Edwards Deming, was famous for his work as a statistician, fostering the use of control charts and the PDSA cycle. Still his major contribution was to promote quality and workers’ pride over management by the numbers back in the 1950’s.
Managing by the numbers is still a problem today, one of the drivers of the “Great Resignation”. Many companies simply trust the numbers, using rankings to classify people within a group, individual incentives and annual performance improvement programs (a.k.a pip) to push employees to perform. These are extrinsic motivators. When what they are doing is, pushing employees to think for their good, a me culture, instead of promoting team collaboration and system thinking. This system penalizes people for things that could be out of their control.
One of his manuscripts at the Library of Congress in Washington states “inhibitors to quality and productivity have crept in, among which are: emphasis on the quarterly dividends, short-term planning, creative accounting, manipulation of asses, management by the numbers, business on price tag with short-term relationship, unfriendly takeover. […] the most powerful inhibitor to quality and productivity in the Western world is the so-called merit system or annual appraisal of people. What it does is destroy people. Destruction of the people in the company leads to the destruction of the company”. “It leaves people bitter, crushed, bruised, battered, desolate, despondent, dejected, feeling inferior, some even depressed, unfit for work for weeks after receiving a rating, unable to comprehend why they are inferior“
These are 5 deadly diseases that Deming would consider cripple trade:
1- Lack of consistency of purpose
2- Emphasis on short term profits
3- Evaluation of performance, merit rating or annual review
4- Mobility of management: job hopping
5-Use of visible figures of management, with little or no consideration of figures that are unknown or unknowable
“Management by the numbers leads inevitably to loss”.
Edwards Deming
That emphasis on budgets, problem-solving metrics, and analytics keeps our brain more in the NEA state (negative emotional attractor). We need NEA to solve problems, analyze things, make decisions and especially to be able to focus. A person’s NEA activates different brain networks and trigger hormones that activate the sympathetic nervous system and thus the fear and anxiety associated with the human fight or flight response. While the NEA is required to move a person from vision to action, a person must spend significantly more time in the PEA, a positive state, in order to achieve sustained desired change.
That emphasis on budgets, problem-solving metrics, and analytics keeps our brain more in the NEA state (negative emotional attractor), prompting the fly or fight response, instead of getting ready to grow and innovate.
Setting goals and measuring performance is probably one of the most challenging activities of a leader. But performance measured on the basis of sole numbers makes people stress out. and besides… How do you measure the loss due to fear created by performance evaluation? How do you measure lost business due to poor service from a call center that has a high turnover?
Learn more about the We Culture CARE approach that we propose instead.
