The Business Sensei

Enter the Manager

The story is told of the late martial arts master and movie star, Bruce Lee, that one day he came upon one of his students arriving early at the dojo.

“Why so early?” the master asked.

“I need a good hour to limber up enough to throw high kicks,” replied the student.

“And how long does it take you to prepare for low kicks?” asked Lee.

“Oh, those are easy,” said the student. “A short warm-up, at most, is all I need.”

“Practice your low kicks and forget about the high kicks,” advised Lee.

In response to the student’s shocked expression, Lee added: “Focus on your strengths and they will overcome your weaknesses.”

In making this comment, Lee contradicted a piece of common wisdom in both martial arts and business. Of course, just because something is labeled as “common wisdom” doesn’t mean that it’s wise or accurate; it may just be common. In this case, the persistent belief that the way to success is to focus on weaknesses is a both extremely attractive and subtly destructive.

The idea that if we could just take each person and “fix” each of their weaknesses we would end up with a team of super performers is highly alluring. The problem with this idea is that strengths and weaknesses are sticky: they reflect the complex facets of each individual. Bruce Lee’s student had a body that was not suited to stretching in a certain direction, and no amount of exercise was going to change that. What made Bruce Lee a skilled instructor is that he recognized that one size does not fit all. You must teach the actual person in front of you, not the theoretical person or the ideal person.

The simple reality is that each person has their own unique profile of strengths and weaknesses. A tall man with long legs may find head-high kicks relatively easy, while trying to get low enough to execute a hip throw would be extremely difficult. For the short person, however, the opposite is likely true. In a business environment, each particular profile may not be so obvious, but it exists just the same.

Now, I do get asked if there’s ever a situation in which everyone has the same profile, the same set of strengths and weaknesses. In fact, there is one group where this is true: the clone army in Star Wars. Because they are all identical, with identical profiles of strengths and weaknesses, it might not matter whether one fixes their weaknesses or builds their strengths. That said, their primary weakness, being unable to shoot straight, seems to be unfixable.

Star Wars aside, in the real world we’re dealing with individuals, not clones. No two individuals are identical, which is an important component of building successful teams: a baseball team that was comprised entirely of excellent pitchers and no outfielders would be at a serious disadvantage. Because each person is unique, not everyone will be able to do the same things: when we assume that every weakness can, and should, be fixed, we are implicitly saying that we’re dealing with clones, not individuals. In reality, each member of the team has different strengths, enabling the team to tackle a variety of different problems and develop different, innovative solutions.

You don’t get that by focusing on weakness. Rather, the secret is to build strength and figure out ways to render the weaknesses irrelevant: in other words, get away from the cookie-cutter approach to management and pay attention to the people in front of you. For example, at a certain service company, one sales team had an amazing “opener” combined with an equally amazing “closer.” The first guy was remarkably good at opening conversations with complete strangers and getting them interested, but couldn’t finalize a deal to save his life. His partner, on the other hand, was terrible at making those initial calls, but given an interested prospect, could close almost every deal. Individually, they were mediocre performers, together they were incredible! Rather than try to force to closer to become an opener or the opener to become a closer, their manager let each one develop their strengths and created a situation in which each one’s strengths overcame the weaknesses of the other. The team really was greater than the sum of its parts.

The reason this works is quite simple: people’s strengths and what gives them a real sense of accomplishment and satisfaction for a job well done tend to go together. When it comes to employee engagement and effective goal setting, we know that people engage more deeply and passionately with goals that are personally meaningful and personally rewarding. Attempts to fix weakness generally fail because the person doesn’t find success in that particular area personally rewarding. Focusing on strength, on the other hand, means that you are always encouraging people to build up the things that they most enjoy, and that enjoyment motivates them to constantly work harder. When you “reward” someone by making them do tasks that they don’t find satisfying, you are destroying their motivation: instead of success being associated with a sense of accomplishment and enjoyment, it becomes associated with drudgery. Also, on a purely practical level, a ten percent gain in something that is already strong yields a much larger actual return on the time and energy invested than a ten percent gain on something that is weak.

It’s also worth noting that, as psychologists Gary Locke and Ed Latham point out, the high performance cycle of business is triggered in part by people feeling personal satisfaction and gaining increased self-efficacy from accomplishing challenging goals. This requires, however, that the goal be personally relevant as well. Building and developing strengths are almost always personally relevant goals, whereas goals focusing on weaknesses are generally imposed on someone. This latter, of course, reduces people’s sense of autonomy in the workplace, increasing stress and reducing motivation, thus short-circuiting the high-performance cycle.

