Checklists = Micromanagement
Source: Innovative Practice Management
Following are excerpts, reprinted with permission, from the above-referenced blog by Mark Bailey. (The title of the blog entry is Micromanagement—The Path to Mediocrity.)
The purpose of using checklists is to ‘standardize’. By standardizing our engagements we believe we can reduce risk and simultaneously improve efficiency. Checklists are tools for ‘control’ (micromanagement).The paranoia that drives the need for control has resulted in a mechanical system that attempts to drive out risk but in fact drives out professionalism and diminishes quality. Audit programs are an example.
When I began my career with the Big 8…….We were charged with writing custom programs for each client based on their systems and the objectives outlined in the audit manual.It’s not just the audit process. Look around your firm, at the checklists you use. I’ll bet you lunch, that in most cases your knowledge workers would be more effective after a short period of time if they didn’t rely on them, because they would have to understand what they were doing and why, rather than just being able to check off steps.
You hire and pay for intelligent, motivated, conscientious, creative minds and then smother all those characteristics with a business model based on control and doom your professional knowledge workers to be only as good as the checklist they fill out. Does that make sense?For the complete May 15, 2008, blog entry, click here.
From Innovative Practice Management, Mark Bailey blog, http://www.markbaileyco.com/blog/.
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