The Business Sensei

Trust the Force, Luke

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

The (now) classic movie, “Star Wars: A New Hope,” features a scene aboard the spaceship Millennium Falcon in which a blindfolded Luke Skywalker attempts to use a lightsaber to deflect energy bolts from a floating drone. This scene is presented to the viewer as a Jedi training exercise. As the old Jedi Master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, calmly instructs Luke to “trust the Force,” Luke attempts to feel the energy bolts before they arrive. Luke gets zapped frequently, to the vast amusement of Han Solo.

As Obi-Wan repeatedly exhorts Luke Skywalker to “trust the Force,” Luke eventually manages to successfully deflect a few of the energy blasts. This is an important step for Luke: In order for a Jedi to exercise their powers, they must be able to feel the Force and trust it. If they can’t trust the Force, all their tricks collapse like a cheap special effect.

Trust, the speed of trust, the importance of trust, and almost anything else that has anything to do with trust, gets a great deal of press in business books and articles. There is a good reason for this: For a team to function at its maximum capacity, the leader must be able to trust the members. Trust, however, cannot be one way — the members must also be able to trust the leader and to trust one another. Unfortunately, trust is not something we can just turn on or off at will. Just because we are told to trust someone, or told how important it is to trust someone, doesn’t mean that we can immediately do it. As with Luke Skywalker learning to trust the Force, it takes time and practice for trust to develop.

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

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

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

So how do you learn to trust someone’s process?

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

The best approach is to start small. Your employees are feeling you out just as you are feeling them out. Don’t launch into something so large that you won’t be able to resist jumping in all the time to tell people what they should do. Rather, give people some degree of autonomy and safe space to experiment with their process for getting work done.  Help them develop their process and be there for them when they make a mistake. In the practice of jujitsu, for students to develop expertise, they need the freedom to practice and screw up, and the freedom to then ask for help. If you punish people for making mistakes, you are demonstrating that they can’t ask for help and you are demonstrating that you don’t really trust their process.

To be a Jedi, Luke Skywalker had to work through the often painful and unpleasant process of learning to trust the Force. To be an effective leader, you will need to work through the often painful and unpleasant process of learning to trust your employees’ processes. No, it’s not easy and you won’t experience the immediate feedback of being able to block blaster bolts while blindfolded. Far too many leaders give up, dooming their teams to under performance. If you can succeed, though, the performance of your team will increase dramatically.

This article is drawn from Stephen Balzac’s upcoming book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers.” 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.  For more information, visit www.7stepsahead.com, or contact Balzac at steve@7stepsahead.com.

Are You Speaking to Me?

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

“Are you speaking to me?”

–          Fearless Leader

The manager of a team I was working with looked at me quizzically and said, “Of course we all speak to each other. Who do you think we speak to?”

That was, in part, the question I was there to answer. The problem wasn’t that they never spoke to one another; indeed, they’d taken all sorts of courses on communications. Unfortunately, none of those courses seemed to make any difference: decisions were still not being made in a timely fashion, brainstorming sessions had about as much storm as a sunny day at the beach, and there was almost no discussion or elaboration of ideas. As one of the more painful results of the situation, the team was spending a great deal of time attempting to fix problems that should have been identified ahead of time, and even more time blaming one another for said failure to identify the problems.

The easy answer was that they weren’t communicating. So they took the aforementioned courses in communications. The problems didn’t go away, although they did learn to blame one another much more articulately.

Easy answers are not necessarily correct answers.

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

From the perspective of the manager, they were all talking to one another. After all, they sent emails to the entire team, they held meetings where they all conversed, and so forth. Thus he was quite confused at the idea that they weren’t all communicating with one another.

His confusion is excusable though, because from his perspective communication was occurring: the team members were all talking to him. Although it superficially appeared that they were talking to one another, in truth each team member would really speak for the benefit of the manager, and other team members were cueing off of his response in formulating their own responses. Even in emails, there was a strong tendency to wait for the manager to respond, and then each person would respond to him, not to the original poster… or the original idea.

The net result was that decision making became a series of “me too’s” instead of productive debate and incisive questioning, leading to poor decisions and lack of commitment. Complicating the problem was that the manager didn’t fully recognize that his team of experts was depending on him to be the brain in the room. He thought he’d hired each of them for their brains! Similarly, brainstorming was all about convincing the manager to buy into the idea, rather than engage in serious conversation with one another. When something didn’t work out, failure was seen as disloyalty to the team rather than as the result of poor process and incorrect communications.