Building strength also increases an employee’s feelings of competence, another key element of effective motivation. When people work hard and can see real success, they feel more competent. When you work hard at something and see little gain from that effort, a common result when focusing on weakness, your feelings of competence and self-efficacy are decreased. It’s hard to feel competent when you’re working extremely hard at something at which you simply never do well, and feel little sense of accomplishment in even when you do manage something that isn’t awful.

Another interesting side effect of focusing on strengths versus weaknesses is that people generally feel happier and more energized when they are recognized for doing well at something they are passionate about. When people are constantly being praised for working on weaknesses, the praise feels hollow or pointless. If you simply don’t value the result, doing it well doesn’t feel particularly praiseworthy. On the other hand, praise for excelling at something you love is highly energizing. Granted, it’s important to understand how each employee likes being praised: publically or privately, but that doesn’t change the basic point that praise for excelling at something you love is more valuable than for excelling at something you hate. The former builds feelings of competence, while the latter undermines them.

A team of clones may look like a great hammer, but not every problem is really a nail. A team with a variety of strong performers is capable of shifting and adjusting to meet each challenge in front of them. With practice, the team almost instinctively adjusts to put the right combination of people in the right place at the right time.

It is exactly for this reason that the best managers, like Bruce Lee and other master instructors, focus on developing strengths, not weaknesses.

 

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.

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

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.

We Can’t Afford That!

“Where are the computers?”

“We can’t afford computers.”

“How can we write software without computers?”

“You’ll figure out a way.”

It’s hard to imagine a conversation like this happening in any company. The truth is, it’s hard to imagine because it basically doesn’t happen. No manager is crazy enough to tell his team to write software without computers. So let’s posit a slightly different scenario:

“Hey, the computers aren’t working.”

“I can’t get the lights to turn on.”

“It’s getting hot in here. What’s going on?”

“Oh, we decided to save money by not paying the electric bill.”

Sorry, that’s still pretty ludicrous. Let’s try another scenario.

I was recently at MIT giving a talk on organizational development. In response to a question about maximizing team performance, I explained that the secret is to have a manager whose job is to be a coach: just like on a top sports team, the manager’s job is to encourage the players, brainstorm with them, push them to achieve more than they thought possible, and make sure they don’t forget to stop and take breaks. It is, after all, the manager’s enthusiasm and sincerity that sets the example for the team, and transforms a team of experts into an expert team.

The immediate response from one member of the audience was, “We can’t afford to have someone just sitting around and watching.”

Now, if they’d left it at that, I would have let it go. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, since it led to this article, they didn’t. They went on to say that the manager needs to do the work of the employees: sales managers should be selling, engineering managers should be doing engineering, and so forth. Resisting the urge to point out that they clearly hadn’t heard a word I’d said to that point, I observed that a manager sits around and watches in the same way that a coach sits and watches. This needs further explanation.

As any Olympic coach can tell you, building a team and keeping it operating at peak performance is a full-time occupation. No one ever says, “These are professional athletes! They shouldn’t need a coach!” If the team wants to compete at a serious level, it needs a coach. If all you care about is playing in the D leagues, well, then perhaps you can get away without the coach. Of course, if that’s what you think of your business, why are you bothering?

When the manager is doing the work of a team member, you have a conflict. Salesmen try to outsell one another; sales success is their currency of respect. Engineers will argue over the best approach to solving a problem; being right is their currency of respect. When the manager is also doing the sales or the engineering or what have you, that shuts down the team. How can the members of the team compete with the manager? While it is a comforting thought to argue that professionals will compete with one another in a respectful manner, and a manager will respect the employee who out-competes him, it just doesn’t work. Comfort thoughts, like comfort foods, may feel good but can easily lead to fattening of the brain.

Athletes trust their coaches in large part because the coach’s job is to make the team successful: the coach is measured by how well he builds the individual athletes and the team. If the coach were being measured on how well he did as an individual competitor, few indeed are the athletes who would trust his advice.

Thus, when a company hires a “manager” who is nothing more than a glorified individual contributor who also signs time sheets, the results are often disappointing. At Soak Systems, it led to constant conflict and eventually to the loss of half the engineering team. If nothing else, the team will never achieve the level of performance that it could reach with a skilled manager.

