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.
There are a great many ways to complete the phrase, “If it ain’t broke…” The classic, of course, is “don’t fix it,” but I’ve found that “then it doesn’t have enough features,” is also pretty popular. While some other popular endings include “then you haven’t hit it hard enough,” “clearly it’s unbreakable,” and “don’t upgrade it,” for the most part, they’re variations of the first two.
“You know the nearer your destination
The more you’re slip slidin’ away”
— Paul Simon
Some twenty years ago, I had a rather odd experience while working for a Silicon Valley software company. As we came closer and closer to shipping the product, more and more problems would crop up. Not problems with the software, as one might expect, but interpersonal problems. There was an increase in argument, bad feeling, and ineffective conflict at exactly the point where it would seem the most likely and logical that people would be feeling the greatest sense of unity and triumph. I experienced the same phenomenon at other companies, both in and out of high tech. In more than one instance, the team would successfully snatch defeat from the very jaws of victory.
In each of these situations the problem was simple; unfortunately, the solution was not. The team in each circumstance had never truly learned to work together, to handle disagreement, or to tolerate variations in working style. The only thing the team had ever agreed upon was the necessity of getting the product out by a certain time. The strength of that agreement was enough to forge sufficient common ground for the team to work together. Unfortunately, as the project drew nearer and nearer to completion, the glue holding the team together became weaker and weaker. Would the team hold together? Would everyone start fighting again? Would people leave the company? After all, working with people you don’t always agree with is often easier than working with complete strangers: as the old saying goes, better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Ironically, then, people would engage in the very behaviors they were most afraid of in order to delay the completion of the project and keep the team intact.
Sounds ridiculous, does it not? Why would trained professionals make such a mistake? Managers and CEOs tell me over and over that this would never happen in their teams. In a couple of cases, they’ve said this even as it was happening around them. Wishful thinking is not a good strategy.
The great benefit of teams is that they provide a variety of skills and perspectives. The great weakness of teams is that they provide a variety of skills and perspectives. In order to reap the benefits of having a team, the members of the team need to learn to work together. This involves more than just agreeing on a set of goals, especially since agreement on goals is difficult to get when team members cannot even agree on how to work together.
The solution is to recognize the importance of the early days of the team’s existence. How many professional sports teams go into competition with a team that’s just been assembled? Very few. Of those few, how many win? Even fewer. Basketball fans might well remember the Olympic Dream Team of a few years ago: some of the best basketball players in the United States all playing on the same team. While they were certainly competent, they did not demonstrate the level of brilliant basketball everyone expected: despite their individual excellence, they never really came together as a team.
In business, the only difference from the sports world is the belief that a team can be assembled and instantly jump to performing at a high level. It simply does not work, no matter how much we may want it to. A team in this situation is particularly vulnerable to cracking under stress at exactly the moment when it most needs to be working together.
So what can the manager or the leader do to build a strong team?
Start by fostering common ground and appreciation of one another amongst the team members. What’s the vision of the company? What are you trying to accomplish? Get everyone excited by the outcome you’re after and help each person understand how they and their colleagues fit into bringing that outcome to fruition. If you can’t figure out how each person fits in, then perhaps your project is insufficiently well defined or your team is too big.
Create as much freedom for people to work according to their own styles. Think in terms of mechanisms that permit maximum autonomy while still enabling the team to communicate and be aware of one another’s progress and needs. Allow for autonomy to increase as the team gets better at working together. Encourage the use of email as much as possible, minimize meetings, and have clear checkpoints where you can easily monitor progress.
Approach problems with the attitude of “evaluate and adjust” not “judge and punish.” There will be false starts and mistakes made, especially in an early version of the product. If people are afraid to be wrong or make mistakes, they will also be less willing to advance different ideas or experiment with novel solutions. Set aside time for brainstorming.
What roles do the members of the team take on? Are those roles truly taking advantage of each person’s skills? As the project advances, are you prepared for roles to change or for team members to take on different roles in the project? Frequently, the roles people start with are not the best ones for them; being able to change as the project develops helps build team cohesion and increases productivity.
How do you recognize status? Everyone on the team is good at something; otherwise, why did you hire them? It pays to find ways of building up the status of your team members and developing the strengths each person brings to the table. The more each person can demonstrate their competence and apply their expertise, the more motivated they will be and the stronger your team will become.
What’s happening when you get nearer your destination?
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.
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.
Not long ago, an article in the New York Times discussed how Merck created what appeared to be an independent, peer-reviewed journal, and then used that journal to convince doctors to prescribe Merck products.
