Episode #72: Dealing With Idiocy In The Workplace

Why, why, why isn’t common sense common? We deal with people in our work lives who do dumb things. They make stupid decisions which fly full in the face of common sense. It is such a puzzle. Why don’t they get it, why can’t they see the obvious logical answer?

Reflecting on this phenomenon, we have to draw a clear line between losing our sanity trying to anticipate these crazies and getting on with our work. That is actually the really scary bit – we can never imagine what they would choose as (for them) a rational course of action, which is actually irrational. How can we spend our entire day worrying about what someone else might do? Well we can’t, so rather than go crazy ourselves trying to head off feckless behavior, let’s concentrate on what we can control.

The first decision is, are we the idiot who is the cause of the problem? Whoa! What if we are one creating havoc and they are just pawns in our game. That can’t be right can it? We are smarter than them, we see better and further than they do. We have perspective, so let’s put a red line through that possibility right now.

Wait - not so fast! What if we have not properly trained these people. What if they are actually “the uninformed” masquerading as “idiots” because we are at fault by not having invested in them sufficiently? What if we have been too busy with our own work to explain the finer points of various tasks? What if we have already mastered it, so logically the task is “easy”, therefore not a lot of explanation needed, right?

Question - were we perfection personified when we first encountered this totally unfamiliar and unknown task? Have we conveniently forgotten the learning curve applies to others as well as ourselves? We may have assumed the task was easy, so we went light on the explanation and forgot to check for understanding. We may have merrily moved on and not put in place some regular checking mechanism to ensure they have got it. “I show you, we do it together, now you do it and I check it”, sound boring and so basic, but did you do that?

Are you a perfectionist? Are you the type of person for whom there is only the “right way” of doing things? Does your logic rule and allow no other possibilities for task completion? If the “idiot” does it differently to you, is that incorrect or just different? Are you entertaining the possibility there might be multiple paths to the mountain top? Maybe we need to consider there might be equally valid solutions to the same problem, including those we haven’t even contemplated or thought about. What if we went really crazy and asked them for their ideas on how we might complete the task? What if we just shut up and listen quietly?

Well now, let’s give you the benefit of the doubt and say you did explain it, you did seek their ownership of the process by asking for their ideas and did incorporate their offerings into the final solution and they still managed to screw it up. What do we do now?

If we are going to empower people, we have to empower them to screw things up as well. We ask them to take a risk with the unknown (There Be Dragons!), the unfamiliar, to step up to greater accountability. When we whack them because they made an idiotic mistake, we are in danger. We are double-crossing the person, because we asked them to go into this area of weakness in the first place and then we belt them for it when they get it wrong. The trust is broken right there and they will join the Great And Venerable Guild Of Do Nothings, because that is the safest path forward. The Guild has a mega membership in Japan by the way, as almost every Japanese person has learnt how not to be the derukugi (出る釘)– the nail that gets hammered down. Their colleagues are also watching hawk-like for your reaction, so they can gauge the danger associated with anything new and shiny coming from your direction in the future.

We need to provide a Reasonable Allowable Margin of Error (RAME) for the task. We need to be checking progress without buying back the delegation, we need to make sure errors are picked up early (before they blow us all up) and we need to be coaching their progress. A great start is to set the control limits for the task. This will allow the person completing the task to know where the boundaries are from the get go. What often happens though is we give them the brief, in brief and then just abandon them until completion. They suddenly start “zagging” when we expected they would continue “zigging” and we discover the differential is fatal. There is nothing more frustrating than to discover the “zagging” when it is too late to do anything meaningful about it.

When the error surfaces, how do we handle it? Often we hear from someone else about the error, rather than the individual in question. This is a danger point, because our attitude and judgment can be clouded by the messenger. “Oh, you won’t believe what Tanaka just did, it's a disaster”, can often be the tactic of the sycophant and office politician. If Tanaka san is not a great English speaker and the messenger is, it is not unknown for the linguistic access to the boss’s ear to become a power play, where the boss gets enlisted as the politician’s unwitting assassin.

So shake out those prejudicial inklings and approach the situation as an objective research project – “Just the facts!” Only after having effectively gathered the data and eliminated the opinions, approach the perpetrator in question. Begin with rapport, something to open the discussion, which will help them to relax. They are feeling guilty, embarrassed, nervous, uncertain, fragile, defensive – wow, a potent, powerful cocktail of potentially explosive emotions.

Telling them they made a mistake is not news to them – they know that, so whining about the mistake is not helpful. We are on the path to recovery here, so we need to choose our words very carefully. You might think we are also on the road to permanent removal, but in Japan that is rarely the case. You don’t have that arrow in your quiver to unloose at will, so better to get smart about this and work on helping them out of their mess. “Play the ball not the player” is good advice, so remove the personalities from the discussion. “You” must become “We” in your new lexicon and “We” are all about fixing the issue not crucifying the fallen one. We focus on the action not the person. We want to hear their views on what went wrong. This is crucial because in their telling we will uncover whether they are in denial or prepared to take accountability. We will also learn if this a systemic issue and not a one off. Those bosses with a short fuse – take a deep breath and turn your body language off at this point. Your words and surface control may be seemingly modest, but your “aura” could be accusatory and hostile. Barely suppressed anger is not a good look in this situation.

For the employee who fesses up, accepts responsibility and wants to recover, get them involved in the decision-making about the solution. Reassure them they have a place here, they have an important role here, that they can make a significant positive contribution here. Reference that we are all the sum product of our failures, because that is how everyone learns. We eliminate what doesn’t work and replace it with systems that predictably, reliably replicate correct outcomes.

Solomon-like you now hand down your judgment and any penalties that may apply. You make the point the mistake is not fatal though very serious. You assure them they can recover from this and keep moving forward in their career.

What if they don’t fess up, what if they stay in denial, engage in passive/aggressive behavior, stay locked into a defensive mindset? Take a break from proceedings, give them time to think about what you have said and then try again.

If at this further point there is still no change, then they need to be changed. In Japan, removing them from employ is difficult, so try to look for an arrangement where you can pay them out, so they leave. Better to be generous on the money because the collateral damage is more expensive. Larger companies can do this more easily, but for smaller companies it is trickier.

Smaller companies however do have some advantages. The individual’s stubborn and unreasonable behavior is prone to impact on their colleagues. They will judge them very harshly because they endanger the whole operation and therefore everyone’s livelihood. That peer pressure will be much more fierce than anything the boss is going to dish out. Murahachibu （村八分) was a form of ostracism for those who went against the collective good in traditional village life and it is still with us in the urban village of the workplace. If you are reasonable and judged by the team to be doing the right thing and the individual in question is not, they will feel intense peer pressure to accept your offer to depart.

Idiocy in the workplace will be with us forever, we won’t be changing that in a hurry, but we can work on prevention, minimization and how we react to it. Given the scope of the problem, this will be well worth working on.

Our action steps:

Ensure we are properly explaining what we expect

Accept there are multiple possible solutions not just our own

Decide the Reasonable Allowable Margin of Error to apply

When things go wrong, ignore hearsay and get the concrete facts

Focus on the issue not the person

Involve them in finding the solution

Reassure them the mistake isn’t fatal

Remove resisters who won’t accept their responsibility