Companies don’t just create major detours off the critical path. They also create lots of potholes that make employees slow down or lose track of the critical path altogether. The most common cause is “make-work.”
Make-work is any task that does not add value to the critical path. For example, as described in the prior lesson, coming in on weekends for face time, rather than the demands of the critical path, is make-work. Attending meetings that are not useful is make-work. Writing and producing reports that no one reads is make-work. Having a 30-minute meeting when a 10-minute meeting would do is make-work.
Then there is the “work about work” where employees write reports about the work they have just done or the work they would be doing if they didn’t have to write this report. Or, as we saw in the previous chapter, they have meetings to discuss the work that they have done, but no one is either interested or paying attention. This lack of interest might stem from the fact that the work being presented is not connected to the critical path. Or the inattention might result from the audience not understanding the critical path themselves.
Management Bureaucracy as Make-Work
Too much of corporate life is make-work, especially when management becomes its own self-serving bureaucracy, ignoring the critical path. Lower-level supervisors, instead of serving the critical path, serve middle managers who, in turn, serve top executives. This hierarchy becomes its own beast that needs care and feeding. Office size, location, and quality of furniture are decided by where you are in the chain of command. Regular meetings are held, reports are generated, and turfs are protected. Battles ensue over which department gets what office space or what food will be served at the corporate picnic. All of this not only distracts from the critical path, but also places obstacles in the way of doing real work.
I have given speeches to top executive groups at many companies. One of my “make-work” indicators is whether the staff has seating charts. Do they make a point of designating where the CEO and her or his top lieutenants sit? Do they struggle over where the other attendees will sit? Is there a pecking order to their arrangements? All this is make-work since its effect on the critical path is minimal, if it has any at all.
Likewise, there are many companies where employees struggle over the order of addresses listed on emails. They will consult with their peers as to whether to list the chief marketing officer ahead of the chief information officer. In these corporate cultures, employees can spend hours trying to read the political tea leaves. Now such worries are likely rooted in management allowing these political considerations to matter. The chief marketing officer my indeed get his nose out of joint if he is listed after the chief information officer. The top management team needs to nip this in the bud and communicate to everyone not to waste their time on such trivia. Till they do, they are reinforcing make-work.
These bureaucratic distractions from the critical path can entice star performers to leave. For example, Mel Bergstein, the founder of the technology consulting firm Diamond Technologies, served as the world-wide technology chief at Andersen Consulting, now known as Accenture. He said he left Arthur Andersen because he was tired of internal squabbles there. "I want to solve client problems, not internal problems," he told the Wall Street Journal. To increase his ratio of real work to make-work, he started Diamond, which became a major player in technology strategy consulting. With a client list of top global companies and offices on 3 continents, it eventually sold for $378 million to PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Email and Text Messages as Make-work
A major form of make-work and stress for employees at all levels are email and text messages. It is a daily and hourly distractor from the critical path. The sheer volume requires sorting just to uncover which emails need reading or require a response.
Employees tell me that they receive about 100 emails each day, and for some, an almost equal number of work related text messages. Upper-level executives report 250 to 300 per day. This means that in a 10-hour day, employees typically get 10 to 20 emails/texts per hour, while upper management receives 25 to 30, or 1 email/text every 2 minutes. Assuming that every email/text concerns the critical path, managers have 2 minutes to respond to it before the next email/text comes in, while employees have 6 minutes. If you are in an hour-long meeting, you will return to your office facing between 10 to 30 emails/texts which you must sort and respond to in 2 to 6 minutes before a new message comes in.
Of course, the above assumes that all the messages are important to the critical path. This is unlikely. In general, many of the messages that are composed, sent and read are make-work. Too many employees send way too many messages and cc: them to way too many people. They make-work either by crafting or editing their emails as if they were writing the great American novel or a Supreme Court brief. They write, edit, re-write, and edit some more. At the other end of the spectrum are emails where you don’t know the point of it because it lacks focus and logic, and contains inconsistencies. In many cases, a phone call or an in-person exchange would be quicker and more effective than an email or text message thread that spans an hour or more—at the end of which time you still don’t know what the other person has in mind.
Email and text messages, then, are a major distractor from the critical path. It forces you to take your attention away from what is important just in the sorting and reading, let alone replying. It’s no wonder that people feel stressed out. They can’t get their critical path work done because of the messaging burden they carry.
I have attended many management meetings where the following scenario plays out. As people enter the conference room, they do not say “hello” to the people already there because those folks are scrolling through their emails at a furious pace before the meeting starts. So, each new person entering does the same thing. As a result, no one socializes before meetings anymore. They don’t notice who comes in the room or if a new face should even be there. Instead of connecting, sharing, and building relationships with their co-workers, they are trying to dig out from under their email burden.
