The Business Sensei

Blame and the Vortex

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

When there’s a problem, perhaps a critical deadline was missed or you lost an important client, what could be more fair and just than finding and punishing the person responsible? Surely fixing blame is the best way to make sure such problems don’t happen again! Blame is, after all, a natural response when something goes wrong. It’s what we do in our larger societal culture: after all, if you get a speeding ticket, it’s clearly your fault, right? You did something wrong. You were to blame for going too fast. Or maybe the real blame lies with the unfairly and ridiculously low speed limit, or the cop who just happened to pick you even though other people were obviously going much faster. In any case, though, you’ve learned an important lesson: pay more attention to whether there’s a police car on the road and maybe invest in a good radar detector. What about the speeding? Well, that behavior may change for a short time, but rarely does the occasional ticket produce permanent, lasting change.

This is the problem with blame: it may fix responsibility, but it does not fix the problem. While it can be very satisfying to identify the perpetrator of the disaster that lost the sale or crashed the server, actually solving the problem that led to the lost sale or crashed server is considerably more useful. This requires returning to the concepts we introduced in chapter one, looking at the organization as a system, and understanding how the system is failing. Failure is feedback. If you listen to that feedback and learn to understand what it is telling you, you will identify a weak point in your organizational systems.

At Koloth (once again, the names have been changed), an internet startup, website malfunctions were a regular event. Each time a problem occurred, the person responsible for making the mistake was identified and punished. The problems didn’t go away. Even firing repeat offenders failed to stop the website problems.

What was really going on? Upon investigation, it turned out that several factors were contributing to the problem. First, the company had a very aggressive, eight week development cycle. The aggressiveness of the cycle meant that serious design decisions were constantly put off in favor of short-term, “temporary,” solutions.

Next, the database engineers were chronically overworked, so developers were instructed to not bother them unless it was really important. As a result, developers would roll their own database code, usually copying it from somewhere else. This created numerous subtle problems which the database engineers had to spend their time tracking down, further reducing their availability.
Finally, a particular senior engineering manager was infamous for his last minute demands on his team. It was not unusual for him to walk into someone’s office as they were leaving for lunch, or at 7pm as they were getting ready to go home, and announce that “this component must be completed right now!” When the component failed or was not completed on time, said manager was quick to blame the team member to whom he’d assigned it. Of course, obvious a problem as this may be, it didn’t come out until we investigated to see why there were so many failures. Once we got past the blame, and saw the outlines of the system it became possible to address the actual problems and change the outcome. Along the way, it turned out that the manager in question was secretly running a web-design business out of his office at Koloth: his clever use of blame prevented anyone from noticing for quite some time.

Now, one might argue that Koloth involved actual dishonesty, and that blame is an effective tool when dishonesty is not present. Unfortunately, when people are given an incentive to be dishonest, dishonesty emerges: this is our self-fulfilling prophecy at work. At Double Coil Systems, a bioinformatics company, when someone was found responsible for costing the company a major client, that person was disciplined or fired outright. As shocking as this may sound, it wasn’t long before no one was ever responsible for anything. Each person involved in any problem had some explanation for why it wasn’t their fault. The problem was always due to some other event. When someone did end up taking the blame, it was usually some hapless member of the IT staff. Apparently, the most junior member of the IT department at Double Coil ran the whole business and had complete control of every laptop at all times. Employees at Double Coil had mastered the art of CYA, and so the actual problems were never addressed. Even worse, when employees did notice a problem, they concealed the information lest they be blamed for it (particularly if they had made the mistake!).

The difference between Double Coil and a world class organization is that at the latter they take the time to understand all the components of why they are losing sales, identify the real bottlenecks, and fix them. Blame isn’t the goal; solving the problem is the goal.

In the end, affixing blame only encourages people to conceal problems or pass the buck. No one wants to be the one to take the hit, so they try to avoid it altogether. When the problem finally does come out, it’s far bigger and much uglier than it would have been had it been addressed early. Even worse, your employees are going to be too busy trying to dodge the blame to really concentrate on fixing things.

If you actually want to solve your problems, focus on the organizational system and understand how it may be inadvertently contributing to the problems you are observing.

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

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in late 2013. For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

Avoid the Remediation Trap: Focus on Strengths

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

Our strengths are the things that we enjoy doing. The reason our strengths are strong is because we feel good when we succeed and so we do more. Weaknesses, on the other hand, are often things that do not provide any internal reward no matter how well we do them.

