The Business Sensei

Do Nice Guys Finish Last?

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

A question I get asked quite often is, “do nice guys finish last?”

The problem lies in the definition of nice.

Leaders should set high standards and then work like mad to help their team achieve those standards. That may require pushing people or telling them that they’ve screwed up.
There is a big difference between holding high standards, expecting people to meet those standards, and being an utter jerk. Jerks end up damaging the team and, given enough time, the company.

Similarly, leaders who refuse to tell you when you’re doing something wrong or who refuse to provide negative feedback when that feedback would be beneficial are not helping the team either.
So, if you define nice as “not wanting to upset or offend anyone ever,” then you probably will finish last. You’ll deserve it.

The nicest thing you can do is treat people as the high performers you know they can become, constantly push people to develop their strengths, don’t be afraid of difficult discussions, and don’t be afraid to take the actions necessary to build your team. We’ll look more at those actions in the next few chapters.

Trust

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

Effective communications comes from building trust, and trust comes from taking the time to build connections with employees and from, yes, communicating. The problem is that many people don’t typically drop by to chat with the boss. If you only talk to the ones who do drop by, you end up with limited information and communications structure that’s more like a game of telephone. There is also a very good chance that you’ll split your team into an in group and an out group. If you really want to get people talking to you, you need to seek them out. IBM’s founder, Tom Watson, was legendary for showing up unannounced at different IBM locations and just dropping in to chat with different people. He was trusted as few CEOs have ever been: employees believed that he cared about them personally. The stories about him reflect that to this day.

Trust is not just about keeping your word. It’s also about living up to the image of leadership in your organization and honoring the implicit promises in the organizational story and culture. If the story your organization tells is one of people being recognized for their work, you need to make sure that happens.

If something happens to cause a breech of trust, you need to acknowledge it, apologize, and explain what happened. Economic conditions or other surprises sometimes mean that promises can’t be honored, be that a raise or sending someone to a conference they were looking forward to attending. When that happens, you need to be honest about the situation. Trying to deny it or fool people only compounds the problem whereas repairing trust makes it stronger.

In a very real sense, trust and safety go hand in hand: when we don’t trust someone, we don’t feel safe around them and, conversely, when we don’t feel safe around someone we also don’t trust them. We tend to be more on our guard and less willing to engage. Commitment, innovation, feedback, and intelligent risk taking are sharply reduced. Careless risk taking, on the other hand, tends to increase.

Trust, it must be remembered, is a two way street. As your employees learn to trust you, you also learn to trust them. That means developing an accurate picture of their strengths and weaknesses. If you force people to operate in their areas of weakness, they will be more likely to fail. This reduces your trust in them and causes them to view you as setting them up for failure. That, in turn, reduces trust in you.

Part of building trust is recognizing process. Every person in an organization tries to work in the ways they work best. Each person seeks to develop their own process. That process is, in a very real sense, a manifestation of who that person is in the organizational community. If you cannot trust someone’s process, you will not be able to trust them; conversely, if you do not trust someone’s process, they will not trust you: you are essentially telling them they cannot be who they are. When you trust someone’s process, however, you build trust in them and enable them to trust you. This increases productivity, motivation, and loyalty. Fundamentally, as psychologist Tony Putman observed, a person becomes what he is treated as being. How you treat the process is how you treat the person.

Recognize that trusting the process is not just about trusting that the results will be what you expect. That is important, but it’s a surprisingly small piece of the puzzle. There is no such thing as a perfect process and no process will always execute without something going wrong. True trust comes when you know that people can be trusted to handle mistakes and unpredictable events. Trust in our own skills comes from learning that we can make a mistake and recover; without that, trust is brittle. Trust in a process comes from recognizing that the process may sometimes give us the wrong answer, but it also gives us the ability to recognize that fact and recover.

Finally, how you act in a crisis can make or break people’s trust in you. A leader who panics in a crisis can undo months or years of team building and trust. On the flip side, being able to remain calm and focused in a crisis can increase trust as you become seen as someone who can be counted on when the chips are down. However, some trust must already exist for your behavior in a crisis to matter: in the Mann Gulch disaster, Wagner Dodge never built enough trust with his team for them to trust him when he figured out an innovative way to save their lives; as a result, most of them died. Conversely, after hurricane Sandy hit the east coast in October of 2012, President Obama won praise from some of his harshest critics for his calm, disciplined, organized response to the disaster.

