The Business Sensei

Demonstration please!

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Omaha giving a talk on leadership. The room was packed (in fact, the best attended talk at the conference!), and the response was enthusiastic. The one slightly odd comment that I got afterward was that the talk should have included group exercises.

This was an hour talk and there were at least 100 people in the room. A group exercise? I figured it was a joke. Then I found out that some of the other speakers had received similar comments, quite possibly from the same person. I’m wondering now if the commenter actually listened to any of the talks.  One of my points was that a good leader takes the time to understand what can reasonably done in a certain amount of time, and that trying to cram too much in is a recipe for disaster. At least one other speaker made similar points.

Apparently this unknown commenter was either not listening, didn’t believe it, or simply has no concept of what he (or she) is asking for. That, in turn, makes me wonder about how this person does as a manager. I have to wonder if they’re busy pushing their team to attempt more and more in less and less time with no sense of whether or not it makes sense to do that amount of work in that amount of time.

Realistically, part of being a successful leader is recognizing what people can and cannot do in the time available. The goal is not to drive people harder and faster, but to use the time well. Complex projects take time to complete; driving people too hard at the beginning makes it much less likely that you’ll get to the end. Rather, what actually works is to start slowly and pick up speed; to choose your targets and focus your energies; and not to throw in something if it would detract from the overall experience rather than adding to it.

Stalking the Elusive Leader

We like to think of ourselves as highly rational beings, but the fact is we’re just not that good at being rational.The recent Star Trek movie demonstrated the normally imperturbable Mr. Spock making foolish decisions based on emotional reactions. Later in the movie, Spock’s reasoned, logical approach is less than sufficient to rally the crew. Certainly they follow him, because he is the legitimate commander at that moment — but they are not excited. When Kirk takes command, however, it is another story. Kirk engages them on an emotional level, a level deeper and considerably more powerful than logic.

I hear all the time about how there is no room for emotions in the workplace.Yet, the companies where I’ve seen this implemented are about as unemotional as Mr. Spock: in other words, they put on a good front. Under pressure, though, they are as emotional as anyone else. I still remember, from early in my consulting career, the manager of a team screaming at me that he did not allow emotions to influence his behavior. For some odd reason, the irony of the moment was lost on him.

Read the rest in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership

Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!

I recently had the CEO of a certain business very proudly tell me that she was so busy looking for clients and helping her staff deal with the economic crisis that she didn’t even have time to sleep. Was she serious? Yes, she was. Were things actually working out for the business? That was less clear, however it didn’t matter. They were Taking Action, and that’s what really counted.

When we’re feeling stressed, the instinctive response is to take action. Taking action feels good; it provides an outlet for our energy and a feeling of accomplishment. It just may not actually be useful. Sometimes it really is better to follow the advice of the old joke, “don’t just do something, stand there!” After all, if you take the wrong action too frequently, you may well find yourself without the time, money, or energy to take the right actions.

Now, it’s certainly true that sometimes the toughest problem is just to get started. It’s sometimes the case that taking some action is better than taking no action at all. However, it does help if the actions being taken are those that have at least some chance of moving the business forward. It helps even more if the CEO can clearly evaluate the success or failure of each action and adjust course as necessary. That’s hard to do when you aren’t sleeping.

A lack of sleep leads to more than just a desire for an extra cup, or ten, of coffee. There is a reason why athletes want a good night’s sleep before a big game and why legendary investor Jesse Livermore stated that one his secrets of success on the stock market was being well rested. Lack of sleep interferes with motivation, judgment, and planning. It makes one more reactive, less able to stop and look before leaping. Worst of all, lack of sleep very quickly degrades a CEO’s ability to recognize a losing strategy and replace it with one that might work.

As anyone who has taken a first aid class recently will recall, the first thing you need to do in an emergency is evaluate the situation. That’s difficult to do when sleepy. Part of that evaluation involves determining how quickly you need to act. Even if there’s a wall of flame rushing toward you, a few seconds of thought can still make the difference between life and death: caught in a massive forest fire, firefighter Wagner Dodge stopped and thought. He survived the fire while those around him were engulfed. Wagner Dodge had only seconds to come up with an innovative solution to his problem. The good news: he did. The bad news: he had never developed strong bonds of trust and loyalty with his team. Under pressure, they ignored him and perished in the flames.