It is very easy to focus people on remediating weaknesses. Unfortunately, this produces neither effective growth nor motivation. There is nothing particularly satisfying about doing something that you never enjoy no matter how hard you work at it or how proficient you might become.

It makes much more sense to focus people on building their strengths. Legendary martial artist Bruce Lee used to say that if you built your strengths they would overcome your weaknesses. Bruce was quite correct: he became a formidable martial artist despite being nearly blind without thick glasses and having one leg so much shorter than the other that he needed special shoes to stand normally. Instead of bogging down in weaknesses, he focused on his strengths.

Focusing on strengths increases motivation and enjoyment. As people become better and better at what they do, you and they will find ways to negate or work around their weaknesses. Along the way, you are increasing their sense of competence, enabling them to take more autonomy, and building the relationship by showing that you care about their growth and development.

It’s worth noting that the Harvard Medical School special health report, “Positive Psychology: Harnessing the power of happiness, mindfulness, and inner strength,” found that focusing on strengths and what people are doing right increased performance by 36% on average. Conversely, focusing on weaknesses decreased performance by 27%. That’s what is known as a Dramatic Difference.

Finally, don’t worry that everyone isn’t good at everything. This is normal. We are not clones.

Balzac preaches real engagement with one’s own company and a mindful state of operation, especially by executives – who must remember that culture “just happens” unless and until they learn to recognize that their behaviors play a huge part in creating and cementing it. It covers the full spectrum of corporate life, from challenging bad decisions to hiring, training, motivating teams – and the secrets of keeping people engaged and learning – and/or avoiding actions which do the opposite. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to participate in creating and steering company culture.”

Sid Probstein

Chief Technology Officer

Attivio – Active Intelligence

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in late 2013. For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

Feedback Systems

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

Feedback takes many forms. Equity, blame versus problem solving, and dealing with jerks provide feedback that tell people how the organization works and handles difficulties. In addition, there are the explicit feedback systems:

There is the feedback that people get that tells them how, and whether, the organization views them as people. This is feedback about the nature of the relationship between members and the organization as a whole.

There is feedback that goes up the organizational hierarchy, informing those higher up about conditions, the market, problems in the organization, and successes. This system often fails.

There is feedback in the form of performance reviews. Done properly, which rarely happens, performance reviews are very powerful and valuable to the organization: they provide a route by which members of the organization can grow, develop their skills, and build their status. They provide an important connection to the organizational narrative.

Relational Feedback

Psychologist Robert Cialdini observes that every culture has a social rule around favors: when someone does something for you, helps you, or gives you a gift of some sort, you are expected to reciprocate in some way. People who do not reciprocate, that is, those who take but do not give, are viewed as greedy moochers, and are often shunned by the rest of the society. Similarly, as Schein observes, those who give help but never accept it, are often viewed with suspicion or resentment.

In an organizational setting, people want to understand what sort of relationship they have with their coworkers, their boss, and with the more nebulous construct that is the “organization.” Reciprocity is one of the ways people explore that relationship. How the team and the organization handle reciprocity thus becomes a proxy for the relationship.

In early stage teams, people might refuse to accept help in order to avoid a feeling of indebtedness or incompetence, or might attempt to help another in the hopes of receiving help later or building status. In fact, for the team to be considered just and fair, there needs to be that mutual exchange of helping behavior in the early stages. Eventually, as the team develops, the mutual exchange of favors turns into a more abstract helping network in which team members automatically give and receive help as necessary to the accomplishment of the task at hand. It’s no longer about the individual ledger; rather, it’s the confidence that we will all engage in helping behaviors for the good of all of us. The trust that enables that to happen comes from demonstrating reciprocity in the early stages of team development.

Similarly, when members of an organization put forth an extra effort or engage in pro-organizational behavior outside the normal expectations, they expect that the organization will, in some way, acknowledge and repay their contribution. When the organization refuses to do that, or, even worse, treats the exceptional effort as “just part of the job,” this creates the image of someone who takes and takes but gives only grudgingly, if at all. For example, when employees work long hours or weekends in order to meet a deadline, they are sacrificing their personal time for the good of the organization. This is not, or at least should not be, a routine event. If it is, you have some serious problems!

How the organization responds to that sacrifice provides feedback on the relationship: reciprocity of some sort says that you are a valuable person; failure to provide reciprocity says that you are a tool or a slave, that the boss is selfish, that the organization does not value its members, or all of the above.

