Organizational Stress: A Two-Edged Sword

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

There is an old and hoary claim that if you put a frog in boiling water, it will immediately jump out, but if you put it in cold water and slowly increase the temperature, the frog will sit there until it cooks. In fact, this happens only if the frog is equipped with little frog cement galoshes rendering it unable to jump: frogs are too smart to be boiled alive. They leave long before the water gets hot enough to cook them. Why, then, does this story have such longevity?

In my experience in the high tech world, I often find that people are sitting in some very hot water indeed. One might think that they would have noticed the warning signs as the heat increased, but apparently not. In fact, they are tolerating, or even accepting as normal, conditions that leave outsiders shocked. Rarely did conditions start off as bad as they became; rather, they became worse and worse over time until the water was boiling. This can make it difficult to recruit new talent or to keep the people whom they do manage to hire. It also means that a tremendous amount of effort is being expended on merely surviving the environment and preventing burnout instead of on productive activities.

It appears, therefore, that while frogs have the sense to get out of the hot water, people do not. Now, most people are smarter than frogs. What’s going on?

For one, frogs do not show off how well they can handle being boiled alive. At many companies, however, what frequently happens is that dealing with an unreasonable situation is seen as a sign of toughness or dedication to the company. Over time, a culture develops which celebrates and perpetuates that purported toughness. In jujitsu, I hear all the time from people who tell me that they had to give up falling because they just couldn’t tough it out anymore. In fact, it almost invariably turns out that they never learned to fall correctly in the first place and that’s why it now hurts too much to continue. Assuming that they just had to “tough it out” prevented them from recognizing and fixing mistakes early, before they were ingrained as bad habits.

Now it’s certainly true that overcoming a difficult or stressful situation feels good: it increases feelings of competence and self-efficacy. There is, however, a difference between overcoming and enduring. Mountain climbers overcome challenges, they don’t merely endure them. Enduring is fine, so long as it moves you toward a goal. Unfortunately, what far too many people choose to endure is, in fact, not moving toward anything except burnout and failure.

Another issue is that people respond to a situation by checking to see how others are responding: if it looks as though others are tolerating the situation, the instinctive response is to attempt to tolerate it as well. Thus, each person assumes that he or she is the only one uncomfortable, while, in reality, no one is happy. Ironically the harder team members work to avoid letting down the rest of the team, the more the team lets down its members and the company.

Of course, in true frog-boiling tradition, if the situation gradually worsens, we often don’t realize just how bad it is getting. It’s not until the environment undergoes a major change or we take a vacation that we realize just how dysfunctional things are. Like sitting in an awkward position, it’s often not obvious how sore you are until you move.

So how can you recognize that you’re being boiled alive and what can you do about it? To answer that, we first have to understand what stress really is, and why it’s necessary for success.

Riveting!  Yes, I called a leadership book riveting.  I couldn’t wait to finish one chapter so I could begin reading the next.  The book’s combination of pop culture references, personal stories, and thought providing insights to illustrate world class leadership principles makes it a must read for business professionals at all management levels.

Eric Bloom
President
Manager Mechanics, LLC
Nationally Syndicated Columnist and Author

Communications: The Proximity Paradox

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

Communications technology is truly amazing. We can carry in our pockets a device that has more computing power than you could pack into a house a few decades ago and that device can even make phone calls. We may not even have to dial the number: if you happen to own an iPhone, you need do nothing more than tell Siri whom to call and Siri places the call for you. What Siri, and its equivalents, cannot do is figure out who you need to call and when you need to call them. This is no doubt an interesting technical problem, made even more complex in the cases where the person you need to talk with isn’t someone you even know.

An article in the NY Times in Dec 2012 made the observation that when you put R&D and Manufacturing near one another, you get unexpected connections. Manufacturing can give feedback to research and vice-versa, and this feedback happens rapidly. MIT researchers are now studying the shocking revelation that people who are physically near one another will often talk to each other.

Okay, I’m being a little bit sarcastic here (but it is true that MIT researchers are studying this). The trap that we often fall into is forgetting that “Manufacturing” or “Research and Development” are not entities. They are merely convenient labels we use to identify different organizational functions. Manufacturing does not talk to Research and Development; the people in the manufacturing division talk to people in R&D. Despite all our technology, we tend to think about and connect most easily with the people around us. If manufacturing and R&D are located near one another, casual conversation and connection is easy, to say nothing of more formal communications. We don’t want them intermingled, for reasons that we’ve already discussed: they are different functions and need to have the space to forge a sense of identity. Neither do we want them so separated that they cannot easily communicate: that creates silos. It doesn’t matter if the silo is across town or in another country, it is still a silo!