Even after the meeting starts, some folks are still on their email. Even if they put their phone or laptop down for the meeting, they pick it up once it pings, thus losing track of the meeting. Pings rule and take precedence. Meetings are secondary.
To help break this email overload problem, companies can devise message protocols that works for them. For example, right after the subject in the subject heading, indicate how important the message is to the critical path: CP5 = extremely important; CP0 = not related to the critical path. This is followed by how fast a reply is needed: RI = Immediately; R9 = by 9:00 a.m.; R18 = by 6:00 p.m.; RN = no reply needed.
In addition to signaling to the reader how urgently (or not) to take each message, such a protocol would force the writer to gauge the demand they are placing on the reader. It may even stop them from writing and sending the message in the first place. For the reader, it helps them sort which messages to pay attention to and within what time framework. Most importantly, it allows a conversation within the company about how to use messaging to improve the critical path. People can hold each other’s feet to the fire to reduce the amount of make-work email/texts. They can also reach agreement as to when phone calls or personal visits are better for the critical path than long email/text threads.
Meetings as Make-work
Then, there are meetings.
Before I rant about meetings, I want to differentiate between work sessions and meetings. Two or three people sitting in a conference room might look like a meeting when it is a work session that benefits from the synergy of doing real work together. They are making faster progress on the real work by interacting with each other. Given the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of much work, these work sessions can be essential to harness all the knowledge you need to get the job done.
Meetings, on the other hand, are symptomatic of make-work in that they often keep people from doing their actual work. In my 30 years of research on how star performers outperform others, I’ve learned that meetings are one of the four leading causes that stars attribute to causing lower productivity. (The others are interruptions, email, and social media.) The more meetings a worker has, the less productive they feel.
Companies that have an excessive number of meetings also create a lot of make-work. First, too many meetings themselves are make-work. Besides keeping people from doing their actual work, they accomplish little. If the meeting is purely informational, then why have a meeting. Don’t waste people’s time. Send out a memo instead. Similarly, too many meetings have too much “noise.” For example, don’t use 10 slides when 3 would do.
More problematic is that people have meetings to prepare for other, often higher-level, meetings. Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella has bemoaned such meetings:
“The more senior you are, the more careful you need to be in setting up meetings. When I set up a review, it turns out that people will do at least five reviews before they show up to me because that’s kind of how it goes, right? They review with their manager or their manager will review with their manager or, depending on the topic and the matrix organization, it could become an exponential growth thing.
“People have too many meetings, particularly as employees become more senior,” Nadella said. “You don’t need to have pre-meetings for essentially what is going to be a discussion. I think that can help cut down the amount of time people spend on meetings. It’s simple, yet it has a profound impact in organization.”
In most large organizations preparing for a presentation to the C-suite, five to ten people will sit around a table trying to decide what the content will be. Then they decide on the slides. Then they revise. Then they rehearse. If their presentation is directly applicable to the critical path, then all this staff power may be warranted. But, how many presentations really affect much of anything? How many were forgotten within a month as if they never happened? And did 5 to 10 people really need to be engaged in all these pre-meetings? Even if it was vital to the critical path, could 2 or 3 people have done it?
CYA as Make-work
The most insidious make-work around meetings are those pre-meetings and rehearsals solely meant to censor any controversial information or to put a spin on it before higher-ups see it. Unlike the unnecessary over-prepping that Microsoft’s Nardella referred to above, the goal of these reviews is purely impression management, or worse, to keep top executives in the dark about what is really taking place in hopes that they will not discern the real truth.
A few years back, I was asked to speak to the top executives of a telephone company about attracting, managing, and retaining star performers. About six weeks before my presentation, I received a call from the HR department. They wanted to know if I would do a rehearsal in front of them so that they could help me shape my material in ways that their top executives could best receive it. Always welcoming input to improve presentations, I suggested that they simply tell me over the phone what they thought would be helpful. No, no, they insisted. They wanted to see a live performance, saying it was routine within the company to pre-screen all presentations to top executives. Well, I told them that I was not willing to do two full presentations for the price of one. No problem, they replied. They were willing to pay me.
A week later, six HR people from the company showed up at my office to listen to the entire presentation. After I finished, they started making their “suggestions.” They wanted me to drop certain topics because they were hot buttons among the executive ranks and might revive past animosities among certain executives. They suggested plugging activities that they were conducting, giving them my “seal of approval.” They also advised excising specific recommendations, especially one where I suggested that certain programs had no benefits for creating star performers. Turns out they were heavily invested in providing such a program and didn’t want it to appear they didn’t know what they were doing.