I’ve met many people who tell me that long hours are part of the job, and ask why they should thank or reward people for doing their jobs. The reason is simple: reciprocity is a proxy for the relationship, and the relationship determines trust. Without trust, motivation, team development, and leadership all start to break down.

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in late 2013. For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

Don’t Reach For The Ground

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

My first jujitsu sensei would constantly yell at us to not reach for the ground when being thrown. His point was that if someone is throwing you and you yield to your natural reactions, you will try to catch yourself with an arm or a leg. In jujitsu, this is good way to end up with a broken arm or leg. What makes learning to fall difficult is that our tendency is reach out is so natural, so deeply ingrained, that we do it without thinking. Students sometimes don’t believe they are doing it until they see themselves on video. Reaching out like that is a very simple, reflexive way of protecting our heads when we fall: it’s better to break your arm than your head. For very young children, it’s great since it takes no training, their bodies are light, and bones are still flexible. However, for adults, it’s not so pleasant and is a serious problem in a great many situations where an untrained reaction is not appropriate or safe: knowing how to fall is why I didn’t get badly hurt the time a car ran a stop sign and helped me dive over the handlebars of my bicycle.

By the same token, we have cognitive shortcuts or biases that are decent default behaviors in many situations, but are of limited value to us in the workplace or other modern organizational settings. Like reaching for the ground, they are simple and easy to use: we are built to use as little energy as possible whenever possible. Particularly when we are tired or distracted, we tend to fall back on these cognitive shortcuts. However, like that untrained jujitsu student’s reflexive reaching for the ground, they are just setting us up for organizational injury. Just as the jujitsu student is being thrown with too much force to reach without serious injury, organizational issues are almost always too complex for us to get away with cheap answers.

Fundamental Attribution Error

“There’s a guy in your office named Joe. Joe’s not getting his work done, he’s missing deadlines. How come?”

I will often pose this question when I conduct management training or when I speak on leadership. It’s always interesting how people answer. Most of the time, people tell me what’s wrong with Joe: he’s not dedicated, he’s goofing off, he doesn’t care, he’s incompetent. Eventually, someone will say, “Wait a minute. You didn’t give us any information about Joe.” Sometimes this takes ten minutes! It might take longer, but I always stop it by then.

What’s happening here is that we automatically attribute problems or poor performance to the person, not to situational factors. This makes sense when we are all experiencing the same environment and doing essentially identical tasks: for example, people living in a small community or working on an assembly line. If most factors are identical, one person’s poor performance is probably due to the person. This can cause trouble in our modern society: When our dinner date doesn’t show up, we assume it means she doesn’t actually want to spend time with us rather than assuming her car broke down or she was caught in traffic. Did that client not return my call because he didn’t want to talk with me, or was it because his office is in Manhattan and he lost power after Hurricane Sandy? In the actual, real-life situation from which I drew the story of Joe, the reason Joe was missing deadlines was that the vendor who was supposed to provide the material he needed was always late and Joe didn’t have the option of changing vendors.

We will often apply the fundamental attribution error to ourselves retrospectively: how could I have ever made such a stupid decision? We forget that the decision may have made complete sense with the information we had available at the time or that other situational factors might have contributed.

When we know someone well, however, the fundamental attribution error will often reverse itself: I know Bob. Bob is a hard worker. Something must be wrong. If you’ve arranged to meet your wife at a restaurant after work and she doesn’t arrive in time, odds are you’ll start worrying that she might have been in a car accident or something, rather than assuming she doesn’t want to spend time with you.

One of the biggest problems stemming from the fundamental attribution error is that it can trap us into playing the blame game instead of understanding why a system isn’t working. We’ll look at that in more depth shortly.

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

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in late 2013. For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

The paradox of perfection

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

The trap of looking for the perfect candidate manifests in a few different ways.

The first manifestation is something I refer to as the Godot Effect, based on Estragon’s line in Waiting for Godot: “Personally, I wouldn’t even know him if I saw him.”

All too often, a prospective hire becomes the repository of every hope and every need of the hiring organization. The fact that the person does not yet exist in the organization only makes this worse. I’ve seen this particular phenomenon happen in front of me more than once. In particular, I was sitting in a product design meeting while the team discussed the next few hires it needed to make.

They started by observing that they needed someone who could handle some specific piece of technology. So far, so good. Then things went downhill.

“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.”

