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Comment by sp332 | Hacker News Reader

"In all three cases, managers got what we asked for, but not what we wanted. How does this happen? Let’s take a look."

So, the managers failed to communicate what they wanted to the employees, but this is spun in the headline as the employees' fault.

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The title is "when employees misinterpret managers". Anybody who thinks that phrase implies it's anything but the manager's fault is either not a manager or is a bad manager.

In that sentence, employees is the subject, and managers is the object. It's the employees who are doing the misinterpreting of the managers. Only a manager would think that the title sounds like owning up to a mistake. :)

I reinforce this comment. The title "When Employees Misinterpret Managers" at best very weakly implies that the managers are doing something. It plainly states, in normal English, that employees did something (they misinterpreted) to managers. Only by the most convoluted thinking could you remove that plain meaning and substitute in "managers gave instructions excessively prone to misinterpretation" or something similar. `bryanlarsen`'s point is absolute bullshit.

Now: reading the article, that does indicate that it's the managers' fault, and it's a bang-up job of doing that. But the headline - oy!

In business communications the onus is usually on the speaker to frame things in such a way that the audience can understand them. When employees misinterpret managers then it can be assumed that managers misspoke.

"When managers fail to communicate" would be a better way of framing the topic.

The headline could've been better, no question.

Except you're missing out the crucial employees part, and it's hard to add without making the headline long and unwieldy. And misinterpret has fairly significantly different loading than "fail to communicate". I still think the original headline is better than yours. The target audience is managers, and will implicitly understand that a it's the managers fault when an employee misinterprets the manager.

Headline writing is hard.

It is my experience that employees who hear it phrased that way, though, will from painful experience assume that they're about to be blamed for something.

Yes, a good manager takes responsibility when something like this happens (as the author does). But how many good managers are there? It should be more clear on who's at fault, maybe the bad managers will turn around about that.

I saw an old work training film about management with Jon Cleese as some sort of angel (god?). He keeps explaining over and over again to the manager that it's his responsibility for everything. It's at least the starting point for a manager to figure out what went wrong.

It's worse than that. The Manager communicated their BAD IDEA very well, and the employees obeyed. It's more of a bad manager situation, NOBODY is misinterpreting orders. Managers are just not understanding what they want (my only problem is the title).

This. When I read the article, I was actually surprised that he didn't want his sales team to generate a smaller overall revenue, distributed over the month - I assumed that the distribution would drive down costs and lead to greater profit.

One thing that I think would have worked better is ask his sales team "why do most of our sales come at the end of a quarter?"

> One thing that I think would have worked better is ask his sales team "why do most of our sales come at the end of a quarter?"

Yes, why? It seems to be that case in lots of organizations. My current theory has to do with negotiation positions: Salespeople want bonuses, they get bonuses per quarter. As the quarter ends, the customer can drive harder for bargains as salespeople get more desperate to make a sale. Consumer just exploit that.

Anybody with a better theory, or some reasons why my theory would be right or wrong?

If my theory was right and the primary cause, then remodelling salespeople's incentive to be independent of quarterly boundaries should remove the hockey stick.

There are a few reasons but they are all related to the quarterly numbers. Whether it's salespeople who get a bonus or the board pushing for a quarterly revenue number, sales will make the biggest concessions at the end of the quarter to try to close the deal. Customers are aware of this and so they push closing out to the end to take advantage of it.

Ways around this might be to look at some kind of rolling 3-month average when examining revenues/sales or comparing sales people to each other (although depending on the sales volume this might suck statistically). You could also do sales bonuses as a combination of numbers + manual review. Maybe eliminate bonuses altogether and go straight commission so that the salespeople's incentive is to close the biggest deal irregardless of when. This of course is predicated on the board not pushing for big quarterly numbers; if that is the case then they are possibly the ones being the "bad managers" (minus extenuating circumstances like shopping around for a buyout).

I'd say that not only bonuses work per quarters but budgets are generally allocated in quarters or semesters as well. Typically, budgets allocated for one period need to be used in that period, otherwise it's "lost" and you don't get as much the next period.

So, on one hand, sales people want to close as many sales as possible before the end of a quarter and, on the other, buyers are also pushed to spend the money towards the end of the quarter.

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