Now, you might be thinking, how hard can it be to communicate? After all, those folks in R&D just have to call those folks in manufacturing! What’s wrong with them? The problem is that when we’re separated into silos, we don’t know whom to talk to! Even if we have a name, without a connection to that person, it’s hard to make that call and get them to listen: they are busy, we are busy, and exploratory conversations get swept aside in the rush to meet deadlines or deal with day-to-day business. Pretty soon, both parties forget. There is a real truth to the old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind!”

Building relationships with other people is a human activity. We can maintain relationships over a long distance and many years with our technology far more easily than ever before. What technology cannot do, however, is create relationships out of nothing. For that, we need human contact. We can initiate and reinforce those contacts through orientation and learning tools such as serious games, we can increase the probability of contact through the physical layout of our offices and plants, we can bring people from different parts of the organization together in various offsite locations, but no matter what we choose, we must create the opportunities for those contacts to occur. Once they do occur, we need to periodically refresh and reinvigorate them. Even professional relationships need reinforcement!

I was recently asked how to determine the ROI of holding a meeting to bring people together from different parts of the organization. This is the wrong question to ask. It is the equivalent of asking an athlete to determine the ROI of any individual workout. One workout is pretty much meaningless. If you happen to miss a trip to the gym or a run around the track, nothing much will happen. But if you stop going to the gym or stop running, after a few weeks or months, you’ll notice a difference! It’s the habit of exercise that matters, not any specific workout. Similarly, it’s the habit and ease of making connections throughout the organization that matters. It’s the flow of information that leads to problems being solved and innovation taking place. You can decide how much that is worth to your organization!

“Balzac combines stories of jujitsu, wheat, gorillas, and the Lord of the Rings with very practical advice and hands-on exercises aimed at anyone who cares about management, leadership, and culture.”

– Todd Raphael, Editor-in-Chief, ERE Media

Control Over Space

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

As we’ve discussed in several chapters, the feeling of control is important. One of the key messages of the organizational narrative is autonomy: how much control do members of the organization have over their schedule, how they do their work, even when and where they work. Leaders need to foster a sense of autonomy and control amongst the members of their team for the team to achieve the highest levels of productivity and performance. We seek to exert control over time, and we seek to exert control over the space we are in. One easy, and powerful, way of doing this is putting a picture of a spouse or other important person on your desk, as we discussed in Chapter 5. However, that is not the only option.

As much as possible, we want to let people have control of their personal space; indeed, we want to make sure they have personal space to have control over! Not having a fixed working area is disorientating. You don’t really feel like part of the organization. Even when you have a fixed working area, be that an office or a cubical, how much control you have to arrange it to your liking or decorate it with personal effects varies from organization to organization. If you want everyone to think alike, a good first step is to make sure everyone’s office looks exactly alike. Of course, they will also tend to be less engaged and less likely to commit to the really difficult goals. Giving people control over their space makes them more engaged and helps them feel that they have more control over their ability to solve the organization’s goals. Control, or its lack, in the small areas of organizational behavior spreads outward to the big areas that businesses really care about.

It is also worth noting that wide open working areas and the lack of even the illusion of privacy can reduce people’s feelings of control. While there are some organizations where this is inevitable due to the nature of the work, much of the time cubical farms and pods are unnecessary and counter-productive. What they save in short-term costs they make up for in reduced concentration and increased distractibility. It’s hard to feel in control of your space when you can hear everyone talking or tapping on keys.

“…[Organizational Psychology for Managers’] combination of pop culture references, personal stories, and thought providing insights to illustrate world class leadership principles makes it a must read for business professionals at all management levels.” – Eric Bloom, President, Manager Mechanics, LLC

Teams in Space

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

Go back to our discussion of silos and spaghetti in Chapter 1. When the borders between groups are vague and intermingled, you start to get spaghetti organizations. It’s easier to take information out of context: people chat with those around them, without really thinking about the context of the information they are discussing. A message meant for marketing might well be misinterpreted in engineering and vice-versa. In each case, the message might well have been delivered in the context of the team’s primary responsibilities; stripped of that context, the meaning changes.

