Frustrated With Low Performance? Check Your Tolerance
It’s Not What You Preach, It’s What You Tolerate
Our owner was furious.
A big customer had just chewed us out during an on-site meeting. The good news was that our customer was thrilled with the new website we built for them. The bad news? They were pissed because our project manager had not sent weekly status reports to them throughout the engagement.
Because our project manager never sent these reports, our customer’s executives had been in the dark about the status of our work. Consequently, they had a negative view of our company. Instead of an exciting discussion about future work, our customer yelled at us.
After the meeting, our owner immediately fired off a short email to our director of project management and me. He said he couldn’t believe this was still happening. Sending weekly status reports has been a requirement at our company for at least the past 15 years. What is going on?!
I went to our intranet and pulled a report, and, of course, there was more than just this one project manager who was late with their weekly status reports.
We had to get this turned around quickly.
Another Tongue-Lashing
Two days later, I stood in the post-game huddle with my son Eric’s travel baseball team. Our 10U boys had just suffered an ugly 14-4 defeat, but the loss wasn’t the coaches’ main topic.
The four dad coaches took turns getting upset at the boys. They talked about how our team can’t complain to the umpire when a call goes against us. We can’t get so worked up and violently slam our bat to the ground when we strike out. We can’t slouch our shoulders and get down on ourselves when we have a bad inning. We must keep our energy up, shake it off, and move on to the next play.
Later that night, I bumped into one of our coaches in the hotel lobby. He said, “Ray, how many games have we played the last two years? 60-70 games? And how many of those same talks have we had with the boys about their poor behavior? 30 times? It’s not working. Until the head coach benches one of our kids for acting up, nothing will change.”
I agreed with him. After a short pause, I said, “It’s the same thing we’re dealing with at work. We talk about these problems, and nothing ever changes.”
And then it hit me.
“It’s the Jocko (Willink) quote: It’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate.’”
Back to Work
Our project management director sent out a firm email to our PM check-in managers about the importance of weekly status reports. He also adjusted some reports on our intranet so it was easier to monitor compliance.
I waited a week and saw some improvement in the stats. After another week and more warnings, I still saw some stragglers on Friday afternoon. I sent the late list to our PM director and told him they had until the end of the day on Monday to get all of their weekly status reports updated. It was the final warning.
On Tuesday morning, I went through the list again. Only two project managers were still behind. One PM was only late by a day with one project. I told him I assumed he was already working on that outdated report but that I didn’t want to see his name on the report again next week.
The other PM on the list was a different story. She was three weeks behind on eight of her projects. She had worked at our company for over seven years, and her performance had declined for at least two years. Moving away from our headquarters in Chicago to a full-time remote situation in Detroit had not helped.
I emailed our sloppy PM, copying her manager and the PM director. I marked the email as high priority and wrote the subject line in all caps: “ATTENTION - MULTIPLE OUTDATED WEEKLY STATUS REPORTS.” I told her that sending out weekly status reports had been a long-time requirement for all PMs and that it was imperative that she do this every week. I listed out her late projects, telling her she needed to send updated reports to all of these customers before she stopped working for the day.
At around 4 pm, she replied, reassuring me that she meets with all her customers every week and had just fallen behind, but that she had sent them all out now. Her email contained exclamation points and smiley-face emojis as she attempted to gloss over the late reports. She wasn’t getting it.
I replied with a brief thank you and a stern reminder that there is no excuse for not sending the reports on time.
I emailed our HR director, again copying her manager and PM director. I told them we needed to hire a replacement so we could FIRE this PM as soon as possible. I said we can’t continue to tolerate such behavior - it’s not fair to our customers or our company.
Going Forward
I’m sure this story will spread around our company and temporarily scare some people into a short-term performance boost, but it’s not enough.
No, the only way to ensure our PMs consistently send out their weekly status reports is to build a machine to enforce this. It requires a disciplined manager to inspect our intranet report every week and hold people accountable when they’re late.
Unfortunately, managers like this are currently in short supply.
For now, I will do it myself. It’s only 15 minutes every week, which is well-spent considering the importance of these reports.
For all of you managers, I’ll leave you with some inspiration from Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton) in “The Founder.” This is what accountability looks like.
Image credit: Alamy