Unity of Crisis

Marvel Comic’s Avengers are a pretty impressive bunch. Thor, Captain America, Ironman, and the Hulk make a fearsome combination: Captain America is practically indestructible, Thor flies around throwing lightning, Ironman, aka Tony Stark, is like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs rolled into one, and the Hulk is, well, the Hulk. When it comes to fighting off alien invasions, these guys have power to spare. That’s a good thing, because impressive as they are individually, as a team they aren’t so hot. Their inability to coordinate well would have been a total disaster if they hadn’t had such tremendous power and a friendly script writer in the basement to back them up. In fact, after watching them in action, it’s easy to understand why Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Nick Fury, is bald.

But wait! Sure, the Avengers have their issues, but they do pull together and beat off the invasion. They may have been at each other’s throats earlier in the movie, but aren’t they a team by the end? What’s the problem?

Fundamentally, the problem is that the Avengers are not really ever a team; rather, they are a group of people, more or less, who are able to agree that working together is less awful than the alternative. That, as the poet said, is not exactly a ringing endorsement! Even without Loki’s mind games, they were already barely civil to one another. He merely accentuated what was already happening, pushing them into open conflict.

The Avengers, of course, are fiction. Sadly, this unity of crisis is not. A common problem in business settings are teams whose members barely interact until the pressure of the oncoming deadline forces them to work together at least enough to get something out the door. At one company, this non-interaction took the form of endless debates and decisions that were revisited every week or two. At another company, the team ended up dominated by a couple of loud members, while the rest simply tried not to be noticed. In neither situation was there productive debate, problem solving, or effective decision making; unlike the Avengers, the motions they went through were not particularly dramatic or exciting. On the bright side, again unlike in the movie, no flying aircraft carriers were harmed.

When I’m speaking on organizational development, it’s at about this point that someone interrupts to tell me that they are communicating: they are sending email. Don’t get me wrong; email is a wonderful tool. However, it’s not some sort of magic cure-all. When I actually sit down with groups to look at their communications patterns, we quickly find out that while emails may be sent to everyone in the group, they are really only for the benefit of the team lead. Quite often, the email chain quickly becomes an echo chamber or an electronic trail useful only to prove a point or hurt a competitor when reviews come around.

The challenge every team faces is helping its members learn to communicate. It seems so simple: after all, everyone is speaking the same language. As we see in the Avengers, though, that is not entirely true. While the words all may sound the same, each person is bringing their own perspectives, assumptions, and beliefs to the table. Moreover, each person is bringing their own assumptions about what the goals are and the best way to accomplish them. Also, not unlike the Avengers, there is often a certain amount of friction between different team members. While most business teams do not explode into physical violence, the verbal equivalent does occur. Unlike the Avengers, when that happens many teams simply fall apart. Although the Avengers avoid that fate, it was close. While that experience may be exciting in a movie, I find that most business leaders would rather skip the drama.

So what can be done to create real unity, instead of a unity of crisis? To begin with, it takes time. Sorry, but just like baking a cake, if you simply turn up the temperature of the oven, all you get is a mess. Teams are the same: if you rush, you still spend the same amount of time but with less to show for it.

Assuming that you use your time well, it is particularly important for the team lead to set the tone: invite questions and discussions, but also be willing to end debate and move on. At first, team members will be happy to have the leader end the debate; eventually, though, they’ll start to push back. That’s good news: your team is coming together and starting to really engage. Now you can start really dissecting the goals of the team, and really figure out the best ways of doing things. Start letting the team members make more of the decisions, although you may have to ratify whatever they come up with for the decision to be accepted. Encourage questions and debate, but do your best to keep your own opinions to yourself: the process of learning to argue well isn’t easy and if the team members realize you have a preference, the tendency is for the team to coalesce around that preference. Alternately, the team may simply resist your choice just because it’s coming from you. Better to not go there.

A unity of crisis can be very useful for a one off event, such as saving the world from an alien invasion. But for more mundane, ongoing, projects, real unity is a far better outcome.

 

 

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 McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” and “Organizational Psychology for Managers.” He is also a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” 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.

