Management, as an invention to help organizations run smoothly, has been around for a little over 100 years. In that time, we’ve come up with some amazing tools and tactics to enhance productivity and engagement. We’ve also implemented some well-intended, but absolutely terrible, ideas. A few of these, despite their problems, are still being used today. Here are the worst management ideas, why they’re so terrible, and how we could fix them.
Interviews
The job interview process seems straightforward and effective; a manager meets face to face with potential new hires and then picks the one that fits the job the best. But in writing a forthcoming book, I found research that shows that job interviews are consistently one of the poorest predictors of job performance. Candidates can be good interviewees but poor workers, especially when they only need to impress one or two people. Instead, smart companies hire using a variety of discernment methods and incorporating the new candidates future team into the process. Some even put a new hire’s permanent status on the team up for a team vote shortly after hiring. It may be easy to fake it in a job interview, but it’s hard to stay fake working with a whole team for a long time.
Annual Reviews
Performance Reviews are straightforward and well intentioned. Periodically evaluating an employees’ performance and providing feedback is a great way to improve performance. In practice, however, annual reviews lack the immediacy required for feedback to work effectively. By the time feedback is given, the employee has either forgotten, or already made changes in their performance. Moreover, annual reviews can devolve into arguments about what the right classification of performance is for a candidate. That’s why many companies are abandoning the annual review in favor of more frequent, less formal performance discussions.
Customers First
“The customer is always right” is a great sounding maxim, especially when you’re the customer. However, it can make for bad management practice, dissatisfied customers, and even decreased profitability. Research shows the one of the strongest predictors of customer satisfaction is employee satisfaction. Employees that feel taken care of, take care of customers better. So to better serve their customers, some corporate leaders have found that they must put their customers’ needs second and their employees’ needs first. They have inverted the hierarchy and aligned their companies with a well-researched model of customer satisfaction that comes through employee happiness.
While these ideas sound like best practices, the research argues the opposite. In addition, the experience of many companies who’ve abandoned them should serve as testimony enough to rethink these management ideas.
David Burkus is the author of Under New Management. He is host of the Radio Free Leader podcast and Associate Professor of Management at Oral Roberts University. To get more resources to help you lead smarter, join his free newsletter.