What is particularly amazing about this story is that Merck is the same company that 20 years ago created a cure for River Blindess, even though they knew that the people most in need of that cure would never be able to pay for it. At the time, the cost to the company was estimated at $200,000,000. Then CEO Roy Vagelos said that he felt that there was really no other choice: he was living up to Merck’s ideals of “health before wealth” and “do good and good will follow.”
As things worked out, the long-term benefits to the company, in terms of prestige, being able to attract top-notch researchers, and access to emerging markets, were immense. Merck did good, and good did indeed follow for the company and its shareholders. It just wasn’t obvious at the time that things were going to work out that way.
So what happened? How did a company that lived up to its ideals as Merck did come to be the same company that used rather questionable practices to convince doctors to use its products?
Now I have no particular contacts or channels into the brains of the people at Merck, so what follows is purely supposition based on observing similar patterns of behavior in sports and business.
It’s well known in sports that athletes who are solely focused on winning do less well than those who are focused on personal excellence and skill mastery as well as winning. Indeed, a total focus on the outcomes and not the process can lead to a number of problems, including depression, burnout, and reduced enjoyment in the activities. Failure, instead of being a learning experience or an opportunity to evaluate and adjust, becomes something to avoid at all costs.
Ways of avoiding failure might involve only facing easy opponents, or it might involve cheating in various ways. Fear of failure is a very powerful force; the most successful athletes are those who master the art of learning how, and when, to not care if they win or lose.
When a business becomes totally focused on making money, it falls into a trap similar to that of the athlete. Milton Friedman to the contrary, a business cannot be solely about making money. Rather, a business is about producing innovative, or at least useful, products and services. These products and services must, in some demonstrable fashion, provide value to people. Money is how the business knows it’s succeeding.
Like sports, however, when the focus becomes too short-term and too outcome oriented, it becomes increasingly easy to justify behaviors that make money now instead of behaviors that maintain the product pipeline. It’s really no different from the athlete who sacrifices long-term health or career for a victory today. Living up to ones ideals is easy when things are going well; it’s when things get difficult that the real test comes.
Being a successful athlete, at any level, takes a great deal of work and dedication. There are always people who are looking for short-cuts. Being a successful company takes work and dedication as well; staying successful is, arguably, even harder. Over the years, very few have managed it. The tendency to take short-cuts is always there. It’s the businesses that stick to their ideals and are not captured by the fear of failure that last the longest and are most likely to survive the inevitable tough times.
I had this conversation recently with my 3.5 year old son. We were in the car, and he had just dropped his favorite stuffed animal, a black cat named Midnight. He couldn’t reach it, and I was feeling around trying to find it for him, while he kept telling me I was near Midnight. When I finally tried asking him if I should move my hand left or right, his response was that I should move my hand, “right to Midnight.”
Now the fact is, a 3.5 year old doesn’t really understand that I don’t know what he knows: after all, he can see my hand and the cat, therefore I should know which way to move. This sort of thing is not at all unusual with young children. For the most part, it’s generally pretty funny.
It’s much less funny when senior management is in the role of the 3.5 year old, and the employees or customers are trying to figure out what is going on. Young children haven’t yet learned to consider other perspectives; management, on the other hand, doesn’t have that excuse.
Many people are familiar with companies that put out products with incomprehensible interfaces or unreadable documentation, and then become highly irate when the customers complain that they can’t figure out how to use the product. I worked with one high tech company where the CEO and engineering team routinely described their customers, primarily research scientists, as a bunch of incompetent idiots. They simply could not understand why their customers could not understand how to use the product. After all, the CEO and the engineers understood it.
Fortunately, very few people are going to argue that a company needs to get input from its customers and involve them in the design process. After all, that’s the best way to make sure you’re giving them something that they’ll be happy to spend money on. The real problem arises when the company’s internal communications are lacking. It is, sadly, not at all unusual for management and engineering, or engineering and sales, or any other combination of departments to be talking past each other. The groups are nominally all working for the same company, but none are capable of recognizing that the others don’t know what they know or cannot imagine that different groups within the company have different, equally valid, priorities.
Engineers, for example, are most concerned with building elegant, effective solutions to problems. Salesmen want to sell product. Documentation wants to describe what the product does. Customer support wants to help the customer actually use the product. Managers are trying to meet deadlines and generate revenue for the company. It would seem that everyone is on the same page. The reality, though, is far different. The engineer’s elegant solution may be brilliant, but impractical: for example the engineer who suggested driving bolts into the side of my house to hold up a sunshade for an afternoon. While that would have solved the immediate problem, it was just a bit of overkill and could easily have caused other problems down the road. Salesmen may promise features that engineering can’t implement or management, in an effort to close a deal, might set overly aggressive deadlines. A case in point occurred in one company I dealt with, when the CEO turned to the VP of Engineering and asked when the product would be ready to ship.
