Tom Breur
31 January 2016
Some management
philosophies give me the creeps. They badly disturb me. One of those, one of my
pet peeves, is that managers should “drive out” slack. It’s this weird philosophy that people who
are idle should be told what to do, or encouraged to pick up more work.
There’s a classic “scene”
in The Goal
where Alex Rogue “catches” a slacking worker – and this infuriates him. It’s
not until much later in the book that he realizes that all efficient systems must
have slack. Although this wisdom may be fairly clear, it may well be a little harder to apply when
you’re looking at your own team slacking… I feel sympathy for that.
If you’ve ever been
totally stuck in a traffic jam, where the highway turns into a proverbial
parking lot, you know you need some
slack (in this case: distance between cars) to operate efficiently. Or else the
traffic doesn’t move very well. When my cabinet is chock full, it’s not only
annoying, it also becomes a very inefficient cabinet to use. Not enough slack.
I guess it all comes down
to trust. If you anticipate “slackers” (subordinates in an idle mode) to goof
off on Facebook, or generally escape their duties (rather than invest some time
in researching a new piece of technology, hone their technical skills, or “just”
replenish their energy), then I guess the “management by whipping”-philosophy
makes sense. But isn’t it ironic how much time and (wasted!) effort all this
whipping costs?
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