Undermining control

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

 

The powerful thing about providing people control is that it builds their sense of competence and autonomy. They become more likely to tackle difficult projects and are less willing to give up. However, if we approach control in the wrong way, we can easily reverse those effects. It’s easy to order people to do something and then tell them exactly how to do it: that’s not giving them control. That’s micromanaging.

The more serious problem, though, is when you routinely second-guess people’s decisions: a form of the hindsight trap we discussed in the previous chapter. Remember that your goal is not to have people make the decisions you would make, but to make the decisions you can work with. As we discussed in the section on feedback, focus on what people did right. When you do have to correct something, make sure you clearly explain why the decision the incorrect and how they can fix it in the future. Avoid doing this unless it really is necessary: frequent correction only undermines confidence and destroys the sense of control. I’m not in control if I’m always wrong! If you are finding that you have to frequently correct people, either you haven’t adequately conveyed the goals to them, you have the wrong people, you haven’t provided them proper training, or you are too sensitive.

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

Make it easy

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

 

It’s worth a brief discussion at this point of the concept of making things easy. My first jujitsu sensei used to frequently remind me to not stand my partner’s foot when I was trying to throw him. It was frustrating for me and didn’t particularly amuse my partner.

All too often, we get in our own way when we want people to do something. There is a big difference between making it hard for someone to say “No” and making it easy for them to say “Yes.” When we make it hard to say “No,” we are also making it hard to say “Yes” because we are, in effect, denying the other person autonomy or control. When we make it easy for them to say “Yes,” we are constructing the situation to produce the results we want and letting the other person freely choose to give us those results. As one Googler in that NY Times article put it, even on days off she comes into the office: there’s always healthy food available and it’s a more interesting place to be.

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

Stop and Admire

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

As we’ve discussed in previous chapters, celebrating success is a critical part of building motivation and accomplishing long-term goals. Celebrating success is part of how we know we’re on track. One component of celebrating those successes along the way is to periodically pause to admire your handiwork. The basic rule here is this:

You will never admire it more than you do right now.

This requires some explanation. Any complex project has intermediate steps. Those steps are opportunities to stop and take a long, hard, look at your work. Do you like what you see? If you don’t, sleep on it. If you still don’t like it, you won’t like it more when you’re done; in fact, the odds are very high that you’ll like it much much less. If you ignore that feeling, then each subsequent step is going to remind you of the thing you didn’t like, which is only going to to undermine your enthusiasm for the project. When we’ve worked hard at something and we just don’t feel good about the result, that’s a clue that something is wrong. It may not be immediately obvious what that wrong thing is, but the odds are pretty darn good that it’s there and whatever it is isn’t going to just get up and walk away on its own.

When we were remodeling one of the bathrooms in our house, my wife designed and built several ceramic tile shelves, complete with colored glass trim that matched the shower enclosure. She completed the shelves, and stopped to admire them. She wasn’t happy with the result. She couldn’t really put her finger on why, but something wasn’t right. She ended up redoing them. The second time around was not only much better, but once we had the redone shelves to look at, even I could clearly see why the originals didn’t work. One very important lesson here is that you can’t always tell what’s wrong until you redo it; if you redo it and you and find you can admire it, it’ll also often be obvious what was wrong before.

An important caveat here is that this method works in the context of having defined goals for what you are trying to accomplish. Without goals, you have nothing to measure against. Without that sense of comparison, your ability to admire is likely to be influenced by any number of extraneous factors. As with all skills, this technique gets better with practice.

 

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

 

Failure

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

 

While there are certainly lessons to be learned from failure, and failure is necessary for successful innovation, we also have to take the time to enjoy the progress we are making and take pride in what goes right. Optimistic people are those who take pride in their successes, who recognize how their efforts made those successes possible, and who keep failure in perspective. Pessimists, on the other hand, focus on how they contributed to failure and tend to view success as being as much about luck as anything else.