On the flip side, when the interfaces between groups are difficult or hard to cross, you get silos. Locked doors or separate buildings are two obvious examples, but sometimes it’s just the attitude expressed toward those who “don’t belong here.” In New England, it’s customary to give directions in terms of the landmarks that used to exist: “Go straight down the road and turn right where Jack’s barn used to be before it burned down in ’92. Then continue to the…” and so on. This form of direction giving is something of a code to see who belongs and who doesn’t. When groups become too insular in their space, they stop communicating effectively. Mingling is good; you just don’t want the space intermingled.

“…Balzac preaches real engagement with one’s own company and a mindful state of operation, especially by executives…”

– Sid Probstein, Chief Technology Officer, Attivio – Active Intelligence

The Final Frontier

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

“Space, the final frontier.”

–          Captain James T. Kirk

To be fair, Captain Kirk was talking about a different kind of space than what concerns us here. It may seem a little odd that a book on organizational psychology would be concerned with space; fundamentally, however, we are creatures of our environment. We respond to what is around us and how we perceive the space we are in can affect our moods, our creativity, even our perceptions that our team is worth our time. How people feel about the space they are in can influence whether or not they believe a leader is authentic!

Imagine that you are going to rent an office: you approach the building and see peeling paint and dead trees outside. How does that shape your impression of the building? What will your clients think when they see it? What if you were going to visit a doctor whose office was in that building? Perhaps you’re already beginning to have doubts. Sure, she has great recommendations, but could someone competent really work out of a building like that? Of course, once you step inside you might find a brightly lit, professional office, but first you have to get that far.

Well known psychologist Martin Seligman once observed that as the chair of the psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania, he interviewed many people who went on to become quite famous in the field of psychology… somewhere else. Why were none of the candidates accepted? Reviewing the applications, he and the rest of the faculty found something wrong with each candidate and consistently felt that their strengths just weren’t strong enough. Eventually, Seligman noticed that they were holding all their candidate reviews in a gray, windowless, conference room. When he tried holding the meetings in a brightly lit, colorful space, suddenly the candidates’ flaws didn’t seem so bad and their strengths were considerably more obvious.

Our moods and our environment feed off one another. It’s hard to be discouraged on a bright, summer day, and hard to be excited when it’s cold and gray outside. Similarly, when our work environment is gray or boring, we tend to be less trusting, less creative, less open to new ideas, and less cooperative. We spend more of our mental energy just trying to be vaguely cheerful, and less on actually getting the work done. Conversely, when we are in open, brightly lit spaces, we tend to be more willing to trust and cooperate with others, happier, more energetic, more creative, and considerably more open to new ideas and experiences. If successful innovation and brainstorming requires that we suspend disbelief and open ourselves to off-the-wall ideas – and that is exactly what they do require – then we need to construct our environment to encourage that mindset.

“…[Organizational Psychology for Managers] should be required reading in MBA programs, military leadership courses, and needs to be on the bookshelf of every Fortune 1000 VP of Human Resources.  Steve Balzac is the 21st century’s Tom Peters.”

– Stephen R Guendert, PhD, CMG Director of Publications

What Is The Momentum of Time?

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

As we discussed when we looked at the High Performance Cycle and goal setting, goals have momentum. In a more precise sense, success has momentum. When we are succeeding, we feel better about ourselves, our work, and the organization we are a part of. How we manage time plays a major role in our perceptions of success.

As we saw earlier in this chapter, when we feel rushed, our perceptions narrow. We don’t see things that are right in front of us. We will even miss things that matter deeply to us: when they felt rushed, our divinity students speaking on the Good Samaritan completely missed their opportunities to live up to the content of their talks. In business settings, people in a hurry will spend days, weeks, or sometimes months not noticing the solution that is staring them in the face.

Whenever we are running behind our schedules, we end up feeling rushed. Being behind schedule might trigger people to work hard, but they do so at the expense of working smart. When we are behind schedule, every minor problem becomes a major disaster. It’s just one more thing that is preventing us from hitting our deadlines and getting the job done! As a result, we tend to respond with quick fixes and overly simple solutions just to get the problem to go away. At one software company, when the product team was clearly not going to make the deadline, the director of engineering grudgingly allowed them another two weeks. They still weren’t ready, so he did it again. This proceeded for about three months! Half of each two week chunk was spent undoing the quick fixes they’d implemented in their frantic race to finish during the prior two weeks, and the other half was spent instituting a new set of quick fixes! The constant feeling of pressure meant that no one had time to think or consider any solution that took more than a few days to implement. In three months of being behind schedule, they probably made about one month worth of actual progress! Had they just extended the schedule by six weeks or two months right from the start, they would have finished a lot sooner.

