The Lumbergh Principle - You have to mean it

by Bobby Robbins

Despite a now insignificant pre-Y2K (Year 2000) computer software plot and laughable late-90’s fashion, the 1999 cult movie classic Office Space still matters in today’s workplace -- in your office space.  The social commentary on display through caricatures of the American workforce, such as the “Upper Management” character Bill Lumbergh, still stings.  People still laugh at this movie because bosses and companies still do the very things that this movie makes fun of.           

If you have never seen Office Space, the name Lumbergh might not mean anything to you.  If you have seen the movie, the video clip below may just inspire a revision of your weekend entertainment plans.  Either way, the clip should serve as a decent framework for understanding what has come to be known as the Lumbergh Principle.  

Actor Gary Cole portrays the perfect disingenuous, high achieving authority figure -- the type that would have been likely shot in the back by his own soldiers in a time of war, yet manages to ascend into Senior Management in environments with less plausible deniability.  In this instance, Corporate Vice President Bill Lumbergh pours on the friendly.    

This is not, however, what our “Best Boss” research sample of **20,000** employees meant when they described the best boss they had ever had as -- being friendly.  

We instinctively know that a “Best Boss” is a friendly boss.  As children and employees, we have seen sufficient successful parental and supervisory applications of friendliness used to help the one with authority to get results from the efforts of others that lack authority.  Certainly the pendulum of leadership history is heavy on the side of heavy handedness, but the modern workplace is different.  Given the choice of a friendly boss or an unfriendly one, both the shiny shoes in the corporate tower and the dirty boots on the shop floor have come to prefer the friendly approach.

The Bill Lumberghs of the world also recognize the obvious correlation between Friendliness, Best Boss Status, and Desirable Results.  So, they have done what only makes sense -- pretend to be friendly. 

The problem is that friendly can’t be faked.  It can be, but not with “Desirable Results” as the predictable outcome.   

The Lumbergh Principle defined -- Friendly doesn’t work, if you don’t mean it

The heart of the issue is that employees and kids alike can tell if you mean it.

Advice for Accidental Lumberghs   

1.)  Knowing that you can’t fake friendly, don’t try.  Be yourself.    

2.)  It is possible that your employees think of you as a walking-talking Lumbergh Doll and all you are really doing is innocently imitating an unfortunate model from your past.  Open your eyes and align yourself instead with the basic tenets of Best Boss Friendliness:

• Friendly is not about hiding behind friendly words.  It means not being Antagonistic or Hostile.    
• Friendly is not about forsaking performance to be nice.  It means showing concern for things that concern others and listening to help deal with those concerns.
• Friendly is not about being buddies.  It means creating a relationship that helps individuals and teams share their concerns and ideas while working to accomplish their agreed upon objectives.   

3.)  Take the time to understand some of the potential consequences of a Lumbergh-esque style:

• Subordinate Resentment
• Disengagement from Team Goals
• Sabotage (remember that the subordinate characters in Office Space go on to embezzle millions and even burn down the office, even as the audience roots for them to get away with it.)
• The loss of genuine access to the hearts and minds of employees when in a position to actually work with them to “Find a Fix” for their concerns and the concerns of the team.   

4.)  Talk with someone away from work or away from home about why you are having trouble shedding your Lumbergh skin.  Feeling the need to fake friendly or the genuine lack of concern for others may indicate there is an opportunity to dig deeper into your own personal context and maybe improve more than just performance metrics.  

      

Before you discount this concept as something only valuable for the “shiny shoe”, white-collar crowd, watch this out-of-the-cubicle take on the same approach.  Lumbergh’s cousin, the Drilling Rig Safety Man, stands even less a chance of improving performance with this strategy.   

CLICK to WATCH Charm School Video

Video Production Note -- **The script direction said to think Eddie Haskell from Leave it to Beaver, but unexpectedly - Lumbergh showed up.  Did you catch it?  Great.

Your Culture Gap is Showing

The Gap between your Formal and Informal Cultures is as simple as 'Follow the Leader'

by Michael Allen

Companies often express frustration that their operations fail to live up to the standards set forth for itself.  These companies are essentially describing gaps between their formal (company standard) and informal (what actually happens) cultures.  While many factors contribute to this gap, such as communication, size, number of locations and hiring practices, maybe the single most prevalent force in driving informal culture is the behavior of front line managers and supervisors. 

One important characteristics of a “Best Boss” is leading by example.  On the surface, this seems like a straightforward and common characteristic of many bosses, but let’s look deeper.  How does the significance of this characteristic extend beyond just the personal esteem in which we hold the boss to the point that it actually impacts the success of the entire organization?  

