
Setting a High Bar and Holding People Accountable - JumpCrisscross
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/business/chip-bergh-on-setting-a-high-bar-and-holding-people-accountable.html
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jahnu
My experience? Letting people go is actually easy. It might be hard for a day
and you genuinely feel bad but it's really not a hard thing to do. What's hard
is putting in the effort to help someone out of the hole they are in. Giving
official warnings is also easy (and often also not properly done, especially
in small companies). Even giving people opportunities to perform better is
easy. Really if you find any of the above hard you are a bad manager or
kidding yourself.

Now the really hard thing is to try and educate someone to be better at their
job. Spend time and think and plan for them to be better and examine yourself
if they don't achieve that.

Now assume my perspective is somewhat correct. Does that article sound like
great advice or someone justifying their self-interested actions?

Again, this is just my perspective.

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staticautomatic
Levi Strauss has a terrible corporate culture and can barely go 6 months
without a reorg. These are not people you should be looking to for answers.

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drieddust
>> Find something you love because you might be doing it for the rest of your
life. Passion is worth 10 index points. If you really love what you’re doing,
it’s not work.

My bullshit detector went into an overdrive reading these lines.

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jemfinch
Did I miss something? The article doesn't seem to say much other than "Setting
a high bar and holding people accountable is important." I wanted something
actionable but found nothing.

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zaptheimpaler
Its a bullshit PR puff piece to make the culture at Levi more appealing -
"look everyone this great guy is in charge and he cares so much!". Probably a
response to employee dissatisfaction or trouble retaining them.

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HelloNurse
"I’m not a big fan of organizations where people backstab or talk behind
others’ backs.

...

I’ve got some trusted people who will tell me if that stuff’s going on behind
my back."

Trusted people who will tell what they want, and who are trusted because they
appear trustworthy: an ideal position for backstabbing and/or manipulative
ambitious bastards.

Naive "leaders" who believe they are smarter than everyone else and perfectly
in control cannot keep those people in check.

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Grustaf
IS it just me or was that article written in "simple English"? It felt like he
was speaking to a child.

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metafunctor
The text is so chock-full of sports metaphors that I couldn't read to the end.
I don't even know what half of those mean.

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siliconc0w
Meh, sounds like a typical C-type. Where the data at? How do you quantify
performance? How do you ensure you're actually rewarding top performers rather
than the top politicians/sales people.

For example, going through someone's resume to try and find 'a history of
winning' is a good way to get the latter. It's a measure of someone's ability
to tell a story and sell themselves (which, to be honest, kinda sounds like
this guy).

Better to give them a case study or some other more concrete measure of
reasoning and analytical ability. It's like how Jeff Atwood started the whole
'test that coders can actually code' thing. It turns out that relevant work
tests are a really good idea but these c-types would rather just hire people
like themselves.

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Spooky23
Metrics are an important part of leadership, but not necessarily the whole
story.

I inherited a group at work who in the surface appeared to be both successful
and well-led. They were hitting their KPIs, the management were recognized
with rewards, and everything was great. Their upstream management had kept a
distance, as the metrics looked great.

I'm a hands on type of guy. After the re-org I started sniffing around and
discovered that not only were they not performing, they were negligent to the
level of deriliction of duty.

The point is, you need to look beyond the numbers and below the surface.
Otherwise, your role as a manager isn't adding any value to the organization.

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mgkimsal
just talked to a family member yesterday who's in charge of "quality
assurance" \- reviewing internal medical documents for errors. Her team has
the lowest scores. It's because she and her team keep finding the most errors.
She was told to start counting every 6 errors as 1 error so they're numbers
will 'match' the other teams. The "errors" have to do with grammar and
punctuation with (US) English. The "other teams" are offshored in various
countries, and her team is US based. But hey... the other team numbers look
better, so just... just quit counting so many damn errors so our numbers can
all look good...

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xchaotic
The facts don't support this guy. Levi Strauss has no magical tech in place,
just some commodity clothes with a bit of history, marketing attached to it.
Management style adda very little here.