Conversely, when a team is running ahead of schedule, people are much more energized and creative. The feeling that there is time available means that people feel they have more space to consider alternatives and look for lasting solutions to problems. Unexpected problems become challenges rather than disasters. When a team is ahead of schedule and team members work long hours because they are excited, they are choosing to put in that extra time. When the team is behind schedule, team members are often pushed to work long hours to try to catch up. The choice is no longer really theirs.

Fundamentally, being behind schedule means feeling that we don’t have control of the situation and our time. Being ahead of schedule means feeling that we do have control of the situation and our time. The more control we think we have, the more motivated and focused we are. Individuals and teams that feel in control work harder and produce higher quality results than those that feel that they don’t have control. Thus, a team that is ahead tends to pull further ahead and teams that are behind will often tend to fall further behind until the inevitable triaging of incomplete work allows them to declare themselves done.

Going back to the High Performance Cycle, when we complete goals with a burst of effort and blast across the finish line after being triumphantly ahead of the game, we feel a much greater sense of satisfaction and internal reward. The external rewards also tend to be greater in that situation. When we stagger across the finish line after completing the equivalent of the Bataan Death March, we just feel exhausted and relieved. Internal rewards are lower and satisfaction is lower. It’s the first case that really builds high performance.

Build schedules that you can beat with hard work. If you consistently finish with lots of time left, then your goals are not aggressive enough. If you are always falling behind, then you are too aggressive. Pay attention to the feedback that you are getting as you set deadlines and see if you are making them. It takes a certain amount of effort and practice to make your schedules appropriately challenging but not impossible, particularly because we tend to routinely underestimate the difficulty and time requirements of most tasks: just think about Boston’s Big Dig or that latest home remodeling task you still haven’t finished. Remember that you want to start with easy goals so you can experience early successes and quickly move out ahead of the schedule: that will set the tone for the entire project. Starting with success gets momentum on your side.

How can I use event-based schedules to accomplish goals?

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

In chapter 9, we talked briefly about the time component of goals. Without a deadline, goals are not seen as particularly important. If we want a sense of urgency around our goals, we need to put a target date on them and we need to have check points along the way to monitor our progress. But if we become overly specific about scheduling every piece of the goal, we find ourselves back in a clock-based schedule, with all the hassle and headaches that entails. One of the problems with a lot of goals is that components are at least somewhat open-ended. It’s one thing to go out and run on the track for an hour; a software design project may not be at a logical halting point after an hour, making it extremely hard to stop and move to the next thing. Instead, we need to treat goals as events, and use events to trigger our goals. We do this by using implementation intentions.

Now, having read chapter 9, you might be thinking, “Are you nuts? Didn’t you just tell us that intentions are not useful?” Well, it’s certainly true that intentions are not goals and should not be confused with goals. However, properly constructed implementation intentions can help us accomplish our goals. Implementation intentions are a way of linking an arbitrary event to a piece of a goal, linking one piece of a goal to another piece, and linking one goal to another. We can even use implementation intentions to link a goal to a break and a particular leisure activity to a goal as a way of making sure that when we stop, we then start up again. One of the biggest advantages of implementation intentions structured into an event-based schedule is that it becomes very easy to develop the habit of executing the steps in order without having to decide what to do next. When we have to think about the next step, that’s when we become the most vulnerable to distraction. Implementation intentions become the metaphorical cotton in the ears that protect us from the siren song of Facebook and other common time sinks.

We’ve already seen how to construct an event-based schedule. To add implementation intentions, or action triggers, we say or note down on paper, “Once I pour my coffe, I will sit down at the computer” and “Once the computer boots up, I will open Chapter 10 and write,” and so forth. By making the connections explicit, we make them more powerful. We “know” exactly what to do when the appropriate trigger occurs. Writing out the schedule helps considerably, since it means we don’t have to actually remember as many things when we’re busy.

Implementation intentions can also be connected to triggers in our environment: “When the coffee cart comes around, I will close the file I’m working on and make the phone call to Bob,” or, “On Wednesday night after dinner I will review the design for the new Tate GPS.” The more specific the implementation intention, the better. Specific triggers are easier to activate. More general triggers are easier to delay: “After dinner, I will…” is more easily put off from dinner to dinner. Sometimes our implementation intentions are conditional or based on an ongoing experience: “Once I find my way home from wherever this stupid Tate GPS took me, I will fire the person who designed it!” (don’t be surprised; he who has a Tate’s is lost).