In essence, the primary purpose of their visit was to shape the presentation to make themselves look good. They wanted to keep any ideas that might appear critical of them out of my remarks, and they were trying to censor those ideas before the top executives ever heard them. At a minimum, they wanted to know the presentation’s content so they would not be caught unawares and would have time to counter anything which might reflect poorly on them.
This is make-work at its worst. Six high-level HR people flew in from over a thousand miles away and took an entire day to play CYA. Instead, they should have been looking to see if the presentation would add value to the critical path -- which is exactly what their top management was looking for in my presentation when I spoke to them.
Reports as Make-Work
In one manufacturing company, 70 reports were generated each month for the top management team. These reports kept several people in sales, operations, accounting, and IT busy month after month. Turns out that almost no one paid attention to these reports. A survey of the top 10 executives found that most only glanced at 2 or 3 each month, but they weren’t looking at the same reports. In fact, they only looked at 15 reports, total, among them, with one executive reading these 2 reports while another executive read 2 other reports.
What a mind-blowing waste. Even if every executive read totally different reports, that would only add up to 20 to 30 reports, meaning that 40–50 were useless. In reality, it was worse than that, with 55 reports going unlooked at by anyone. The IT department said they missed generating some reports on occasion and not one person noticed or asked where those reports were. Why was this company wasting precious staff time, skill, and energy each month to create reports which no one read and which had no influence on the critical path?
How demoralizing to everyone involved is this monthly make-work? What critical path opportunities were lost?
To make matters worse, this top management team didn’t have a common understanding of what constituted the critical path. So it is not surprising that they didn’t agree as to which reports were necessary for them to size up the effectiveness of the critical path and how to improve. This company’s managers had taken their eyes off the critical path.
Control as Make-Work
Any large organization has to protect against make-work because it can begin to overwhelm critical path work. Yes, coordination activities between departments may not be directly on the critical path, but they can help it run smoother and faster. Or, control processes may protect the company from the government or legal attacks. But, they can also become a make-work impediment.
A large advertising company allowed their business unit heads to sign multi-million-dollar contracts for client engagements. Yet, they could not sign off on any expense over $500. All those had to go to the CEO’s office along with a memo justifying the expense. Turnaround time averaged two and a half weeks. So managers who could severely damage the financial health of the company by signing bad client deals had to spend extra time writing up explanations as to why they needed to spend $500 for new desk chairs or printers for their departments. Then someone in the CEO’s office had to read those explanations and make a decision to approve or disapprove. In the meantime, the requesting department had to postpone their plans to use the requested expenditure. New hires often went over two weeks without a desk, chair, or laptop while they awaited purchase approval! You might say that the requesting departments could have gotten better at predicting their needs and getting them into the pipeline sooner, and you’d be right. But to paraphrase Peter Drucker, this would only enable the make-work to be done more efficiently when it should not have been done at all!
Historical Legacy as Make-Work
Another overlooked critical path pothole is historical legacy. Many companies do things simply because they’ve always been done that way. Perhaps those practices were once productive, but now they no longer are.
There’s the story of the grandmother who asked her grandson why he cut off the ends of the ham roast before putting it into the oven. He replied that his mother did it that way. When he asked his mother, she said that the grandmother had always done it that way. The grandmother recalled that when she did it, they were poor and only had one baking pan to fit their small stove. To make the ham fit, she had to cut off the ends. But both her daughter and grandson had bigger pans and ovens, so they didn’t need to copy her.
Well, organizations have their own versions of the ham story. Some are expressed in dress codes, others in work hours. Some show up in how office space is allocated, others in pay systems or promotion patterns. To make room for new activities that add real value to the critical path, you have to stop doing “old” activities that do not.
For example, let’s return to the topic of reports for a moment: consider regular reports that are generated. As mentioned earlier, how many of them are actually read and used? When was the last time someone audited all the reports and “retired” those that had outlived their usefulness? In one company, an IT staffer actually looked at the log of who accessed every report the company produced each month. She found that no one had read 20% of the reports generated over a 3-month period and that another 30% had only 1-2 people access them during that same time period. She then fed this data back to the head of IT suggesting that she notify the appropriate executives that those 50% of reports would be discontinued unless they received a request to retain them. Out of half of all the reports that employees spent time each month generating, only 15% were deemed worthy of continuing to be written and distributed. This saved not only IT effort, but also all the other staff people throughout the organization who had to input the data for these reports.
Another company, after auditing its reports, made it a company-wide practice that adding any new report must lead to the retirement of at least one existing report, if not more. The idea is to keep reports lean and only focused on the critical path.
