Want your best and brightest to flee? Want rumors and grumbling at all-time highs? Want lower productivity and increased sick time and stress leaves?
1) Use bloated, imprecise language to make sure your business goals and strategies remain a secret to your employees, suppliers and clients. See The Gobbledegook Manifesto, and do the reverse of what’s suggested.
2) Demand regular, lengthy meetings for every department, work unit and project team. have lengthy regular meetings that repeat many of the same things that have no relevance to individual employees. Provide no training, mentoring or reinforcement of effective meeting techniques. Avoid effective meetings by not referring to Manager Tools.
4) Assign credit for major accomplishments to one executive. Explore opportunities for this corporate leader to be profiled in major publications, explaining how their go-go management style single-handedly resulted in a new product launch. Make sure employees from these projects get a copy of the media coverage, with a memo reinforcing the executive’s brilliant leadership.
5) Announce a new way of doing things every six months, tied to a management trend the human resources manager or the COO saw at a conference. Hire expensive outside consultants to “drive change” into the organization. This works best if employees can see the consultants trade in their old cars for Hummers and BMW convertibles partway through the change process. If you can’t decide on a bold new change initiative, just pick one from the list at random.
6) Make a big show of management’s openness, transparency and trustworthiness at a company-wide Trust Exercise. Next week, introduce efficiency measures that remove senior management meeting records from the intranet.
7) Show that your organization “gets” social media by launching a CEO podcast, as a companion to their dormant blog. Post the first one at a launch event. Post the second one three months later. Don’t post a third one.
8) Live the corporate values and walk the talk, but reward managers who cut corners and undercut other parts of the organization.
9) Systematize employee recognition, setting quotas for praise. Model the desired behavior by praising work units that weren’t involved in a project. Encourage Management by Walking Around, in which high-level managers dispense recognition randomly.