Now, people have assured me over and over again that they are optimists! They are not focused on failure, no way, no how. Actions, however, trump words in this case, as they so often do. If you engage in behaviors that orient you toward success, you are an optimist; if you engage in behaviors that keep you thinking about failure, you are behaving pessimistically. When planning is all about avoiding failure, that’s inherently pessimistic!

Although pessimists so often seem rigorous and logical, optimists are happier and more successful. An organizational culture can be biased toward either optimism or pessimism; the most successful organizations are fundamentally optimistic. Optimism works.

Of course, it’s not enough to just say, “Be more optimistic!” If that were all it took, you wouldn’t need this book. Being optimistic is more than just some sort of mythical power of positive thinking. Rather, real optimism, the kind of optimism that gets things done, is based in identifying the positive, building resilience, engaging in behaviors that reinforce our sense of control over the world, and learning to reframe failure into useful feedback. Building an optimistic organization, enjoying success, and knowing how to learn the right lessons from failure, are all skills that take time to develop.

In this chapter, we are going to look at how to do just that. Along the way, we’ll see how the different aspects of organizational behavior that we’ve already discussed fit together to reinforce that message of optimism.

 

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

Thinking Success

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

 

“It was a terrible throw!”

This statement was made to me by a student in my jujitsu class. She then proceeded to elaborate on all the ways in which she had executed the throw incorrectly. Her partner, meanwhile, was patiently lying on the ground at her feet where she had thrown him. Observing this fact, I eventually commented that the throw couldn’t have been all that bad. After all, it had accomplished its primary objective: putting the other person flat on his back.

In jujitsu, it’s easy to perform a technique and then focus on everything wrong with it; after all, a technique can always be improved. The problem, however, is that when you focus on all the problems you lose sight of the big picture which, in this case, was that the technique was successful. Was there room for improvement? Of course there was. That room for improvement doesn’t change the basic success, unless we allow it to.

The same phenomenon happens in business all the time. After a grueling marathon of long days and late nights, the team finally ships the product. Rather than celebrate the release, they focus entirely on the bugs that didn’t get fixed, or the features that they didn’t have time to put in. In one rather egregious case, the director of engineering was busily berating his team for their “lousy” work even as the customers were singing their praises!

As we have discussed in a number of different contexts throughout this book, a focus on success is far more rewarding and, well, successful, than a focus on failure. When we only look at failure, we start to think of ourselves as failures. When we look at success, we think of ourselves as successful. Failure is depressing; success is exhilarating. When we feel like we’re failing, our willpower is wasted just forcing ourselves to keep going. We try to make things easier in order to feel a success, any success. When we are successful, we start setting our sights ever higher. Think about the motivation trap and the high performance cycle!

 

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

Frog Soup

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

As we can see, stress can be one of our most effective tools. The key is learning to use it well. As we saw in chapter 9, performance is all about being able to develop effective strategies and measurable goals. As we see from examining the dynamics of performance, success in this endeavor is not based on what we can do in a few minutes, a few hours, or even a few days or weeks. Performance is determined by how long and how steadily we can work. We get an amazing amount done when we can work in ways that take advantage of our innate productivity cycles! The old aphorism that, “success is a marathon, not a sprint,” isn’t just a good idea, it’s the law (at least metaphorically!).

It’s when we let stress get out of hand, or when we allow the wrong kinds of stress to dominate the environment, that we start to undermine our natural productivity cycles. Once stress becomes destructive, we rapidly enter a destructive cycle that can transform even the best organizations into miserable places to work. Unlike our mythical boiling frog, which has the sense to know when to jump, all too often we allow ourselves to be trapped in those cycles, not realizing just how bad it is getting.

While the stress and performance management techniques we looked at will help, it’s even better to develop the habits of thought and working that prevent destructive stress cycles from occurring in the first place. The more we avoid destructive stress, the more our performance management techniques serve to increase our performance, rather than merely maintaining it. Learning to avoid destructive stress, also known as developing a success mindset, is the topic of our final chapter.

