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Dunbar's Number Works at Work
“If you wait for people to come to you you’ll only get small problems. You must go and find them. The big problems are where people don’t realize they have them in the first place.” - W. Edwards Deming.
In small organizations it's easy to manage people, enforce rules, and make sure your vision is coming to life while remaining in compliance with the law. As your organization gets bigger, even the best of intentions can’t control everything at all times. When an organization gets over about 100 people, roughly the number of people one can maintain stable social relationships according to British anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, a manager starts to lose control. Dunbar goes further to say that as organizations grow beyond that number, more restrictive rules need to be put in place to manage. I’ve noticed in districts where I’ve worked, the bigger the district, the more restrictive the labor contracts are. Smaller districts operate on a more personal level, where people are more likely to know each other well, have closer relationships, and are able to get things done without as much bureaucracy.
Abstraction can explain at least part of Dunbar’s number. Once an organization goes beyond the number of people a manager can have relationships with, people become numbers. Abstraction is the reason you use chips in a casino rather than cash. The chip is just a representation of cash and won’t be valued as much. If you sat at the blackjack table with your last $20, you’d be more reluctant that you’d be with $200 in chips. The money is more valuable than its representation, abstraction. At work, abstraction works the same way. Managing 90 teachers at a school site is very different from managing 3,000 teachers from the district office. At the point that abstraction sets in at work we lean into metrics, pay less attention to the impact our decisions have on individuals, spend less time managing the managers, and leave ourselves exposed to expensive and embarrassing liability.
Jamelia Fairley and Ashley Reddick are named on behalf of about 5,000 women from over 100 McDonald’s restaurants. These women are claiming that their “extensive illegal harassment went ignored by management.” Specifically Fairley says that colleagues would tell her she had a “fat ass” and that they would “take her on a ride”. Also, one colleague would pull her to his groin area and rub his genitals on her. Reddick claims that a colleague would rub his groin area against her and touch her thighs, one day he held his phone to her face and showed her a picture of his genitals. According to the complaint, whistleblowers would have their hours reduced or terminated. If the complaint was addressed, the harassors would be transferred to other stores where they would have access to other victims.
According to a company statement, “McDonald’s has always been committed to ensuring that our employees are able to work in an envoronment that is free from all forms of discrimination and harassment.” I am sure they believe that and would like to make that a reality, however Dunbar’s number would say that McDonald’s executives can’t manage store managers' commitment or conduct. McDonalds has 1,400 stores, and 750,000 employees, even if the attorney who wrote that statement believed it in his heart, he couldn’t personally insure safety for all McDonald’s employees. We see similar employee complaints and corporate statements all over the business world including Bank of America, Amazon, Police Departments, and even the government.
There is reason for hope. Abstraction does not have to poison your organizational culture. The answer is also in Dunbar’s number. The solution requires that leaders talk to direct reports, emphasize what is important, and direct them to talk to their direct reports emphasizing the same values. Then, leaders do down the chain of command meeting with people and asking them if they are clear on those values. Too often, the only value that is communicated down the chain of command is the bottom line, profit reports, and other metrics related to money, rarely the people. What is communicated are organizational values placing money and metrics over people. People problems are usually dealt with as they arrive, essentially, putting out fires. Many of you only see or even think about sexual harassment, or mandated reporting when you fill out the required forms or view the annual video. Misbehavers and hide in abstraction too. Because there is so much going on, keeping management and executives busy, their behavior usually goes unnoticed especially if the company or store is doing well financially.
Management by walking around has roots in the 1970’s with the military, and Hewlett-Packard. Toyota has a practice called a “gemba walk”, where executives and leaders wander around plants checking in with employees, gauging satisfaction and challenges. This walking around, or being present is known to improve morale, connect leaders with people on the front line, and opens lines of communication and more informed leaders. I have been in way too many meetings where leaders talk in detail about people they have not met or talked to. Instead, they quote the people who they like or who are comfortable talking to them. This practice lends itself to biased and uninformed decisions and poor leadership.
Having people problems does not mean you are a bad organization, it's part of the deal when you bring large groups of people together. Conflict is unavoidable, so is misbehavior. When it happens, deal with it. The bigger the organization, the more important it is that you walk around and that you make it part of the routines of the other leaders. Your presence and your emphasis on what is important is the only way to make sure that your message and values are communicated throughout the organization. Former Cleveland Mayor, Carl Stokes, once said, “My style will be management by being on the street, management by walking around. Third persons won’t have to tell me what’s going on in our city. I’ll hear it, I’ll see it, I’ll touch it myself.” Having a big organization isn’t bad, neither is facing problems, but as you grow so does the responsibility to communicate your values. Walk around and communicate your message and you will SOAR!
William A. Brown
April 19, 2020
https://news.yahoo.com/us-mcdonalds-workers-file-500m-212748119.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mcdonald-s-corp-lawsuit-idUSKBN1XV1WE
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