Now, to be fair, being the center of communications on your team is a normal thing and it happens quite often. Indeed, had the manager not taken on that role, the team would not have been even as productive as it was. However, as the team became more sophisticated and the problems they were working on became more difficult, their habits of communication needed to change as well. Instead of operating as what amounted to a wheel, with the manager in the center acting as the clearing house, they needed to become more of a star, with each person talking directly to each other person.

Making the change wasn’t easy: it involved changing some long ingrained habits, and that never happens quickly. How did we make it happen? There is no fixed formula, but here are a few ideas you can use if you find yourself in a similar fashion:

–          When someone sends an email to the group, resist the urge to respond right away. If no one responds in a reasonable amount of time, assign someone to write the initial response. You may have to force feed the discussion in this way in order to get people talking.

–          Conversely, if email discussions devolve into pointless running about in circles until you step in, resist the urge to hand down a solution. Instead, direct and focus the discussion, making a point of asking specific team members to voice an opinion.

–          Instead of running brainstorming meetings, appoint someone else to run it, give the team some preliminary goals, and leave the room. Later, you can have the team set the goals.

–          Instead of making a decision for the team, guide them through your process for making a decision. In subsequent meetings, instruct someone else to lead the decision making process.

–          Appoint someone to act as Devil’s Advocate in meetings: their job is to raise questions and push back on issues. Encourage your team to respond to the points the Devil’s Advocate raises, don’t do it yourself. In some cases, you may have to say, “I’m not the person you have to convince. It’s her.”

Through a combination of different techniques, we were able to significantly shift the team’s communication style, dramatically increasing productivity. Now that’s a worthwhile conversation to be having!

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 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.

Who Needs Strategy?

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

“Our goal is to succeed!”

“Our goal is simple: we will build a winning product.”

“Joe’s goal is to get his work done on schedule 75% of the time.”

“Billy’s goal? He should cross the street safely 75% of the time.”

I’ve heard each of these so-called goals presented with a straight face. They sound good; well, at least the first three sound good. The fourth? Well, isn’t it just like the third?

Goals are an interesting beast. We talk about them all the time, put them down on paper, hang banners with goals written on them, and exhort people to stay focused on the goal. Despite all that effort, a great many of these goals never come to pass. Most of them are little more than wishful thinking or downright fantasy.

The goal problem is two-fold.

First, setting a goal does not make it happen. You can set a goal of finding a pony under your Christmas tree, but that doesn’t magically cause a pony to appear. For a goal to succeed, there needs to be a plan to accomplish it. That planning process, sometimes known as the strategy, is critical. It doesn’t matter how much you want to succeed if you aren’t willing to plan you aren’t going to get there.

Now, I frequently hear that planning is pointless since no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. That may be true, but seeing the plan not survive is at least giving you feedback that you’ve encountered the enemy. Seeing how your plan is failing can give you vital information on how to shift focus, allocate resources, and generally adjust your strategy.

More broadly, though, the difficulty is often a misunderstanding of what it means to plan. I’ve worked for companies that tried to plan projects out 2-3 years. While this is possible in a very broad sense, details matter, and you can’t plan details that far in advance. Instead, you have to plan the steps in front of you. Part of the plan is to pause periodically and review the plan. What worked? What didn’t work? What are the next steps? Developing an effective strategy is not something you do once and then execute blindly; you have to constantly adjust as circumstances change. The beginning chess player tries to play out a sequence of moves and is paralyzed when the opponent doesn’t respond as expected; the chess master has a plan and constantly adjusts his strategy in response to his opponent.

Interestingly enough, the beginner usually can’t explain his plan, while the master can. The beginner’s plan sounds like, “I have a plan: I’ll do this, and this, and this, and that’s how I’ll win.” The chess master, on the other hand, is likely to treat you to a detailed discussion of his thinking processes and chess strategy. The first is easy to say and easy to listen to, but is fundamentally useless. The second is hard to articulate and takes a lot of effort to follow, but actually does have a chance of working.

I said earlier that there are two big problems with goals. The second is failing to fail correctly.

Sometimes failure is a form of feedback. In fact, this is exactly what you want failure to be: a means of testing out different strategies and figuring out which ones work best. It is Edison’s proverbial, “I learned a thousand ways to not make a light bulb.” Used this way, failure can be very helpful. Indeed, without such productive failures learning and strategy development is impossible.

However, sometimes the cost of failure can be somewhat higher. If Billy’s goal is to cross the street safely 75% of the time, what about the other 25%? Even if we raise the expectation to 99%, that one failure can negate all the successes: getting hit by a car can ruin your whole day.

