Management is policy implementation

Jul 12, 2022

Many senior managers think they are in the business of making decisions. A problem arises, and our swashbuckling hero swoops in to assess options and pick the unambiguously “correct” one. Our hero is often happy in this situation: my team needs me! My judgment is valuable!

To be fair, managerial guidance is essential, especially when dealing with thorny problems: Should we expand geographically? Should we hire this person? How many pizzas should we order for the team offsite?

But these decisions are typically downstream from some higher-level policy — either stated or unstated — that shapes corporate behavior. More than anything, it is the implementation of these policies that is the real job of the manager.

Take, for example, one of the questions we asked: Should we hire this person?

In isolation, this seems like a one-off evaluation of a specific candidate. It either will or won’t work out. What policies could possibly be guiding the decision?

A sample: Does everyone on the interview panel need to greenlight someone, or can a few firmly held opinions rule the day? How important is hiring speed — do peers and recruiters get antsy when a job is open too long? Are you willing to hire people from nontraditional backgrounds, or does your company demand “on-paper” impressiveness (not that they’d admit it)? If the former, is your company even a place where someone without formal credentials can thrive, or will that person’s engagement with peers and customers hold them back? Are you willing to move on from hires that don’t pan out, or are you likely to hang on to people forever?

The answers are themselves downstream from a manager’s views on the importance of equity, fairness, velocity, risk-taking, and consensus, among many other considerations.

Unlike the individual decisions that follow, policies are rarely “right” or “wrong.” They are a bundle of pros and cons, and, as a manager, it’s critical to keep both in mind. Too often, I see managers who only see the good in their policies and ignore trade-offs, or worse, managers who think they can create “perfect” policies with an excessively “smart” (read: complicated) policy implementation.

To make this more concrete, let’s consider an example from government, whose practitioners are more likely to think in policy terms.

When implementing a welfare state, governments usually weigh two competing goals: (1) Making sure that everyone who needs help gets it and (2) Preventing people who don’t need it from abusing the system.

It’s impossible to design a system that fully accomplishes both, so policymakers choose: We’ll require X amount of paperwork, Y number of in-person visits, and place Z restrictions on how and where aid can be spent. The more X, Y, and Z policymakers require, the more society says that preventing abuse is more important than getting help to those who need it.

Of course, we would never frame it in such harsh terms, but that’s why explicit policy design is so crucial. We must contend with our actual values, not our perceived ones. (I won’t expand on whether our welfare state lives up to our values, but if you’re interested in diving deeper, this from Annie Lowry is excellent.)

As it goes in government, so it goes in business.

Consider a common desire of CEOs: “I want us to be bolder! I want us to take Bigger Swings(TM)! We need to be risk-taking and entrepreneurial!”

A noble goal, to be sure, but how many CEOs deliberately implement a culture and accompanying policies that support risk-taking? Let’s run through a checklist of what they might consider:

How hard is it to secure resources for a new initiative?
How much consensus does your company require before launching something new?
How long will you wait for results?
If it’s not working, will you kill it, or will it march on in zombie form forever, sucking up morale and resources?
And, perhaps most importantly, how are people who work on risky ventures rewarded (or not) when they fail? I’ve seen companies “celebrate failure!” by buying pizzas for teams that are being disbanded, but then, mysteriously, the individuals on that team are passed up when it comes time for promotion. (It’s almost like the pizzas communicated nothing about the company’s unstated values!)

The answers to these questions, and many related ones, determine whether yours is a culture of genuine risk-taking or incremental progress. (I should note: Neither is superior — it depends on your business, industry, and company stage.) If the stated goal is “risk-taking,” but you require X amount of paperwork, Y number of meetings, and Z restrictions on how quickly a team can move, then it might not be enough to make X, Y, and Z “better”: you may need to scale them back or even ax them to signal that you’re serious.

The real danger emerges when managers think they can avoid trade-offs — that some magic implementation of policy and culture results in all of the good and none of the bad.

Since I’m a Data Scientist, I’ll represent this graphically.

In general, this is how we should think about policy implementation:

And, sure, it’s possible that by hiring better people, adding more resources, cleaning up our operations, and, yes, designing better processes, we can do this:

But managers frequently think they can do this:

This kind of “ideal state thinking” pops up everywhere. Once you see it, you can’t un-see it (sorry). But I’ve found that it emerges with special intensity during discussions of organizational design.

Managers start with a simple template (e.g., organizing by functional area) and then layer on complexities: “Oh, well, this person needs to talk to this person, so let’s add a dotted line. And these two teams are working on similar areas — maybe they don’t need to merge, but should they do quarterly planning together? Oh, also, we don’t have enough designers to go around. Maybe each one should partner with multiple cross-functional teams? How annoying will that get for everyone? Ah, and how could we forget? This person is an up-and-comer. We should give them a cool opportunity…”

Suddenly, what began as a clear organization chart that privileged one set of concerns — functional excellence, mentorship, career growth, etc. — can become Frankenstein’s monster.

The insidious thing about this trap is that managers often can’t see how destructive it is. When you operate at a high enough altitude, it’s easy to overlook the hidden costs of complexity. But make no mistake: Complexity kills. It creates ambiguity and slows execution. It ensures that your policies mean all things to all people and result in neither Good Thing A nor Good Thing B — just confusion over what you’re willing to sacrifice when trade-offs must be made, as they always must.