From someone who could do “both,” it quickly morphed into someone who could do three things, then four. After a while, it did become clear that things were getting just a bit ridiculous, but that didn’t help. There still wasn’t a serious return to reality; by the time the people in the room were finished, the only person who could have met their needs was Doctor Who. In other words, they were looking for a fictional, centuries old, omni-competent Time Lord. Alternately, if he wasn’t available, they could have tried to hire the professor who teaches the most courses in a typical college catalog: a scholar known as Staff. Unfortunately, Professor Staff isn’t usually available either. The net result is that they were so busy looking for someone with a highly improbable set of skills that they couldn’t recognize a qualified person when they walked in the door.

Closely related to the Godot Effect is the idea that, to misquote the X-Files, the perfect person is Out There and is always the person who is Not Here.

In one training exercise I ran, participants were presented with a problem and were given the names of other people who might or might not be able to help them. The trick was that not everyone was present: some of the people listed weren’t available. While some of the participants made do with the contacts that were available, many of them fixated on the people who weren’t there. Just as Clint Eastwood, at the 2012 Republican Convention, imbued an empty chair with all the characteristics he disliked about President Barack Obama, participants in the exercise imbued the people who weren’t there with all the characteristics of the person they were looking for, including the belief that this person would be eager to help them. This idealized mythical individual prevented them from recognizing the imperfect, but physically present, individuals who could have actually helped them!

The next form of the perfection paradox is a little more subtle. Ask any hiring manager if they’d hire someone who never takes decisive action, refuses to consider alternatives, and has never challenged themselves, and the usual answer is, “Of course not!” Despite the vehemence of their response, however, that’s exactly what they are doing.

Naturally, it doesn’t look that way.

It looks like they are hiring people with strong track records and consistent employment: People who have a history of successes, not failures, and who have never been responsible for something going wrong. The problem, though, is that they rarely take the time to understand why those people have those perfect records. At best, I’ve seen managers attempt to break down someone’s record, in order to see if it was airbrushed.

While there is value to verifying that someone is being truthful on a resume, those managers are missing the point. The real problem is that the resume really is as perfect as it looks.

Basketball great Michael Jordan famously said, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career; I’ve lost almost 300 games; 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot— and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Michael Jordan is so good exactly because of his willingness to take chances, to push himself, and to act without a guarantee of success. All too often, that perfect resume is really showing you someone who carefully burnished his image or selectively chose projects which would not risk that beautiful façade. When you focus on perfect resumes, you are quite often weeding out the people who are willing to seek out challenges and push the envelope. In other words, you are screening out the people who are most likely to be out of the box thinkers! Far more important than someone who has never failed is the person who can fail and get back up again: as one of my jujitsu instructors once said, “The fight’s not over until you can’t get up.” The ability to fail and recover is a sign of optimism and resilience, critical attributes of developing a success driven mindset. Those attributes should be part of your definition of a qualified person.

The final aspect of the perfection paradox relates to the stages of team development that we discussed in chapter three.

Recall that teams in early developmental stages are very focused around conformity and appearances. There is a strong tendency toward a mentality of “what you see is what you get,” or, in this case, “what you see is what you look for.” A WYSIWYLF (pronounced wizzee wolf) may sound more dangerous than a WYSIWYG, and it is. Simply put, our image of the right person to hire is shaped by the people around us. We look for people who look like us or like our coworkers. A poor manager is unlikely to hire a good manager in large part because she doesn’t know what a good manager looks like! This part of the interplay between organizational culture and recruiting; we’ll go into that in more depth later in this chapter. Suffice it for the moment to say that even advanced teams can be trapped by what our organizational culture tells us is the image of the “right” person.

The net result of all these factors is a lack of faith that the hiring process will get the results we want.

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in late 2013. For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

Recruiting With Confidence

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

Near the end of the award winning movie, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Aragon leads his pitifully small army to the Black Gate of Mordor, realm of Sauron the Dark Lord. Sauron’s forces outnumber Aragorn’s by easily a hundred to one. On the surface, there appears to be little chance of success. Indeed, during the planning of the assault, Gimli utters the famous line: “Certainty of death, small chance of success… What are we waiting for?”

