Can’t we just manage well?

Photo by Mike Strasser, West Point Public Affairs

We know that multi-tasking don't work, at least repeated experiments by Psychologists have shown it since the '50:s. We know that performance reviews and bonus systems don't work for intellectual work, at least research teams from Stanford, Harvard and MIT has shown it repeatedly... So why do we insist?

Over at Harvard Business Review, Samuel Colbert says that:

"...despite all the evidence — despite the fact that almost every person reviewed and every person reviewing knows it is bogus — corporate bosses do nothing to hasten its demise. They won't even acknowledge they have a problem."

Mr Colbert goes on to list five reasons why we continue to do performance reviews, even if they are clearly detrimental:

1. Intellectual laziness


2. Ego building - it feels good to be always right


3. Managers don't want others to know that they might be wrong


4. Performance reviews allows companies to ignore the work of fixing bad processes


5. Many managers fear being seen as bad leaders by the world outside their own companies

Personally I believe that the fifth point, the fear of being seen as a bad leader by people outside the company, might be the most important one. There will always be critics, all over the internet there are always some people making destructive comments, whereas the majority remains quiet. Even truly obvious things like employee training programs is challenged by a majority of managers, who sees training as a waste of time and money.

Two last thoughts, it seems that we humans really like negative thoughts - it has been shown that news-coverage is skewed towards the negative, horrendous and spectacular, because they capture people's minds and bring in the audience. Lastly, I was very encouraged to learn that Kiva.org has started to promote micro-lending for education, a truly positive step in the obviously correct direction.

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[...] believe that we need to rethink management’s role and purpose. We seem to have a major problem in learning from research, probably because of fear of being seen as odd or [...]