Further guaranteeing that this problem will occur, most companies hire managers based on their technical, sales, marketing, and so on, skills. They do not hire, or promote, based on their coaching skills. They don’t provide them the training or coaching they need to succeed. Putting someone with no management training into a management role will, at best, produce someone who sits around and watches. More likely, it’ll produce someone who is actively harmful to the team. No wonder companies want “managers” who are also individual contributors: at least they are getting some work out of them and keeping them from causing trouble! Such “managers” really do look like an unnecessary expense. Since most people have never experienced really competent management, they also don’t realize just how much opportunity they are missing.

It’s quite true that you can’t afford to have an untrained manager sitting around and watching. There is also no point in buying computers if you won’t use them or paying for electricity if you don’t have anyone in the office. But if you want to write software you can’t afford to not buy computers. If you have people coming into the office, you can’t afford to not pay for the electricity. If you want to achieve top performance, you can’t afford to not train someone to sit around and watch.

“Author Stephen Balzac has written a terrific book that gets into the realpolitik of organizational psychology – the underlying patterns of behavior that create the all important company culture. He doesn’t stop at the surface level, explaining things we already know like ‘culture beats strategy’ – he gets into the deeper drivers and ties everything back to specific, actionable stories. For example he describes different approaches to apparent “insubordination” by a manager; rather then judging them, he shows how each management response is interpreted, and how it then drives response. 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

Monsters University Goal Setting

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 21^st century’s Tom Peters. 

Stephen R Guendert, PhD

CMG Director of Publications

 

 

The other day I took my kids to see Monsters University. For those unfamiliar with the movie, it’s the prequel to Pixar’s extremely funny Monster’s Inc, of a decade or so ago, and tells the story of how the main characters of that movie met.

That would be James P. Sullivan and Michael Wazowski, just in case you haven’t been paying attention.

Early in Monsters University, Michael Wazowski arrives on the titular college campus with a list of goals: register for classes, unpack, ace all his classes, graduate, get a job as a scarer. Mike Wazowski is nothing if not ambitious.

And he does accomplish the first two goals on his list.

After that, well, it got tricky.

Creating goals is more than just writing down what you hope will happen: that’s the easy part. The hard part is breaking those goals into manageable chunks. While big goals might inspire us, left only as big goals they don’t give us good directions. It’s on a par with driving from San Francisco to Boston by “going east.”

It helps to be a bit more precise if you want to end up in the right city. If you don’t know at the start how to be that precise, then you have to create goals to find out before you overshoot your destination. That can leave you embarrassed, not to mention all wet.

At their best, goals force us to anticipate potential problems and plan to avoid them; goals enable us to identify our strengths and figure out how best to use them to our advantage. Done well, goals turn into strategy, and when they fail that’s warning us that something isn’t going according to plan. While no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, the very fact that our battle plan is failing is telling us that we have made contact.

I run into businesses all the time whose goals are like Mike Wazowski’s: they start easy and then jump to the big, bold, and vague. There are two major differences, however, between them and Mike: their failures to set clear goals don’t make a good movie and it doesn’t always work out well in the end. In other words, it pays to understand how to really set goals.

 

Preorder Organizational Psychology for Managers.

The Missing I

As published in MeasureIT

 

“There is no me. I had it surgically removed.”

— Peter Sellers

At one high tech company that I worked with, I watched an interesting scenario unfold: after completing a major milestone, the engineers were high-fiving and taking some time to brag about their accomplishments. Enthusiasm and excitement were running high when a member of senior management decided to interrupt the gathering with the reminder that, “There is no ‘I’ in team.”

This utterance had an effect not dissimilar to that of a skunk wandering into a fancy dinner party. On the scale of wet blankets, this was one that had been left out in the rain for a week. Within a few seconds, all that enthusiasm was gone, vanished into the ether. Properly harnessed, that enthusiasm could have catapulted the team into its next milestone. Instead, the team approached its next milestone with a shocking lack of energy, especially given the successes they’d had to that point.

The problem is that while there may not be an “I” in team, a team is made up of individuals. There are three “I”’s in individual. What does a team do? Well, in most situations we hope the team will win. There’s an “I” right there in the middle of win. Oddly enough, you can’t win if you take out the “I.”

