Stop “Manage by Exception”
What is “manage by exception”
From our days in the savannah many centuries ago, we humans owe our survival to noticing suspicious activity, like a movement of a bush which might indicate a tiger lurking.
The human mind hasn’t changed that much since, and we’re still great at quickly noticing what’s wrong.
There is a German phrase “Nicht meckern ist Lob genug”, which means, “not complaining is praise”.
A joke about the young Albert Einstein says that he was not speaking at all by the age of 3, so his parents brought a doctor, but he couldn’t find anything wrong. At the age of 4, he was still not speaking and the worried parents didn’t know what to do.
One day at the age of 5 at the dinner table, Einstein finally said “The soup is cold”.
The stunned parents burst with joy “You can speak! You can speak!”
After a few moments, the curious parents asked him why he hadn’t spoken before, and he replied “Until now everything was fine”.
We tend to take positive things for granted and easily notice the negative ones. It must have happened to you a lot — if you use the train or the bus to commute to work and it comes on time or a few seconds late, this is “how it should be”. But when it’s a few minutes late, you get irritated, stressed and it can ruin your day.
This phenomenon in our day-to-day lives is apparent in managerial behavior.
Management by exception
Management by exception ( MBE) is a style of business management that focuses on identifying and handling cases that deviate from the norm, recommended as best practice by the project management method.
Managers only intervene when there are significant deviations from the norm, whether positive or negative. In all other cases, the managers set the standards and employees have autonomy and accountability. This way the managers can focus on higher-impact activities.
The rationale and advantages are easy to follow — fixing problems that occur, detecting anomalies such as fraudulent activities, spotting quality issues and under-performance.
The problems with manage by exception
Despite the advantages of this management style, there are several problems:
Managers get fixated on their direct reports’ weaknesses and judge everything based on them, instead of utilizing their strengths and improving them even further.
They intervene only when something big happens, overlooking smaller mishaps and giving frequent, continuous feedback. Good and even excellent behavior is not celebrated, thus employees don’t know what behaviors to do more of.
Manage by exception also promotes reactivity to problems over preventing them.
“The smart person avoids situations that the clever person knows how to get out of”.
The dependency on accurate metrics might put a time-and-effort burden on collecting them (e.g. document your time distribution in 15-minute slots).
It encourages hiding errors, as they invoke a managerial intervention, reducing shared learning and improving, the opposite of psychological safety.
It promotes complacency, keeping doing what we always did, and less exploring new customer problems and needs to solve and expand new opportunities.
It tends to slow delivery down and lengthen the feedback loop as new measures are introduced to fix problems, e.g. a new process of manual sign-offs by engineers before a software release, which is less agile and “you build it you run it”, rather more bureaucratic.
What to do instead of manage by exception
- Set clear goals and standards, clarify the autonomy levels, explain and repeat the “why”
- Have weekly 1:1s to build trust and rapport
- “Catch them doing something good” — give constant positive and negative feedback The recommendation is to give 5 times more positive feedback than negative one
- Coach, prepare individual development plans
- Set psychological safety
- Celebrate wins and recognize both small and meaningful achievements
- Focus on taking advantage of and improving your directs’ strengths rather than improve their weaknesses
