The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off. | ||
| --Gloria Steinem[222] | ||
In the pantheon of the twentieth-century managers, Robert McNamara stands out: dashing, analytical, and quick. President John Kennedy called him the smartest man he'd ever met. After a brilliant career at the Ford Motor Company, of which he became head in 1960, McNamara was the U.S. secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968 and president of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981.
McNamara transformed the World Bank from a small, sleepy, financial boutique into a large, bustling, modern corporation, expanding lending more than tenfold in the course of his thirteen-year tenure. He dramatically increased the World Bank's role in agriculture and education and opened up new lines of business in health, population, nutrition, and urban development. He articulated a new role for the World Bank in alleviating global poverty, passionately calling attention to the plight of the poorest 40 percent of the world's population who had been essentially untouched by development lending.[223]
On his arrival at the World Bank in May 1968, McNamara quickly took charge. John Blaxall, a young economist at the time, recalls being summoned to McNamara's office shortly after his arrival, being handed a stack of annual reports, and asked to assemble multiyear financial statements—something that hadn't been done before. McNamara penciled in his left-handed scrawl on a white-lined pad the headings that he wanted. The columns across the top were the past five fiscal years, and the rows were the standard balance sheet and income statement items. How soon could he have it ready? Blaxall gave him a date and observed with concern that McNamara carefully wrote it down.[224]
Within six weeks, McNamara had a set of tables covering all major aspects of the Bank Group's activities, with totals for each five-year period and detail for the past five years. Blaxall recalls McNamara poring over the sheets full of numbers, exclaiming with some animation: "This is really exciting, John!"
McNamara then asked the senior managers in the President's Council of the bank to fill in the numbers for the next five years for the activities under his responsibility. The immediate reaction was that it couldn't be done, to which McNamara replied that they should do it anyway—and have it ready within a month.
It is not surprising that the five-year lending plans submitted by the geographical units had little correspondence to the five-year plans prepared by the technical units. And the financial projections put forward by the disbursement department were unrelated to either.
It was at this point, in early summer 1968, that McNamara announced to the senior managers that in the future, the World Bank would have only one sheet of music from which everyone would play. Ensuring the necessary consistency would be a key role of the programming and budgeting department. The game plan was not a narrative but rather a set of standard tables—a bunch of numbers—through which McNamara managed the organization for the next thirteen years.
Some elements of the World Bank's activities, however, weren't captured by McNamara's standard tables. One occasion in particular brought this home to me.[225] This was in the late 1970s when McNamara had agreed to come to one of the staff meetings of the Western Africa region, where I was working. He offered to answer any question.
Any question?
Being an incautious kind of person, I spoke first and asked him the question that was on everyone's lips at the time: Was there any tension between his policy of pushing out an ever-increasing volume of development loans and improving the development impact of the projects that were being financed by the loans? In effect, was there a tension between quantity and quality?
His reply was chilling. He said that people who asked that kind of question didn't understand our obligation to do both: we had to lend more money and we had to have high quality. There was no conflict. People who couldn't see that didn't belong in the World Bank.
Next question!
And so the meeting moved on to other topics.
Years later, project audits would confirm the very tension that people were concerned about in the late 1970s. The audits documented that McNamara's push to rapidly expand lending was accompanied by a declining quality of projects.[226] What's worse, economic studies also revealed that the push for more lending contributed to a ballooning debt problem in the developing countries, a debt crisis that was a precursor of the 2008 global financial meltdown.
But more fundamentally, what that incident in the late 1970s brought home to me was that this style of management, dazzling as it was, prevented discussion of real issues in the workplace.[227] It was striking to see how McNamara's internally contradictory statements were made to stick by the sheer force of his presentation. He staked out positions on both sides of the issue. Yes, he stood for quantity, and yes, he also stood for quality, and if there was a quality problem, no, it wasn't his responsibility. Someone else must be responsible.
Next question!
When a CEO is talking like that, and very forcefully, it is no longer possible to discuss openly the issue of whether the organization is pushing too much lending out the door.
The struggle between truth and power is ancient. As long ago as the ancient Greeks, the sophists held that playing games with language, presenting falsehood in the guise of truth, was a key to power and winning.
In 1837, Hans Christian Andersen advanced our understanding of the phenomenon with his tale, "The Emperor's New Clothes." The tale has a familiar part and an unfamiliar part.