While it’s critical for a team to be able to work together and for members of the team not to be competing with one another, that’s only a piece of the puzzle. It’s equally important that each member of the team feel that they are an integral part of the team’s success. Without that personal connection, it’s extremely difficult to get people excited about the work.

Unfortunately, I see companies far too often treating team members as interchangeable parts, not as unique individuals. Not only does this undermine the team, it is also a tremendous waste of resources: a major advantage of having a team is that you have access to multiple eyes, ears, hands, and brains. Each person brings unique skills, knowledge, and perspective to the problems the team is facing. When a company fails to take advantage of those people, then they are spending a great deal of money for very little return.

In the Mann Gulch disaster, Wagner Dodge failed to appreciate the perspectives and opinions his team brought to the table. He relied solely on his own eyes, ears, and brains. Had he bothered to obtain information from the rest of his team, it is highly likely that most of them would not have perished under Dodge’s command. When the team has no “I,” the team cannot see.

On the flip side, some companies go too far in the other direction. One company, that shall remain nameless, spends so much time on “I” that there’s no time left for “we.” There have no team; there’s only a group of people who happen to be wandering in something vaguely approximating the same direction. Meetings are characterized by constant jockeying for position and arguments over turf. Different groups in the company see themselves as competing with one another for the favor of the CEO and for the eventual rewards. Oddly enough, the level of excitement and commitment in this situation is about the same as the one in which there is no “I.” When you have too much “I,” no one can agree on what they are seeing. In other words, too much “I” or a missing “I” produce much the same degree of blindness. That’s not good for the individuals, the team, or the company.

So how do you make sure you have the right “I?”

Start by creating something worth seeing. Paint a vivid picture of the company’s future, and show each person how they, as individuals, matter. Remind employees of the skills, knowledge, perspectives, and abilities that led to them being part of the team.

Show each person how they fit into the overall picture, and how their colleagues fit in as well. Make sure each person has a clue about what the others are doing. Ignorance breeds contempt.

Strengthen individual autonomy: find opportunities to allow people to decide how they’ll get their jobs done. Don’t regulate anything that isn’t absolutely necessary to getting the product out the door.

Always praise successes. Highlight significant contributions, remind people of their strengths.

Encourage and provide opportunities for team members to continuously develop their strengths. Improving individual skills dramatically improves team performance.

For a team to win, it needs to see where it’s going. That requires the team to have “I”’s and something to look at. How can you provide both to your team?

The Seven Habits of Pointy-Haired Bosses

 

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, routinely features tales of bumbling managers. The popularity of Dilbert, and the degree to which it resonates with people, are a testament to his accuracy; indeed, Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss has become an iconic figure. Dilbert aside, however, I have observed that very few leaders intentionally act like the pointy-haired boss depicted in the comic strip. Rather, they engage in pointy-haired behaviors without realizing the effect they are having on the organization as whole. Let’s explore some examples of such behaviors and their unintended consequences.

 

 

1. Pointy-haired bosses break their own rules and figure either no one will notice or no one will mind because they are in charge. In one company, the CEO called everyone together to talk about the importance of really working hard and putting personal needs to one side in order to ship a product. At the end of the talk, he announced he was leaving for a two week vacation in Hawaii and wished everyone good luck. This did not go over well. One vice-president, who had apparently not been warned, almost choked on his coffee. When the CEO came back, two people had quit and the rest were up in arms.

 

 

2. The pointy-haired boss believes that he is separate from the group he leads. In fact, leaders are also group members, with a very important and well-defined role. Through their actions, leaders set the norms for their group. For example, the manager of a team at a large software company imposed a $.25 penalty for being late to meetings. When he was subsequently late himself, the team gleefully demanded he pay up. After a brief stunned moment, he tossed a quarter into the pot. No one complained about the fine after that. What the leader does is directly mirrored in the organization. When leaders find that employees are not living up to the standards of the organization, they often need to look in a mirror and see what example they are setting.

 

 

3. Pointy-haired bosses fail to recognize the culture they are creating. To be fair, it’s hard to see your own culture from the inside, and despite what many managers and CEOs believe, culture is formed not from what you say but from what you do. As MIT’s Ed Schein observes, “Culture is the residue of success: success in dealing with external challenges and success in internal advancement.” What behaviors are successful in the organization? What behaviors are rewarded? The very behaviors that people tell me they want to change are frequently the ones they are encouraging.”