It’s all too easy to confuse the two types of failures and businesses do it all the time. They are afraid to fail when that failure would give them valuable information and they take risks that sound good but where one slip causes you to lose everything.

How do you tell the two apart?

Check out the strategy around the goal. If there is a strategy and the possibilities of failure are being considered and managed, then odds are good that if you fail, you’re failing successfully. If there is no strategy or failure is not being considered as a possibility, turn and run away. All you’re doing is rolling the dice, and if that’s your game, Vegas is a better bet.

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 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.

Dial M for Manager

I am pleased to announce that my next book, Organizational Psychology for Managers, will be published by Springer in 2013.

James Bond movies always follow some very predictable patterns. The movies always open with Bond involved in an extremely dangerous mission, which he single-handedly accomplishes to the tune of numerous explosions. Bond then shows up in M’s office in London to be briefed on the mission that will be the focus of the current movie. That done, Bond picks up his arsenal of tech toys from R (formerly Q), and is off. M, meanwhile, remains behind trying to keep track of what is going on and presumably coordinating other agents and missions.

James Bond is, of course, the ultimate individual contributor. While various people might help him from time to time, he’s basically on his own. Because Bond has a script writer, he’s never going to become a manager: that would spoil all the fun. Of course, we can imagine what might happen were Bond to end up behind a desk running the operation. SPECTRE would hatch some sort of dastardly plot and the agents sent out to stop them would all be killed, except for the dying guy who escapes to tell Bond what happened. Bond would then have to go back into the field and foil SPECTRE himself.

Unlike James Bond, many individual contributors do end up in management. Perhaps it has something to do with their jobs not being as exciting as Bond’s, or maybe it’s just that that’s the only promotion path in the business. Either way, it’s not unusual to see excellent salesmen becoming sales managers, excellent engineers, engineering managers, excellent marketers, marketing managers, and so forth. Like our hypothetical Bond scenario, however, many of them unsuccessfully fight the urge to do everything themselves.

Being an individual contributor means being in the trenches getting your hands dirty. While it’s very frustrating at times, it can also be very rewarding. Perhaps more important is the fact that you get to be the person taking action. You don’t have to sit around and wonder, you know what’s happening. You’re in the middle of it. You are like James Bond, only without the explosions, deadly tech toys, and, of course, the women. On the other hand, odds are pretty good that no one is trying to kill you.

Now, like Bond’s boss, M, you are a manager. Being a manager means not being in the thick of things. It means not doing the work yourself. It means going against years of training because now you have to work through others. Now you have to give instructions to your team of individual contributors and wait to hear back from them. You no longer know exactly what is going on, because you are not doing it. This can be a very stressful and unpleasant experience, especially if your manager is someone who is always asking for updates because she finds not knowing as unpleasant and stressful as do you.

Truth be told, the transition to management can be a very disorienting experience. Unlike a James Bond movie, if you don’t manage your team well and there’s a problem, your direct reports won’t appreciate you coming in to save the day. In fact, such an act would only make it harder for you to gain respect as a manager instead of an individual contributor who happens to sign time cards.

So what can you do to make the transition easier?

Start by embracing your role as someone whose job it is to build up others. You’re now the coach, not the player. Look for opportunities to improve the skills of your team, build their confidence, and foster a sense of team unity. Remember that there really is an “I” in team, so praise both good teamwork and individual initiative.

As you and your team build out goals, make sure you mark logical checkpoints on the calendar. That way, both you and they will know when you expect an update on what’s going on. Then make sure they know that if someone is having trouble, you’re there to act as a sounding board, help brainstorm, or just bounce ideas around. You may not have the answers, but you can help your experts figure out the answers.

If you do have to solve problems for the team, don’t just give them the answer. Let them see how you work through the problem to arrive at a solution. Then, the next time around, have them solve the problem while you coach from the sidelines. Sometimes you have to teach your players new moves. That’s okay.

If something goes wrong, make sure they know that you’re there to help them fix it, not to yell at them. You want people to feel comfortable bringing problems to your attention early, while they are small, rather than after they’ve had time to get large and unwieldy.

Finally, periodically take the time to see how far you’ve come and celebrate your progress with the team. The positive feedback will build your skills as a manager, and their skills as team members.

Good luck!

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 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.

Following Prince Charming

“Don’t worry, I’ve got a solution to that.”

I was sitting across a table from Joe. We had just finished dinner and he was trying to convince me to join his new company. I had some doubts about the feasibility of what he was proposing.

