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Dictators.  Every company has them.  They are the managers that make your life a living hell.  They are the ones that give you superhuman workloads and scoff at your need for food and sleep. They are the ones that pass down their will to you and are disgusted by your need for discussion and consensus.  They have a short temper, a shorter attention span and a practically non-existent tolerance for what they perceive to be ineptitude.  Organizational behaviorists attempt to make dictators sound less menacing by labeling them “Drivers,” but it’s mostly a ploy to avoid being accused of criticizing.

The reason why people have so much trouble dealing with these dictators is because they’re afraid.  Dictators are menacing and sometimes bullying.  It is much easier to build rapport with your coworkers by complaining about a mutually despised boss than to do anything about it.  Because a dictator is also incredibly stubborn, fixing the situation seems like an impossible task.  However, all the fear, all the hesitancy and all the barriers fall away once you get into the dictator’s head.

Managers become dictators when they’re worried about task completion.

It’s not necessarily that dictators don’t care about people; it’s that they care about tasks more.  Dictators are goal driven.  They see goal achievement as the only measure of their “success.”  Once you realize this, it seems logical that dictators get on their pulpit when they are worried about the team’s ability to complete the task to the satisfaction of higher-ups.  As such, everything else—including your feelings—take a back seat.   You can turn Mr. Hyde back into Dr. Jekyll by giving him tangible assurances that everything is on track.  If you are working on schedule and are making progress, provide the dictator with status updates regularly without being asked.  If you are falling behind, give the non-fluffy reasons why you are (i.e. that there is 40 hours of work and 2 days with 24 hours in each to do it in versus you’re tired and overworked).  What you’ll see is that the dictator will become a little more relieved and if he is relieved, he’s not going to ride you.

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It seems like most companies didn’t really worry about contingency plans and such before the 9/11 attacks.  Now, there are small consulting companies on top of small consulting companies that grew up around the business of planning for contingencies.  It’s surprising that it takes a major national catastrophe to get companies thinking about what happens if the office building is no longer there, employees are missing or unavailable but business has to go on.

While major catastrophes are thankfully rare, minor ones happen all the time.  A female employee could go into pre-mature labor, a power-outage could strike your city, a vital employee could give 2 weeks’ notice, or your network could get hacked.  Is your company and/or department prepared for those cases?  The honest truth is that most companies aren’t.  When push comes to shove, you want to be able to say, “Aha! We have Plan B for this.  Let’s go ahead and implement it,” as opposed to, “F*CK!! What the hell do we do now??”

What’s the problem with “crossing the bridge when you get there” and dealing with those issues if and when they come up?  Well, when something unpredictable does happen, most people are not really in a position to think rationally.  Disasters (big and small) have a tendency to cause chaos and indecision, among management inclusive.  A time of great distress may not be the best time to make really important decisions.  Managers are also not the only ones who will be frazzled by calamities.  When something unexpected occurs, one of the initial concerns among the working populous is, “What does this mean for me?”  In a time of distress, the first thing you want to do is to comfort and reassure your employees and the last thing you want to do is laden them with responsibilities that they didn’t see coming. Again, having a plan gives people a sense of security and causes them to react faster if something were to occur.  What you also have to consider is that, depending on the event, the people who know the job best are gone or unavailable, leaving people who need to fill in to struggle.

Any way you slice it, you’re better off putting in a contingency plan when everything is hunky dory and this is how you should proceed:

1. Publicize your intent to make a contingency plan.  Other than the moans and groans of temporary additional effort, I can’t imagine you’ll face any resistance.  Most people understand that all sustainable companies must have one.  Make sure you specify that as the reason when you do go public with the announcement (there are always a few people who will think you’re doing it to see how many employees you can eliminate).
2. Create a “if this person is out/unavailable for short/long periods of time, this person/people will fill in” plan.  Once you’ve thought this through, it’s important to make that list public.  It’s important primarily so that people aren’t surprised and that if and when something happens, they are prepared and can step up quickly.  However, it’s also important because employees could provide valuable feedback on the plan.  If you think I should take over accounting if the accountant goes on leave and I can’t add 2 and 3, it would behoove you to be told this in advance.
3. Begin cross-training immediately.  As soon as you have a rough contingency plan in place, start cross training employees on each others’ functions.  This has three benefits: it teaches employees the job they would be expected to cover in advance, increases the pool of people who can do any particular job, and increases employees’ knowledge and usefulness.
4. Make sure people performing their current primary functions create detailed documentation on their job process (that’s not half-assed).  The documentation should be used as the method of training and the employee being trained should be able to use the documentation to walk through the process without too many head-banging-against-wall questions.

I know — all this is extra administrative effort but look at it this way: if your top 20% of employees were stuck at sea on a boat together, would your company be able to function just as effectively as if they were there?

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There is a common misconception in many firms that you must provide your employees with training relevant only to their current position or function.  While, of course, you want to give your people all the tools they need to excel at their present role (because most of the time the benefit to you outweighs the cost of training), providing them only with current-role development may be shortsighted.