The familiar part is that the emperor of a prosperous city is swindled into buying an imaginary suit of clothes. The cloth, he is told by a pair of scoundrels, is invisible to anyone who was either stupid or unfit for his position. The emperor cannot see the nonexistent cloth, but he says that he can for fear of appearing stupid; his ministers do the same. When the scoundrels report that the suit is finished, they pretend to dress the emperor in a suit of clothes. The emperor then goes on a procession through the capital showing off his new "clothes." During the course of the procession, a small child cries out, "But he has nothing on!" The crowd realizes the child is telling the truth. That is the familiar part of the story.
The unfamiliar part of the tale is that the truth that the child has inadvertently blurted out makes no difference. Neither the emperor nor the attendant nobles pay any attention to it. The emperor holds his head high and continues the procession, as do the other courtiers. The charade continues.
In this tale, Andersen put his finger on a key feature of all hierarchies: the mere exposure of falsehood doesn't put an end to it or change behavior. False statements that support the power structure of a hierarchy have precedence over true statements that put the power structure in question. Everybody in the power structure tends to go on acting as though right is wrong and black is white because their own role in the structure depends on defending it.
Some writers have noted that this style of communication was the norm in the heyday of the Soviet Union. It resulted in concealing issues for long periods rather than solving them. Eventually the issue would become too big to conceal, and it would suddenly explode into the open. In those settings, language was being used not to clarify reality but to obscure it.[228]
Nontransparency isn't limited to the former Soviet Union. It is characteristic of communications in any hierarchy—the more despotic, the less transparent.
Other writers have described this phenomenon with a more expressive term than nontransparency. In 2005, Princeton University Press published a book by Harry Frankfurt, an Ivy League philosophy professor. In this book, entitled On Bullshit, Frankfurt pointed out philosophically that bullshitting is different from lying.[229] Lying is saying what you know is wrong. Bullshitting is saying things where you don't really care whether they are true.
If we accept Frankfurt's thesis, we can exonerate McNamara of lying when he said that there was no conflict between pushing out more and more lending and maintaining the quality of loans. In his heart of hearts, I'm sure he believed it deeply. He just wasn't interested in finding out whether it was true. It was a statement of will rather than a statement of fact. He was exhibiting a lack of attentiveness to the truth. He was bullshitting. He was doing it very eloquently and forcefully, but it was bullshit.
The point here is not to pick on McNamara as an individual. The issue isn't the individual bullshitter. If you had asked any of the other legendary managers like Jack Welch or Harold Geneen a similar question, you would have gotten a similar answer. These managers stayed above the fray by denying that there was an issue, or if there was one, it wasn't their responsibility.[230]
The issue is institutionalized bullshit. Institutionalized bullshit systematically drives out truth, and truth is what is needed for consistently achieving the complex goal of delighting clients.
When you have a CEO denying that there is any tension between pushing out lending and the quality of the loans, and impugning the integrity of anyone who raises that question, it's difficult for any team to discuss issues openly. If they do, it is their integrity that will be put in question. They will be seen as rocking the boat and not being team players. As a result, most teams go with the flow and lose any possibility of achieving high performance. A few courageous teams may speak out about the issue and point to the truth. But those teams are rare, and their life expectancy is typically not long.
Jeff Sutherland, whom we met in Chapter Three, clarifies what's at stake by reference to the science-fiction movie The Matrix. In one scene, a character called Neo is offered a choice of taking a red pill or a blue pill. If he takes the blue pill, he will wake up and everything will look the same—the same sugar-coated semblance of reality that he's been living with for so long. If he takes the red pill, he will be able to see things as they really are.
In the movie, Neo takes the red pill. When he wakes up, he finds himself naked in a liquid-filled pod, with his body connected by wires to a vast mechanical tower covered with identical pods.
Similarly, in the world of work, people have the option of taking the blue pill or the red pill.
In traditional management, managers take the blue pill. When they wake up, everything looks the same. They see no issue in expanding quantity with fewer resources.
Workers are issuing progress reports to managers saying that everything is okay and that their work is proceeding according to plan with only minor issues.
People are telling customers, "Your call is important to us," when they both know it isn't so, and that is seen as normal.
The amount of time spent actually doing useful work is quite small. Most of the workday is spent talking about work or doing rework of something someone didn't like or tending one's career. That is normal.
Phantom work jams are occurring all over the organization on a daily basis. No one notices them or does anything about them.