“I really know this area,” he continued. “And I’ve already worked out several possible solutions. It won’t bottleneck the project.”

You couldn’t fault his confidence. He was calm, focused, and intent. He spoke with a definite air of authority. He knew how to start companies and he knew he knew it. A lack of self-esteem was not one of his problems.

Over the next two years, some odd events took place.

Although we had regular code reviews, somehow Joe’s code was never looked at. It’s not that he refused or said, “I’m the CEO, no one looks at my code.” Rather, he confidently reminded us of his expertise, and was always very willing to help others, or at least have the code review time be focused on more junior engineers.

Joe finally decided that writing code was taking away from his ability to do other CEO-like things. When we eventually got a look at his code, it was rather like a software house of horrors. He did things to software that should never be done. We now knew why we were seeing those weird bugs and mysterious problems.

As we came closer and closer to our ship date, we realized that one of the earliest problems had never been solved. Joe was working on that. He was always so calm, so confident, he projected such authority, that we never doubted that he’d deliver.

He didn’t.

Why hadn’t we pushed sooner for a solution? In hindsight, it seems like the obvious thing to have done. Yet, it never happened. Joe didn’t share information, especially information that he thought was valuable to him. He simply didn’t share so smoothly and with such charm that no one ever noticed.

The company folded. Joe, however, did extremely well for himself.

Joe looked like a leader. He acted the way leaders are supposed to act: calm, confident, authoritative. He was not, however, a particularly good leader. But he was very good at keeping anyone from realizing that until it was much too late.

Lest you think that this is a phenomenon reserved to small tech startups, let us consider a certain giant pharmaceutical company. In 2001, Pfizer’s board appointed Hank McKinnell CEO. McKinnell was widely perceived to be strong, confident, and charming, if sometimes abrasive. Rather than the last being seen as a negative, it was seen as strength: He was someone who could get things done. McKinnell had no lack of self-esteem. Karen Katen, the other candidate for CEO, was seen as quiet, but effective. However, she lacked, at least in the board’s estimation, the necessary authority and toughness to get things done.

Five years later, McKinnell’s confident, strong, charming, occasionally abrasive, style of leadership led Pfizer into serious financial trouble. The board forced McKinnell into retirement. However, don’t be too quick to offer Hank a hanky. He did quite well for himself. He did so well for himself, in fact, that Pfizer was hit with several shareholder lawsuits over the size of McKinnell’s compensation package.

A New Jersey woman once learned that her next door neighbor had been arrested as a spy. She famously commented that, “She couldn’t be a spy. Just look what she did with the hydrangeas.”

The pretty colors of the hydrangeas are a superb way of distracting people if you’re a spy. The moral equivalent of those colors can be a great distraction when you’re not exactly the best leader around. If you can look enough like a leader, you can often win the rewards that go with leadership and dodge the consequences of failure. Sometimes, you can dodge the consequences all the way to the top. The company, however, doesn’t get to dodge the consequences of that poor leadership: just ask Pfizer. Following Prince Charming can be extremely expensive for the organization.

So how do you tell the difference between a real leader and Prince Charming? It’s not enough to just look at results. Joe and Hank had a history of results. It’s just that when it really counted, their companies suffered while they profited. So, you really have to ask yourself some important questions:

Are Prince Charming’s methods sustainable? What is the burnout or turnover rate in his team, division, or department? The higher they are, the more likely you’re dealing with Charming.

What happens to his team, department, or division after he’s promoted or moves somewhere else? Does productivity increase? If it does, you should be asking why it wasn’t higher when Charming was in charge.

How does information move through Charming’s department? Is there a great deal of open discussion, a sharing of information, perspectives, and knowledge? Does the leader seek out input and invite people to challenge his ideas? If so, you have a real leader. If not, Prince Charming is in charge and odds are he’s so full of himself that he’s not going to listen to anything he doesn’t want to hear. Quite simply, a good leader facilitates discussion by asking questions and periodically summarizing the discussion. Prince Charming is too full of himself to do that. He’s only interested in what he has to say.

When you follow a real leader, the entire company benefits. When you follow Prince Charming only one person lives happily ever after. What steps do you have in place to make sure you have the real leaders in your company?

Help Star Performers Ramp up the Whole Team

Originally published in Corp! Magazine.

