Please do not ask to “walk the extra mile”
Telling phrases, part 1
Throughout my work life, I have developed an allergy against certain words or phrases. Out of this collection, wanting and praising people to “walk the extra mile” is ranked very high.
Why is this so bad?
It is usually meant to emphasize that people should not stop where their duty or time obligations end but to put in a little extra effort to get things done.
There are two very understandable desires in this:
1. finishing work items
2. people not dropping everything when they are not obliged to continue
It is the way these two elements are combined that makes it so bad. Think about it for a moment.
If “walking the extra mile” is a common phrase at a workplace, I wonder:
What happened during the regular miles? How did you spend your time, money and effort then What did you learn from the experience? What do you want to change?
In essence, a company where you get asked to “walk the extra mile” is sending the message:
“We regularly fail to get our act together as part of our regular work, so we need heroes to save us.” And even worse: “Our common work setup is insufficient to get things done. We are not aware that this is bad. Our managers do not learn from our failures to plan or inspect and adapt properly. We value effort over intelligence, time spent over effectiveness.”
Would you like to work in such a company? Extra hours and weekend work need to be treated as what they are: serious threats to a sustainable pace of work and transparency about the real capacity. They warrant a blameless post-mortem to find out what happened and how to avoid this from happening again in the future. Everything else is lazy or ignorant management.
The Proclaimers — I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)
