日記
Rule 1: Improve Understanding of What Coworkers Do
To respond to complexity intelligently, people have to really understand each other’s work: the goals and challenges others have to meet, the resources they can draw on, and the constraints under which they operate. People can’t find this kind of information in formal job descriptions; they can learn it only by observing and interacting.
The manager’s job is to make sure that such learning takes place. Without this shared understanding, people will blame problems on other people’s lack of intelligence or skills, not on the resources and constraints of the organization.
This was the case at the hotel unit of a global travel and tourism group that was struggling with falling occupancy rates, declining prices, and poor customer satisfaction. Many of the hotel managers blamed the “detached mentality” and weak customer-facing skills of the reception employees, who were young and inexperienced—and never stayed long enough to learn better. The sales managers at the group center agreed, even accusing receptionists of contributing to low occupancy rates by pretending that no rooms were available when in fact the hotels had vacancies. The chain therefore decided to set up an incentive based on occupancy rates and sales for the receptionists and to train them in customer service.
Despite all the energy devoted to these initiatives, the results did not improve. Eventually, a team of salespeople decided to spend one month with the receptionists to see what was really going on. The team discovered that the receptionists’ most pressing challenge was handling unhappy customers. Their constraint was a lack of cooperation from the support functions, including housekeeping, room service, and maintenance, whose actions had the most effect on customer satisfaction. Housekeeping, for instance, regularly failed to inform maintenance about broken appliances in rooms, leaving the people at reception to manage the customers’ complaints at night.
To compensate for this lack of cooperation, receptionists were drawing on other resources. One was the refunds they could grant to defuse angry complaints at checkout. The new training actually made receptionists much more at ease with entering rebate discussions, which inevitably pushed price points down further.
A second resource was their own youthful energy: When a guest complained, the receptionists would try to fix the problem themselves, abandoning the front desk to make a faulty shower work or to dash around looking for a spare remote control to replace a broken one. By the time they got back to the front desk, a line of fuming guests would have formed.
Their third resource was offering unhappy guests an upgrade, which meant they needed to keep some rooms in reserve—a practice that depressed occupancy rates. The new incentives were useless, because they had no impact on the lack of cooperation from the support functions and how the receptionists coped with it. The bonus scheme, which showed receptionists how much they could have earned each day, only increased their frustration.
Exhausted and discouraged, the young clerks would often quit after a few weeks. Their high turnover rate didn’t stem from a lack of commitment, as the sales team had believed. On the contrary, the receptionists who cared the least were the ones who stayed the longest.
Exploring the real context of employees’ work helps managers discover when people need to cooperate and how well they’re doing it. Although you can measure the combined output of a group, it is difficult to measure the input of each member, and the more cooperation there is, the harder it gets. Indeed, when managers rely on traditional metrics and peer feedback, they may end up rewarding people who actually avoid cooperation.
Of course, it isn’t always feasible for a manager to spend a month observing in minute detail what’s happening on the front line. But managers do need to supplement the formal metrics and reports they receive with observation and with judgment when measurement is impossible. In many cases, just a day on the ground watching the interplay among people from different functions will provide insights into where and how cooperation is breaking down. Once you identify that moment of truth and some simple root causes, you can move on to applying the other rules.
