The Business Sensei

How to Use Sports to Advance Leadership and Organizational Development – Steve Balzac with James Rick

Here’s the blurb from my appearance on the Full Potential Show. For the actual show, click here.

Can sports be used for more than just fun and pleasure? You bet!  The same disciplines or character development, leadership and team based skills applies to almost every other domain in life.

Steve Balzac is a man of many talents. He is a consultant, speaker, and author of 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development. He is a popular speaker on such topics as leadership, team building, interviewing skills, and sports performance. In this interview, he shares the lessons he has learned from the sports he excels in – Jiu Jitsu and fencing – and how they tie-in with the honing of leadership and organizational development potential.

THE TIE IN

a)    Use the other person’s force against him (as in Jiu Jitsu)
b)    Meet and go with the force of the other person in order to take him to where you want him to go
c)    In a difficult situation, attract the other person to where you want to take him
d)    Don’t be afraid to try different techniques, even if you have to look like an idiot sometimes
e)    Explore and practice the fundamentals well (as in fencing)
f)    Build yourself to a point where you can stay focused for long periods of time
g)    When you’re up there, you should not care whether you win or lose. If you focus on the outcome, you doubt yourself and hesitate
h)    After preparing your team, give them permission to go off and achieve what they need to
i)    Look at mistakes as the cornerstone of innovation and as a part of the process of evolution
j)    Determine if mistakes repeatedly committed is due to a flaw in the system
k)    Don’t do all your research ahead of time – it’s impossible to know everything ahead of time
l)    Develop a culture where it’s acceptable of everybody to commit mistakes, including you
m)    Consult with your followers to show them you’re interested in listening to their ideas

FINAL POINTERS ON LEADERSHIP AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT:

1)    Tell your own story – what you’re trying to do and why you care about it
2)    While you should have an outcome, dwelling on it during show time can actually hinder performance
3)    Walk your way backwards through the steps from the outcome – this will make the first step very easy
4)    Don’t be afraid to ask someone to show you the way (no team makes it to the Olympics without a coach). This will shorten your learning curve.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• “Experiment” is synonymous with mistakes and breakthroughs.

My Hovercraft is Full of Eels

As published in Corp! Magazine

“Is the product done?” a certain manager asked during a product review meeting.

“It is done,” replied the engineer building the product.

“Are there any problems?”

“There are problems.”

“What is the problem?”

“It does not work.”

“Why doesn’t it work?”

“It is not done.”

I will spare you the transcription of the subsequent half hour of this not particularly funny comedy routine. The manager and the engineer managed to perform this little dance of talking past one another without ever seeming to realize just how ludicrous it sounded to everyone else in the room. It was rather like Monty Python’s classic Hungarian-English phrasebook sketch, in which translations in either direction are random. In other words, the Hungarian phrase, “I would like to buy a ticket,” might be translated to the English phrase, “My hovercraft is full of eels.”

It was extremely funny when Monty Python performed it. As for the manager and the engineer, well, perhaps they just didn’t have the comedic timing of Python’s John Cleese and Graham Chapman.

As it happens, “my hovercraft is full of eels” moments come about far too often. What was unusual in this situation is that it involved only two people. Usually, considerably more people take part. Thus, instead of a not particularly amusing exchange between two people, there is an extremely frustrating exchange involving several people. The most common failure to communicate is the game of telephone: as the message passes along the line, it becomes increasingly distorted.

What I hear from teams over and over is, “We are communicating! We send email to everyone.” This is where the hovercraft starts to fill with eels. Broadcasting is not really communicating: effective business communications require a certain amount of back and forth, questioning and explaining, before everyone is on the same page.

Who talks to whom? When you send out an email, do questions come back to you? Or do people on the team quietly ask one another to explain what you meant? While it’s comforting to believe that every missive we send out is so carefully crafted as to be completely unambiguous, very few of us write that well. Of that select few, even fewer can do it all the time. Particularly in the early stages of a project, if there are no questions, then there are certainly problems.

When someone else asks a question, either via email or in a meeting, does everyone wait for you to respond? Even worse, does Bob only jump into a thread if Fred jumps in first? Who is Bob responding to at that point, you or Fred? Are you still addressing the main topic or is the hovercraft starting to become eel infested?

It can be extremely frustrating to ask, “Are there any questions?” and receive either dead silence or questions about something trivial. It can easily become tempting to assume that there are no questions and just race full speed ahead. However, until employees figure out how much each person understands about the project and how you will respond to apparently dumb questions, they will be cautious about what they ask. Their curiosity is as much about one another and about you as it is about the project. How that curiosity gets satisfied determines whether you have productive conversations or a hovercraft that is full of eels. In the former case, you get strong employee engagement; in the latter case, you don’t.

If you’ve been working with a team for some months, or longer, and people are still not asking questions then there are really only two possibilities: either your team is composed of professional mind-readers or you are about to find a room full of those pesky eels. No project is ever perfectly defined from the beginning. Questions and debate should be ongoing throughout the development or production cycle. A lack of questions tells you that there is a lack of trust between the team members and between the team members and you. When trust is lacking, so is engagement.

Now some good news: remedying that lack of trust isn’t all that complicated. It does, however, require a certain amount of persistence and patience.

Start by highlighting each person’s role and contribution to the project. Why are they there? What makes them uniquely qualified to fill the role they are in? Be specific and detailed. If you can’t clearly define their roles, you can rest assured that they can’t either.  Questions come when people are clear about their roles. Disengagement comes when people are not clear about their roles.

Prime the pump with questions. Demonstrate that you don’t have all the answers and that you need the help of the team to find them. Give each person a chance to play the expert while you ask the dumb questions. When you set the tone, the others will follow. Communications start with the person in charge.