Today, many businesses are still facing the financial equivalent of that wall of flames. Instead of stopping and thinking, they are leaping into action. In many cases, those actions are not working out so well. The CEO who isn’t sleeping isn’t helping her company or herself. She is, however, giving herself the opportunity to undermine her own credibility with her staff. The longer that goes on, the more likely they’ll give up on her at just the wrong moment.

So what should a CEO do?

• Build up a reservoir of trust and reinforce it daily. Help employees understand your decisions. Invite employee feedback, ideas, and suggestions.
• Build and maintain loyalty: this is the worst time to cut employee benefits or have an opaque layoff policy. As demonstrated by IBM’s Tom Watson or HP’s Hewlett and Packard, building employee loyalty makes a tremendous difference in tough times. Without it, they won’t follow you when you most need them.
• Don’t just react to the crisis. Stop and think. Brainstorm solutions with others. Find someone who will give you unbiased feedback. Take full advantage of the eyes, ears, and brains around you.
• Take care of yourself. Exercise and sleep are critical to maintaining perspective and functioning effectively under pressure. Despite the failing equipment around them, even the Apollo 13 astronauts took the time to sleep before attempting their return to Earth.
• Anticipate success. Never pass uncertainty down to your team members.

Many companies will survive the current economic tsunami. Fewer will prosper as the economy turns around. It will be those who know when to stand there before they act who will be in the second group.

Click here for a printable version.

Yankee Swap Rorschach

The holidays are the season for Yankee Swaps. Now, a Yankee Swap would seem to be a fairly simple and straightforward activity: each person either chooses a wrapped gift or steals an opened gift from someone else. This latter activity can, of course, trigger a chain reaction, but that’s part of the fun. At the end, everyone feels like they had at least some measure of control over the outcome. One would think it difficult, if not impossible, to mess up a Yankee Swap.

However, all things are possible. In this case, one company held a Yankee Swap with incredibly detailed and complicated rules which had as its most salient feature that no gifts were opened until the very end. In other words, the experience was transformed into the equivalent of a very slow grab bag: a long, frustrating, totally random process at the end of which people felt that they had no control over the outcome. Ironically, the most common complaint from employees at this company is that many of the rules are complex, time consuming, and leave them feeling like they have very little control over how they get their work done.

Read the rest at Affluent Magazine

Surviving Rapid Growth

I was recently invited to contribute some tips on how a business can survive rapid growth (and hopefully thrive along the way!). You can find my response here:

http://budurl.com/wahx

-Steve

Strengthen your business by knowing your competition

Imagine for a moment that you are going skiing. You put on your equipment. You make sure you’re prepared for the weather conditions. You get up there at the top of that black diamond slope and before you race down the slope you carefully put on your blindfold.

Well, maybe not. Even James Bond, whose movies routinely feature some pretty outrageous ski stunts, never tried skiing blindfolded. When you’re trying to dodge obstacles and avoid being shot by enemy agents, the last thing you want to do is not be able to see where you are going.

Despite that, many businesses choose the blindfold.

Read the rest at Mass High Tech

The Bi-Lingual Advantage in IT

Imagine a typical software solutions problem. The company needs to improve its bottom line revenue, the customers are complaining and want their problem solved yesterday. At best, the engineer sees a technical challenge involving algorithms and code. At worst, he sees an annoying interruption to solving interesting technical challenges. The engineer’s goal is to build a robust, elegant solution to a problem. The manager, on the other hand, sees something very different. His focus is not on the technology but the process of assembling and coordinating a team. Who has the right skills? What skills are needed? What will this cost? How quickly can it be done? The manager’s goal is to give the customer what they really want, even if that is not the most elegant solution.

Dilbert highlights, to great effect, the gap between management and engineering. Frequently, the two groups seem to live in different worlds. More significantly, they often appear to work for completely separate companies with totally contradictory agendas. Sadly, there is some truth to this. Ed Schein, professor emeritus of business psychology at MIT Sloan, points out, managers and engineers form two distinct, separate organizational subcultures. Each group has very specific goals, which may not always be in alignment. Unfortunately, since both groups are working for the same company, and apparently speaking the same language, they tend to assume that they have the same image in mind. As many managers and engineers have discovered, this can lead to more than a little friction.