Do basketball players have hot hands? A hot hand in basketball is when a player is shooting better than normal. A star player with a hot hand is, therefore, going to be shooting incredibly well. Many players claim that it happens, and many statisticians point out that it doesn’t. The argument against basically says that when you look at the frequency that a missed shot follows a successful shot, you find that the whole “hot hand” thing is just an illusion. It may feel like something is happening, but the results don’t match.

The statisticians, however, are missing a key point: a basketball player is not on the court by himself. In other words, he’s not playing in isolation. When a player is shooting extremely well, the other team is going to put more effort into guarding him. Of course, if that’s correct, the extra effort expended guarding that star player should leave less available to guard other players on the team. In other words, the increased performance of a star should have the effect of increasing the performance of the entire team.

Once someone actually thought to ask that question and look at star performance in that context, the answer turned out to be that hot hands exist and that true star performers don’t just perform well on their own –they increase the performance of everyone on the team.

Star performers in a business setting are the same, or at least they can be. The trick is to set up your team so that star performers increase everyone’s productivity rather than just their own.

To begin with, what are your incentives? If you’re only rewarding team members for their individual performance, you’ve got a problem. You’ve told your star performer to make herself look as good as possible, even at the cost of other team members: Imagine a basketball team where each player was only concerned about his own personal record and not about whether the team won or lost. The fact is, such a team wouldn’t be all that successful. I’ve seen any number of software development teams, for example, structured in just that way, with exactly the expected results.

Part of what enables a star to be a star is the strength of the team. While it can be comforting to argue that focusing on individual incentives will weed out the weaker performers and leave you with the star players, that’s a bit like arguing that your basketball team only needs Michael Jordan. He’s a fantastic player, but even he can’t be everywhere on the court. Jordan is so good in part because he has a strong team supporting him. Conversely, the team is so good in part because of Jordan.

This brings us to the next point: how do people communicate on the team? This can be tricky: everyone sends emails around, but that doesn’t mean they are communicating. It’s important to look at the patterns of conversation and communication in the group: quite often, one person is the center of the wheel; even when a team member is ostensibly addressing the group, he’s really talking to that one person, and no one responds until that one person weighs in.

Related to communication is the question of how well your teams argue and makes decisions. A team which never argues is also incapable of making good decisions. Sure, they may get lucky once in a while: a blind basketball player might also sink the occasional basket. Effective decision making requires being able to debate issues, ask pointed questions, disagree strongly, and eventually come to a consensus that everyone can work with. Teams that can’t do that tend to not benefit from star power.

What is the boss’s attitude toward giving and receiving help? At one company, the manager who took over a particularly high performing team had the attitude that, “you do your job, and let the other guys take care of themselves.” Although the star performers continued to do relatively better than everyone else, overall productivity dropped off rapidly after that manager took over the team. People stopped helping each other. Conversely, in a different department, the manager who came in with the “we’re all in this together” attitude saw his team performance skyrocket. Although the best performers on his team were not as individually strong as the best performers on the first team, on the second team the stars really brought everyone else up, and everyone else really supported the stars. In basketball, five people working together will beat five people working apart.

Hot hands exist, in basketball and in virtually all other areas of team performance. It’s only a question of whether or not your team is set up to take advantage of them when they occur.

Happy Groundhog Day!

In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray finds himself reliving the same day over and over again. Great movie, and solid proof of the old adage that adventure is something really dangerous and exciting happening to someone else. As much as watching Groundhog Day can be lots of fun, actually experiencing it is something else again. Thus, it never fails to amaze me when organizations willingly enter the Groundhog Zone.

No, I don’t mean that they are afraid of their own shadows, although that sometimes happens too! Rather, they are trapped in a cycle that is at best non-productive, at worst, downright destructive to the organization. Worst of all: everyone knows its happening and yet no one does anything about it. Unlike Bill Murray, though, they aren’t actually trapped. They just think they are.

For example, I worked with one two thousand person organization on some serious leadership issues. The first time the organization ran into this particular problem was decades ago, and it nearly destroyed the business. Many of the top people stormed out to found a competing company. The same thing happened again some twenty years later. The third time around, we made some progress: there was no fissioning of the business. Everyone stayed put and the first steps were taken to resolving some of the long-standing structural problems that were causing this cycle to repeat. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t necessarily pleasant, but it happened.

Okay, that’s an old business. Should we really be concerned with problems that only come up every twenty years? That’s up to you; I suppose it depends on when the next time the cycle rolls around. But Groundhog moments are not limited to older companies. Younger companies can have the same problems.