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

Techniques for managing performance

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

At this point, we now understand that managing stress is really the art of managing performance. Managing performance, in turn, requires that we recognize what sort of performance we are after: do we, like a sprinter, need to perform at an extremely high level for a short time? Or, like a marathon runner or endurance cyclist, do we need to maintain strong, consistent performance for a long period of time? In the course of our day, do we need to frequently deal with unexpected or unanticipated problems that have the effect of distracting us and raising our arousal outside the optimal zone?

The key to using the various techniques for stress management, or, more properly, performance or arousal management, is recognizing that:

    The techniques are flexible; how you choose to apply them determines the results you get.
    They take practice. Remember that under stressful conditions, we revert to our rehearsed, trained behaviors. What we haven’t rehearsed we don’t use or it doesn’t work when we need it most. Top performers in all domains practice the skills necessary to maintain that performance. Put another way, the will to win is useless if you don’t have the will to prepare.

Remember, when you find yourself always feeling tired or waking up in the morning not feeling rested, that’s an important clue that you are draining your reserves faster than you are replenishing them. No matter how much we may feel like we’re running around being productive, actual quality performance is rapidly declining under those conditions.

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

Killing the Princess: The Dangers of Goal Lockdown

Remember the Ford Pinto? If you don’t, you are not alone. The Pinto’s history was a troubled one, complete with explosions, fires, and lawsuits. In a nutshell, in the 1970s, Ford committed to building a small, light, inexpensive car. It turned out that while they were so committed to that goal, that they also made a car that was prone to exploding in an accident. Why did that happen? According to management professors Lisa Ordonez, Maurice Schweitzer, Adam Galinsky, and Max Bazerman, it was because the management at Ford set goals.

Wait a minute! Aren’t goals are supposed to be a good thing? Normally, yes. However, Ford’s management was supposedly so committed to their goals that they developed metaphorical tunnel vision. In other words, although they knew there were design problems with the Pinto, they ignored those problems in favor of the more powerful outcome goal they were committed to accomplishing. Interesting concept, but are there other examples?

In fact, yes. According to the same four professors, setting specific, high outcome goals led to dishonest behavior at Sears Auto Repair: by requiring mechanics to generate $147/hour of revenue, the mechanics were effectively incentivized to cheat customers. They also implicate goals in the Enron fiasco of the late 1990s. So, if goals are supposedly such wonderful things to have, how can we explain what happened? While it would be easy and comforting to simply say these four professors are ivory tower academics, that would be unjust and incorrect. In fact, they have a point: the best thing about goals is that you might just accomplish them; and the worst thing about goals is that you might just accomplish them.

To put it another way, goals are powerful tools. Like all power tools, it’s important to know how to use them correctly lest you cut yourself off at the knees. In a very real sense, the rules for goal setting and rules for chess have a great deal in common: both sets of rules are relatively simple, but the strategies for success within those rules are complex. Failing to understand the proper strategies leads to defeat. In the case of goals, it can lead to a phenomenon that I refer to as, “Goal Lockdown.” In Goal Lockdown, people become so fixated on their goals that they ignore all feedback or other information that they might be heading into trouble. Indeed, in extreme cases, they will take any feedback as confirmation that they are on track, even when the feedback is someone yelling, “Hey, didn’t that sign we just passed read ‘Bridge Out?’”

The dangers of improper goals are not limited to giant firms like Ford or Enron. I ran an organizational development serious game for a certain high tech company. This particular serious game takes participants outside of the normal business world, instead presenting them with a fantasy scenario with very real business problems. Instead of playing their normal roles of managers, engineers, salesmen, and so forth, the participants are kings, dukes, knights, wizards, and the like. Participants still must recruit allies, motivate others, negotiate over resources, and solve difficult problems. Changing the scenery, however, makes it fun and increases both learning and retention of the material.

In keeping with the fantasy nature of the scenario, a number of plots involve the princess. Unfortunately, for all those people who had plots, and goals, that included the princess, she was eliminated from the exercise; in other words, figuratively killed. What was particularly interesting, however, was that the people whose goals involved the princess found it extremely difficult to change those goals, even though they had just become impossible! This was Goal Lockdown in action. Fortunately, by experiencing it during the exercise, we were able to discuss it during the debriefing and the people at that company are now on guard against it.