As those familiar with the story know, the attack is diversion. Its goal is to draw the attention of Sauron so that Frodo can destroy the Ring of Power. Aragorn, however, cannot let on that the attack is anything but an all-out assault on Sauron’s fortress. To fool Sauron, indeed, even to convince his soldiers to follow him, he must act and speak as though he has complete confidence that his badly outnumbered army can win. Aragon must not just be confident, he must be so confident that people will be inspired to follow him to almost certain death. That act of confidence is what makes it possible for Frodo to succeed and for Sauron to be defeated.

Small chance of success indeed, but a small chance is better than no chance at all. No chance at all is exactly what they had if they did nothing. It took immense confidence to seize that opportunity, but it worked in the end.

Okay, The Return of the King is fiction. What about reality? Whether in sports or business, confidence is key. Confident teams are more likely to win. Confident entrepreneurs are much more likely to get funding. Confident salesmen are more likely to sell. Confident engineers successfully solve more difficult problems than their less confident brethren. Confident CEOs are much more likely to build a successful business. To hire effectively requires confidence.

Why do people lack confidence in the system?

I heard a hiring manager comment that she would “Prefer not to hire anyone at all.”

Her company is growing, they are actively looking for people. At the same time, this manager who has been tasked with building up her team is openly telling candidates that if she has her way, not one of them will be hired. Indeed, given the choice, it’s hard to imagine candidates accepting an offer if they did get one, compared, say, to an offer from an enthusiastic and confident employer.
While making the observation that this woman lacked confidence might be something of an understatement, it is only a start. Confidence begets confidence, just as lack of confidence begets lack of confidence. This manager was demonstrating a lack of confidence in herself, her company, their hiring process, and in the candidates. That, in turn, makes it extremely difficult to attract top people: if the hiring manager doesn’t seem confident, what does that tell the candidate about the company? Those who can get other offers will go elsewhere, leaving this manager to choose less qualified people, further confirming her lack of confidence! Therefore, it is important, and far more useful, to understand why she lacked confidence. Only then is it possible to do something to increase her confidence and make it possible for her to hire effectively.

Indeed, this manager cited one major reason for her unwillingness to hire. No surprise, it was the economy. Despite what she’d been told to do by her boss, she fundamentally did not want to hire anyone because she was terrified that the economic recovery would fail and the company would go under. Listening to the news of that day, it’s easy to understand why she felt that way: The fact is, it is hard to listen to the news without feeling discouraged. It’s even worse in a world where the news is always on, as close as our computer or cell phone. When we hear the same five dire forecasts over and over, it reinforces the message of doom and gloom, even when it’s the same news story being repeated five times! Being tough and bucking up only works for so long. Eventually, even the toughest will get tired: a steady diet of discouraging words can undermine anyone’s confidence in a variety of subtle or not-so-subtle ways.

In the end, though, while this woman’s lack of confidence may have been made obvious by the economy of the time, further investigation revealed the economy wasn’t the actual cause. The actual cause was both more immediate and less obvious: she fundamentally didn’t trust the hiring process her company used. If you don’t trust the process, it’s hard to have confidence in it, and the more vulnerable you are to surrounding influences such as the news. In a strong economy, her lack of trust could easily go unnoticed simply because the positive news flow would allay her fears; without the positive backdrop, however, her fear and her lack of confidence in the system were fully exposed. Sadly, this lack of confidence appears to be the case in a great many different companies.

Now, lest I give the wrong impression here, this lack of confidence is not necessarily unjustified. In fact, when people don’t have confidence in the system, there is often a reason. Let’s take a look now at those reasons and what can be done to build confidence so that you can find the best people and convince them to come work at your company. Believing that they’ll come to you because they’re desperate is not a good strategy! In the best case, you get a lot of desperate people who will likely have second thoughts as soon as they don’t feel quite so desperate any more. If you don’t mind being a way-station for those seeking better jobs, that’s fine. But if you’d like to be a destination for the best, that requires having confidence your system.

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

http://www.ere.net

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in late 2013. For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

Celebrate Progress

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

One of the most important things you can do as a team is periodically celebrating progress. It is always more motivating to look at how far you’ve come rather than how far you have yet to go. Indeed, it’s more motivating to say, “we’re half done,” than to say, “There’s still half left to do.” The two statements may be mathematically equivalent, and IBM’s Watson, the Jeopardy playing computer, would probably find them identical. If you happen to be employing Watson, then it may not matter what you say. However, if you happen to be employing people, it matters.

