Are You an Idealist or a Pragmatist?

When I was a young history teacher, parents often accused me of working their children too hard. The complaint was always the same – the child had spent too many hours preparing for a history test, to the detriment of other subjects, and had failed the test anyway.

They were wrong. Sitting at a desk for five hours does not equate to studying history for five hours. The learning required 30 minutes of honest effort – if it took less, great; if it required more time, more focus was needed, and the effort would improve the child’s learning efficacy. The important point was that the quality of the work was the key, not the time it took to complete it. Remarkably, this principle is largely ignored in the world of business.

Encouraging managers to come to grips with resourcing issues, in order to take their teams beyond the stress and frustration of overwork and underwork, mistakes and missed deadlines, demoralization and disengagement, has prompted some to accuse me of idealism. And, of course, they mean idealism of the worst possible kind – that of the academic observer, detached from the messy reality of the coalface.

Now long experience of shedding blood, sweat, and tears at the coalface, in many different endeavours, allows me to dismiss the charge. Calling someone an idealist because he believes resourcing issues can and must be resolved is a fallacious argument, on two counts.

First, it is an ad hominem attack on the messenger that tries to deflect the need for an honest response. Secondly, it is also fallacious because it begs the question. Whether timely resolution of resourcing issues is a practical requirement in business is precisely the question that needs to be debated, and to dismiss the affirmative answer as idealistic is to take as your conclusion something that still needs to be logically demonstrated.

The issue of excessive hours has long been endemic in the workplace, and is emblematic of the leadership woes in business today. Anyone remember Parkinson’s Law?

Consider an advertising agency where working into the night is routine, even though many of the people involved are plainly under-worked. Or the irony of frontline healthcare workers having their own health destroyed by excessive hours and the attendant problems of sleep-deprivation, dietary deficiencies, and relationship dysfunction.

Examples abound, but the circumstances behind the excessive hours worked in each case are frequently very different. Busyness, the scourge of our age of total work, is notoriously deceptive because it is mostly misguided, unstructured, and uncoordinated.

An inability in a business to get through its workload within standard working hours (accepting the occasional need for overtime) represents a management failure to optimize productivity. The manager must find out why employees need extra hours and then fix the problem.

Excessive hours might be caused by poor organization and workflow, incompetence, or lack of motivation, by poor teamwork or a lack of appropriate training. Further possibilities would be equipment issues, inaccurate benchmarking, duplication of effort, or strategic confusion relating to recruitment. The possibilities are endless – over-qualified people lacking a sense of challenge, boredom with routine, lack of adequate supervision, insufficient delegation and empowerment, or just plain laziness. Of course, it might even be the result of a downsized team saddled with unrestructured productivity expectations.

The failure of information technology and the Brave New World of people analytics to resolve resourcing issues is explained by three factors that will not be readily overcome:

First, Big Data practices invariably subvert morale and promote disengagement. Secondly, equipping managers with the knowledge of psychology necessary to understand the data and ask insightful questions will be a gargantuan undertaking, with no guarantee that they will be appropriately inclined to apply what they learn anyway. That leads into the third factor, office politics – personality conflicts, power games, and plain old human perversity will never be cured by technology and new systems. The human condition defies quantification, and managing it requires empathy and wisdom.

The accusation of idealism is just an attempt to hide a refusal to address reality – hardly a model of pragmatism. It is very tempting for executives to make the numbers look good; they know that job security is a distant memory, and people are easily exploited. But running people into the ground is destructive not only of employees and their families, and therefore the community, but also of the business and the credibility of free market capitalism.

If you don’t have time to reflect on the reasons for the excessive hours people are working, there’s something wrong. If you don’t have time to feel concern for the damage done in their lives, there’s something wrong. If you don’t have time for constructive team meetings to identify issues and brainstorm solutions, there’s something wrong. If you don’t have time to go one on one with people, giving and receiving feedback, there’s something wrong.

And if there’s something wrong, and you just let it go on doing damage, it’s pretty clear that you are not a leader. So just who is the idealist and who is the pragmatist?