"Engineering Management Thought of the Week" Jeff Glass

A universal concept in management is the existence of a distribution related to all management decisions and actions. It is also a very difficult concept to master in an organization. I like to call this the “Management Bell Curve.” It simply means that for every managerial action, there is a distribution of reactions (not strictly a bell curve but you get the idea). It speaks to the fuzzy nature of managing complex organizations made up of people. I think the Management Bell Curve is particularly useful to consider when dealing with personnel issues or trying to motivate people. The Bell Curve will be the distribution of reactions to any decision you make that impacts your employees. You will have a certain number of your employees who will like it no matter how silly it may be and you will have certain number of employees who will dislike it no matter how logical and beneficial it might be. Then of course there those in the middle. Many times your goal is to benefit or persuade the most employees with a particular HR decision and thus you are trying to minimize the number of employees in the negative tail of the curve but you need to remember that you will never entirely succeed at that. You may know the saying: “You can please some of the people all of the time or all of the people some of the time but you cannot please all of the people all of the time” (attributed to poet John Lydgate). I think this is true in general but more often in management, you cannot please all of the people any of the time.

One thing that makes managing this bell curve particularly difficult is that your most vocal employees many times are also those that represent a small fraction of employee perspectives. Thus, you are left wondering how you can satisfy the majority or even find out what the majority is thinking. So the difficulty becomes determining how to motivate, lead, and manage the vast majority of employees while typically hearing from a small fraction in the tails of the curve. That small fraction could overly support your decisions (the “yes men”) or could be overly critical (the “naysayers”), but either way, you need to get past that group and on to those who are more representative of the entire body of people you are trying to reach. You need to avoid the outliers in both directions. Accept that there will not be complete agreement with any of your decisions and remember; you are not trying to be liked, rather respected. (Side bar: Of course, there are also those times when you are fairly sure that you know what the majority’s reaction will be (and it’s not good) but you still have to make the decision because it’s the right thing to do for the organization. But that’s a different blog post).

So how does the Management Bell Curve play out in real life? I think there are at least three ways to address the Management Bell Curve. Number 1; Understand your culture and your employees. This probably means plenty of surveys and plenty of MBWA (Management by Walking Around). There are few other great ways to get to know how your employees feel. Number two; Use your intuition. You have to develop your intuition for what your employees will feel about any given action and ensure that you take this into account in your planning. It doesn’t mean you always can do, or want to do, what the employee would like but it certainly means you consider their reactions and try to manage them. Number 3; Communicate, communicate, communicate. The only way to understand and manage the limits of the bell curve in this array of opinions in your organization is to communicate with your employees in all kinds of ways. Most leaders utilize many different types of communication and constantly communicate the same message over and over to ensure that it is absorbed. This will help narrow the Bell curve so there are fewer people in the negative tail and it will make your management job a bit easier. (Side Bar: Zappos has an innovative way of maintaining its culture, minimizing outliers and narrowing the bell curve of responses to its management decisions – it pays new employees $2,000, to quit if they are unhappy with their jobs! http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/why-i-sold-zappos.html).

So whenever someone comes to you with an opinion about a decision you have made or an action you have taken, you must ask yourself – Does this person represent a large fraction of our employees or are they an outlier? If it is the latter, the chances are that it is better not to second guess your previous action. Many of us have witnessed the “squeaky wheel that gets the grease,” thereby making all the other “wheels” who were quietly and contentedly going about their job, unhappy. It is worthwhile to look at this from the other side too. That is, when I am concerned about something as an employee in my organization, am I representing a typical view or do I have a perspective outside of the norm. If you ask yourself this instead of making your boss ask it, you will be a more valuable employee.

One word of warning – be careful not to hide behind the Management Bell Curve. That is, just because you feel that the reactions to a decision SHOULD be a certain way and you find some people are reacting differently, don’t automatically assume they are outliers. Investigate, ask trusted colleagues/employees, get down into the trenches and find out the perspective of the majority. You can fool yourself and it will make you feel better at first with no negative short term impact but in the long run, you are eroding trust that takes a long time to build. So don’t assume anything and keep the lines of communication clear and active!