Any external event can trigger an implementation intention. The best events are those that require no effort on our part to notice. Thus, “When I look at my watch and see that the time is…” is not a good trigger. Looking at a watch requires us to make a conscious effort to remember to do that and then think about the time. It’s better to trigger off something automatic, like the lights dimming or changing color, the mail being delivered, or that annoying guy who never varies his schedule an iota walking by. Since we so often work in environments with artificial lighting, you do want to be careful about using “it’s getting dark outside” as a trigger, unless you can control the lights. Having the lights automatically clicking on is a good trigger, or having software on your computer that changes your screen brightness according to the position of the sun is another. Even reminders on your smartphone can be very effective, although they tend to be more useful when you want to transition activities at a very specific time.

Some people find it helpful to use objects as triggers: “when I see the Perkins file in the morning, I will…” Like having too many goals, too many such triggers will cause confusion rather than triggering the desired behavior. You don’t want to trigger five behaviors and then have to choose. You want one thing to trigger and then it triggers the next thing, and so on.

It’s worth noting that successful athletes use implementation intentions all the time. When a fencer trains to respond to different attacks by their opponent or a judo player to different throws, what they are doing is setting up a very rapid implementation intention. Teams do it as well, although that does take significant practice since several people’s responses must be coordinated. Some athletes will even use implementation intentions to decide ahead of time how they will feel if certain events take place in the competition: “If I find myself down on points, I will be energized, relaxed, and focused,” or, “If another runner passes me, I will imagine a rubber band pulling me forward and snapping me past him.” As silly as some of these intentions may sound, rehearsing them works. The event triggers the feeling or the action.

What is time?

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

Perhaps the best definition of time is that it is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop us from trying to do everything at once! Even more unfortunately, this approach triggers that feeling of being rushed and reduces our ability to get things done. It helps, therefore, to view time as a framework within which we organize our tasks and plan out how to accomplish our goals. This means adopting more of an event-based view of time rather than the clock-based (or duration-based) view most of us are accustomed to. In this context, a schedule is a way of organizing and viewing time such that people and resources are in the right places at the right times and flowing from event to event.

What is an event-based view of time?

We are accustomed to scheduling ourselves based on the clock:

7:45 pre-meeting meeting
8:00am Project planning meeting
9:00 am Customer meeting
11:30-12:30 –Lunch
12:30 – 2:00 Work on presentation
2:00 – 4:00 Brainstorming meeting

And so forth through the day and week. We learned this in school and we do it at work. The problem, though, is that a lot of work needs to be done in ways that don’t always lend themselves to such precise structures and many activities are not always totally one hundred percent precise in their start and stop times. When you have to coordinate a great many people and resources, you need to have a more precise, structured approach to time: colleges, for example, have to manage student schedules, room utilization, professor availability, etc. But that structure comes with a lot of overhead, and is not always all that useful. While we don’t want to completely eliminate structured time, we also don’t want to be totally controlled by it.

A recent article in the NY Times discussed joint military training between the United States and Japan. When asked what the most difficult part of the training was, the Japanese commander commented that he was initally put off by the fact that the US Marines did not have a set schedule. Japanese military exercises are conducted with, “the precision of a Tokyo subway.” Eventually, the Japanese commander realized that the American troops had learned through real combat experience that things do not always, or often, go according to plan. Flexibility is essential. Rigidity leads to defeat.

Master of Time and Space

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

Where oh where has my little week gone, where oh where has it gone?

It’s Thursday afternoon and that big project is due at 5pm. There’s no way you can finish it in the time you have available. No problem, you can just go to the time bank. All your life, people have been telling you that it’s important to save time. Well, just like you’ve put away money for a rainy day, you’ve saved quite a lot of time. Now you just need to withdraw some of that time and use it to finish the project.

What do you mean that didn’t work? When you save time, shouldn’t you be able to withdraw it when you need it? Unfortunately, that trick never works. Even Doctor Who, the main character of the popular British science-fiction series about a wandering Time Lord, can’t manage that one. That’s the problem with time: no matter how much we save, it’s never there when we go to make a withdrawal. We all get sixty seconds to a minute, sixty minutes to the hour, and 24 hours in a day. Time passes whether we use it or abuse it. The only choice we have is how we use the time, not whether we use it.