Read the rest at Enterprise Management Quarterly

How You Hire Just As Key As Who You Hire

Where you start is what you get. I regularly hear managers say:

• “An unexpected problem arose and the team didn’t step up.”
• “I can’t figure out how to motivate them.”
• “No one goes above and beyond.”
• “They are just so passive!”

Alternately:

• “They won’t stop arguing!”
• “People complain about being interrupted all the time.”

Businesses like to describe their culture in positive terms, as “can do” or “fun-loving, but hard working,” or “highly motivated, team-driven atmosphere,” and so forth. Unfortunately, as the comments above illustrate, this is often wishful thinking. Culture is a complex construct and actions taken early in the company’s history can have far reaching effects. And while everyone knows that who a company hires can make a big difference, what is less obvious is that how a company hires can be even more critical.

Read the rest at the Indus Business Journal

Has the pig flown?

Swine flu is in the air. After a brief flurry of panicky news reports, what we’re hearing now is that it’s not so bad, not such a big deal, and so forth.

A common event that I’ve seen at company after company is that when someone spends all night fixing a bug that they caused, they are a hero; however, the person who went home at 5pm after carefully checking their work and making sure they didn’t have any major bugs is told they aren’t working hard enough. 

An ounce of prevention may be worth a pound of cure, but people believe in the cure far more than the prevention. Heroics are always far more exciting than quietly making sure that the problem doesn’t happen in the first place.

We don’t know yet why the swine flu outbreak is turning out to be mild. To some extent, this may be due to the virus being wimpy. It may also be due to the precautions that are being taken. It’s not clear that we’ll ever be able to tell.

What we do know is that flu pandemics come around on a fairly regular basis. We also know that the 1918 pandemic started with a mild, “wimpy,” wave in the spring and summer before turning into the deadly outbreak of the fall. 

When I ran a Pandemic Flu simulation exercise in Washington DC during the summer of 2006, the response to the flu was disastrous. Fortunately, the previous and current adminstrations learned from that and other exercises; the current administration is taking all the right steps. 

I’m wondering what the public reaction will be if the flu continues to be “wimpy?” Will the administration be seen as having panicked, or as having taken reasonable precautions?

If the swine flu turns out to be nothing this summer, what will happen if it comes back in the fall?

Put another way, is it a waste of time to play it safe? It is in many companies, or at least it’s not nearly as popular as going for heroics.

Growing Wheat in Siberia

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. 

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.

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. How do you do that? Here are some tips:

• Involve those who will be affected by the outcome in the process of solving the problem. Nothing gets buy-in like giving people the opportunity to develop the solution.
• Identify the actual problem. The company with the 50 page style guide needed code that could be maintained over time and easily read by someone other than the writer, and they needed the process to not interfere with actually getting work done. That can be accomplished with a one page style guide. Instead, they were trying to win the World’s Most Beautiful Code Contest. That may be prestigious in certain obscure circles, but it doesn’t sell product.
• Ask yourself how you’ll know when you have a workable solution. This may seem counter-intuitive since you don’t have a solution yet, but it helps to figure out what success looks like. That way, you’ll know it when you get there.
• Brainstorm possible solutions.
• Do not evaluate any solution until the end of the brainstorming process. Off-the-wall ideas frequently trigger creative solutions.
• For each solution, ask yourself if it will actually get you to the outcome you want. Focus on the idea, not the person who came up with it.
  • Take the time to honestly assess what might go wrong.
  • Recognize that “oh, we’ll figure that out later,” is often a warning of trouble ahead. Make sure there is a way past potential roadblocks.
• Test your solution before you commit to it, or at least look for examples of similar solutions being successfully implemented.
• If more than one solution has survived to this point, pick one and implement it. Be willing to abandon it and pick another if it becomes obvious that it won’t work. You can’t foresee everything that can go wrong.
• Be willing to reformulate the problem if the solution doesn’t work.
• Give people as much autonomy as possible in implementing the solution. When possible, allow them to develop their own implementations. The company with the Wiki could have used email and encouraged each person to maintain their own records in whatever form was most individually useful. Instead of trying to figure out how to maintain a central repository, perhaps what they should have done was to present different ways of organizing the information and allow each person to pick the one most useful to them.

This may seem like a lot of steps, and there certainly is effort involved. The Soviet Union decided it was easier to yell at the wheat. Given the amount of wheat they imported, it’s clear which method is cheaper in the long run.

Good luck!

Published  at FreudTV.com