Business 101: Doing the Diving Catch

I am so jealous of Scott Adams. For those who don't recognize the name, he's the cartoonist that does Dilbert. I am jealous because it is so easy to tap into the ironic subject material in any large company. There are so many people working hard to make his job so easy.

I was with a small company that was bought by a large company. While the transition was still new, I had the luck to be selected by the Human Resources group as part of a focus group of employees from throughout the company. You know, one of those internal interview sessions that HR groups do to justify their existence to the executives. With the usual amount of filtering of the information into what the executives want to hear... Anyways, there was one guy in the group who was more brash then the rest. He'd been through it before. He wanted to point out that in the normal operation of the company, employees who were part of successful projects were overlooked while to be successful you needed to "do the diving catch".

So what did he mean by "do the diving catch"?

The company used MBOs to measure progress. MBOs = Management By Objective. Every manager and employee was committed to a list of objectives to be completed by specific dates. Objectives often had dependencies on others. Your part of a project might have to wait for someone else's completion or availability. Being a company with "above average" employees, the project schedules were always aggressive. So as schedules slipped from whatever reason, yours became even more challenging. Now the crux of "becoming overlooked"; if you worked hard and met your objectives on time, that was what was expected and you were rewarded with more aggressive objectives. Now for the "diving catch"; if a project got into trouble, especially a "key" project, there was great opportunity in "recovering". By doing the "diving catch" and working hard to rescue a project, the rewards were much, much better.

So, if you were meeting your objectives you would rarely enjoy much fanfare or exceptional raises. The scramblers who were getting all the visibility were those who were catching up, motivated with bonuses, special awards, special recognition and ended up getting better reviews. Projects that were well planned, coordinated and executed got congratulated. But a project that ran into trouble (and it was amazing how adept some managers were at managing their problems so they weren't to blame) was a gold mine. Ironically, managers were able to get resources and rewards for their people that couldn't have been justified before-hand... They are often what I called vampire projects. Held to their objectives they would die, so they survive by sucking the resources and talent from other schedules and teams...

There were employees who thrived this way. I went on to experience much of this first hand ... Scott, are you listening?