At one company, the engineering teams are unable to make decisions. The same issues come up week after week: every Monday is Groundhog Day! While there is a lot of talking and a great deal of motion, there is no progress. Running around in circles may feel good, but doesn’t exactly get you anywhere. Management regularly gets involved in various ways, and always with the same results: there’s some yelling, some threats, maybe a few people get fired, and there’s a brief flurry of forward motion. After a few weeks or a couple months, though, they are right back to where they started. Even though many members of the management team know there’s a problem, even though they keep talking about the problem, they take no action despite the cost to the organization: on the order of six figures per month. Groundhog Day indeed!

So what do you do when you realize that you are trapped in Groundhog heaven? Since every company’s Groundhog Day is uniquely theirs, the key is to know how to generate possible solutions, rather than find a one-size fits none approach.

First of all, don’t be afraid of your own shadow. Recognize that something isn’t working the way it should. The longer you pretend the problem doesn’t really exist or the longer you just hope it’ll go away, the worse it will get. As Einstein famously said, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the very definition of insanity. Whatever you’re doing to change things isn’t working. It’s time to try something else.

In Bill Murray’s case, Groundhog Day just happened overnight. In the real world, you didn’t get into Groundhog mode overnight and you won’t break out of it overnight. Stop looking for quick fixes: if they haven’t worked yet, they aren’t likely to in the future. You’ll spend more time and money trying quick solutions that don’t break the cycle than you will in committing to one solution that may take some time to implement. Organizational change, even beneficial change that everyone claims they want, is still difficult. If it wasn’t, Groundhog Day would be over by now.

Look outside the company for ideas. Let’s face it, you’ve got some really smart people working at your company (if that’s not true, you have bigger problems!). If they haven’t managed to change things, it might just be because they either don’t know how or they are too busy doing their jobs to devote the time and energy necessary to driving the changes necessary, or both. Whatever the reason, recognize that if they could, they would. Look at other companies and adapt their solutions to your specific culture and situation and bring in the resources you need to actually break the cycle.

Bill Murray has no choice but to repeat Groundhog Day over and over. Fortunately, you aren’t Bill Murray. What choice will you make?

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.” 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.

What do you really stand for?

Knowing where you are going as a company, and having a simple, clear, exciting vision that you can communicate well to your employees can improve performance dramatically. So why doesn’t it work more often?

The key to having a powerful vision is to be consistent across all aspects of your corporate behavior. If you want people to care, they have to feel that they are caring about something that matters up and down the company.

Take, for example, the recent debacle at Lowe’s. As several articles in the NY Times discussed,  Lowe’s decided to fund a reality show called “All-American Muslim.” This show committed the unforgivable sin of revealing that Muslim Americans are much like every other American as opposed to being terrorists. In response to complaints from one group, Lowe’s then pulled out of the show, triggering a great deal more complaints, this time from almost everyone else.

Now, Lowe’s might claim to support diversity and oppose racism, as quoted in another Times article:  “In a statement on its Facebook page, Lowe’s said it had ‘a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion’ but had pulled its spots from the show because it ‘became a lightning rod’ for’individuals and groups’ with ‘strong political and social views.’ ”

In other words, it appears that Lowe’s feels strongly about supporting anything that no one argues with. Unfortunately, this does not exactly send a message about strong commitment to your own values. One has to wonder how an employee at Lowe’s will feel about the corporate vision going forward from here.

By comparison, let’s look at the employees of the Taj Hotel in Mumbai. As discussed in a recent news story, when gunman attacked the city three years ago, employees risked their own lives to protect guests at the hotel. This can be directly attributed to the Taj’s consistent vision of providing outstanding customer service no matter what, a vision that is carried out at all levels of the organization and reinforced at every opportunity.

As I discuss in my book, “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” a vision needs to answer some key questions, including:

• “Where are we going?”
• “Why do we care?”
• “Why does anyone else care?”
• How will the world change, even a little, if we accomplish our vision?”

These are all important and necessary questions to address, but they are not sufficient to make your vision work. You also have to believe in the vision, and you have to demonstrate that you will stand up for what you believe in. Otherwise, you shouldn’t waste your time with a vision: you’re better off not standing for anything at all than demonstrating that you won’t stand up for what you claim to care about.

Of Cats and Unwanted Prizes

Originally published in Corp! Magazine

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.

In an office environment, however, a catastrophe is anything but a cause for celebration.

The worst thing about catastrophes is that they happen about as often as a cat sitting down on top of the book you’re reading. At least, to listen to some managers, it certainly sounds that way. Somehow, every little thing, every small problem, was magnified until it had the aura of impending doom. In short, every setback was becoming a prize for the cat with the most beautiful behind. At one company, the conversation went something like this:

“We’ve found a major bug in the software.”

