Box-Ticking: The Management Strategy That’s Killing your Productivity
Just what we need, another opinion about management. Well, mine is likely no better than anyone else’s, and since everyone is entitled to one, here it is.
There are lots of well documented management styles, and if you’re here, you’ve undoubtedly already studied them and assessed your own, so we’re not going to talk about those at all. Instead we’re going to discuss a style of management that no manager will ever willingly claim they subscribe to, yet a troubling number do, be it willingly or without realizing it. That management style is:
Box-Ticking
“Box-Ticking” is a management style that prioritizes the ticking-of-boxes provided to a manager by their manager to be prioritized over everything else, even the measurable, functional achievement of real business and technological goals. The impact of the latter, of course, is measurable benefit to the business, resulting in increased revenue, decreased cost or both. The the impact of the former is measurable only in the ascending of the rungs of the corporate ladder by the box-ticking automatons. So, what are the characteristics of a Box-Ticker? Read on.
Box-Ticker Goals
The goal of a Box-Ticker, clearly stated, is: The ruthless pursuit of their own self-interest, based on the interest of their immediate superior. This means that you, my hapless friend, will, in turn, be judged not on your objective achievements and their impact on the company, but on your ability to support the ticking of said boxes, regardless of their effect on or relevance to whatever you might be in the business of building. Box-ticking culture also generally involves pervasive monitoring of employees, reduction of performance into often arbitrary data-points, and intense micro-management in pursuit of the ticking of said boxes.
Now, in the case where the boxes themselves support actual achievement, which results in demonstrable benefit to the team, product, or business — all’s well. The problem here is that development teams don’t want or need a prescriptive set of directives to follow in order to achieve success. Great development teams are self-organizing, self-improving and evolutionary. Over time they get better because of the agency they have to self-govern. When box-ticking culture seeks to remove that agency, teams can only ever be as good as the boxes being ticked, and will never realize their full potential.
Box-ticking often also pushes its way into your goal setting exercises, but your employees’ personal and team goals shouldn’t be constrained to any set of directives from a management level that is wildly out of touch with the actual process of development. Even if your job becomes, sadly, about ticking those boxes, there’s a difference between your goals, and your job.
High quality engineering leadership, by comparison, sets broad expectations, and leaves the details meeting those expectations up to the people closest to the development process itself, with the deepest subject matter expertise.
The Circularity of Box-Ticking
Here’s the insidious part of the box-ticking culture… it’s self-reinforcing. Box-Tickers naturally seek out and prefer other tickers of boxes, especially in positions of any responsibility. This means that if you’re encountering a Box-Ticker in your management hierarchy for the first time, I’ve got bad news for you: He or she is just the tip of the iceberg. Box-Ticking is a top-down management strategy, and all the boxes are inherited from above. That means that, very likely, someone in the distant clouds of the leadership chain has begun a box-ticking regime that only eventually trickled down to you. But depending on your position, it probably doesn’t matter… the real decision you have to make is
What To Do When You Work for Box-Ticker
Manage Up
There’s no silver bullet here, but many experts recommend a strategy of managing UP. “Managing up” is a strategy where you try to act in both yours and your boss’s best interest. With box-tickers, though, this only works if your goals are the same — namely ticking boxes, and getting promoted. But for many high-performing contributors and managers, if performance becomes solely based on your willingness to do whatever is necessary for your boss to get promoted, your quality of work-life and pride in your job is going to plummet.
Spin
One answer is to spin: that is, describe your actual, functional achievements and goals in terms of the boxes. This is an exercise in reverse-illusion, where you take the corporate buzzword directives and employ them to frame your achievements. Look at the things that are important for you, your team, and your products, and then look for the closest match to the boxes you’re given. Luckily, corporate box-ticking is usually so generic as to have no actual meaning (see: Synergy, Breaking down Silos, Vertical Integration, etc). When you actually build things or deliver stuff or otherwise add tangible, demonstrable value, I guarantee it can be retrofitted into some square, meaningless peg.
Leave
When a box-ticking regime comes into power, within a year a pattern emerges: people leave. Sorry it had to come to this, but managing up can be demoralizing, and often futile, and spinning everything you need to do for products and features get out the door on time (in addition to the actual work of getting products and features out the door on time) can quickly become exhausting. It’s also very possible that your box-ticking boss is just a symptom of a much bigger problem, and that can be a dead-end for a go-getter like you. Bad bosses are the number one reason people quit their jobs. So I hate to have to tell you this, but that box-ticking new boss of yours might just be a sign that it’s time to take a hard look at the door.
The bureaucratic, rule-based micromanagement of box-ticking can be hard to deal with, especially if you loved your job before the boxes fell out of the sky. But there is hope: There are plenty of great bosses out there that know what they’re doing and need people who do too. Find one of them, and leave the boxes on the curb.