“This is like déjà vu all over again.”
- Yogi Berra
In the classic British science fiction series Doctor Who, there is a scene in which the Doctor is trapped in a time loop: the same events keep taking place over and over with no end in sight. Naturally, this being fiction, the Doctor quickly recognizes what’s going on and figures out a way to break out of the loop. In real life, it’s not quite so easy. Granted, actual time loops tend to be pretty rare; not so the feeling of being stuck in one.
Read the rest in the CEO Refresher
There’s an old saying about throwing steaks to lions in the hopes that they’ll become vegetarians. Apparently, if you do it long enough, the lion eventually grows old, loses his teeth, and gums the steak to death. But they’ll at least consider vegetables at that point.
The current political dance in the Senate is a rather interesting example of lions and steaks. We have a minority party that has found that the best way to succeed is to do everything possible to prevent the majority from accomplishing anything. The majority keeps throwing them steaks and hopes that they’ll become vegetarians. Why? Well, let’s look at this as if it were a corporate boardroom and see what lessons can be learned.
Now, to be fair, most businesses don’t have 100 vice-presidents. However, they have enough. I regularly hear tales of businesses (sorry, I can’t name names) with small coalitions competing with or refusing to cooperate with the majority. In each case, the minority players are working to make the majority look bad. Why? To gain the favor of the CEO, and hence to accrue more personal power to themselves. It seems more than a little silly, since it doesn’t do the company any good: even if the minority is right in their ideas, the cost of the infighting does more to hurt the company than any benefit that the minority’s policies would have brought. And when the minority’s policies are wrong, the damage is even greater.
Unfortunately, what has happened is that the minority coalition has lost track of the goals of the company: they are focused on their own goals, which usually involve succession to the CEO position, a larger scope of authority, bigger pay packages, and so forth. The reasons are as varied as the companies. Sometimes the minority coalition fails and is fired by the CEO or the Board. Sometimes they succeed, and the majority is fired.
What determines the result of the struggle is how the majority handles the competition. If they try to be nice and refuse to compete back, the minority is only encouraged. If they are so afraid of looking bad that they refuse to compete, they just end up looking bad. It’s only when the majority demonstrates that they are willing to play the same game, and compete as viciously as the minority that the game changes. Quite simply, in every group in which competition arises, the only way to end that competition is for the majority to demonstrate that the cost of competition is greater than the cost of cooperation and the rewards of cooperation are greater than the rewards for competition.
It doesn’t much matter if we’re talking about IBM or the US Senate. So long as we’re dealing with people, the dynamics are the same. Only the scenery changes.
I’ll be doing a webinar on Feb 1 on the topic of “Cartesian Splits and Chinese Splits.” The webinar will focus on mental side of sport performance. Here’s the description:
Many gifted children tend to focus the greater part of their energies on intellectual pursuits. When they participate in sports, they often find themselves frustrated by the experience of “getting it” intellectually, but being unable to execute the techniques being taught, or finding that their body just does not appear to respond the way their mind does. Gifted children will often respond by increasing their focus on their intellectual skills, neglecting or dismissing the value of the physical. Mental training techniques such as relaxation and visualization combined with integrated mind/body activities in a mastery setting, such as martial arts, can provide gifted children the opportunity to developtheir physical skills in a fun and supportive environment. This seminar will draw upon current research in the field of sport psychology as well as the instructor’s own experiences in both competitive and non-competitive sports.
More information and a registration link is available at http://giftedonlineconferences.ning.com/
I was just interviewed by Leadership Radio on how consultants can get published more frequently. You can listen to it here.
This is the short version of an article that was accepted for publication by the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. The full version will probably be out in a month or two.
It’s not enough to say that if you want to keep the best people when the economy improves, you just need to communicate more. It matters what you say and how and when you say it. Communication occurs in the context that you’ve created over time, and how your communications will be received will depend a great deal on that context. If you want to keep your best people, then you need to do your homework. (Or, conversely, if you want to recruit someone else’s key people, find companies that did not do the homework suggested in this article.)
Read the rest at Ere.net
January 2nd,2010
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Personally, I wouldn’t even know him if I saw him. –Estragon,Waiting for Godot
Some years ago I was sitting in a product design meeting. The discussion kept circling around some particularly knotty issues that no one in the room actually knew much about.
In one sense, this wasn’t a serious problem given that the company was still actively hiring and there was a recognition that more people were needed. Someone finally commented that we’d have to make sure to hire someone with the particular expertise in question, and in one fell swoop, that task was assigned to a non-existent person. Again, this is not necessarily a problem … yet. It became a problem, however, as the meeting progressed:
“We don’t have anyone on the team who can handle […technology…] either.”
