The Diary of a Reluctant Management Consultant

No, really, just stop

It has come to my attention that this month is interim performance appraisal month. I became aware of it when I received an invitation to my interim performance appraisal meeting. We all know your rating was already decided weeks ago, after you finished some random task or said something irrelevant in a meeting that either made your boss think you’re the company champion or the fifth floor’s village idiot.

But of course, just deciding on an employee’s rating would be terribly unfair. More efficient and perhaps more honest, but supposedly very unfair. So it’s important to gather subjective, immaterial and uncorrelated supporting evidence in order to justify the manager’s off-the-cuff evaluation of your performance. And this week I came across a rather novel way of doing that. It’s rather obviously called “Stop, Start and Continue”

Now, “Stop, Start and Continue” could easily be mistaken for the name of Alfa Romeo’s Motorplan (it runs for the first 10,000km or three months, whichever comes first or unless the gearbox falls off, in which case the motorplan is invalidated – hey, it’s your fault for buying an Alfa), but it also happens to be a very quick and easy way of evaluating employee performance. Why send out links to expensive performance management web sites, complicated Excel spreadsheets for capturing 360 degree feedback or asking people to complete a self-evaluation (an entertaining way to see just how deluded some colleagues can be)? All you need to do is send out a brief e-mail to superiors, peers and minions of the person being evaluated and ask them to list what the person should stop doing, start doing and continue doing, all for the purpose of learning, growth and weeding out the idiots.

To save you some time and attention, I’ve listed a few choice selections of what to answer if you’re lucky enough to be asked to participate in a friendly game of “Stop, Start and Continue”.

Stop

• Asking what Jack Welch would do.
• Pressing ‘Alt’ and ‘Tab’ every time someone passes your desk; we know you’re surfing the net and the fake budget spreadsheet from 2007 isn’t fooling anyone.
• Please.

Start

• Practicing higher standards of personal hygiene; there’s a reason why no one’s inviting you meetings and it’s not because “we’ve run out of chairs again”.
• Subscribing to those online recruitment web sites… I’m not saying anything but they might come in handy after we replace you with a macro in Excel.
• Working – a novel way to earn a salary and perhaps even a bonus as opposed to whining every year that you’re underpaid and the only bonus you got was an accidental extra helping of bolognaise at the canteen!

Continue

• Coming to work earlier and earlier and leaving later and later till you eventually leave before you arrive. We will interpret this as commitment, but will mark you down for having poor work/life balance
• Falling asleep at your desk. We all have a good laugh when you deny it, even though we can see the impression your keyboard has made on your cheeks. Also, it’s a mousepad, not a droolpad.
• Bringing donuts to Monday’s weekly progress meeting in a vain attempt to curry favour, when we all know you haven’t done anything since last week’s progress meeting you work-shy lazy bastard

Wanted for facepainting

I’m finding it very difficult to get anything useful done at the office. And seeing that I bill by the hour, this is proving to be as annoying as a VIP convoy bludgeoning its way through peak hour traffic (being late for a soccer game isn’t an emergency). Team members are taking leave every second day to watch soccer games, attendance at my meetings is falling as people leave work early, despite me offering to brand only three people per meeting as work-shy lazy bastards (WLBs) and those that do make it to the meetings arrive late, offering flimsy excuses like “We were stuck in traffic”. Apparently, while stuck in traffic this group of WLBs were attacked by a gang of Argentineans fans who mercilessly painted the Argentinean flag on their faces. Given this complete abandonment of responsibility, I’ve decided to exact my own revenge as only a reluctant management consultant can. So, here are my Top Ten Ways to Annoy Soccer Fans at Work:

Imagine all the exciting meetings that can take place in this room?!

Earlier today I spent a precious half hour of my billable time trying to set-up a meeting. Now we all know how much fun meetings can be: they’re a great way to meet new people, indulge in a free cup of coffee, ask irrelevant and often rhetorical questions before leaving early enough not to get any actions assigned to you. However, setting-up a meeting shouldn’t have to be a painful exercise. You get onto Outlook, add invitees, chose a  meeting room, check availability, perhaps tweak the time a bit to suit your internet surfing habits and then you’re done.

But not today. Today, trying to book a meeting was about as difficult as trying to get the French to work a forty hour work week. The year’s only just begun and people’s diaries are already booked out. An hour is all I need and the first opportunity I can find based on their schedules is the 29^th of January! What can these people possibly be doing this early in the year, apart from trying to impress their colleagues at how busy they’re pretending to be and of course, irritating me?