“We can’t delay the ship.”

“We can’t ship with this bug.”

At that point, the manager started screaming that the product would go out on schedule, or else. When he finally calmed down and I was able to talk with him privately, he told me that he knew that if the company didn’t ship on time, the customers would abandon them and they would go out of business. He was happy to ship non-functional software to avoid that fate.

When he calmed down still further, he agreed to delay the ship.

I am sure that most readers are chuckling to themselves right now. After all, delays in software are legendary. Obviously, this manager was overreacting. True enough; the question is, why? Why would a perfectly sensible, intelligent man react so negatively to something which is, frankly, a common event in the software business?

It turns out that this particular company prided itself on holding to very aggressive schedules. The schedule was so aggressive that they were virtually always running behind. Therein lay the problem.

Time is a funny thing. We react very differently depending on how we perceive it. Being behind schedule all the time had the effect of generating a certain sense of urgency, which was the stated intent of the aggressive schedule. Unfortunately, the urgency generated in this situation was of the slightly breathless, heart-pounding sort similar to what one might experience if being chased by a very large cat of the “has a big mane” variety.  A cat which, I might add, is looking to do more than just sit on your book.

The problem with aggressive schedules is that, in fact, being behind schedule can generate the same panicked response in people that they would feel in a situation which actually was dangerous. While in those situations, we’re very good at running away or fighting desperately, but we’re not good at making cool, rational decisions or developing innovative solutions to problems. Each pebble encountered along the road becomes a giant boulder. When we do finally get to the end of the project, rather than feeling a sense of accomplishment and success, there’s more of a sense of relief that at last it’s over. What’s missing is the thrill of victory that energizes people for the next project. That feeling of success is the key to getting, and keeping, people excited and motivated.

In short, instead of the team beating the schedule, the schedule was beating them.

Conversely, when a team is running slightly ahead of schedule, something very different happens. Running ahead of the game means that the team is feeling a constant sense of success. When people feel successful, they work harder, they are more creative, and they look forward to coming into work each day. Teams that are running ahead of schedule are more likely to develop innovative new solutions to problems rather than just slap on band-aids. Feeling that you have the time to stop and think is critical: just think about how easy it is to miss the obvious when you are feeling rushed.

The trick is to view your schedule as a living document. It’s something that you will constantly adjust according to the situation, especially at the beginning of a project. The less you know about potential difficulties down the road, the harder it is to plan: so don’t. Instead, plan to plan. As you move forward, you can revise and project the schedule further and further into the future.

If you find yourself running behind, that’s feedback. Pay attention to what it’s telling you. Is something more complicated than expected? Is someone overwhelmed with a task that turned out to be significantly more time-consuming than you thought? Did something go wrong? Is a vendor habitually late with parts? Is your schedule just plain too aggressive?

If you’re running ahead, that’s also feedback. It might mean that the schedule is too easy and your team isn’t being challenged. Be willing to become more aggressive. It could mean that you need to slow down: are people rushing and cutting corners? At one company, pressure on QA engineers to rush product inspections led to some very expensive and embarrassing recalls and some very irate customers. Moving way ahead of schedule could also mean that your team is working too hard too soon: success is a marathon, not a sprint. Burn out early and you won’t reach the finish line.

Leave the catastrophes to the cats.

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.” 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.

Make A Decision!

“Daddy, can I have that?”

As the holidays approach, a familiar refrain is heard. More common than Jingle Bells or other traditional Christmas music are the unending requests from children for various toys. Even for those who do not have young children, there is the pressure of deciding what gifts to get for family and friends. Indeed, in one sense, the parents of young children have it easy: their kids are at least telling them what they want. Of course, if all the kids got all the toys they asked for, we’d be able to pay off the national debt about fifty times over. Since very few people have that sort of money, a certain level of decision making still needs to take place.

Although web-based retailers have certainly removed a great deal of the terror normally associated with holiday shopping, nonetheless it remains an oddly exhausting activity. An hour of shopping on Amazon.com may not leave us battered, bruised, or pepper-sprayed by over-eager shoppers, but it can still leave us feeling like our brains have turned to jelly and are dripping out our ears. Not only does this lead to some very odd looking stains on our shoulders, it can also be very hard to focus on much of anything else. Attempting to put off the e-shopping is even worse. In many cases, the effort of not shopping can be more exhausting than the shopping itself! When it finally happens, the shopping experience is all the more, let us say, poignant.