When you provide current-job-specific training, you are creating employees who are silos.  They may become expert in their current job but that will be all they know.  That being said, there are definitely industries and job roles in which this outcome is desired by parties on both sides of the table.  However, in most cases and in most industries, seeing only as far as your nose is a detriment.  To stay competitive and become successful in today’s business world, people have to be both expert in their field and well-rounded in their business as a whole (or alternatively have well-rounded knowledge of more than one field).  The Economic and Social Research Council in the UK has conducted many studies on the topic, and states in a results publication, “This research shows that although professionals, almost by definition, have a detailed knowledge of some specific field, they can only prosper in the modern world if they regard this knowledge as a basis on which to build, not a canonical body of wisdom that will last them for life.”

This is why beyond-present-role training becomes crucial.  However, you, the employer, should not look at providing such training as a favor to your employees.  The primary benefits still go to you:

• Employees who are well versed in more than one aspect of your business can provide more creative solutions.  Once they know how they fit into the bigger picture and they have a holistic understanding of what is important to your business as a whole, they will be more apt to make cost reduction, process acceleration and other suggestions.
• Employees who feel like you are helping develop their career are more likely to stay. In my experience, people will leave dead end jobs.  This is especially true for those with limited experience (such as recent college graduates) because they do not want to do the same thing for the rest of their lives.  Unless they have exposure to other business areas, they will not even be qualified to move within their current firm.  That’s why when you provide true career development training, employees feel like they are actually learning things that make them more valuable and hence are less likely to pass up that opportunity by going elsewhere.

Meaningful career development training can be horizontal or vertical.  Horizontal development means providing training to an employee that increases the breadth of his skills.  If you have a staff full of software engineers programming PHP and Apache, throw in a course of iPhone App development.  Yes, it’s going to be a great time for them, but you never know when your company is going to throw away the Blackberry in lieu of the iPhone and wouldn’t some developers who knew how to work it be useful then?  Development training, in this case, allows for longer term flexibility and responsiveness.  Vertical development means giving your accountants some training in investor relations or tax accounting, so that they can understand how their work impacts the end users.  Maybe one of those accountants, through this training, realizes he is, after all, a people person and is much better at talking to investors than crunching numbers.  Perhaps another will take on a project to revamp the accounting reports to make them more investor-friendly.  Both cases would improve the utilization of your employees’ talents.

Cost is always a concern.  Providing training to people who might soon leave is always a concern. However, as more and more learning happens after the classroom, job development is becoming almost an expectation (particularly in large firms).  There are alternatives to hiring expensive outside consultants to come teach.  A firm can pay for some credits at a local college, rotate people among departments or have employees shadow management for extended periods of time.  As for employees bailing, there are a billion reasons why they might.  With career development training, you can at least eliminate one.

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In speaking with a lot of people who are on their way out of a company, I noticed a pattern.  The breaking point that led many to their ultimate decision to leave was (a) they were not promoted to a management position and (b) they could not understand why someone else was.  Surprisingly, it was the latter that peeved people the most.

The issue here is transparency. There are lots of new and old strategies on how to hire, fire, and promote people, but there’s a common thread among them: a company must have specific and objective criteria that candidates have to meet in order to be promoted.

Having clear, objective, and well publicized criteria is important on a number of levels.  Employees need to, firstly, understand what they’re working towards.  In essence, it becomes a set of goals to achieve.  Secondly, employees need to know how they–and everyone else–will be evaluated, which is something a general policy of “you will be promoted for doing good work” does not provide.  A vague statement like this opens you, as the employer, up to constantly having to justify your promotion decisions, managing discontent from the rest of your employees who feel that the vague criteria allowed you to make a completely arbitrary decision, dealing with attrition that could result in you losing talented and vital employees, and possible legal claims of discrimination.

In fact, the U.S. Court of appeals has made many rulings on discrimination cases that stemmed from companies having overly subjective promotion standards.  In Paul Muller vs. United States Steel Corporation, the court stated that “The law is clear that a plaintiff in a job discrimination case need not prove that the employer had a specific intent to discriminate. It is sufficient that the employer’s conduct produced discriminatory results.” Therefore, even if you, as management, have no desire to show favoritism, if there are vague promotion policies that allow others to exhibit some kind of favoritism, you are still legally liable.  The judges’ decision mentions another case, Rowe vs. General Motors Corp., that was specifically about promotion.  The case was lost by the company because promotion “standards which were determined to be controlling are vague and subjective,” and “there [were] no safeguards in the procedure designed to avert discriminatory practices.”  Obviously, there is a HUGE leap to be made from subjective promotions to discrimination, but I wanted to hammer home the point that discontent bred from both can be serious–on a morale-dropping, practical and legal basis–and there is overwhelming encouragement for a firm to establish objectivity anyways.