Further investigation (read intimidation), proved that the guilty WLBs’ (Work-shy, Lazy Bastards) schedules were about as empty as a list of interesting things about Gordon Brown. To “catch-up” they’d booked out their diaries with an all-encompassing entry called “Work” starting at 08:30, finishing at 16:30, everyday for the next two weeks. Amateurs! If you’re going to fake your diary entries you’re going to have to be a little more creative than “Work”! There’s always “Strategy Session”, “Project Prioritisation” and the ever reliable “Performance Review” to substitute for goofing off. And 08:30 to 16:30 is so predictable! You’ve got the mix the times up; a two hour workshop here, an hour team meeting there and maybe even forty five minutes for non-existent travel. I leant the latter from an attorney. 99% of attorneys give the other 1% a bad name.

The second challenge that I faced while struggling to set-up my meeting was trying to get a decent meeting room. There are many factors that influence your choice of meeting room, including obvious ones such as the number of people it can accommodate, availability of a screen, projector, flip chart, white board, working white board pens, that sort of thing. But there are other more subtle reasons for choosing a particular meeting room – a nice view, effective air conditioning, comfy chairs and proximity to the flatscreen TVs so you can check the cricket score in moments of boredom. Some organisations have floors dedicated to Executives, which means any meeting on their floor comes with lunch and snacks, which are always a good idea. An old client had a rule that you could ask for tea, coffee and biscuits to be served at your meeting only if an external party was attending. As we were consultants, we deemed ourselves to be external parties which meant biscuits all year round. It’s the little things that count, even if they are tiny, soggy ginger biscuits.

The names that companies give to their meeting rooms offer an interesting glimpse at their corporate culture. The bland (read Swiss) name their rooms efficiently, combining the floor number and the room number, starting in the northwest corner, proceeding regimentally round the building in a clockwise fashion. South African companies are quite keen on using our flora and fauna to christen our meetings rooms, which does raise an eyebrow when you’ve got back-to-backs in Buffalo, Bush Baby and Bougainvillea.

When another client moved into a new building staff were asked to suggest names for the meeting rooms, with the winning suggestions receiving a prize of dinner for two at an average restaurant (any restaurant that has ice-cream and hot chocolate sauce on its menu). I suggested Bart, Homer and Crusty the Clown, but for some unknown reason didn’t win. Other suggestions included Saturn, Jupiter and Mars (I’ve always wanted to go to Mars for a meeting); Silverstone, Monaco and Imola (you guessed it, suggestion from a grand prix nerd) and Sarbanes, Oxley and GAAP (those goofy auditors).

And the winning meeting room names were… and I promise you this is true: Vision, Mission and Values! Go figure.

The best meeting room names I’ve come across are Steam Room, Hotel Room and Leg Room. No surprise here: advertising agency.

Now, if you’ll please excuse me, I have a Performance Review at 09:00.

Another year, another list of unachievable New Year's Resolutions

Intoxicated with the assurance of a fresh start to the year, I too make New Year’s resolutions. It’s a great time of year and before you know it, you’re caught up in the rush of making promises you can’t keep, setting goals that are ambiguous, immeasurable, unattainable, unrealistic and unbound by any measure of time in our known universe and of course, swearing to go to the gym more often… starting next week.

So, after much thought and careful consideration in Woolworths queue, I’ve come up my Top Ten New Year’s Resolutions for 2010:

