
When Employees Misinterpret Managers - revorad
http://bhorowitz.com/2011/07/20/when-employees-misinterpret-managers/
======
sedev
That's a lovely article with a wincingly bad headline. The author does a very
good job of describing what happens when managers give instructions and then
discover that they have instructed people to act counter to the managers'
desires. That is not 'misinterpreting'. That is essentially a compiler error;
the manager told the employees to do the wrong thing, and the employees
trusted that they knew what they were talking about.

In a normal business environment, human cognitive biases about authority act
very strongly. I think that a big part of what causes 'bad management' is that
managers may tend to think of themselves as buddy-buddy with their
subordinates, and rationalize that surely someone will tell them if they make
a mistake, issue instructions that seem counterproductive, make bad tradeoffs
like the ones in the article, et cetera, et cetera. That's almost always
wrong. The incentive structure for normal employees means that you go along
with the boss' idiot idea in almost every case, or alternatively that you take
it on good faith that your wise and benevolent manager knows what they're
doing, and in both cases employees do not critique managers in ways that the
managers can hear (by which I mean, both covert conversations and social cues
that managers miss).

~~~
dkarl
It's more like simple user error than a compiler error. "Aaaagh, why did the
computer do that?" "Because you told it to." s/computer/employees/

Also, in his retelling, he skipped the part where the employees pointed out
situations where they would be punished for making the right decisions, asked
for assurance that doing the right thing for the business would be rewarded
(or at least not punished) regardless of the official "goals" and
"incentives", and were told not to expect any such consideration. I guarantee
that happened, but for some reason he doesn't remember it as an important part
of the story.

~~~
sedev
I hope that we can more widely spread the news: power makes you stupid. I
wouldn't say 'for some reason' - I would say 'because of cognitive biases that
would afflict any other ordinary human being in his situation'.

Power makes you stupid, a summary: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/11...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/11/25/AR2007112501236.html) \- the article in
question cites work by Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University and Dacher
Keltner of Berkeley.

"Keltner and others have shown that power exacerbates many cognitive biases.
People who lack power turn out to be more accurate in guessing the opinions of
those around them, whereas those in power tend to be inaccurate. Because
subordinates are also hesitant to tell superiors things they do not want to
hear, the problem gets worse, with powerful people having even less input and
perspective about how others think and feel."

So I believe that that's a cause of a great deal of bad management - I also
believe that's part of why the 37Signals folks have done so well with a
minimal-management strategy, they're consciously trying to avoid the way that
information becomes tainted when it travels vertically in a hierarchy.

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wccrawford
I don't think the employees misinterpreted at all. I think they knew exactly
what they were doing.

I think instead, the manager simply failed to realize what his actions would
do. He gave them different incentives, and they reacted to them.

Employees are there to work for the company, but they will not promote the
company at their own expense. If your incentive plans incentivize the wrong
things, you'll get the wrong things.

'Clever' incentive plans are rarely actually clever.

~~~
dpritchett
It'd be _really_ nice if people read Freakonomics before sitting down to
design workplace incentives. I know it's not the most rigorous treatment of
economics but it does a great job of hammering the point home with some
memorable and accessible anecdotes.

~~~
munin
do you think people that design "workplace incentives" can read? ;)

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praptak
This Wikipedia page is the best piece on incentives of all time:

 _"The term 'Cobra effect' stems from an anecdote set at the time of British
rule of colonial India. The British government was concerned about the number
of venomous cobra snakes. The Government therefore offered a reward for every
dead snake. Initially this was a successful strategy as large numbers of
snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually however the Indians began to
breed cobras for the income.

When this was realized the reward was canceled, but the cobra breeders set the
snakes free and the wild cobras consequently multiplied."_

~~~
nradov
Scott Adams (Dilbert cartoonist) had a similar example of a company that paid
its testers and developers a small bonus for each bug found and fixed. So of
course the developers started intentionally coding bugs just so they could get
paid for fixing them.

~~~
pchristensen
[http://www.klocwork.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2009/10/dilb...](http://www.klocwork.com/blog/wp-
content/uploads/2009/10/dilbert-minivan-small.png)

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sp332
"In all three cases, managers got what we asked for, but not what we wanted.
How does this happen? Let’s take a look."

So, the managers failed to communicate what they wanted to the employees, but
this is spun in the headline as the employees' fault.

~~~
bryanlarsen
The title is "when employees misinterpret managers". Anybody who thinks that
phrase implies it's anything but the manager's fault is either not a manager
or is a bad manager.

~~~
sp332
In that sentence, _employees_ is the subject, and _managers_ is the object.
It's the employees who are doing the misinterpreting of the managers. Only a
manager would think that the title sounds like owning up to a mistake. :)

~~~
sedev
I reinforce this comment. The title "When Employees Misinterpret Managers" at
best _very weakly_ implies that the managers are doing something. It plainly
states, in normal English, that employees did something (they misinterpreted)
to managers. Only by the most convoluted thinking could you remove that plain
meaning and substitute in "managers gave instructions excessively prone to
misinterpretation" or something similar. `bryanlarsen`'s point is absolute
bullshit.

Now: _reading the article_ , that does indicate that it's the managers' fault,
and it's a bang-up job of doing that. But the headline - oy!

~~~
dpritchett
In business communications the onus is usually on the speaker to frame things
in such a way that the audience can understand them. When employees
misinterpret managers then it can be assumed that managers misspoke.

~~~
Splines
"When managers fail to communicate" would be a better way of framing the
topic.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Except you're missing out the crucial employees part, and it's hard to add
without making the headline long and unwieldy. And misinterpret has fairly
significantly different loading than "fail to communicate". I still think the
original headline is better than yours. The target audience is managers, and
will implicitly understand that a it's the managers fault when an employee
misinterprets the manager.

Headline writing is _hard_.

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bfe
I love how forthright Ben is in detailing his own mistakes in management, to
show how he learned from them.

He's insightful here on how to avoid managing for short-term metrics in a way
that sacrifices value and long-term growth, one of the most widespread and
persistent management mistakes. Ultimately, no metric can substitute for
having individual employees who really care about producing work that the end
user will love.

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neelm
Ben Horowitz's actual topic is the challenge of incentivizing management.

His subject is covered very well by one of the best to write about this
subject, Charlie Munger (Warren Buffets right hand man and Director of
Berkshire Hathaway).

Charlie Munger discusses extensively the challenge of not only incentivizing
managers and employees, but demonstrating that it is difficult to even fully
understand what really incentivizes them (hint: it's typically different than
what their superior thinks it is). He talks about human mis-judgement and its
role in distorted intending incentives.

Munger says over 30+ years in business, this is the one area he continues to
make judgement mistakes year after year, since this is such a difficult topic
to get right. That doesn't mean you can't get it right or that proper
incentives don't work however.

Check out the FedEx example in Munger's 1995 speech to Harvard.

<http://www.rbcpa.com/Mungerspeech_june_95.pdf>

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lmkg
See also, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodharts_law> . There are several
take-aways, but the relevant one here is "a metric becomes useless as soon as
it is a goal."

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zipdog
One thing about "you get what you measure/pay for" is that if you're clear
about your incentives its much easier to see how your expectations and the
employee's actions misalign. If you hide your measurements and incentives
behind a complicated or arbitrary system you'll never spot the misalignment.

------
signa11
i am sure folks here have already looked at this :
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc> (RSA Animate - Drive), but
doesn't hurt to spread the word again.

maybe _marginally_ related to the article...

