Saturday, January 28, 2023
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Recent
  • Business
  • Economy
  • Investing
  • Markets
  • Personal Finance
  • Retirement
  • Tech
  • Startups
  • Insurance
  • Market Research
  • Crypto
  • Home
  • Recent
  • Business
  • Economy
  • Investing
  • Markets
  • Personal Finance
  • Retirement
  • Tech
  • Startups
  • Insurance
  • Market Research
  • Crypto
No Result
View All Result
Home Startups

Zuckerberg, Musk and how to mitigate bad executive decisions

Updates Finance by Updates Finance
July 15, 2022
in Startups
0
74
SHARES
1.2k
VIEWS
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter


You might also like

Atomos tows a $16M load of funding to create tugboats in space • TechCrunch

Traits of an Entrepreneur | StartupNation

Google Forms cheat sheet: How to get started

Top executives sometimes make stupid decisions. The goal of any support group is either to help prevent those decisions, or to quickly point to the adverse impacts to the decisions so they can be reversed before causing terminal damage to a company.  You can’t do either without solid — and often real-time — metrics because you’re seldom brought in before a bad decision has been made.

After the fact, you must instead create and present a compelling argument to limit the damage.

My bad approach to a problem

Years ago, when I worked for IBM, I was given the chance to meet with the head of my division and speak candidly. The rule was I could not be held accountable for anything I said. (I expect that policy was revisited after my meeting, because the first words out of my mouth were: “Are you a complete idiot?”) I had just joined the Internal Audit division, but before that I was running sales compensation — and I have a degree in a related field. So I knew how commissions worked, and knew the division head had just effectively killed the division. 

What did he do? He took the sales compensation program and inverted it. Instead of the low, fixed salary and high commission setup that had many sales reps earning seven figures, he wanted a high salary/low commission model. The change prompted all the top sales people to quit. Revenues dropped by a whopping two-thirds, putting the division deep into the red and costing him his job.

The issue: execs who don’t understand motivation and productivity

It amazes me how many top executives don’t understand the tools that are used to motivate and attract employees. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that he was unhappy with employee performance, so he was going to change the performance metrics mid-year and force out the bottom performers. He may have instead effectively told all Facebook employees to find jobs at other companies. Zuckerberg isn’t alone in doing stupid things. Elon Musk’s recent comments about Twitter’s employees have led to resignations at that company, and his comments about working from home at Tesla are undoubtedly doing the same thing there.

Reminder: this is occurring in what remains a very tight job market. 

Part of the job of any staff group (IT is a staff organization) is to help keep top executives like Zuckerberg and Musk from making stupid decisions that could damage the company. That’s where employee metrics come in; the ability to survey and get a bead on employees is critical to potentially reversing a bad decision before the outcome is unrecoverable. Granted, neither Musk nor Zuckerberg seem able to admit mistakes, let alone use metrics to avoid them, and both are known to be vindictive. (That’s something Sheryl Sandberg seems to be learning at the moment.) So the presentation of metrics alone might problematic and reason enough to avoid working for either man. The response to an internal memo by employees at SpaceX likely has key people thinking about leaving that relatively successful company as well.

Across the tech industry, there are major employee shortages at the moment, so driving employees to leave seems ill advised. With the right employee metrics — watching for things like increased LinkedIn or Glassdoor searches, longer lunches or time off during the day, or union recruitment — a corporate leader can re-calibrate messaging and determine whether that messaging is mitigating the problem. (Metrics can also let you know that maybe you should consider a company that is more supportive of its employees and isn’t suffering from off-the-rails executives.)

Lessons learned?

Mucking around with compensation and perks is something executives seem to do way too often, given most have no understanding of how these things relate to productivity. Musk and Zuckerberg are hardly alone in mistreating workers, but if employees are adequately monitored, at least you can get figure out how bad the problem is before a company becomes non-viable. And you can use that information to potentially mitigate or reverse what those at the top of the food chain are doing.

In the end, we all work in a numbers business. It should be unacceptable not to use data to ensure the care, feeding, and especially the loyalt, of the employees critical to success. When senior executives misbehave, it’s up to those who understand the real issues and can get metrics to convince them to reverse a bad decision.

Copyright © 2022 IDG Communications, Inc.



Source link

Tags: baddecisionsexecutivemitigateMuskZuckerberg
Share30Tweet19
Updates Finance

Updates Finance

Recommended For You

Atomos tows a $16M load of funding to create tugboats in space • TechCrunch

by Updates Finance
January 27, 2023
0

You may not have known that space needs tugboats, but now you do — and Atomos Space just closed a $16.2 million Series A investment, which will enable...

Read more

Traits of an Entrepreneur | StartupNation

by Updates Finance
January 27, 2023
0

Anne MacRae has been in the factoring, trade financing and asset based lending industry since 2006 and​ is currently the Vice President of Business Development with Express Business...

Read more

Google Forms cheat sheet: How to get started

by Updates Finance
January 27, 2023
0

Need to make a quiz, survey, registration form, order form, or other web page that gathers feedback from co-workers, customers, or others? You can design and deploy one...

Read more

Berlin-based design platform Kittl raises $11.6M Series A to take on Adobe and Canva • TechCrunch

by Updates Finance
January 26, 2023
0

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Did you know you can...

Read more

Morgan Stanley fines some employees $1M for WhatsApp, iMessage use

by Updates Finance
January 26, 2023
0

Investment banking firm Morgan Stanley has punished some of its employees with fines that topped more than $1 million for breaching compliance rules by using WhatsApp and iMessage...

Read more
Next Post

What’s Russell Peters doing now? Investing, and it’s a laugh

Related News

Inheritance tax ‘no longer just for rich’ as more families face six-figure death duty

August 20, 2022

Infosys Q2 results: Profit rises 11% to Rs 6,021 cr; board okays Rs 9,300 cr share buyback

October 13, 2022

UK nurses vote to strike over pay

November 9, 2022

Browse by Category

  • Business
  • Cryptocurrency
  • Economy
  • Insurance
  • Investing
  • Latest updates
  • Market Research
  • Markets
  • Personal Finance
  • Retirement
  • Startups
  • Technology

Get the latest Financial news on updatesfinance.com. Business news, Economy news, Investing news, Personal Finance and more.

CATEGORIES

  • Business
  • Cryptocurrency
  • Economy
  • Insurance
  • Investing
  • Latest updates
  • Market Research
  • Markets
  • Personal Finance
  • Retirement
  • Startups
  • Technology

Recent News

  • Video shows Memphis police beating of Tyre Nichols
  • Nestle to invest $100 million in Colombia, says Colombia president By Reuters

Copyright © 2022 - Updates Finance..

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • DMCA
  • Disclaimer
  • Cookie Privacy Policy
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Contact us

Copyright © 2022 - Updates Finance..

Are you sure want to unlock this post?
Unlock left : 0
Are you sure want to cancel subscription?