By Roy Snell
roy.snell@corporatecompliance.org
I am really tired of trite sayings made up by people who are trying to make a buck. My favorite was from years ago, when I was working in administration at Mayo. We had a speaker who wrote a book titled something like, “If It Ain’t Broke, Break It”. Well, the “Management Program of the Month” people are back at it, with another trite, hot-selling titles like, “Disruptive Management”.
Let me explain something: If something is not broken, you should not break it. If something is working, you should not disrupt it. You should fix things that are broken and disrupt things that are not working.
In this country, we have too much management and too many meetings. We need to give more people responsibility, accountability, and authority for their area and then we need to get out of their way. What we don’t need is people five layers up having nothing better to do than to micromanage, break, disrupt, or otherwise change things five layers down. Five layers is so far removed from what those people know, that chances are slim they even know what they are changing things from or to.
There are people who will change something just because they “can think of another way.” And there are people who “can think of another way” but who don’t bother to check if that thing has been changed five times in the last five years because five other people already “could think of another way.” These people need to ask themselves first, “Will the gains made by my change be offset by the efforts spent making the change?” But even if a change can be justified because it will make something 5 or 10 or 20% better, the next question needs to be, “Will taking time to completely re-do something bring more benefit than using that time to do something that is not currently being done?” Or, in other words, “Is the 20% gain we will get from changing something that is kind of working be greater than the 100% gain we will get from tackling something that is not working at all?”
Monitor, audit, and check in on the people and areas you are responsible for. Look at their results on an aggregate level. If the results are good, go away and do something else. If the results are bad, then think about breaking, changing, or disrupting. But changing, breaking, or disrupting just for the sake of change is simply illogical.
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Good advice for sure.
I especially like the:
“Monitor, audit, and check in on the people and areas you are responsible for…” The reason being is that as I’ve mentioned throughout social media sites and blogs…auditing and monitoring, in a general sense is often a non existent process or task in compliance programs. Glad to see it mentioned here.
This is also true among compliance professionals when they learn how to use new technology such as Excel to support their work. For example, there are many ways to get the correct answer using the variety of functions that are available in Excel. What I find equally frustrating is when some “expert” comes along and tells someone (who by the way is getting the right answer) that his or her approach is wrong and essentially they need to “break” the formula so that they can fix it with a better one.
What???
I like the idea that if I have something that works and is acceptable (what ever “acceptable” may mean)…then I don’t have to rework it for the sake of reworking it since in the end I still have the same results. What’s the point?
Thanks for sharing, Roy!
Fundamental rule of compliance programs and compliance officers: first, do no harm. Our role is to be advisors and subject matter experts to our organization’s leadership. We will not have long-term success if we break what isn’t broken so we can remake the world in our own image.
I agree. What a distraction from what you point out as really needing attention – things that are broken or not working. Frustrating – definitely!
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