If anyone brings up a real problem without a solution, they are silenced for not being a team player.
Accountability is one-sided. Managers are searching for workers who have made mistakes so that they can be punished, and the workers are doing their best to make sure the search is unsuccessful.
Management is frustrated, and customers are upset. That is also normal.
There is talk of improvement of morale. Karaoke competitions are held. Retreats are staged. Managers come and go. It makes no difference. Nothing changes. It's simply the way things are. This is normal in the world of traditional management.
This is what happens when you take the blue pill.
For those who take the red pill, waking up is a shock. Now we see that everything is broken!
We suddenly realize that the managers are not leveling with themselves and the workers. There is a tension between quantity and quality that is not being addressed.
It dawns on us that the subordinates are not leveling with the bosses: the progress reports are not revealing what is really going on or the real problems being encountered. No one wants to hear about those problems.
Now we see that people are saying things they don't believe just to get through the meeting.
We see that the work is agonizingly slow. Phantom work jams are everywhere, and something urgently needs to be done to fix them.
We suddenly realize that accountability is two-sided: if the workers have failed, the managers have also failed.
Now many of the bureaucratic practices of the organization appear comical or pointless.
Now we see the karaoke competitions, the employee-of-the-month competitions, and the lunches with the CEO for what they really are: distractions from the real problems in the way the work is organized.
Now we can see that people are living only a fraction of their true potential. Never experiencing the exhilaration of what it means to be fully functional now appears tragic.
We feel an irresistible urge to do something about it.
That's what happens when we take the red pill: we experience an urge to establish radical transparency.
A similar awakening occurred in science in the seventeenth century. People like Francis Bacon took the red pill and started saying that we have to stop taking on faith what Aristotle said and find out what actually happens. We have to pay more attention to truth than to authority.
Initially there was resistance in the universities.[231] It took decades before rigorous observation was embodied consistently in scientific practice. But eventually it happened. In science, truth generally triumphs over power.
Scientists didn't necessarily become paragons of honesty in all their dealings with other human beings, as Francis Bacon's conviction for corruption in 1621 demonstrated. Scientists merely adopted certain practices to encourage openness in regard to scientific experiments and principles.
In management, we are now on the brink of an equivalent revolution. Until recently, most organizations have been taking the blue pill and opting for the status quo: living with the system of traditional management that dominated the workplace of the twentieth century.
As in any other hierarchy, an elaborate set of falsifications and mystifications is deployed to maintain the power structure. As long as the goal of management is the simple linear one of producing goods and services, those falsifications and mystifications are tolerated. That degree of nontransparency is good enough to get by. But once the organization takes on the more strenuous and complex challenge of delighting clients, nontransparency isn't good enough. The reason is that in the organization that aspires to delight its clients, managers and workers must become more open with each other about the impediments that prevent high performance.
They cannot consistently delight clients if discussing impediments is a matter of tactical calculation, or if people are telling each other what they want to hear or only so much as they need to know. Achieving the complex goal of client delight requires total openness about any impediments to the work: everyone levels with everyone else. There is total openness within the team, of the team in relation to management, and of management in relation to the team.
This is not about returning to some golden age when people were honest and everyone spoke the truth. Historically there was no golden age: we have been living with nontransparency for millennia. Nontransparency has always been the norm for communications in hierarchical bureaucracies. That's because a hierarchical bureaucracy is a hermetically sealed container, whose continued existence depends on the participants' speaking consistently with the underlying assumptions of the power structure, even when they are at variance with external reality. By contrast, radical management is an open system that depends on the ascertainment of truth—what will delight clients—in order to achieve its goals.
Several centuries ago, science managed to pull itself out of the hole of myth and legend dominated by authority, although there are exceptions even today. Nevertheless, by and large, science has implemented principles and practices that enabled progress toward intellectual integrity.[232]
Now management must do the same. Radical management means seeing the workplace as it is, rather than as we would like it to be, and being willing to do something about it. In this way, it can kindle the spirit of innovation and ignite client delight.
Radical transparency cannot be accomplished by exhortations. It is established and maintained by systematic management practices. Some of the principles and practices that facilitate radical transparency have already been touched on, particularly client-driven iterations focused on delivering value in each iteration. As a result, a team's progress, or lack thereof, is visible early and often.
