Ibid. 3rd Ed. (p. 83), 2nd Ed. (p. 121)

In work, "All One Team" is rendered impossible by many modern management practices, such as Management by Objective (MBO), annual performance appraisals, and the use of arbitrary numerical goals and targets—all of which foster competition and conflict between people, and sometimes between whole departments, as opposed to their working together for true benefit of the company…

Such management practices have become popular (at least amongst management!) because they make the best of a bad job—they make things less bad than they would be otherwise.

— Neave, The Deming Dimension. (p. 3)

TODAY’S POST is inspired by an investigative journalism story into some unethical behaviours the big banks here in Canada are supposedly pushing their employees to engage in, all in the name of some of our “favourite” dysfunctions of the prevailing style of management, specifically Management by Objectives, Setting Numerical Targets, Rating and Ranking People, Pay for Performance, and of course Fear.

I thought I’d try something different this time and share a brief walkthrough of my Deming analysis of the story via a Miro board I put together. Within you’ll find the associated story which I’ve “exploded” into pages with highlights and annotations that connect them back to Deming’s Nine Faulty Practices of Management, along with relevant entries from his 14 Points. I’ve also included a flow diagram to illustrate a hypothesis I have about how the practices “link” together to create the problems described in the story.

I may do more of these depending on how they are received. Let’s call it a small PDSA to test the hypothesis that visual and aural analyses are more engaging than written…

NB: I’m using a new tool for recording and the audio isn’t where I’d like it to be - consider this an early beta for future efforts. I’d still like to get your feedback about it, however.

Accessing the Miro Board

While I am beginning to paywall parts of my content like the Miro Boards that I use for researching and compiling notes, given that this entry is an experiment I’ll be making it available to free and paid tier subscribers.

Password: MBOGoneWild

Reflection Question

In what ways do you see the faulty practices of management used in your organization? What behaviours do they encourage? What have been the consequences to employees? How were they affected? What was the effect on cooperation and teamwork? Was the customer well-served? What efforts were made to improve?