Likewise, look at critical path processes. At one university, it used to take 2 weeks for a student to get signed up for a work-study job. The whole process was manual and filled with paperwork that had to travel by internal mail to several different departments. This was frustrating to the faculty and staff who wanted to hire the students, as well as to the students who lost two weeks of potential work and pay. Everyone was told that this was the way it was done. Finally, one of the financial aid staff took it upon herself to re-examine the process. She automated the system, putting it online where all the departments could access it. She cut the turnaround time from two weeks to less than 24 hours. She improved that piece of the critical path.
Perfection Leading to Make-Work
An additional pothole is to demand perfection in everything. Many executives are of the mind that if you don’t demand total and uniform perfection, then it undermines success. From their perspective, if you allow sloppiness to creep in anywhere, then before long, it will undermine important areas. From another perspective, if your entire company is entirely on the critical path, then striving for perfection only makes sense.
On the other hand, such perfection can create much make-work that has no effect on the critical path or the bottom line. Herb Simon won a Nobel Prize for his work on optimizing vs. satisficing. Traditional economists believed that managers tried to always optimize to reach the best decision. Instead, Simon found that mangers “satisfice”; i.e., they reach a decision that’s good enough and then move on. Getting 80% there was fairly efficient, and often all you needed for success. To move from 80% to 100% was generally inefficient because you bumped up against the law of diminishing returns. Like squeezing an orange, you get 80% of the juice out pretty easily; getting the last 10% to 20% requires a lot more effort and resources.
So companies might consider where satisficing might be acceptable. For sure, you want zero mis-treatment of customers, zero accidents, zero lawbreaking, and maybe zero defects. But are there areas where perfection, as the saying goes, is the enemy of the good? Are there non–critical path activities, like emails or office allocations, where satisficing is the better route? Rather than spend time trying to create the perfect strategic planning tool, perhaps the company is better served with one that is good enough to make important decisions. As you demand or pursue perfection, consider how much make-work it might entail.
Executive Itch as Make-Work
Top executives contribute to make-work because they do not often consider how their actions take people off the critical path. One CFO loved to ask “what-if” questions born out of an innate curiosity. She would often ask lower-level employees to get her data on things that crossed her mind. For example, she once asked a lower-level marketing manager the size of four potential new markets. What she didn’t appreciate is that it would take 2 staff people 3 days each to gather the data for an acceptable answer. She also did not realize that those 2 people already had full to-do lists of tasks pertaining directly to the critical path. To get her the data, they had to stop their critical path work.
I refer to this type of critical path distraction can be referred to as the “executive itch—organizational scratch” syndrome. Many executives have an idea float through their heads and they want to pursue it. But to flesh it out, they need some data or facts. So, they set the wheels in motion by sending subordinates down the rabbit hole to chase down what they need. In other words, they want their itch scratched. They don’t stop to think how much work it will require and how it might disrupt other more important work. When they finally do get the information, many have already lost interest in the topic. They’ve already moved on to the next “itch,” and don’t realize how demoralizing it is for the subordinates who compromised their own work schedules to hustle up the answer, only to find that it was neither that important or urgent.
When I work with companies to reduce this big critical path de-railer, I ask them to take the “executive itch” pledge.
For executives, I ask them not to send subordinates scurrying without first determining that what they are asking is important to the critical path. More importantly, do not go two or three levels down the organizational chart without notifying the appropriate managers in charge of those levels. Bypassing the chain of command to derail people off the critical path sends all the wrong signals by blindsiding managers who prioritize the critical path.
For subordinates, I ask them not to jump to scratch the itch. Instead, always (politely) question every request to understand how it relates to the critical path. They should also present the requestor with a list of critical path work they are doing and ask how and where the request fits in. Finally, they should give a reasonable estimate of the time, resources, and effort required to fulfill the request. This is not meant to be insubordinate. Rather, it’s meant to create a thoughtful, reflective pause before action. Of course, if the request is important and urgent to the critical path, it’s a no-brainer to get it done. However, everyone—employees and managers alike—have an obligation to keep everyone—subordinates and superiors alike—on the critical path.
Poor Management as Make-Work
One final critical path pothole is that managers allow their employees to get off the critical path. They will say that managing their people is like “herding kittens” or “chasing butterflies”—meaning that their folks are too individualistic or creative, “marching to the beat of their own drummer.”
These are cop-outs. In reality, how many clichés can they use to say that they haven’t done a good job of helping their people understand and get on the critical path? If people are tied to improving the critical path, then they don’t have to be herded. Of their own volition, they are adding value. If they are not doing that, then either they are not suited for your company or you -- the manager -- are not doing your job.
Critical Path Action Items
What is the ratio of real work vs. make-work in your job? department? company?
What are the major causes of make-work?
What can you do to reduce the amount of make-work you do or that you inflict on others?
Can you get your bosses, subordinates, and colleagues to take the Executive Itch Pledge?