Snakes & Ladders – How will you manage your staff against the plans you made for 2013?

The only thing you know for certain about the budget, said an old mentor of mine, is that it’s wrong.

One way or another, you’re going to have issues with the plans you made in November for the year ahead. Not surprising, given that you aimed to somehow foresee the next year’s market conditions, predict the performance of your customers and anticipate everything from super storms to the attrition of key personnel.  Then you reconciled this guess work with your shareholders’ aspirations – which are seldom modest or undemanding – to produce ‘the plan’.

Beyond the obvious problem – the fact that you have no idea if the reality will render the theory absurd – which you can’t waste your time worrying about, you have a major concern that you can and must address:

How will the ever present plan, and perceptions of success and failure, affect your staff’s actual performance?

Whatever you business, and engineering staffing is a perfectly good example, you have some ladders to take advantage of and a number of snakes to avoid in managing productivity.

Ladder 1

New Year Urgency

It’s simple. Your well rested staff return to work fired up, full of resolutions and raring to go. Success follows. Happy days.

Snake 1

New Year Attrition

Not everybody translates their ‘New year – new start’ positivity into hard work for you. January is the biggest month for hiring and job seeking. Right now one of your key staff is planning to make a fresh start of a different kind this year. You are never more vulnerable to turnover among strong performers than you are in January. Have some conversations and make sure you know how your top people are feeling.

Ladder 2

Motivation increases from strong start

So Q1 has gone great. By and large your staff over performed. The atmosphere is buzzing and there’s a great deal of confidence about the year ahead. You can harness this to drive greater productivity. Increase the optimism through the promise of additional rewards. Share some of the results of the over performance, you might see it again in Q2.

Snake 2

Complacency sets in as your staff hit the cruise control button

Some will use success to strive for more success, others will use success as a justification for slowing down. Again your answer is in adjusting rewards. You can’t use the stick for someone who’s overperformed, but you can switch the carrot out for something slightly larger and more juicy. Increase the performance rewards at the highest thresholds and motivate people to excel further.

Ladder 3

Fostering long term development

When you’re on target, you have the opportunity to invest time and energy in developing your staff. If you know they are going to hit targets, you can spare a little time for training, team building and all the other things that are, conversely, the first casualties when you begin to slip behind. When things are going well this year, give serious consideration to investing a little energy in longer term productivity. If you don’t take advantage of successful times to do this, you never will do it.

Snake 3

Entitlement increases from ‘high value / high maintenance’ mentality

Many a trajectory has begun with early success, followed by plateau and then freefall – induced by the early success itself. A proportion of the people who work with you will take pride in their success over the line and become entitled. I’m contributing all this, I should be getting more. I’m better than they are, I should be treated better. These people need me more than I need them. The worst thing about this reaction to success is that it can inflict collateral damage on other staff. Egotism is a virus and it spreads quickly. If you look to reward high performers early with extra benefits to reach for and investment in their skills, they will feel rewarded in both the short term and long term. Entitlement is never just the result of performance, it is the result of performance combined with a lack of perceived appreciation.

Ladder 4

A definition of minimum acceptable performance is understood and you can manage to it

The plan allows you to manage underperformance, because of clearly understood targets that are either met or not met. If they are not met, you have a very clear mandate to chase good performance, or to let people go accordingly. The threat of failure can be a great motivator and if you’ve got an agreed threshold, there is never any ambiguity. Make sure the staff understand the importance of accomplishing targets and then dig in to the work of helping them get there, even if it means reforecasting to meet external challenges.

Snake 4

Doom, gloom and dismal prospects will never inspire improved performance.

If your staff are chasing after a plan so unrealistic as to be entirely unachievable they will not be motivated by it and it might as well not be there. The double threat is that they will hold you responsible for signing off on the budget in the first place. Maybe you were trying to please shareholders; maybe you were just wholly unrealistic. It doesn’t matter – there’s a massive burden to carry everyday and you gave it to them. Sure, they accepted it, but what other choice did they have? If all your staff have to look forward to is one round of meetings after another where they are asked why they are so far behind the forecast, they will not stick around to endure it; they’ll just go somewhere where they can get an even break. And you know that regardless of the plan, they may just be performing better than you honestly expected.

There are many more ladders and many more snakes and I’d be fascinated to hear your own versions. The bottom line is that you’re going to play this game whatever happens; your budget will either contribute to success or to failure. Which way it goes is up to you.