Your response in a crisis is the model for how others will respond. If you remain calm and build safety, people will respond to that and trust you more than ever. If you panic, you will reduce perceptions of safety and trust will decline.

Organizational Psychology for Managers is phenomenal. Just as his talks at conferences are captivating to his audience, Steve’s book will captivate his readers. In my opinion, this book 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

Communications

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

Communications get the blame for an awful lot of organizational problems. Sometimes it’s even justified.

In order to function, members of any organization have to communicate with one another. If they don’t, not a whole lot gets done. The trick is to recognize the patterns of communications and the nature of the message.

In many groups that believe they aren’t communicating, they really are: just not with one another. If you’re talking to the wrong person, it doesn’t really matter how many good communications tricks you learn. Effective communications require a sender and a receiver. When you only have one of the two, it doesn’t work so well.

Leaders easily and naturally become the center of communications in their group. Practically speaking, this means that no matter who is talking at the moment, the leader is the only one viewed as a valid sender or a valid receiver. People might address the group, but the message is really just for the leader; this is particularly true in stage one where the leader is the one making the decisions. Similarly, no matter who is speaking, group members will often attempt to gauge the leader’s response before expressing their own. If we were to draw the information flow, it would look like a wheel, or sometimes a letter Y or a chain, with the leader as the center. Once you know to look, it becomes comparatively easy to spot.

“But we send emails to everyone!” is a refrain I hear quite often. That may be true, but it doesn’t change the basic wheel structure. When you are communicating in a wheel, many people will ignore the email until the leader responds or will rapidly recalibrate their responses. This does change as the group develops, as we will discuss shortly. The goal is to transform the pattern into a star or a circle where everyone talks, and listens, to everyone.

The level of urgency of the communications also matters. Some years ago I worked for one Silicon Valley company where my manager had a habit of walking into my office just before noon and asking for information that he needed “immediately.” So much for lunch.

I quickly noticed that no matter how urgently he needed the information, he would not act on it for days. The urgency was really about satisfying his needs for control rather than any real business need. I learned to leave for lunch earlier.

When all communications are “urgent” or of “high importance” then pretty soon none of them are. People discount the urgency, which leads to an increase in “volume” from the sender. This triggers another round of scurrying about until people realize that this new level of urgency is also a chimera. Unfortunately, when you constantly amp up the urgency you have the side-effect of reducing communications, not increasing it. In the end, all that really happens is that stress levels go up and information flow is blocked. Save the urgency for the things that really are. If you are convinced you always need an instant response, odds are something else is very wrong.

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

What is a Leader?

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

A question I get asked all the time is some variant of, “What is a leader?” The question may be, “How do a I recognize a real leader?” or “What do true leaders look like?” or any of a dozen other versions of the question. I created a stretch of dead air on a radio show one time by responding, “Whatever we think a leader looks like.” The host apparently didn’t expect that!

We are biased toward seeing as a leader someone who fits our cultural image of a leader. Conversely, we build our model of leaders in the image of other leaders. As we discussed in chapter one, James Kirk was John Kennedy in outer space. This bias can get in our way, though, when it prevents us from recognizing the real leader or from giving people the opportunity to lead because they don’t fit the image we’re looking for. We’ll look at some activities to identify real leaders when we discuss training in chapter 8.

Conversely, how the leader sees her role is shaped and reinforced through television, movies, books, and other media. It is also shaped by the cultural assumptions each organization makes about what constitutes appropriate leader behavior. As a result, leaders act according to those assumptions often without ever questioning them. This can trap a leader into taking on a role that they are not comfortable in but feel obligated to play. This becomes a serious problem when it interferes with the ability of the leader to accept feedback or when followers become unwilling to provide feedback. Without feedback, error correction cannot occur: if the leader misses the “bridge out” sign, and no one is willing to speak up, the results can be more than a little embarrassing.

At root, though, being a leader really means only one thing: you have followers. A leader without followers is just some joker taking a walk.

Fortunately, there are many ways to convince people to follow you; unfortunately, there are many ways to convince people to follow you. People will follow the leader because that leader is the standard bearer for a cause they believe in, or for a reward, or because that leader exemplifies particular values or a vision, or because that leader is providing structure and certainty. People will also follow out of fear or greed or as a way of hurting someone else. There is no implied morality in being able to convince people to follow you. Fundamentally, people follow a leader for their own reasons, not the leader’s. The art of leadership is, to a great extent, aligning other people’s goals with the goals of the leader and the organization.