A workplace is an extremely complex and dynamic organism and the workers themselves will only act in ways that make sense to them in the moment.  If the actions of supervisors suggest that certain behaviors are acceptable, even if they fly in the face of company policy, the employees will be prompted to act in the same manner as their leader.  Even worse, if the boss is allowed to pick and choose which rules to follow, he or she is giving unspoken permission for others to do the same.

Let’s look at a specific example.  There is a manufacturing company that has very high safety standards, including the proper use of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment).  The plant manager is well known to show up on the manufacturing floor wearing his Nike training shoes and a hat of his favorite football team.  While he may try to justify not wearing PPE in his own mind, what he fails to recognize is the precedent he is setting for the workforce.  After all, if the boss can wear his tennis shoes on the plant floor, why can’t the others?  Not only is he not modeling the proper standard, he has now set the precedent that the standards themselves are simply suggestions and not to be taken seriously.  

Some of you may be asking yourself, “but what if I make a simple mistake and now I’m leading the entire team down the wrong road?”  There is actually no better time to demonstrate the characteristic of leading by example than when you make a mistake.  Simply stating your mistake and the steps that you are going to take to rectify the situation shows that you do in fact care about the standards of the company, and most importantly, that you are willing to hold yourself accountable to the standards.  The resulting impact on informal culture is that the formal culture will be seen as worthy of being embraced and that everyone is able - especially leaders - and prepared to redirect and be redirected for performance that doesn't match the desired culture.  

We won’t go into detail in this post about what leaders do to redirect bad performance, in themselves or others, but you can click here to read an archived newsletter on that topic.

Can you work incident free without the use of punishment?

by Michael Allen

I was speaking recently to a group of mid-level safety professionals about redirecting unwanted behaviors and making change within individual and systemic safety systems.  I had one participant who was particularly passionate about his views on changing the behaviors of workers.  According to him, one cannot be expected to change behavior or work incident free without at least threatening the use of punitive actions.  In his own words, “you cannot expect them to work safely if you can’t punish them for not working safely.”  He was also quite vocal in his assertion that it is of little use to determine which contextual factors are driving an unsafe behavior.  Again quoting him, “why do I need to know why they did it unsafely?  If they can’t get it done, find somebody that can.”  

What an Idiot!

I meet managers like this from time-to-time and I’m immediately driven to wonder what it must be like to work for such a person.  How could a person like this have risen in the ranks of his corporate structure?  How could such an idiot...oh,wait.  Am I not making the same mistakes that I now, silently scold him for?  You see, when people do things that we see as evil, stupid, or just plain wrong, there are two incredibly common and powerful principles at play.  The first principle is called the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) and, if allowed to take over one’s thought process, it will make a tyrant out of the most pleasant of us.  The FAE says that when we see people do things that we believe to be undesirable, we attribute it to them as being flawed in some way or to them having bad intentions.  They are stupid, evil, heartless, or just plain incompetent.  If we assume these traits to be the driving factor of an unsafe act and we have organizational power, we will likely move to punish this bad actor for their evil doings.  After all, somebody so (insert evil adjective here) deserves to be punished.  The truth is that most people are good and decent people who just want to do a good job.  

Context Matters

This leads us to our second important principle, Local Rationality.  Local Rationality says that when good and decent people do things that are unsafe or break policies or rules, they usually do it without any ill-intent.  In fact, because of their own personal context, they do it because it makes sense to them to do it that way; hence the term “local rationality”.  As a matter of fact, had you or I been in their situation, given the exact same context, chances are we would have done the same thing.  It isn’t motive that normally needs to be changed, it’s context.  

With this knowledge, let’s look back at the two questions from our Safety Manager.  

1. “How can I be expected to change behavior or work incident free, without threatening to to punish the wrong-doers?” and 
2. “Why do I need to know why they did it unsafely?  If they can’t get it done, find somebody that can.”  

Once we understand that, in general, people don’t knowingly and blatantly do unsafe things or break rules, rather that they do it because of a possibly flawed work system, e.g. improper equipment, pressure from others, lack of training, etc., then we have the ability to calmly have a conversation to determine why they did what they did.  In other words, we determine the context that drove the person to rush, cut corners, use improper tools, etc.  Once we know why they did it, we then have a chance of creating lasting change by changing the contextual factors that led to the unsafe act.  

Your key take-aways: 

1. When you see what you think is a pile of stupidity, be curious as to where it came from.  Otherwise, you may find yourself stepping in it yourself.
2. Maybe it wasn’t stupidity at all.  Maybe it was just the by-product of the context in which they work.  Find a fix together and you may both come out smelling like roses.