Our IT development team recently went bowling to celebrate completing a major project. None of us were practiced bowlers, but we had a good time nevertheless. This was about having fun together and paying attention to an important milestone that we reached.
Afterwards, I remembered a story Ken Blanchard told in one of the early One Minute Manager videos. He described a game of bowling where there was a curtain in front of the pins. The manager stood next to the curtain. The employee rolled the ball and could hear the ball hit the pins, but could not see how many she knocked down. The manager said, "a little more to the left." The employee rolled the ball and hit the next set of pins. "A little more to the right," said the manager, and so it continued. As I recall, Blanchard used this story as an example of how managers control the feedback, and that the feedback was usually poor.
The story got me thinking about what would happen if we removed the curtain? Employees would bowl and see the results as it happened. Based on how many pins were down, and where they were, they would adjust their aim and roll another ball. No big surprise here-- this is how the game of bowling works. And if it were a modern bowling alley there would be a scoreboard for each lane that automatically kept track of how everyone was doing. Any bowler could look up and see their score, and where they stood compared to everyone else. This is a sport after all, and we are good at keeping score and sharing results in sports, right?
Here's the kicker: with bowling you don't need a manager. Remove the curtain and show the results and the scores, and the team of players is off to the races. So why don't organizations work this way? Think about it. If we worked this way we could eliminate performance reviews. Now that would be motivating!
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