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Are Your Employees Obsessive?
January 27, 2010
Thinking employees aren't productive enough is common, but you may have overlooked an unanticipated issue—they be more obsessive about their job than is healthy.
Jeff Grimshaw, co-author with Gregg Baron of "Leadership Without Excuses: How to Create Accountability and High Performance," defines a "fetish" as "unreasonably excessive attention or reverence," and shows how leaving one unchecked can destroy long-term performance and accountability.
Anything done to extremes can be damaging, even those fetishes that seem good at first glance, the authors point out. The top five they've uncovered in organizations are:
• Personal responsibility fetish: When individual employees, rather than the institution, bears the brunt of the blame.
• Numbers and quantitative measurement fetish: Confusing what is easy to measure with what is important to measure, then assigning mystical importance to the results.
• Jack Welch fetish: Substituting a famous leader's formulas for personal judgment.
• Process and methodology fetish: Loving the process, ignoring the goal.
• Results fetish: Trying to succeed by any means, regardless of consequences.
All these obsessive behaviors lead to finger pointing, dysfunction, and excuses instead of high performance, the authors say. Grimshaw and Baron look inside this behavior using behavioral economics, which explains how our emotional wiring, biases, and quirks shape our decision making, especially our economic decision making.
Armed with this knowledge, Grimshaw and Baron say leaders can create the conditions necessary for employees to deliver their best performance every time. By understanding the hard-wired human frailties of the workforce, excellent results can become the norm, they argue.
The authors use case studies from Qualcomm, Royal Caribbean International, Vanguard, McDonald's, ADT, Kaiser Permanente, Merck, KPMG, State Farm, PetroVietnam and other companies where they generated results using the techniques outlined in their book.
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