Richard Spragg writes about a number of issues related to engineering jobs. Find out more about Talascend, about electrical engineering, about civil engineering and about mechanical engineering jobs from Our Website.  

Beware the tipping point when an honest mistake becomes a dishonest cover up

Businesses can be a lot like soap operas in one important respect – a secret never stays secret forever. It’s only ever waiting in the background today to become tomorrow’s main plot line.

One of the most common forms of secrecy in the modern workplace is the concealing of mistakes – it is this small and unnecessary crime that results in more dismissals than any other kind of misconduct. People make mistakes; it’s a natural part of being human. Immediate acknowledgement, combined with ideas for fixing the problem, will always be the best course. 

Everyone makes mistakes; people respect colleagues who admit to it and get to work on making it right. Whatever the situation, we are usually presented with a fork in the road, where the obvious need to face the music conflicts with the immediate ability to suppress the problem.

There is a crucial tipping point when honesty becomes dishonesty.

In this instant, if you choose the wrong path, your integrity flies out the window along with most of your chances of walking back your mistake. There’s always a point where you get to make a call on what you’re going to do:  either pull over, admit you've got a flat tire and ask for help; or keep driving, hoping nobody notices and guaranteeing reduced performance and damage to the car. You won’t be able to drive forever, but every yard you drive is foolishness, and you’re undermining your credibility every minute. 

Long ago, at another company in the UK, a colleague of mine chose the wrong path. In a moment of carelessness, an otherwise capable and valued employee, failed to inform his customer about an additional cost for which they would be liable under the terms of the contract they were signing. He missed it; He just got the math wrong on a busy day - something to do with the overheads on raw materials. Later on, when the customer good naturedly refused to pay the cost, assuming it was an invoicing mistake, my colleague agreed and just assumed on a multi-billion dollar project that the mistake would be lost. The contract  was immediately rendered unprofitable. In a moment of foolishness, my colleague buried the mistake. He was trusted, He owned all contact with the customer – who remained happy with arrangements, ignorant of the whole problem which they assumed to be an error made in good faith on the first invoice. He was able to hide the mistake for weeks.  Nobody noticed until further down the line that the arrangement was actually burning money.

At that point, the right questions were asked and the details emerged. Angry exchanges, apologies and packed boxes followed. And why? Because He didn't walk into the Project Director’s office five minutes after realizing the mistake, face the embarrassing truth, and get the support he needed to fix the problem – which in this instance would almost certainly have been a frank conversation between his boss and the customer, a compromise, and a reduced - but still profitable - margin.  No big deal. All will be forgiven within a week, maybe there’ll be some closer oversight next time.

We write frequently about how seemingly trivial events can dramatically affect your career.  These stories include careless texting mistakes that corrupt vital data security, career moves that seem to happen by accident, and here, the little white lie of omission.

The last few years have provided no end of evidence to support the notion that fessing up now will save a lot more trouble later. It is true on a corporate level; it’s true on a personal level. The tangled web begins with a very simple individual decision, taken at the tipping point where incompetence becomes malice. It ends with a global financial crisis, a Ponzi scheme, the collapse of a great career, or more likely – just the loss of a job.

Disgraced Olympic sprinter Marion Jones was shown a small vile of liquid and asked if she had ever seen it before. This was her tipping point. The truth would have been painful, but a lot less painful than the eventual prison term, which resulted entirely from her lie to federal investigators in answer to that very specific question. The truth – as she must have known then in her heart of hearts, was coming out all the same.

Ironically, it is Lance Armstrong who appears to have made a far more sensible decision. Perhaps, having seen the writing on the wall, he chose a path that will leave whatever he has done in the realm of athletics, where Marion Jones must surely wish she had left hers. The criminal investigation into Armstrong remains closed.

Ultimately, the question that fascinates a great many people when it comes to the cyclist is simply this: How could he possibly have thought that those hidden things would remain hidden? If the conspiracy touches as many people as the USADA’s 200 page report claims, it’s incredible to believe that anyone involved in the alleged activities could possibly have thought they would remain secret.  

The only way three people can keep a secret, says the Chinese proverb, is if two of them are dead.  When the time comes for you to face that fork in the road, plan on a full disclosure approach. Take responsibility; start moving past it there and then.

The chances are you’ll be disclosing everything in the end anyway, but from a very different position.

Richard Spragg writes on various subjects including global engineering jobs, staffing and marketing in the technical sector.

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