Made2Measure

  This is the fourth in a series of blog posts on employee engagement defined in the Global Measures of Court Performance as the percent of employees who, as measured by a court-wide survey, are passionate about their job, committed to the mission of the court and, as a result, put discretionary effort into their work. In the first post in the series on March 24th, I reviewed the findings in Gallup’s 2019 pioneering book, It’s the Manager, by Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, and Jim Harter, Chief Scientist. Based on a decade of study of tens of millions of interviews of employees and managers across 160 countries, their study revealed “the most profound, distinct,  and clarifying finding” in Gallup’s 80-year history of studying the workplace: Managers who develop engaged employees did not merely influence the results of their teams, including higher productivity, lower turnover, greater safety, better profitability, and higher quality – they accounted for an astoundin...

U nexpected successes -- positive deviations from our preconceived expectations, assumptions, and certainties about the performance of organizations, groups, individuals, even justice systems and countries – are “bright spots,” ripe opportunities for management excellence. The lesson of paying close attention to these bright spots is deceptively  simple: Don’t try to solve problems, copy successes . Unexpected successes are the best opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship counselled Peter F. Drucker many years ago in his 1990 book, Management Challenges for the 21 st Century (HarperCollins, 82-83). We should starve problems and feed the opportunities of unexpected success, he wrote. Unexpected successes should be exploited, not ignored, or actively rejected. They are bright spots for improvements, less risky and arduous to pursue than unexpected failures. We should identify and learn from these unexpected successes as valuable data points. Unfortunately, we tend to ov...

This is the third in a series of posts on employee engagement defined in the  Global Measures of Court Performance  as the percent of employees who, as measured by a court-wide survey, are passionate about their job, committed to the mission of the court and, as a result, put discretionary effort into their work. In the first post on March 24th, I reviewed the findings in Gallup’s 2019 pioneering book,  It’s the Manager, , by Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, and Jim Harter, Chief Scientist. Based on a decade of study of tens of millions of interviews of employees and managers across 160 countries, their study revealed “the most profound, distinct,  and clarifying finding” in Gallup’s 80-year history of studying the workplace: Managers who develop engaged employees did not merely influence the results of their teams, including higher productivity, lower turnover, greater safety, better profitability, and higher quality – they accounted for an astounding 70% of...

  This is the second in a series of posts on employee engagement defined in the Global Measures of Court Performance as the percent of employees who, as measured by a court-wide survey, are passionate about their job, committed to the mission of the court and, as a result, put discretionary effort into their work. In the first post on March 24th, I reviewed the findings in Gallup’s 2019 pioneering book, It’s the Manager: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know , by Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, and Jim Harter, Chief Scientist. Based on a decade of study of tens of millions of interviews of employees and managers across 160 countries, their study revealed “the most profound, distinct,  and clarifying finding” in Gallup’s 80-year history of studying the workplace: Managers who develop engaged employees did not merely influence the results of their teams, including higher productivity, lower turnover, greater safety, better profitability, and higher quality – they a...

  This is the first of a series of posts on employee engagement defined in the Global Measures of Court Performance as the percent of employees of a court who, as measured by a court-wide survey, are passionate about their job, committed to the mission of the court and, as a result, put discretionary effort into their work. In Gallup’s 2019 pioneering book , It’s the Manager, authors Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, and Jim Harter, Chief Scientist, lament that while both the science of management and   how people today work, live, and want to experience their lives has advanced, the practice of management has been stuck in time for more than 30 years. Based on a decade of study of tens of millions of interviews of employees and managers across 160 countries, their study revealed “the most profound, distinct,   and clarifying finding” in Gallup’s 80-year history of studying the workplace: Managers who develop engaged employees   did not merely influence t...

How should courts and partner justice institutions respond to the existential crises facing our society today? Peter F. Drucker, the dean of this country’s management philosophers, would give us this advice:  The important thing is to identify  the future that has already happened. Every hundred years or so, we experience a sharp transformation. We come to an inflection point and must cross a divide, writes Peter Drucker in  The New Realities , originally published in 1989.  “Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself – its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structure, its arts, its key institutions. Fifty years later, there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born.” We are today at such a transformation: at the  confluence of existential crises that reinforce each other  – the coronavirus pandemic, ec...

In a yet-to-be-published article , my colleagues Sahira Abdool, Tricia Cameron-Anglin, and Jeffrey Newman and I wrote that  the twin crises of systemic racial injustice and the Covid-19 pandemic have caused unprecedented social and economic upheaval – including economic contraction and violent street protests -- that pose existential threats to society. The article is an urgent call to action for judicial leaders, both judges and court administrators, not only to continue to provide critical justice services but also to become active participants  in a  whole-of-society approach (WOSA)  to combat racial injustice and the pandemic. For example, we urge court leaders to close   the gap between the law on the books and the law in practice by asking tough questions about differences between what we would like to see happen and what actually is happening in the justice system, such as the fact that   pretrial custody account for roughly one-third of ...

  For more than a decade, we have witnessed an erosion of political freedoms and civil liberties across the world amidst a democratic backsliding toward autocracy, a system of government in which a single person (the autocrat) possesses absolute power to weaken institutions such as an independent judiciary that sustain the democratic system. At the same time, a surveillance-based economy, and anti-democratic threats this poses have thrived.   This quote is from the abstract of an article on illiberalism I wrote that was published   August 10, 2020.   In the article I highlight China, where the mass surveillance of its citizenry is the most aggressive and invasive in the world. For example, using a range of personal data accessed by the government, citizens and businesses are supervised, judged, and rated as part of a “social credit system” that gives them “trustworthy” scores. Low scores ban them from any number of activities, including accessing financial marke...