We have so many gadgets now for measuring time: clocks, watches, iPhones, the list goes on and on. But measuring time is not experiencing time: we have thermometers that tell us what the temperature is, but whether we feel warm or cold can depend on many factors other than just the number on that thermometer. 45 degrees in January can feel downright warm, and 55 in July might seem blessedly cool. Time is similar. Our experience of time passing is very different from what the measurement of time might tell us; this is why productivity and time are not the same! While we might measure time by the ticks of a clock or the dropping of grains of sand through an hourglass, we experience time as a series of events. When we have nothing to occupy our brains, time seems to stretch endlessly, each second ticking by with the excrutiating slowness of an overwritten sentence. Watching paint dry is so painful exactly because nothing much is happening. Conversely, when we are engaged in something that fills our brains, time seems to race by. When we look back, though, on a day filled with activity, it often seems like a very long time must have passed. Two people can experience the passage of time in the same situation very differently. Some athletes will view their opponents as moving very rapidly, while other athletes, who trained to manage their perceptions in ways that change their sense of time, will see their opponents apparently moving in slow motion. The second are far more likely to win.

What it boils down to is that we do not experience time or perceive time by the passage of seconds on our watches. We perceive time through the passage of external events: day and night, the waxing and waning of the moon, the changing of the seasons, and so forth. Those who have spent time in a windowless conference room or office may have noticed that feeling of disorientation that occurs when you step out at the end of the day and realize just how much time has passed: working for IBM in the late 1980s, in the winter months I would often arrive at the office before it was light and leave after dark. Spending the day in a windowless office meant that by the end of the day, I felt extremely confused about what time it actually was. Spending the day in an office dealing with a constant barrage of interrupts produces a similar disorienting effect.

At the same time, as it were, how we feel about time can change our perceptions of the world around us. In one classic experiment, divinity students about to give a talk on the Good Samaritan had their sense of time manipulated: while still in their dorm rooms, some of the students received a phone call stating, “Where are you? You were supposed to be in the chapel five minutes ago!” Other students received a phone call stating, “Although we have plenty of time, we’d like everyone in the chapel a few minutes early.”
On the route between the dorm and the chapel was an apparently sick or injured person. Those divinity students who thought they were late went by that person, in many cases without even noticing him lying there. Those who did notice assumed that someone else would take care of it or figured that maybe the person wasn’t that sick, or something. Conversely, those divinity students who thought they had plenty of time were far more likely to notice the sick person and take appropriate action. Feeling rushed reduces our ability to see the world.

Just as our perceptions of time influence our behavior and how effectively we work, pursue goals, and interact with others, the physical space we are in matters as well. Space creates associations and triggers for our behavior; the right space can make us feel safe or in danger, critical or creative. The same space at different times can also trigger different reactions. Fundamentally, we humans are creatures of our environment. We can’t completely ignore our surroundings when looking at organizational psychology and behavior. Rather, we need to understand how space matters and how our interactions with the space around us can serve to reinforce or undermine our organizational culture, narrative, learning, motivation, perceptions of fairness and justice, and goal setting. Even our perceptions of leadership can be affected by how space and time are handled.

Do your best…

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

I often hear the argument made that the effort involved in effective goal setting is really unnecessary so long as people just “do their best.”

The problem with “do your best” is that “your best” is an arbitrary term. There is no real way to measure it or even know when you’ve arrived. Each person has their own view of what “best” means. Thus, I’ve often heard managers telling employees, “You call this your best work? This is terrible!” Of course, this “feedback” is of absolutely no value as it fails to provide the person with any information that she can use to change or improve her work. Conversely, I’ve also seen many an engineer respond to a deadline by saying to their increasingly frustrated managers, “But it’s not done yet. It could be better!”

For an organization, “do your best” lacks any coherent focus or vision. It produces muddied priorities instead of a common objective. Common goals help bring teams together and provide a means to adjust course when something doesn’t work as expected; “do your best” is more likely to produce argument and blame when the team runs into an unexpected problem. In a “do your best” environment, clearly failure is the result of someone not “doing their best!” Everyone should just “try harder!” This is a sure recipe for overwork, exhaustion, burnout, and low productivity. Of course, since everyone is busy running around in circles frantically trying to “try harder” and “do their best,” it looks like a lot is getting done: remember that motion does not equal progress. Accomplishing goals equals progress.

The whole point of goals is that they give us a way to decompose a task into logical pieces, organize those pieces, and attack them in a systematic fashion. Goals provide us feedback so that we know how far we’ve come, how much is left to do, and when we’ve arrived at our destination. “Do your best” does none of these things. Overall, people, and businesses, with clear goals out-perform those who are simply attempting to do their best roughly 99.9% of the time. But, since autonomy is an important motivating factor, you should feel free to bet against those odds if you really want to.