Additional steps are needed to establish radical transparency within the team, the team in relation to management, and the management in relation to the team. Several practices are particularly noteworthy:
The daily stand-up meeting. Teams typically hold a daily meeting where people stand in order to keep it brief. Team members share with each other the answer to questions: What did you do yesterday? What are you going to do today? What impediments are you facing?
Identification and removal of impediments. A make-or-break aspect of radical management is managers' encouragement of staff to identify impediments and their prompt action to resolve them.
Simple visual displays that everyone can see. It is striking to visit the workplaces of computer experts and find the walls covered with handwritten sticky notes, cards, and charts. The displays serve as ever-present information radiators. Anyone can walk by and see what has been completed, what is being worked on, and what is coming next. There is no need for progress reports. The reality is always visible.
These three practices don't guarantee transparency, but they do make transparency easier and covering up more difficult. Transparency is essential to radical management. If people don't level with each other, radical management turns into a fantasy. The fog of bureaucracy will descend, and the workplace will lapse back into the command-and-control world of traditional management.
I am not proposing that everyone be totally honest about everything. That would be unrealistic. Normal politeness and business sense require occasional dissimulation of the truth. As Jeremy Campbell argues forcefully in The Liar's Tale, harmless lies are part of the inevitable social routine of any society: they make the world run more smoothly and avoid needless embarrassment.[233] Nor is this about a free-for-all airing of problems, grievances, and complaints. The focus is on total openness about the work—specifically, the identification and removal of impediments to getting the work done.
Just as scientists didn't necessarily become paragons of honesty in their personal dealings with other human beings, managers will not miraculously become totally honest human beings. Rather, this is about managers' adopting certain practices that reinforce openness about impediments affecting the accomplishment of the work.
Why didn't greater openness emerge in traditional management? One reason is that it wasn't necessary. The traditional management that we inherited from Major George Whistler from that train wreck back in 1841 has a number of assumptions: failure is assumed to be rare; the goal of producing goods and services is a straightforward linear task that is in principle achievable 100 percent of the time; roles are defined; duties are specified; deadlines are set; if failure has occurred, it involves personal dereliction of duty; and those responsible for the failure should be punished.
Another reason is that the managerial attitude toward failure creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. By punishing failure, failure becomes ever harder to find. As the story of Nathalie, the software developer in Chapter One, illustrated, the language of traditional management is often deliberately couched so as to facilitate deniability and prevent the discovery of failure. Traditional management has routines to cover one's own backside, up and down the line.
In a world where no one ever clearly succeeds or fails, merit is wholly subjective, responsibility dissolves, and accountability goes out the window. Performance is at best variable. In big bureaucracies, failures can go on for months, years, even decades, without being rectified. Over time, problems build up behind the scenes and then suddenly they explode into the open.
In some organizations, radical management is unthinkable precisely because it would expose the personality conflicts that now lie hidden, particularly in top management teams. Although conflicts are hindering performance, the concern is that if the conflicts were exposed, the goals, methods, and membership of the team would have to be reconsidered, and fundamental issues of governance would have to be addressed. This would be painful and disruptive, and thus unthinkable.
Radical management means not only thinking about such possibilities but also doing something about them. It starts from different assumptions about failure and how to respond to it.
With the shift in the goal from the simple linear task of producing goods and services to the complex task of delighting clients, failure can no longer be assumed to be rare. The bar has been raised. Failure will be more frequent. Indeed, in a dynamic, unpredictable world with a complex goal of delighting clients, some failure is a certainty. Radical management accepts the inevitability of failure and puts arrangements in place to learn rapidly from failure and so progress toward success.
Its approach is to fail fast and fix it quickly. With short work cycles and practices that encourage openness, failure stares everyone in the face almost as soon as it happens. The team knows and management knows, so there is nowhere to hide. The principles and practices of radical management make crystal clear, iteration by iteration, whether management is spelling out what needs to be done and whether the team is delivering that.
Making failure so visible can make individuals and organizations uncomfortable, particularly those that have been living with nonaccountability for a long time, perhaps decades. If at the end of the iteration, the team doesn't deliver on its goal, then it is a failure of both the team and management. A retrospective is held to figure out what went wrong. Maybe the goal was too ambitious; perhaps it was impossible. Maybe the project wasn't ready to be worked on. Maybe the team didn't identify the impediments. Maybe the impediments didn't get removed. Maybe the team had the wrong membership or the wrong skills. Maybe management interrupted the team. Whatever the cause, the diagnosis will determine the next step. Failure is faced up to so that issues can be fixed and high performance can emerge.