In jujitsu practice, the students who always focus on how far off the black belt is tend to not finish the journey. Those who focus on how far they’ve come are the ones who keep coming back.
You don’t need to highlight individuals every time you do this; in fact, you shouldn’t. The goal is not to make anyone feel bad for not getting as much done as someone else; rather, it’s simply about sharing success. Feeling that the team is making progress helps boost everyone’s morale, increases team cohesion, and helps build trust.

Depending on your organizational culture, you can occasionally highlight individual accomplishments in much the way that some sports teams will highlight most valuable players. It’s important, though, to pay close attention to how people work and what they expect. At Atari, a new CEO tried to transform the highly collaborative, team-based culture into a more individual, competitive culture. He focused heavily on “engineer of the week,” and other such awards. However, engineers at Atari viewed game development as a collaborative process, where everyone worked together to produce a quality product. The focus on individual performance shattered the team structure, turning high performance teams back into struggling level one groups. Atari never recovered.

When you celebrate team successes, you build relationships, strengthen competence, and provide the trust necessary for greater levels of autonomy. Success builds on success just as failure feeds on failure. What you focus on is what you get.

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in late 2013. For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

Focus on experiences, not things

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

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the perils of rewards, and now I’m going to talk about using rewards. Bear with me. As we discussed earlier, rewards can be very useful when they are a form of feedback. It’s when they become the goal that they become problematic. The nature of the reward also matters: some rewards force us into the motivation trap, while others are easily amenable to becoming something we do with people.

It turns out that the most common form of reward, cash bonuses or items, easily slip us into the motivation trap. Cash or items, be they t-shirts, fleeces, laptop bags, tech toys, all produce much the same results: a short-term blip followed by, at best, nothing, at worst long-term dissatisfaction. While some people use cash to buy something they’d like, most of the time the extra cash goes to paying bills or toward a rainy day fund. Cash also creates an expectation of an even larger cash reward the next time around.

Giving people tech toys or other things seems like a nice idea, but actually doesn’t work. First, the reward feels impersonal: look, everyone in the department got a new phone. Of course, that can get tricky, since some people like Android and others iOS. A more serious problem, particularly with technology, is that the gift loses its appeal very quickly. All it takes is a newer, fancier tech toy to hit the market and suddenly that old gadget is no longer cool: Now it makes you look behind the times. In early 2012, Apple announced the iPad HD, popularly referred to as the iPad 3. It was definitely an amazing gadget. In October, they announced the iPad Retina, an even more amazing gadget. As several newspapers reported at the time, Apple fans were furious. Suddenly their new iPad HDs were obsolete. One analyst commented that he didn’t understand the fuss: if the HD was a good device on Monday, before the iPad Retina was announced, why wasn’t it a good device on Wednesday? He was, of course, missing the point: the excitement wasn’t in having just any gadget, it was in having the newest gadget. In the end, things lose their motivational power very quickly: getting a new iPhone is fun for a week or two, but after that it’s just another item that I stick in my pocket along with my wallet and keys.

Rather than things, lasting happiness and motivation are produced through experiences. It is the opportunity to go off and do something that we enjoy that really builds long-lasting motivation. There are several reasons why this works.

First, in order to give someone an experience, you have to have taken the time to get to know them and know a little bit about what they’d like. If you have an employee who loves watching the Olympics, giving her tickets to attend the games would be extremely effective. However, if you gave her tickets to the opera, maybe not so much. As we learned as kids, it’s the thought that counts. While that is not an absolute truth, as anyone who has ever received a particularly ugly sweater can attest, knowing that someone cared enough about you as a person to arrange for you to do something you deeply care about is a very powerful motivating force. Again, treating someone as a person as opposed to a generic tool on the team is extremely important.

The other thing about experiences, though, is that they never lose their value. Our memories of the fun times we’ve had remain positive memories. They don’t stop being positive just because we might do something else. Graduating from high school can still evoke memories of pride and accomplishment even in someone who went on to gather advanced degrees from a top college. If you enjoyed learning to wind surf while on a vacation, the memory of that enjoyment will always be with you even if you never wind surf again.

The things we do become part of who we are; they shape us as people in a way that gadgets cannot. Sure, it might be nice to receive a new camera right before a major vacation, but the camera isn’t what makes the vacation fun. It may help us remember our trip and it may enable us to share some of our enjoyment with others, but rarely is it the point of the trip.

Experiences do not have to mean vacations, although that is important. We’ll discuss that further later in this chapter. Experiences can be work related. For example, continuous learning is a form of experience provided by the organization to those who desire it.