Much of leadership is based on a purely transactional relationship: you follow and support the leader, the leader rewards you. While this is the basis of almost all forms of leadership, if that is all the relationship consists of, it is very limited. The best leaders build on the transactional element to inspire their followers to greater efforts than can be obtained only through rewards. This is commonly known as “transformational leadership,” which certainly sounds impressive. In a very real sense, the information in this book is really about to become that type of leader without getting trapped in definitions.

The other critical point of effective leadership is recognizing that being a leader is not a static enterprise. As the term implies, a leader must lead. Change initiatives fail when organizational leadership isn’t out there in front showing the way. People stop following when the leader stops moving.

Part of how the leader moves forward is by changing and developing their own styles and techniques of leadership. As we discussed in the previous chapter, the needs of the team dictate the approach of the leader. A leader can no more treat a stage 3 group like a stage 1 group than a parent can treat a fifteen year old like a three year old (despite, as many parents observe, certain behavioral similarities).

The key lesson here is that the external trappings of leadership are not leadership. Giving instructions, dividing up work, setting an agenda, taking questions, are all part of leadership, but they are not leadership. Those are tools which a leader might use to get a job done. Good leaders, like any master craftsman, learn to use their tools well.

Understanding Hierarchy

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

While I was writing this, I was asked the question, “How important is hierarchy on a team? I’ve been told it’s a problem. I’m responsible for 160 people, and I don’t know what I’d do without a hierarchy.”

Hierarchy is a tool. Whether it works for you or against you depends on how well you understand your tool and the situation in which you are using it. For my friend who has to manage 160 people, some sort of hierarchy is essential: without it, he’d swiftly be overwhelmed.

Hierarchy is a way of organizing and structuring a system. In a typical martial arts school, the hierarchy of belts provides each student a quick visual assessment of who knows what. This can make it easier for students to ask questions or know whom to imitate: learning is enhanced when we can imitate someone we see as similar to us. That person who is one belt ahead is easier to see as “like me” than the person who is many years and belts advanced. The hierarchy also provides visual feedback of the student’s progress, a key component of maintaining motivation.

One of the key roles of the military ranking system is providing a method of coordinating precision operations. It does this by, amongst other things, providing clear rules for whom to listen to and under what circumstances and managing transitions of power should a leader be abruptly removed or cut off from the team. Like the belt system in martial arts, it also provides visual feedback of progress.

In a large organization, hierarchy provides a structured way to know where you are in your career, an easy way to identify nominal skill levels, and a means of coordinating different business activities.

However, when hierarchies become inflexible or bureaucratic, they can easily turn into obstacles. Small companies that attempt to impose rigid, large company hierarchies are asking for trouble: they don’t need the overhead and lack of flexibility that hierarchies can create. A small business’s biggest strength is that it can shift course quickly. A large company, on the other hand, is slower to change but has more resources. It is silly and counterproductive for a small business to impose large company hierarchy and thereby give up its flexibility when it doesn’t have the resources to take advantage of that hierarchy.

Even in larger organizations, the structure needs to be flexible enough to permit good information flow up and down the hierarchy. Too rigid an adherence to hierarchy will reduce productivity and motivation and stifle innovation.

Hierarchy needs to be built out carefully, in accordance with the narrative, goals, and needs of the organization. Make sure you clearly identify what each level of the hierarchy means and how people move up. Periodically review your hierarchical structure and make sure it is still serving you, and not the other way around.

Problem Solving and Mistakes

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

Team Development — Stage 1

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

Imagine that first day on a new job working with a group of strangers: there you are, staring at your partners, wondering what to do. You don’t want to admit that you don’t know; after all, perhaps you’re in this group by accident. Sure, they said that the selection process was careful, but they must have made a mistake in your case. If anyone realizes just how little you know, they’ll surely ask you to leave!

The good news is that everyone else feels the same way!

If you’re lucky, a manager or team leader has already been assigned. They’ll clear up your confusion and get things going. If there is no formally appointed manager or leader, however, that can be a problem. It is truly amazing how long it can take to get nothing done. Often enough, though, the mounting pressure of an impending deadline will force someone to take charge or perhaps simply do the project themselves. The latter case, in particular, tends to trigger more than a little resentment!