“September 1st,” said the VP.
The CEO turned back to the phone and said, “We’ll have it for you on July 15th.”
The CEO simply could not understand why engineering couldn’t have the product done by July 15th, and the VP of Engineering simply could not understand why the CEO couldn’t accept September 1st. The net result was that the product ended up shipping on October 1st, delayed by a constant series of unmeetable deadlines.
When I’m telling this story, someone always says to me that the two people simply needed to communicate better. True, but not very useful. If it were simple, they would have done it. Under the pressure to get a product out the door, each one forgot to stop and get the full picture. Their frames of reference narrowed to the point where they could not imagine any other answer than the one they had locked onto. Whether two people or ten people are involved, it’s important to stop and ask four critical questions:
1.What do I know that they do not know?
2.What do they know that I do not know?
3.Do I actually have enough information to make a decision?
4.Are we really all on the same page?
Taking the other person’s perspective can pay off in a big way. What’s stopping you?
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.
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.
It’s the end of the world! There’s clearly no chance that the US will escape from the current economic downturn. Doom is at hand.
More and more people are telling me that they no longer listen to the news. They are finding the steady drumbeat of negativity too depressing. Their response is to shut out the noise.
Now, there’s something to be said for that approach. After all, if you don’t listen, you don’t have to pay attention to how bad things are. On the flip side, you might also miss something useful. Back in 1910 or so, legendary stock trader Jesse Livermore always read the newspapers, no matter how bad things were. When the economy finally turned, he was ready. Inside a year, he went from a million dollars in debt to a million dollars in the black. During the Great Depression, IBM’s Tom Watson always stayed current on the news: when conditions changed, his swift actions made IBM a huge success.
Perhaps ignoring what’s going on is not the best course of action, especially for CEOs and other business leaders.
The fact is, though, it is hard to listen to the news without feeling discouraged. It’s even worse in a world where the news is always on, as close as our computer or cell phone. Being tough and bucking up only works for so long. Eventually, even the toughest will get tired: a steady diet of discouraging words can undermine anyone’s confidence in a variety of subtle or not-so-subtle ways. So if the answer is not playing ostrich, and it’s not toughing it out, what does work?
The most important thing is to reframe excessively negative news into something more neutral or even positive. This is actually less difficult than it sounds, mainly because the news frequently appears worse than it actually is. In Edwin Lefevre’s classic, “Reminiscences of a Stock Operator,” he observes that the news media is always most excited and positive at the top of the economic cycle, and most dire and pessimistic at the bottom. Lefevre’s book was written in 1923, and his observation remains true today. Just because it’s easier to get the news doesn’t mean that the psychology has changed.
In a recent news report, one economist was claiming that hyper-inflation and total social collapse is just around the corner. Is that likely? I’m no economist, but I have to wonder how many people today remember “Dow 36,000?” James Glassman’s book was published at the height of the Internet boom: in October 1999, just a few short months before the market crashed in March 2000. Today, we’re hearing the equivalent of Dow 3600. The predictions of a rosy future stretching into forever were loudest, and most believable, at the top; what does that say about the news today?
What then is the best way to listen to the news and keep your outlook positive? There are several strategies used by master stock traders and other business leaders:
·Be contrarian: it’s always most euphoric at the top and grimmest at the bottom.
·Look for the hidden opportunities. When it looks like we’re doomed, that’s when things are turning.
·Don’t listen to every news broadcast or read every paper or website. Hearing the same stories over and over reinforces the feeling that you’re getting new information. In fact, you’re getting the same information, and it’s all usually from the same original source.Hearing something through multiple channels “tricks” us into giving it too much credence.
·For some reason, negative news frequently sounds logical and good news foolish. Stop and take a larger perspective. Don’t let your point of view become narrow.
·Each day, set aside some time to get away from the computer. Shut off the TV, put down the newspaper. Do something fun. Give yourself perspective.
·Don’t be afraid to act. It’s easy to get stuck looking for the perfect move. Sometimes, the important thing is just to move. Once you’re moving, it’s amazing how much more positive the news becomes.
While it’s certainly true that we can’t control the economy, we can control how we react to it. You can be sucked into the doom and gloom, or reframe and seize the opportunities that are out there. Tom Watson chose the latter. What’s your choice?
Stephen R. Balzac, "The Business Sensei," is a consultant and professional speaker. He is the president of 7 Steps Ahead, LLC, a consulting firm helping businesses get unstuck and transform problems into opportunities.