“That’ll be the next hire.”
“Wasn’t the next hire supposed to be […original problem…]?”
“We’ll need someone who can do both.”
Read the rest at ERE.Net
Why do we take off our hats when entering a building? There’s no reason for it; it’s something we do. It’s part of our culture. While it probably had meaning at some point in time, that meaning is now lost. But we do it anyway because culture is bigger than we are. In fact, culture is not only bigger than we are, it’s bigger than almost anything we can imagine. Culture is not just what we wear, what we eat, or what religion we believe in. Culture is a vast ocean that informs and directs our thoughts, perspectives, and views on how to approach the world and other people in it. According to MIT’s Ed Schein, culture is everywhere; it is such a pervasive part of our lives that we are not even aware of it. This gives rise to several questions: What is the value of culture? How is culture transmitted? And, of course, what is culture?
Why do we take off our hats when entering a building? There’s no reason for it; it’s something we do. It’s part of our culture. While it probably had meaning at some point in time, that meaning is now lost. But we do it anyway because culture is bigger than we are. In fact, culture is not only bigger than we are, it’s bigger than almost anything we can imagine. Culture is not just what we wear, what we eat, or what religion we believe in. Culture is a vast ocean that informs and directs our thoughts, perspectives, and views on how to approach the world and other people in it. According to MIT’s Ed Schein, culture is everywhere; it is such a pervasive part of our lives that we are not even aware of it. This gives rise to several questions: What is the value of culture? How is culture transmitted? And, of course, what is culture?
This article was originally published in the January/February 2010 Analog Science Fiction/Fact. You can read the rest by
clicking here.
This was just published in the CEO Refresher. Full text is provided here since the link expires after a month or so.
“She doesn’t know how to lead!”
“Clearly, we picked the wrong person when we brought him on as CEO. He’s just not a leader!”
“We don’t need a leader. We’re all equals.”
These are all comments I’ve heard from Boards of Directors, senior management teams, even groups of college students. Okay, to be fair, college students don’t refer to any of their number as a CEO, but otherwise the sentiment is the same. In each case, the first reaction of the group to any difficulties or controversy is to accuse the leader of being unable to lead. The groups with no leader do avoid that problem, but at the cost of not actually managing to get anything done. Sooner or later, a leader emerges, whether or not openly acknowledged.
Fundamentally, the problem with effective leadership is that most people have no idea what an effective leader looks like or how an effective leader actually leads. I am told over and over by managers, board members, and the like, that what the leader really needs to do is stand up and tell everyone to shut up and do as they are told. Of course, should the leader actually do that, those same people are the first to scream that they are having their opinions ignored. What they really mean is that they want the leader to tell everyone else to shut up and let them speak.
I worked with one company that fired a team leader because the CEO didn’t see that he was contributing anything. He seemed to spend all day doing nothing at all. Once he was gone, though, it became painfully obvious to the company that he was doing far more than nothing. By the time the CEO accepted that he’d made a mistake it was too late to get the team lead back.
The image of the leader as the person who tells everyone what to do, approves all decisions, and controls all aspects of the group has just enough truth in it to be dangerous. When a group is first assembled, there is frequently sufficient uncertainty about the goals of the group and about how the members all fit in that they are quite happy to have a certain amount of very directive leadership. Indeed, a leader can get away with quite a bit at this point, in large part because the members of the team don’t yet actually care all that much about the team’s goals.
At this point, the leader needs to be helping the members of the team build a sense of team spirit and team identity. That means getting to know one another and appreciate each other as individuals, not necessarily for what they bring to the team. As paradoxical as it may appear, you build the team by not focusing on the team. Instead, you focus on the individuals by building a strong foundation of trust and camaraderie. People want to be appreciated for who they are, not just for the skills they bring to the table. The more team members can celebrate each others accomplishments, whether those accomplishments are work related or not, the more likely that team will be successful. That level of cohesion and trust does not come about through telling people what to do.
The toughest moment for the leader is when people start to care. Now that they care, they will actively work to bring about the success of the team, which is where things become challenging for the leader. When they didn’t care, they accepted the leader’s directives with little question. Now that they care, they want to bring their own perspectives, ideas, thoughts, and approaches into the mix. That means that many of them will start to question the leader, argue, and potentially become confrontational. Should the leader respond by squashing the apparent dissent, he also squashes the nascent sense of caring about the team and the company. Instead, the leader needs to slow down, invite opinion, and explain his actions and reasoning. The leader must be open to making changes if someone comes up with a better idea of how to do things. Otherwise, the leader is not fully taking advantage of the resources available to him: the eyes, ears, hands, and brains of his team. Unfortunately, this team strengthening behavior is all too often seen as weakness by many people, including the leaders themselves. As a result, they refuse to do it, and thus limit the capabilities of their team.