The best way to deal with all the above-mentioned issues is to create a rubric that specifies as much as possible by way of what is necessary to get promoted.  Some tips:

• Be as specific as possible in the requirements – “Acquires 10 new clients every quarter” vs “Works diligently to acquire new clients”  The former delineates to your employees what they need to accomplish whereas the latter does not.
• Be reasonable with criteria – If you’re not careful, creating promotion criteria can become like creating a job posting–you list ridiculously impossible requirements and then wonder why no one is applying.  If your employees feel like the criteria is unattainable, they will stop trying altogether.  To keep yourself grounded, think about one or two successful people who hold or held the job and list the attributes or accomplishments that led to their success.
• Check in often so everyone knows where they stand – Have regular discussions with each direct report as to where they are in their requirements for a promotion and what they still need to work on.  This accomplishes two things: it shows your employees that you want to help them in their career development (a sort of “be all you can be”, corporate style), which motivates them to work harder (toward goals they see as tangible) and you are hence promoting the habits that make your company successful (if your requirements list is good).
• Be accountable for your standards – If an employee does meet all the requirements you have set out, you have to promote him/her.  If you toss your criteria out the window even once, you and your list lose credibility and respect immediately.  It’s worse than never having made an objective list.

On that note, criteria NOT to consider though it is still considered in many places:

• How long a person has worked in her current role
• How personable and likable she is (unless maybe she’s in sales…)

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I have been asked by Mark Suster to retract this post, but, after a brief Twitter exchange, I hope he will accept instead my hard edit, including his full paragraph quotes.

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Mark Suster, whose blog and general insights I always find very interesting (and sometimes very entertaining), has officially jumped the shark and, seemingly, I am the only one to have noticed.

In his response to Vivek Wadhwa’s TechCrunch post on whether entrepreneurs are born or made, Mark made a few far-fetched and sometimes contradictory arguments against the allegation that entrepreneurship can be taught. One in particular, however, made me reread it a half dozen times to make sure I actually read what I thought I did:

If you take 2,000 of the world’s top performing companies, only 29 (1.5%) are run by women.  They run only 15 of the Fortune 500.  It’s a fact, women aren’t good at running companies [emphasis mine]. If they were they’d be running more successful companies.  In fact, data proves that white, middle-aged men are the best at running companies because they run the most successful ones.  Of course I don’t believe this argument.  But you can take data to say whatever you want to say by using it out of context.

Let’s acknowledge the possibility that Mark’s tone does not reflect his opinion of women, as he states at the bottom of that paragraph.   The above says, to me, that yes, data would seem to suggest women suck at running companies, regardless of what I believe.   Coming to a random conclusion about such data, however, exhibits opinion (…but that’s just me).  It is also very different than saying data is being used out of context.  Either way, Vivek did not appear to be doing either in his post.  He was simply trying to craft a conclusion to the empirical data he gathered, and I would venture to say he, as well as that data, was not so much arguing for nurture as he was against nature-only.  Akinning that conclusion to the above paragraph is comparing ripe apples to rotting oranges.  (The more logical argument here, made by a commenter, is that correlation between education and entrepreneurship does not imply causation.)

Mark’s first error is to pre-assume only one explanation for results, which, in reality, could have dozens of explanations, and have that one be based on seemingly nothing but existing preconceptions, rather than facts.

Continuing with the example above for fluidity, I will venture to say that there are numerous reasons why there aren’t many women running Fortune 500 companies, many of which are not female-nature-related.  Wadhwa raised many of them in a prior TechCrunch article.  Some that instantly come to mind are:

• Women bowing to social expectations to get married, start a family and raise it.  While it’s not the 1950′s anymore, the construct and gender roles still exist.  Women who put career before family are still looked down upon in many communities.  This shouldn’t be news, but if it is, it’s probably worthwhile to make more female friends.
• Much of getting ahead in big corporate environments comes from “networking” outside of work and many of the locations and environments of those events may not be such where women feel comfortable finding themselves.  Women sucking at golf or not being able to hold their liquor are probably the only nature-related arguments you can make here.
• Fortune 500 companies are just a small sample of the macrocosm of businesses and may not be representative of the managerial landscape at large.
• Many women simply choose not to pursue management or entrepreneurship, not because they know they wouldn’t be good at it but because they’d rather do something else.
• Pre-conceived notions about women’s abilities to run companies causing a selection bias against women….(I hope you see what I did there)

What is implied is that if it were nurture [I think he meant "nature"?] then your parents would be great entrepreneurs.  Just like the way that all sports stars and all rock stars have famous parents, right?  This argument is flawed.  First, your parents may have had the DNA characteristics to be a successful entrepreneur but life’s circumstances might not have led them to those careers.  Or maybe your parents had the right DNA but the 10,000 hours weren’t there.  PC’s weren’t there.  The Internet wasn’t there.  So they chose other careers. Or maybe your parents didn’t have the DNA but you did.  Kind of like a guy who can hit a 98 mile-per-hour fastball might have had a dad who couldn’t.  Or … maybe entrepreneurship is nurture and not nature.  Maybe I’m wrong.  But this argument, wrapped in “data” is false evidence and is flawed.  What your parents did does not feature in the argument about whether entrepreneurs are born or made.