Providing people with the opportunities to do things they value builds their relationship to the organization: by providing the opportunity, you become their virtual partner or supporter.

Experiences can be used on a group level as well. While having organized, group activities is certainly a good thing, it should not be the only thing. Low level teams try to do everything together to build team unity. This is silly and counter-productive. In one case, a certain organization sent members of a group to a state fair. The manager insisted that everyone stay together and attend the same events, whether everyone was interested or not. Rather than building unity, it only created division.

Physical objects are ephemeral. Experiences never grow old, never get stale, and don’t become obsolete when someone announces a new model.

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

Escaping the Motivation Trap

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

So how do we escape from the motivation trap?

I’ve frequently walked into an organization and been told, “The problem is Phil. He’s unmotivated.”
When I chat with Phil, I quickly find out that he’s a marathon runner, or a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, or volunteers in a homeless shelter, or one of dozens of other activities that require a great deal of consistent, focused, effort. In other words, motivation.

Phil isn’t unmotivated. He’s just not motivated to do the thing his manager wants him to do at that moment.

The first step to escaping the motivation trap is simply the realization that people are always motivated to do something. We want to make it easy for them to channel that motivation into their jobs.

When it comes right down to brass tacks, an organization is a community of people with a purpose. It doesn’t matter whether we’re looking at a corporation, a non-profit, a school, a hospital, or a cycling club. Every organization has a purpose, expressed through its culture and conveyed in its vision and organizational narrative.

People who join the organization are going to be at least open to the organization’s vision. At best, they are already excited and eager to be part of it. If either of these points is not true, you have a serious problem in your organizational culture and narrative, the ability of your people to convey the purpose, or your hiring process – we’ll discuss that last point in the next chapter.

The next point is that it is the rare person indeed who comes to work wanting to do a bad job. However, if we just get wrapped up in our use of rewards and punishment, it is possible to turn enthusiastic people into people who no longer care or are happy to do a bad job. Unfortunately, we have some cultural beliefs that tell us that people don’t want to work and are lazy, uninterested, and take no pride in their work. The myth that workers don’t want to be there and have to be forced to work is a cultural value dating back to a time during the industrial revolution when horrible working conditions did, indeed, destroy motivation. As is often the case, cultural values have not yet caught up with reality.

People who are part of a community seek to gain status in the community. Thus, given the opportunity, members of an organization will act in ways which increase their status in the organization, provided they believe their actions matter and can see a path from where they are to a place of higher status. That status will typically translate into greater referent, legitimate, or expert power as well. We can take this a step further and observe that people always choose actions that they believe will increase their status in some way: we need to feel we are making progress in the activities to which we devote our time and energies.

The other side of the equation is that any large project is going to be draining at times. There will be moments of frustration and points where people are so tired, angry, or upset that they feel like just throwing in the towel and storming off. This is not something to just ignore or say that “professionals keep going” and other trite phrases. Professional athletes have people cheering them on and helping them through the long down periods.

Thus, motivation really comes down to unleashing people’s natural desires to do well, increasing their competence and status, and supporting them during difficult periods. It’s about using referent power to build those individual relationships we discussed in the previous chapter, and being there for people.

In this case, a necessary component of referent power boils down to how do you present yourself and what sort of example are you setting?

Are you genuinely interested in your team members as people, or is your interest in them only to further your own career? As Google found out, employees respect and trust managers who have the employee’s interests at heart. Similarly, if you want people to respect and trust you, you have to respect and trust them first. Motivation comes from working with someone who respects you and cares about your career: that is what makes it possible to trust the feedback that you are making progress.

Do you have strongly held beliefs and values? In other words, are you committed to something other than yourself? When someone is only committed to themselves, it’s very hard to trust them; you never know which way they’ll jump. However, people who are committed to a clear set of values can be trusted to hold those values even when it’s inconvenient.

Along the lines of strongly held values, do you demonstrate integrity? Remember that all leadership is at least partially transactional. While transactional leadership is quite limited on its own, it is the basis for anything deeper and more powerful. Without integrity, that transactional foundation will be unstable. Without the transactional foundation, inspiring others becomes impossible, and you’re back to using force: inspiring promises won’t work particularly well if no one believes you. At one company I worked with, a certain manager always found a reason to not follow through on promises he’d made; it wasn’t long before he had a department full of people who spent most of their time sitting around grumbling and doing the minimum amount of work necessary to keep getting a paycheck. The most bizarre part of the experience was that he seemed genuinely bewildered by their reactions, which brings us to the next point.