Ultimately, if you don’t want to bother with serious games and if you do want to avoid Goal Lockdown, there are some steps you can take. The simplest is to identify your outcome but then focus on your strategy. How will you accomplish the goals? What are the steps you will take? How will you know you are succeeding and how will you know if you’re failing? A system that doesn’t tell us what failure looks like is a system that we won’t trust under pressure. In the long run, the more we focus on process and how that process will move us towards our objectives, the more likely we are to be successful: we are focusing on the things we can most easily change. It’s when we focus on the result and let the strategy take care of itself that we become most likely to fail, sometimes in very dramatic ways!

Speaking of panic…

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

I have three cats. Cats being the creatures that they are, I have only to sit down to read a book and instantly there is a cat on my lap. Regardless of which cat it is, a familiar pattern ensues: first, the cat carefully positions itself in front of my book. Once I adjust to move the book, the cat then carefully positions itself on one of my hands. This continues until I give the cat the attention it’s seeking. At that point, it first butts its head against me and then, purring loudly, turns and sticks its behind in my face.

I am sure that there are people who find this end of a cat absolutely fascinating. I’m even quite sure that there are contests in which cats win awards for having the most beautiful behind. For cat breeders and cat fanciers, it can be a big deal to win one of these cat trophies. It is a cause for great celebration. 

It is not a cause for celebration when our arousal spikes up so fast, or is kept high for so long, that we hurtling down the right side of the performance curve. Instead of a more or less gradual decline in performance, we instead experience a very different form of catastrophe.

As we can see, instead of sliding smoothly down the curve, performance can collapse suddenly. Whether this collapse occurs depends on a number of factors, including the overall level of stress, a person’s overall level of fitness, whether or not you’ve had enough sleep, how recently you remembered to eat, and so forth. People who are in good physical condition, are getting enough sleep, and who are remembering to eat despite the stress are less likely to experience catastrophe. They aren’t immune, but at least their odds are better.

When we are sliding down the performance curve, various centering and focus techniques can be used to stop our descent and move us back up toward the peak; we will look at those techniques shortly. Once we fall off the cliff, however, we have to start all the back at the left end of the curve. In other words, we need to rest and recuperate, at least overnight, possibly for a few days, before our performance will return to its precatastrophe peak. Quite simply, when we are sliding down the right side of the curve, we are drawing on our energy reserves more and more rapidly. When we hit catastrophe, we’ve exhausted our reserves and we need to recharge.

If we try to continue performance once we’ve hit catastrophe, we just make things worse. Now we’re into error catastrophe, where mistakes compound upon mistakes, and our efforts to fix them only causes yet more errors. Athletes who hit catastrophe generally don’t have a choice about continuing: they are often physically unable to do so. If you’ve ever seen an uninjured runner or cyclist abandon an endurance race, that’s often what’s going on. In the office, however, we are more likely to get into competitive frog boiling. No one wants to be the first to admit defeat and go home, so everyone keeps pushing on even though productivity is plummeting and we’re actually making the situation worse. When we are feeling stressed, our instincts are to make the stressor go away; taking a break and sleeping seems counter-intuitive, even though it’s exactly what we need. Remember, cognitive short-cuts most often kick in when we’re tired or distracted, and lead us into errors. It is also possible to reach a point of such mental fatigue that it almost becomes too difficult to stop and take that necessary break. This is where it’s particularly important that the team leader has the judgment and presence of mind to chase everyone out of the office.

A final thought here: I’ve seen many companies where the idea of going home and getting a good night’s sleep was viewed as a sign of weakness. Instead, the teams would push on until they dropped from exhaustion, and then force themselves to continue the next day. The results were never worth it. In the infamous Apollo 13 disaster, with oxygen running out for the stranded astronauts in the damaged space capsule, mission controller Eugene Krantz still ordered the crew to get a few hours sleep before attempting the difficult maneuvers necessary to bring the space capsule back to Earth. Running out of air was less risky than the consequences of attempting a difficult operation on no sleep.

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