So what is going on here anyway? How can a few mouse clicks be so draining?

As psychologist Roy Baumeister and John Tierney explain in their book, “Willpower,” the act of decision making is oddly tiring. The more important the decision feels the more exhausting it is. When it comes to buying gifts for family and friends, well, the level of import often feels insanely high. Even worse, the more decisions we make, the harder the next one becomes. Eventually, we hit the point where we start making really bad decisions, such as deciding to go to the store at the last minute: even for those of us who are comfortable and familiar with the Internet, going to a bricks-and-mortar store often remains a natural and reflexive action no matter how utterly crazy the experience actually is. Worst of all: we don’t even realize how bad our decisions are becoming; all we know is that everyone around us is simply getting more and more unreasonable and the information we’re looking at more and more poorly written. Well, at least it appears that way and will only get worse when you’re experiencing decision fatigue. When our brains get tired, they start taking shortcuts, such as reverting to non-decisions such as “I’ll deal with it later,” or reckless ones such as buying our kids that “Build a killer robot” kit, complete with working death ray and nuclear reactor.

When it comes to buying presents, this once a year experience, nightmarish though it may be, is ultimately not all that big a deal. Sure, it may feel that way at the time, but ultimately it generally works out, albeit with the occasional bizarrely ugly sweater or killer robot along the way. In a business environment, however, this sort of decision fatigue can be both subtle and costly.

It turns out that there are two types of decisions that are particularly difficult. Coincidentally, they are also the types of decisions that arise quite frequently in businesses, at least those that involve more than one person. These two types of decisions are those involving compromise or negotiation and those involving innovation and trying out new ideas or ways of doing things.

The fact is, compromise and negotiation are relatively rare skills in the animal world. Outside of Tom and Jerry, I’ve never seen a cat negotiate with a mouse. When dogs and cats compromise, it usually involves one of them running up a tree (lest there be any confusion, it’s usually the cat). Even for people, compromise is surprisingly difficult at the best of times, not just when the old Christmas spirit is sapping our self-control.

Now, I am often told that compromise and negotiation is something that certainly managers and salesmen need to do, but what about everyone else? How much compromise and negotiation really takes place in an office? Quite a lot. Brainstorming, problem solving, group discussions all involve compromise and negotiation. So does simply dealing with life in the world of cubicles. When everyone is suffering from decision fatigue, it becomes much harder to work with other people. Little things become major irritants simply because it’s that much harder to shut them out.

Innovation and trying out new ideas run into trouble for much the same reasons. There is a much greater tendency to let problems fester or to accept those natural and reflexive solutions, the solutions that we don’t really like but which are familiar and oddly comfortable despite the actual unpleasantness they bring. In other words, the functional equivalent of going to a large department store, tired and grumpy children in tow, on December 23^rd. At least in that case you get to join all the other people who are doing the same thing.

Fundamentally, new ideas are particularly difficult to accept when we’re suffering from decision fatigue. Meetings to address what should be simple problems can drag on for hours and, at the end, no one can actually make a decision. This only increases the frustration level.

So what can be done to avoid these problems?

As many an endurance athlete has told me, “Eat before you’re hungry, drink before you’re thirsty.” In other words, don’t wait until you’re feeling grouchy and out-of-sorts to get a healthy snack (or even an unhealthy snack, though the benefit doesn’t last nearly as long). If you wait, you’re already making bad decisions and it can take a long time to get your brain back on track. Athletes who wait too long to eat or drink suffer from rapid performance collapse, and getting hit with decision fatigue is very similar. The major difference is that an endurance athlete whose performance collapses knows it. With decision fatigue, we don’t always realize just how drained we are until the next day when we ask ourselves, “How could I have been so stupid?”

Next, take breaks. They don’t have to be long, but getting out of the office for a few minutes to take a walk or get a snack can do wonders to replenish our mental energy before we start making bad decisions.

As the old adage goes, make haste slowly. If you do have to make a major decision, sleep on it. Make it first thing in the morning when you’re fresh, not at the end of the day. If you’re running a meeting, separate any decision making from the rest of the meeting. Take a long break before making any decisions or, again, if possible wait until the next day. Finally, recognize that everyone is always a little distracted at this time of year. Take that into account in your planning. It’s a lot more productive to build a little extra time into the schedule than to have to go back and fix bad decisions.

Making good decisions and getting along with our coworkers can be hard enough at the best of times. Don’t let the holiday spirit make it harder.