The goal of the leader must be to create a team that is more capable than any individual member of the team. Otherwise, why bother having a team in the first place? By building up a sense of team identity, trust, and appreciation for one another amongst the members, each person will be free to ask for and receive help from one another. As MIT’s Ed Schein points out, it is only when each person, including the leader, feels that they can accept and give help freely that the team has the potential to become stronger than any individual member. It is only through the asking and giving of help that the team can determine which member or coalition of members are best suited to solving any particular problem that comes up.
Thus, we come full circle. This process of mutual helping contradicts the image many people have of leaders. Rather than working to build up their teams, far too many so-called leaders act like the leaders they see on television or in movies. Others do not even seek leadership roles because they believe that being a leader means acting in ways that they find repugnant. If they do seek leadership roles, they may be ignored by team members who have bought into the fictional construct of the leader.
The leader who has to constantly tell people what to do is not doing a good job of leading. The leader who has to get out of the way so that his team doesn’t run over him in their rush to accomplish the goals of the team is the true successful leader. What sort of leaders do you have in your organization?
It’s easy to put together a group of knowledgeable and skilled individuals, but a team of high performers is not the same as a high-performance team. Just think about the Olympic Basketball Dream Team of 1992, made up of top American players. While they certainly played great basketball, the team never performed at the level people expected, given the skills of the individual players. Transforming your group from a set of people who happen to be going in roughly the same direction into a high-performance team isn’t always easy, but the results are always worthwhile:
Read the rest in The Imaging Executive
December 7th,2009
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Imagine for a moment that you’re sitting down to your Thanksgiving dinner when suddenly the roof of your house swings back and you find yourself looking up into something huge and incomprehensible: the eye of a hurricane perhaps, which I suspect is a lot less comprehensible close up than it is on TV.
I was unexpectedly encouraged to think about this today when I went out this morning to start smoking the Thanksgiving turkey. I flipped open the top of my grill and what should I find inside but a mouse nest. Needless to say, the mice were not at all thrilled at having the roof of their house flipped up, but I’m guessing that these mice thought they were getting a pretty good deal on the place and didn’t imagine that their house came with a detachable roof. Let’s not even talk about the central heating…
To make a long story very short, the mice booked out of there and we cleaned out the grill. Half an hour at 500+ degrees did the rest. I figure that any bacteria that can survive that treatment is going to take over the world anyway so I’m not going to worry about it.
Meanwhile, back to the mice. Much to the annoyance of our cats, who sat at the window watching, we let the mice scurry off. Their odds of survival are pretty good, even if their next home is likely to be a real hole in the ground.
Someone recently told me that he was former biology teacher and thus believed strongly in the survival of the fittest. The mice got me thinking: what does that mean? Drop a human in the forest at the end of November and their odds of survival aren’t all that good. The mice, though, will do just fine. Who is more fit to survive, the mouse or the human? Granted, the mice aren’t likely to find any other mice that will take them in or help them, but mice are individualists. They won’t even remember being a family before too long. They’ll survive, or they won’t, on their own.
One untrained person alone in the forest is in trouble. Put several people together, though, and their odds suddenly get much better assuming they can cooperate. Granted, that can be a big assumption sometimes, but it’s vital if you want to survive in the forest or in business.
I once read the statement that, “Teamwork was invented by the weak in order to beat the strong.” I’ve also heard some form of that argument put forth many times, usually by the person who is trying to make sure that no one can compete with him. Let’s face it, the biggest, strongest person has a vested interest in convincing everyone else not to form a team. The fastest, most skillful programmer might well see a real short-term benefit in a fractious and divisive team. In the short-term, there is a real benefit for some in keeping people divided: remember, it’s “divide, then conquer.” The results for the business, though, of such a dynamic may not be quite so good.
Over the long term, being able to work as part of a team confers a distinct advantage on the entire group. Members of the group can support one another, assist one another, and watch out for one another. New members can be taught the skills and accumulated knowledge of the group, so that they don’t spend their time reinventing the wheel. Over time, a cohesive group can outperform any individual or collection of individuals.
Mice don’t form teams. They don’t even have the concept. When disaster strikes, they’re on their own. They don’t help one another. They think only about themselves.
People are capable of forming teams, forming what Ed Schein calls “networks of mutual helping.” We don’t always manage it, but we’re stronger when we do. Whether we’re talking about business challenges or about responding to the next Katrina, our ability to form teams is our greatest advantage if we choose to use it, if we choose to reach out and help others and let others help us.
So here’s my Thanksgiving question: are you a man or a mouse?