I can't say that I feel proud for having allowed myself in that World Bank meeting in the 1970s to be browbeaten by Robert McNamara into silence. I didn't feel good about the obvious conflict between quantity and quality. Living in a fog of institutionalized bullshit isn't healthy for the human spirit. It creates distrust of oneself, disconnection with others, and the betrayal of stakeholders. It leads to a divided life.
Radical management is about opening up the windows, letting in bright sunlight and fresh air, and discovering what's going on instead of covering it up. It means aiming high and failing often, but taking responsibility for failure and addressing it. It's about living a life where actions have consequences. It's exciting, frightening, challenging, and thrilling. It's about truly living.
Radical Transparency Within the Team
Radical transparency within the team enables the self-organizing team to improve. A team that doesn't know how it is doing or what its members are doing usually lacks the clarity and traction to improve. Radical transparency provides that clarity and traction.
Practice #1: Have the Team Estimate How much Time Work Will Take
In traditional management, managers typically decide how much work will be done and how long it should take. In radical management, the team is given this responsibility. The belief is that the people who know most about how long things will take are the people actually doing the work. When members of the team themselves make the estimate, they take responsibility for it and learn from the experience.
Practice #2: Let the Team Decide How Much Work to Undertake
From the prioritized list of tasks provided by the client or client proxy, the team decides how much work it can accomplish within the work cycle. The team commits to deliver work that is of value to a client or stakeholder within that cycle and lives with the consequences of its decision.
Practice #3: Calculate the Team's Velocity After Each Iteration
The team establishes its velocity for each work cycle: how much work that adds value to clients can it accomplish during a given time period? This enables the team to understand its own trajectory and whether it is improving. (See Practice #3 in Chapter Seven on team velocity.)
Practice #4: Have the Team Members Stay in Contact with Each Other on a Daily Basis
Teams typically hold a daily stand-up meeting in which team members share with each other the answers to questions: What did you do yesterday? What are you going to do today? What impediments are you facing?
Initially it can be uncomfortable having to justify oneself to others. But over time the members of the team connect with each other. It's no longer just one person's problem if something is not going as well as hoped for. Now it's the team's problem, and everybody can work together to solve it.
Practice #5: Conduct Retrospective Reviews at the End of Each Iteration
At the end of each work cycle, the team conducts a review of what it has accomplished, as well as what could have gone better, and it then plans the next iteration of work. The team systematically inspects and adapts how it is doing the work.
Practice #6: Use Informal Visual Displays of Progress
Radical management aims to maximize transparency by having simple visual displays available at all times in the work space. The displays serve as information radiators.[234]
When information is available to a select few, only those few can take responsibility. When information is stored in computers, it is available only when people go and look for it; it isn't constantly visible
"Visual controls," writes David Mann, "might seem like an embarrassing return to the information Stone Age." However, accuracy, proximity, and flexibility are great advantages: "Hand-created data, especially when you know whose hands created it, including the real possibility that the hand was or could have been yours, have a much lower intimidation value than the crisp, precise-looking management document someone has posted on your team's information board."[235]
Transparency of the Team in Relation to Management
Radical transparency of the team in relation to management provides management with timely and reliable information about how the team is doing, as well as information about impediments. In this way, the risk that the team will go off on a tangent is reduced.
Practice #7: Deliver Value to Clients at the End of Each Iteration
At the end of each iteration of work, the team produces not progress reports but items of finished work—something that is of value to the client or stakeholder. The focus is on completing work at the earliest opportunity, because finished work is more transparent than reports about work.
In the traditional organization, having more work in process is seen as progress. In radical management, as in lean manufacturing, work in process is viewed as a problem because it entails hidden costs that will have to be spent in order to complete the task. The more time it takes to do that, the more costly and problematic work in process becomes.
In each iteration of work, management can see what the team promises and what it delivers. By doing work in short iterations, the team cannot go too far wrong without that fact becoming visible to everyone. By focusing the team on delivering something of value at the end of each iteration, management and stakeholders can see what is happening. As a result, management can adjust in time if the team is going off track and can also shift priorities in an orderly fashion as new issues emerge without disrupting the work of the team.
Because the people doing the work are getting continuous feedback as to what is—or is not—delighting the client, they can align their activities with the true goal of work: continuously delighting clients.