The dominant characteristics of stage one groups are dependency and inclusion. Members are primarily concerned with their place in the group; the greatest fear is banishment. Consider that exile from the community was, for much of history, seen as a fate worse than death. Indeed, even today with all our technology, survival completely apart from the group which is civilization is extremely difficult!

Thus, members of stage one groups have a very strong focus on appearing competent. Making a mistake is perceived to be tantamount to risking membership in the group. Unfortunately, with many of the companies I work with, that is also the reality (that’s why I’m working with them! It’s not easy to change.). As a result, members are afraid to take risks or admit to mistakes, preventing effective error correction from taking place. The unwillingness to make mistakes or appear less than competent also means that members will often fail to ask questions, leading to confusion about objectives, and are unwilling to accept help lest that be seen as a sign of weakness.

Another characteristic of stage one groups is that the group does not know how its skills match up with the task at hand. Indeed, in a very real sense, the group does not know what its skills are as a group. It takes time and exploration for the group to discover their strengths and weaknesses and how they can support one another to maximize their strengths. There’s a reason the Red Sox have Spring Training, and even then they sometimes never get it together.

Communications in the group will tend to be polite, distant, sometimes appearing formal, or at least extremely careful, in nature. Because group members do not really know how they stand with one another, no one wants to offend anyone else. Conflict is seen as disruptive to the harmony of the group, proof that members are not committed or loyal. There is a great deal of “go along to get along” taking place.

It’s been argued, granted somewhat sarcastically, that to know oneself is the ultimate form of Freudian aggression. By contrast, in a group, the person most people wish they could work with is themselves. Since that’s not actually possible, similarity is the next best thing.

Groups seek common ground. This commonality may be physical, stemming from gender, skin color, size, etc. It may be based on background, nationality, education, or culture. The more diverse the group, the more likely the group will demand conformity as a way of building similarity. The conformity may be based around dress, time spent at the office, where and when to eat lunch, or buying in to some particular ideology. IBM’s blue suit and tie dress code was part of the effort to create similarity in the company and became a cultural icon; a political party’s efforts to require all members to buy into a particular orthodoxy is another way of building similarity. Conformity can also be based around dislike of an outside group or a member of the group who does not buy into the group’s values. Stage one groups are quick to punish such deviants, initially with the goal of bringing them back into the fold. Should that fail, they are usually shunned or exiled. Conformity works best when it focuses on issues that actually help the group get the job done. When conformity focuses on trivial or irritating topics such as requiring everyone to eat lunch together or always show up at the same time, it tends to stifle creativity and individual expression. This causes resentment and reduces group performance.

A strong leader can often be enough to provide the focal point, or at least a focal point, of similarity for the group. Members are usually extremely loyal to the leader, and will rarely question his judgment. When there are questions, they are usually relatively polite and restrained, at least as defined by the cultural norms of the organization. Think of the image of the 1950s manager who takes care of his employees and to whom the employees will go with work or personal problems.

Lacking a strong leader, the group may not coalesce at all. If the group does coalesce, it is often around something trivial or inappropriate: a particular style of dress, eating lunch at a certain restaurant, or in opposition to the schedule, mannerisms, or style of a particular team member. These early attempts at similarity actually produce conformity. Some conformity is necessary for the group to function; too much is stifling. Lacking leadership, the group will not be productive until a leader emerges. As distressing as this fact is for many people, leaderless groups simply don’t function.

The more diverse the group, the greater the need for conformity: the less the members appear to have in common, the more they need to create common ground. On the flip side, the higher the intelligence and self-esteem of the members, the more they resist conformity. As you might imagine, a diverse group of highly intelligent, competent, confident individuals is going to be struggling with two opposing psychological imperatives. Skillful leadership is particularly important here!

Team Development or Growing Wheat in Siberia

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

Once upon a time, the late and unlamented Soviet Union decided to grow wheat in Siberia. Their logic was simple: by growing wheat in the inhospitable conditions of Siberia, the wheat would become stronger. The wheat, however, was indifferent to Soviet philosophy. Despite speeches, threats, and promises from the government, the wheat stubbornly refused to grow.

In 1990s, a group of Nobel Prize winning economists developed some very interesting theories about how the financial markets should work. Their theories were brilliant and attracted billions in investment dollars into the hedge fund they created. Long-term Capital Management almost took down the entire US economy when it collapsed in the summer of 1998.

