My bride is a smart woman, and that is definitely one of the reasons that I married her. Over the weekend, there was an accident at her facility. By “accident”, I mean that one of the employees decided to do something incredibly stupid.
Surprise! Restricted duty: 1; getting stuff done: 0.
(At least the employee still has to come in to work. No forced time at home.)
What did this employee do? Let’s suppose the employee is at point A and need to get to point B. The employee is smart, knowing the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. By the sound of this story, you’re probably like me, guessing that the employee must be some sort of latent mathematical savant at this point. But wait, there’s more.
A straight line is out of the question, because there is a piece of equipment in your way. Because of the nature of this facility, that piece of equipment might be in excess of 350°F. Still, even with this imminent danger, our savant quickly deduces that the path integral of the curve generated by a path over the piece of equipment is shorter than walking around the equipment.
Seriously, how smart is this guy? I couldn’t set up the parameters for this calculus in Mathematica as quickly as he’s able to do it all in his head. I am ashamed of myself.
For all of the mathematical genius that this employee is, a circus performer he is not. He falls on to the equipment, burns his foot, and is on a restricted duty until a doctor clears him to work again. If he’s lucky, there’s some good pain medication involved that would include advice to stay away from moving parts, but I don’t know if that’s the case or not.
One of the great things about OSHA is that the burden is now on the employer to prove that they trained the employee to not walk over the equipment. Common sense need not show up anywhere in this equation. This is where my liberal blue blood fails me. I love what OSHA does. It must exist. I believe that there are employers who maliciously put the lives of their employees in danger. I have seen things at production plants that should frighten the burliest of burly men. However, I also believe in some sort of libertarian balance to counter the checks.
Anyway, instead of firing the idiot who burned his foot, the problem has now been turned into an engineering project to find a way to prevent this from happening again. Now we have separated the responsibility from the accountability.
These are two very important words that don’t get nearly the press that they should, but if you want to really learn about business, then you must know them.
Responsibility: having some requirement to do something.
Accountability: feeling the pain if that something gets borked.
How often are you accountable for someone else’s mistakes, when you weren’t the person responsible for performing that task? If you’re in any type of management position, that accountability should go up considerably. If I’m writing a bad piece of software, my boss will feel the pain first. And then I will (if I’m still employed). In fact, we feel this in programming all the time. Ever have to fix a bug for something that needled you the first time you wrote it? It’s the “I don’t know quite how this works, but it seems to be working, so I’ll ship it” moment. And then it bites you in the ass. Fortunately, since I’m not writing commercial aircraft control software, no one dies. My penalty is that I get to drop whatever cool new thing I’m doing and go back to old yuckiness (yes, that’s a technical term) and fix it.
But this story is fundamentally different. This is not a database or software. I am the only one ultimately responsible for my own health and safety. In this moment, when I decide to risk any part or whole of life and limb, I make 100% of my choices. We all do. There is some mental calculation that takes place for the briefest of seconds when we decide to cuss out the cop or just bow our heads and take the speeding ticket. In some people, that calculator is broken. They are a risk to themselves and your company’s continued profitability (if there are any profitable companies in 2009-Q2).
It’s true in any company – software, production, legal, accounting, clerical – it doesn’t matter. You need people who make decisions at a certain level in a certain amount of time. Anyone who doesn’t meet those expectations is a risk. As a manager, you must weigh all factors, including potential for training, against those risks.
And anyone who would risk very serious burns to save a dozen steps isn’t worth the risk.