Can you make an emotional connection to other people on the team and in the organization? Logic is all well and good, but when it comes to deciding whom to trust and whom to listen to, emotion drives the train. If your team can’t make an emotional connection with you, they’ll never really trust you and will abandon you when a better opportunity comes along. Sometimes, they won’t even wait that long. That was, in the end, what happened to the manager I just mentioned. His personal brand became toxic; no one would stay in his department. He went back to being an individual contributor, where he was much happier.

So, with these points in mind, how then do we actually enable motivation?

Before answering that, let’s recognize something very important: there are no magical motivational techniques. Although the techniques we will look at are ones that can be easily done with people rather than to them, it’s still possible to turn each “with” into a “to.” It depends on your presentation.

What are we doing wrong with motivation?

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

When motivation is focused around rewards and punishments, it is being done to people not with them. There are several problems with this approach.

First of all, as we touched on in the previous chapter, rewards need to be used carefully in order to motivate appropriately. The classical image of using rewards and punishments, as taught in many programs, is that you should always reward behavior you like and punish behavior you don’t like. As we’ve already observed, different people have different ideas of what constitutes a reward and what constitutes a punishment. Even if we all agree that being fired is punishment, firing people does not motivate them, it only gets rid of them.

A more serious problem, as we’ve discussed, is that when people are taught to work for a reward, they do exactly that. When the reward stops, so do they. Even worse, though, is that rewards cannot remain static: the same reward will not provide the same level of motivation.

Consider a serious athlete. They compete in a tournament and, after a few years of trying, they win. They might do it again, but if they are good enough, it’s not long before that tournament becomes too easy. It’s just not worth the effort for one more identical trophy. They look for something harder, something more challenging, with greater prestige or rewards. If they are good enough, they might make it to the world stage, at which point there are no more higher level competitions to win. However, there is always the possibility of winning multiple Olympic gold medals, as swimmer Michael Phelps did, or winning multiple years in a row, as fencer Mariel Zagunis attempted in 2012. Phelps retired after the 2012 Olympics when he successfully became the most decorated Olympian of all time. Zagunis narrowly missed becoming the first woman to ever win three Olympic gold medals in fencing in a row.

Left to our own devices, we seek greater challenge. We also expect the benefits of overcoming those challenges to be ever greater. Conversely, doing the same thing becomes boring. The less interesting or inherently attractive the task is, the greater the reward required to keep us focused on it.

Another problem with the reward and punishment approach is that it works best in a metaphorically quiet environment. The famous behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner once claimed that if he could completely control all inputs a person received, he could completely shape their behavior. In fact, it’s not even clear that it would work as well as he thought even if he did have someone in a box where he had total control. It does sound good though.

The real world is a noisy place. People are receiving a constant stream of inputs and are reacting to a variety of different stimuli. Many of your messages are going to get lost or misinterpreted in the shuffle. A small, inadvertent reward can negate a great deal of punishment: a smile, a laugh, a nod taken to mean approval can be enough.

People also resist crude behavioral manipulation. The smarter and more capable a person is, the less willing they are to feel that their behavior is being manipulated: manipulation infringes on their feelings of autonomy and competence. For them, the reward becomes not responding. There’s a big difference between having a coach push you and feeling that you are being forced into a behavior. Force triggers resistance. When deprived of control, we seek to reassert that control in some way.

I attended a jujitsu seminar in which the instructor, a skinny old man, effortlessly threw us around. When we tried the same technique on each other, we ended up sweating and gasping as we tried to force our partners to the ground. The instructor didn’t even work up a sweat. There was no sense of power, no feeling of being grabbed, but we just flew through the air. When we did it, we applied force. The more force you apply, the more the other person fights back. The secret to defeating your opponent is to let them throw themselves to the ground and the instructor was a master of allowing us to do just that.

All that being said, there are situations where rewards are effective. Rewards are extremely motivating when structured as feedback that you are working towards a goal, rather than being the goal itself. Rewards are also effective, perhaps even most effective, when done in ways that build a relationship: as we’ve discussed, remembering to give employees gifts on their birthdays is powerful technique for building motivation and loyalty.

It’s important to notice when your efforts at motivation are forcing you into a position where you have to apply more and more of your reward and coercive power. This is both exhausting on a personal level, and, if unsuccessful, it also reduces the effectiveness of that power. It’s time to try something different.