10.	Stop making fun of fat pople who’ve just joined the gym as a result of making a New Year’s resolution. At least they’ve made the effort to join the gym. But there’s a lot working against them, including heart palpitations, shortness of breath and the cupcake shop just outside the gym I go to.
9.	Remove my “Cancer – Death on an Instalment Plan” poster from inside the smoking room, not because of the complaints but because the poster’s now yellow.
8.	Stop pointing at midgets and giggling.
7.	Always ask lazy asses why they’re taking the lift up or down just one floor.
6.	Be nice to auditors – not all of us are as passionate as they are for ticking things with different coloured pens.
5.	Stop asking work-shy lazy bastards (WLBs) reading newspapers in the client’s library for their employee numbers. It freaks them out and disturbs the other people legitimately using the library.
4.	Stop laughing out loud when people reach for a calculator to make basic calculations like trying to work out 10% on a restaurant bill. Stop making it worse by inviting other people in the restaurant to come and witness this grand display of stupidity.
3.	Stop dancing like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction while on a teleconference with colleagues in London.
2.	Stop using Excel for shopping lists and PowerPoint for break-ups. Agenda usually includes: The Current Relationship Context Why It’s Not You, It’s Me Why It’s You Graph demonstrating the “We’ve Just Grown Apart” Differential Outstanding Issues (including friends to be claimed, CDs to be returned and stalking ground rules) Q&A
1.	Return to sending retrenchment notices by letter instead of last year’s novel approach of using bulk SMSs (U R Fired! C U L8ER). People don’t seem to appreciate the cost savings (25c per SMS versus R1.83 per printed page and envelope, assuming hand delivery, in case you’re wondering).

Employee of the Month

Over an awful lunch in our awful canteen, one of my colleagues was complaining that another valuable “asset” in the company is being rewarded, even though we all know he’s a Work-shy Lazy Bastard (WLB). Despite the fact that the reward is fairly inconsequential, similar to those quality “employee of the month” frames at your local McDonald’s, it does irk a lot of people that the guy who puts the ‘ass’ in ‘asset’ is being acknowledged for his ephemeral hard work. Yes, this is very unfair. Perhaps as unfair as Jethro Tull winning the 1989 Grammy for Best Hard Rock/Metal performance instead of Metallica, but the WLB must be doing something right. Somehow or the other, he must be creating the impression that he’s a hard worker, someone who goes the extra mile, someone who’s a quality employee. Don’t hate the playa, hate the game, as my hip hop lovin’, my pants are hanging below my bum, is Metallica a brand of car polish, 23 year old team member always says.

After careful observation of the WLB in its natural habitat, the cubicle farm, I have discovered some really neat ways for you to create the illusion that you’re the business shizness (I may be spending too much time with the 23 year old). With minimal effort, and I really do mean minimal, you too can soon be the proud owner of an “employee of the month” certificate.

Businesses that experience resource constraints (short-staffed if you’re in retail) are always talking about cloning their staff. A pipe dream perhaps, until of course genetically modified crops finally work their magic. But this can now be achieved by simply sending e-mails very early in the morning or late at night. People get these sneaky e-mails and think that you’re really putting in a special effort. Meanwhile, you’re just sitting on your couch, sipping a beer while watching illegally downloaded episodes of “House”. It’s remarkably easy to achieve. For Outlook 2007:

• Open a new mail message
• Click on the ‘Options’ tab
• Click on the ‘Delay Delivery’ icon
• Under the ‘Delivery options’ section, select the time when you would like your e-mail to be sent (try not to choose round numbers, go for something like 02:23)
• Click ‘Close’, then ‘Send’

Colleagues will be astonished when they see you’ve been working at 02:23! A hard worker like that is surely deserving of reward.

Another shifty WLB trick is to block book your diary. Simply set-up nondescript sounding meetings with yourself. Things like ‘Budget Meeting, ‘Team Meeting’ or ‘Performance Review’ will all suffice. When people try to book meetings with you, they’ll see how frightfully busy you are. Some will even call to try get a precious hour of your time. Cancel a fake meeting and they’ll love you even more for accommodating their humble meeting in your stressful schedule.

People who have meetings all day are always rushing from place to place. To validate your impenetrable diary, you must do the same. No matter where you are going in the building, even it’s to have a nap in your car, you must get there at pace. Look frustrated if you can, it adds to the effect. If you get stopped by a colleague, tell them that you’d love to chat but you’re running late for a meeting, but he’s more than welcome to book some time in your diary… Another quick tip, leave meetings early, because naturally you have another meeting to rush to!

A quality employee is also a knowledgeable employee. Thus, it’s important for you to demonstrate just how knowledgeable you are. This can be achieved by using a lot of jargon and abbreviations, mentioning random obscurities or by simply making things up. Ask people what they think of the new King III report. Question whether the GL has been updated with the EQTs, the MMs and the NCDs ASAP. Object in meetings because you feel the group just isn’t taking GR58A into account. Wait a week for someone to thank you for raising the important GR58A issue, which thankfully, has now been resolved. Go ahead and start making space for that “employee of the year” award!

Now, if you’ll please excuse me, I have to send a few e-mails this evening…