In both cases, a belief about how the world should work was trumped by the way the world does work.

To bring this a little closer to home, I worked with one high technology company that decided to create a set of coding standards for its software development team. While not an unusual occurrence in software companies, in this case, the manager in charge wrote up a fifty (that’s right, 50) page standards document. Naturally, everyone was overjoyed and memorized everything; at least, that’s what the manager thought. In fact, no one read more than a page or two and most of the engineers ignored even that.

Another company was trying to manage information: design decisions, notes from discussions, and so forth. They had the very good idea that they could manage all their accumulated wisdom as a Wiki. Unfortunately, the Wiki swiftly ballooned into an unmanageable morass of data in which no one could actually find anything useful. The problem wasn’t so much getting people to remember to update the Wiki; it was organizing the information in a manner useful to everyone who needed to use it, and in convincing people to take the time to keep it organized. Indeed, even agreeing on how it should be organized generated controversy and bad feeling.

In both of these cases, beliefs about how people should do their work were trumped by the way people actually do work. Like Soviet wheat, it can be remarkably difficult to motivate or threaten people into doing something that they really do not want to do. Unlike wheat, people can be forced. It’s merely a question of how much time and energy you want to spend: pushing people takes a great deal of effort and tends to result in significant amounts of anger and frustration for all parties involved. Not, in other words, a conducive atmosphere for creating a strong, collaborative team.

Of course, sometimes it is necessary to have people do things they don’t want to do. Code does need to be commented, information needs to be documented, and so forth. Fortunately, unlike wheat, people can be convinced. Instead of pushing them, the key is to get them to pull: the best teams are the ones that know where they should go and will trample anyone who gets in their way.

So what are teams really? Why are some teams a marvel of camaraderie and high performance, while others burn out their members, leaving them exhausted and depressed? Why do people go from loyalty to opposition to the leader? What is the relationship between the leader and the team?

Organizational Psychology for Managers is an insightful book that reminds the business leader of basic principles of leading a successful organization in an engaging style.

Elizabeth Brown
President
Softeach, Inc.

Change Narratives

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

I live in a small town west of Boston. Halloween is a big deal here. It doesn’t matter which night of the week Halloween falls, that’s the night the kids are out trick or treating. Naturally, the kids prefer it when Halloween falls on a Friday or Saturday night so that they don’t have to worry about going to school the next day, but the idea of celebrating Halloween on the nearest Friday or Saturday night is anathema. Witches have more flight capability than the idea of moving Halloween. It just doesn’t happen.

My son, though, came up with a different approach: he asked me what would happen if there was a snow day on Halloween. Would that mean a full day of trick or treating?

“What are the odds of a snow day in October?” was my response.

I’ve always heard that it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature. The converse is apparently not true. In 2011, we got a Halloween snowstorm. Not only did schools close on Halloween, they closed for the next two days as well. So much for the odds.

But Mother Nature’s little treat quickly revealed itself as a trick: due to downed trees and power lines, Halloween was postponed, and ended up being the evening of a school day after all. Halloween moved and no one objected: when Mother Nature makes a change, it can be best described as, well, a force of nature.

A year later, we had Hurricane Sandy. Some towns kept Halloween on schedule, some moved it. The force of the story is very strong: Halloween is supposed to be on October 31st. Even though there was still storm damage, the cultural habits produced different results in neighboring town. The kids, of course, made out like bandits: they got to go trick-or-treating twice!

This is the problem most organizations face when it comes to implementing effective and lasting organizational change. So long as enough force is applied, the change will happen. As soon as the force is removed, people revert to their old behaviors. They might not even wait for the force to stop. Sometimes a crisis can force permanent change, as happened at IBM when Lou Gerstner took over. A crisis can also force the sort of permanent change that happened at DEC: they were acquired by Compaq. Waiting for a crisis to force a change to occur is a very risky way to approach organizational change.

In chapter one, we discussed the process of unfreezing a culture in order to make change possible. What we are going to look at now is how change affects the narrative of the organization and how to frame the changes in the context of the existing narrative. Not only does change reactivate all the issues we’ve already discussed, it introduces a whole new set of cocnerns that need to be addressed if you want people to become active agents of change instead of opponents of it. While these new questions can manifest in a variety of ways, the seven canonical versions are:

• What will this do to the organization?
• How will my place in the organization change?
• How will this affect my job?
• Will I still enjoy working here?
• Will this hurt our product quality?
• Will I still measure up?
• Would I be able to get a job in this new organization?