 

 

4. Pointy-haired bosses lack an understanding of group/team dynamics. They like to say that their organization is “different,” and the research on group dynamics doesn’t apply. That’s like the people in early 2000 who said about the stock market that “This time, it’s different.” If you’re dealing with people, patterns repeat. It pays to recognize the patterns and understand how they are manifesting in your specific situation.

 

 

5. Pointy-haired bosses are often unable or unwilling to create a clear, compelling vision for their organization that gets everyone involved and excited. The best way to attract and retain top talent is to make people care about what the company is doing. That’s best done through painting a vivid picture of the outcome and creating clear goals.

 

 

6. Pointy-haired bosses motivate through short-term rewards and/or intimidation. They assume they know what their employees want, rather than taking the time to ask or to observe how people are responding. Short-term rewards and intimidation generate short-term spikes in performance, but build neither loyalty nor the desire to go the extra mile. Unfortunately, far too many people are willing to sacrifice the longer-term performance of their team for a short-term gain. In one company, the head of engineering “motivated” employees by inviting them to join him for happy hour in a bar on Friday nights. Had he asked, he would have realized that what the team wanted on Friday nights was to go home and have dinner with their families. Instead of motivating the team, he made them feel imposed upon.

 

 

Finally,

 

 

7. Pointy-haired bosses do not believe in asking for or accepting help. It’s not about asking for help, it’s about investing time and money to enable the company to accomplish its goals. The boss’s time is a resource; skilled leaders invest their time and the time and money of their business where that will produce the best return. Sometimes the best return is obtained by investing in an employee, sometimes by investing in a contractor.

 

 

Very few leaders deliberately engage in these Pointy-haired boss behaviors. Rather, their behaviors are the result of their own corporate success story. Therefore, for all that even one or two Pointy-haired boss behaviors can derail an organization, behaviors acknowledged to be counter-productive are very difficult to eradicate. Nevertheless, the ability of a manager or CEO to recognize these failings and invest in changing themselves is the true test of great leadership.

 

 

Twinkie, twinkie, little star…

The news that Hostess Brands (aka Interstate Bakeries), maker of the legendary Twinkie, is closing its doors after 80 some years is all the rage these days.

Along with that news is the argument about why they are closing their doors. There are so many claims and counter-claims running around that it’s starting to sound like the beginning of a bad detective movie. Hostess is dead! Whodunit?

Some people are claiming that union demands killed Hostess, others that tripling the CEO’s pay did the job. More than likely, what really did the job was the death of a thousand knives: a series of cascading errors that put them in the position where their demise was inevitable; it was just a question of what specific event finished them off.

Of course, to really understand what happened, we then have to ask the question, “How did the cascade get started? What happened, or didn’t happen, what changed or didn’t change, to make the vulnerable in the first place?”

Here we can see the power of organizational culture at work. Specifically, we can see what happens when two cultures that were tightly aligned drift apart from one other.

When Hostess was founded in 1930, it was a product of the culture of the time: created by people living and working in that time period. The foods it sold were the foods of the day, the things people wanted. Over the years, Hostess became very successful selling twinkies, Wonder Bread, and the like. They weren’t just the best thing since sliced bread, they were the sliced bread!

Culture, of course, is the residue of success: the accumulated lessons an organization learns over time about how to successfully navigate the world. Those lessons can be hard to unlearn. Sometimes bankruptcy will do it, but not always. In the case of Hostess, they went bankrupt in 2004 and spent the next five years in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. When they emerged from Chapter 11 in 2009, however, they had apparently failed to learn some lessons, specifically:

1. Sliced bread was no longer quite the rage it had been in 1930.Indeed, today artisan breads, local breads, and the like are extremely popular. Wonder bread is no longer the first choice of many parents.

2. The dessert market changed. Twinkies are not so cool or fun anymore. They are the object of jokes and experiments to see how long before the go bad, or how much oil can one absorb, and so forth. They are not a school lunch staple as they were even 30 or 40 years ago. Same for Hostess cupcakes, ding-dongs, and the rest.

Are there additional factors? Sure. Supposedly Hostess never really modernized its distribution system and it’s not at all clear how much their internal management ever adopted modern goal-setting and motivational techniques. Fundamentally, though, what killed Hostess is the same thing that almost killed IBM in 1992: their market changed; their culture did not. Unlike IBM, Hostess didn’t have the same willingness to confront unpleasant realities and make necessary changes soon enough.

The rest is merely detail.