Practice #8: Systematically Identify Impediments in the Daily Stand-Up Meetings
Impediments to improved effectiveness are also systematically exposed by the team to the management. In traditional organizations, people who bring bad news to the attention of the management tend to be punished unless they also bring solutions. In learning organizations, people are rewarded for bringing forward solutions. By contrast, in radical management, people who bring bad news to the management's attention are celebrated, even if they have no immediate and obvious solutions for the problem.
A well-known example is the way that workers on Toyota's production line are congratulated if they spot a quality problem on the line: the line stops until the problem is understood and fixed—something that is almost inconceivable in traditional organizations.
The shift in language from "What are the problems?" to "What are impediments?" is significant. "Problems" may arise from unhappiness for any number of reasons. "Impediments" relate to goals. "What is preventing us from delighting clients?" An airing of impediments focuses the discussion on what is getting in the way of reaching the common goal.
Transparency of Management in Relation to the Team
Management is also transparent in regard to the team by providing a unified and fully reconciled list of requirements at the start of every work iteration. It then refrains from making any changes in priorities until the next iteration. This makes it totally transparent to the team what is expected of it, while leaving the team free to decide how much of this work can be accomplished and how it should be accomplished.
As a result, work is focused on items of highest priority, and no time is wasted on items of low priority that happen to have been included in the original specifications.
Practice #9: Set Priorities for Work at the Beginning of Each Iteration
Management has to allow the team to self-organize and draw on its talents, energies, and insights. It thus creates a workplace in which a team takes responsibility for accomplishing something tied to objective standards.
The difference between responsibility that is assigned and responsibility that is personally accepted is significant. It is even more so when allocated responsibility does not respect the intrinsic requirements of excellence that the work itself requires.
In the world of traditional management, if people are asked to do twelve units of work when they know they can perform only eight units of high-quality work in the time allotted, their options are unsatisfactory. They can tell the boss that it isn't possible and risk being labeled as troublemakers. Or they can try to work evenings and weekends and so produce the twelve units of work, in the process interfering with their private life. Or they can cut corners by doing the best they can and hope that their boss doesn't notice that the quality has declined.
In such a world, there is social pressure to conceal problems. Managers may be honest individuals, but here there is social pressure to be less than fully frank. Since everyone is expected to do the same, a facade of not leveling becomes the cultural norm. In this way, good people slide into not being fully open, not calling a piece of shoddy work just that, not pointing out that the company is making money with bad profits, and so on.
In this world, the manager inhabits a moral maze where those higher in the hierarchy are inclined to absent themselves from the details of the production process, calling for results with an apparent indifference as to how they are achieved, and not inquiring into what kinds of compromises might have been made in the process. These are the practices that lead to the buildup of bad profits in the background, with brand liabilities that eventually have to be repaid.
To avoid having these issues arise, management sets the direction and the priorities for work, but it is the team itself that decides how much work can be done in an iteration and how to go about that work.
Practice #10: Go and See What Is Happening in the Workplace and in the Marketplace
Taiichi Ohno begins his book Workplace Management by noting that while a fool is wrong 70 percent of the time and a normal person 50 percent of the time, even a wise man is wrong 30 percent of the time.[236] Knowing this, even a wise man has to have humility: he may be wrong even in matters in which he is certain he is right. A willingness to check things out—the true scientific spirit—and accept the possibility of being wrong then becomes a key attitude in radical management.
Practice #11: Establish a Clear Line of Sight from the Team to the Client
The team is able to see whether and to what extent the client is delighted by its work. Among the actions that management takes are ensuring that the client or the client proxy is available to discuss the user stories as needed and giving feedback on whatever is delivered at the end of each iteration.
Practice #12: Systematically Help Remove Impediments
Management supports the daily stand-up meetings that systematically identify impediments. It informs itself of these impediments and takes steps to remove them.
In some cases, impediments concern actions by management or organizational policies or procedures. There may be good reasons for these actions, policies, or procedures. Management works with the team to find solutions to the perceived issues.
Practice #13: Accept Two-Sided Accountability
If subordinates have failed, managers should accept that they have also failed. As management theorist Samuel Culbert says, "The consequence of a failed performance should be personal development, new perspective, improved judgment, skill enhancement, and general all-around learning. If the cohort is one's boss, so much the better. In a straight-talk relationship, both have the opportunity to learn. Subordinates learn what they need to do differently to achieve desired results, and bosses learn what type of support and guidance the subordinate needed but did not receive."[237]