Let’s look at each of these questions individually.

What will this do to the organization?

In other words, “I have an image of the organization, based on the vision and the stories and my experiences here. What is going to happen to that organization? Will I still be proud to work for the new organization?”

Fundamentally, people base their perceptions of the organization on their experiences. The organization is as they have found it to be. The longer they’ve been there, the more deeply immersed they are in the culture of the organization. It’s become something solid, something predictable. Now that is all changing! Like living in California during the Loma Prieta earthquake, it’s very disconcerting to have the solid ground under your feet suddenly not feel quite so solid. For several weeks after the quake, whenever the cat jumped on the bed, I would awaken bolt upright. Don’t make change in your organization feel like that!

In constructing the story for why change needs to occur, we have to connect the existing values of the organization to the new values. It’s a sequel, not a completely new story. People need to be able to see that at the end the values of the organization and the underlying culture they are part of will still be there. They may be different, but they’ll be there. By connecting the dots, by telling the story of how the current values and vision are transforming into the new values and vision, people can feel comfortable with the change, rather than worried or anxious. Anxious people resist; comfortable people join in the process. Resistance is a sign that you’re going too fast.

If there are organizational values or processes that are going to disappear, again, connect that to the story. You’ll recall that in chapter one, we discussed the process for getting employees to convince themselves that change in necessary. In inviting people to talk about why the current situation isn’t working, include those things that are changing: “How is this process getting in the way?” “What are two or three better ways of getting this done?” Your goal is to have people telling you why the values or processes need to change or disappear, rather than you fighting to convince them.

In conducting serious organizational change, sometimes a few sacred cows need to become hamburger. The less sacred they are when that happens, the easier it is for everyone to swallow.

How do I create the rest of the story?

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

In creating the rest of the story, we need to recognize some basic facts: people operate in their own perceived best interest and people preferentially choose higher status over lower status. The problem is that we don’t always know what they perceive their best interest to be, and we don’t necessarily know how someone measures status. However, we do that there are certain things people seek in a job, be that volunteer work or their careers. To paraphrase psychologist Peter Ossorio, when people value a concept or an ideal, they will value and be attracted to specific instances of that ideal. The goal, therefore, is to understand what you offer along the dimensions of things people value. Understanding what you offer along each of these dimensions is critical to being able to construct an organizational narrative that will attract the right people to the organization, provide the framework in which motivation can occur, and maximize your chances of creating a highly motivated, loyal, productive work force: it’s not enough to merely provide opportunity; you have to make sure people both know that the opportunity exists and believe it’s worth chasing.

We need to start by recognizing that everyone is the hero of their own story. We all have dreams, hopes, and aspirations for the future. When the job we are doing fits into our self-narrative, we feel connected and excited. The work matters, it’s helping us get where we want to go. Note that this doesn’t mean that you need to hire a college graduate straight into the role of CEO in order for them to feel heroic; that would be foolish on many levels. Rather, people will work hard at even menial jobs provided those jobs provide a path to something bigger. Conversely, high profile jobs with lots of perks won’t hold someone who feels that, even in such a role, they are relegated to being a bit player or an interchangeable component. Nobody likes being the sidekick forever. People want to feel important, as if they matter as individuals. People who feel like cogs in the machine disengage.

Next, the story has to be exciting, or at least interesting. It has to hold our attention, particularly in today’s distraction filled world. What we are doing has to matter sufficiently that it’s what we’ll choose to do because it matters, not because we’ll get yelled at by the boss or fired. Remember, you might find writing software to be the most boring thing imaginable, but most software engineers find it incredibly enjoyable. In building your narrative, you need to understand at least a little bit about the people you want to attract so that you can speak to them in their language. That means that you will have multiple overlapping stories for different parts of the organization and different jobs within it. Generic stories attract generic people.

In building the story, there are then six key elements that we have to consider: the variety, or lack thereof, of the skills a person will be called up to use; the visibility of a task; the importance of a task; how much autonomy or supervision the person will have; how they will receive feedback; opportunities for growth; and safety. Frequently, we will have to balance different competing values of at least some of the first five elements. A lack of a path for growth, however, never goes over well. A lack of safety, itself a rather complex subject, can undermine everything else.