Separate producing answers from evaluating answers. Collect up the possibilities and take a break before you start examining them and making decisions about them. Brainstorming without evaluating allows ideas to build upon one another and apparently unworkable ideas to spark other ideas. Pausing to examine each potential answer as it comes up kills that process.

Encourage different forms of brainstorming: some people are very analytical, some are intuitive, some generate ideas by cracking jokes, others pace, and so on. Choose a venue where people are comfortable and only step in if the creative juices start to run dry or tempers start to get short. In either case, that means you need to take a break.  Intense discussions are fine, heated discussions not so much.

Initially, you will have to make all the decisions. That’s fine, but don’t get too comfortable with it. As trust and engagement build, the team will want to become more involved in the decision making process. Invite them in: that demonstration of trust will further build engagement and foster effective communications. Effective communications, in turn, builds trust and engagement.

Having a hovercraft full of eels isn’t the real problem. The real problem is what a hovercraft full of eels tells you about the trust, engagement, and communications in your company.

Sir CEO and the Green Knight

As published in the CEO Refresher

One fine day, Arthur, the CEO rode forth upon his trusty steed. At his side hung his magic sword, Expostfacto. Expostfacto was widely considered to be a sword with a sharp legal mind. Arthur had made his fortune renting camels, which he parked every day in a large camel lot.

The sun was shining. The birds were singing. Suddenly, a dragon came roaring out of the sky, heading straight for Arthur. Flame billowed from the dragon’s mouth. Arthur drew his sword and with one swift blow, buried the dragon in a shower of subpoenas.

So it went, as Arthur spent many days enjoying the freedom of facing foes instead of sitting in stultifying board meetings, where, regretfully, it was seen as déclassé to employ the full might of Expostfacto upon annoying board members or customers. Against the power of Expostfacto, each foe swiftly fell under a massive pile of paperwork.

So it went until the day that Arthur encountered Maldive, the Green Knight.

“None shall pass!” quoth Maldive.

Many blows were exchanged, with Expostfacto screaming its legendary battle cry, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,” a phrase which has become familiar to all internet users. Eventually, though, with a mighty blow, Arthur struck Maldive’s head from his shoulders. That should have ended the fight right then and there, but Maldive was an internet marketing scheme. He simply put his head back on and continued the fight. Eventually, Maldive knocked Expostfacto to one side, and placed the point of his sword at Arthur’s throat.

“I could slay you now,” said he. “But on your honor, I will spare you if you can answer this question: What does every engineer desire? Swear on Expostfacto that you will return in a month. If you have the answer, you will live. If not, you die.”

Ignoring Expostfacto’s muttered comments on possible loopholes and the inadvisability of signing anything, Arthur took the oath to return in a month with the answer or without it.

Arthur rode across the land searching for an answer to the question. He called together all his senior managers and asked them, to no avail. He even posted the question on Twitter and Facebook, leading to some very interesting answers and suggestions, particularly from certain ex-politicians in New York and California. However, since Maldive had asked about engineers, Arthur knew those answers couldn’t be true because an engineer wouldn’t know what to do with one even if he found someone willing to go on a date.

By day 29, things were looking quite bleak for Arthur. As he rode through the frozen lands of Nadir, he encountered a strange looking man. The strange thing was that the man did not appear to be in a rush. As a CEO, Arthur was quite used to people rushing around following his orders. He could always tell when things were getting done by how much people were rushing.

“Who are you?” asked Arthur, puzzled at the sight of someone so calm and relaxed.

“Merlin,” was the reply.

“Merlin the Magician?” asked Arthur.

“No, Merlin the consultant. What seems to be a problem?”

“Nothing, nothing at all,” said Arthur who, like most CEOs, became very cautious at the sight of a consultant.

“Good,” said Merlin, who turned back to whatever he was doing, completely ignoring Arthur. This was a very unusual experience for Arthur, who was not used to being ignored by anyone.

After several minutes, Arthur said, “Well, I guess I’ll be on my way.”

There was no response.

“I’m going now,” said Arthur.

There was no response.

Arthur started to ride away. There was still no response from Merlin, who seemed quite happy to let Arthur leave. Arthur had not ridden very far before he stopped and turned back.

“Do you know what every engineer wants?” asked Arthur.

“Why do you ask?” replied Merlin.

Before long, Arthur was telling Merlin exactly why he wanted to know and what would happen if he didn’t find out. I wasn’t long before a price was agreed upon and Arthur had his answer.

“That’s it?” exclaimed Arthur. Reflecting on it further, he said to himself thoughtfully, “But that’s what everyone wants!”

The next day Arthur showed up at the appointed time for his meeting with Maldive.

“Well?” said Maldive.

“Is it money?” said Arthur.

“No.”

“Is it a fast car?”

“No.”

“Sex?”

“We’re talking about engineers,” responded Maldive. “If that’s the best you can do, then prepare to die.”

“Wait,” said Arthur. “What engineers want is the freedom to make their own decisions.”

There was a long silence.

“I see you encountered Merlin,” growled Maldive. “Very well. But I doubt you will learn from this experience!”

And so Maldive turned and rode away.

Arthur, meanwhile, departed for home in a very thoughtful mood. What, indeed, did it really mean that people want to make their own decisions? Obviously, if he allowed all his employees to make their own decisions, surely chaos would result. No one would know what anyone else was doing! There would be no coordination between departments.

The moment Arthur returned to his office, he discovered the true meaning of chaos. Thousands of emails needing his attention; projects stalled because he hadn’t been around to tell people what to do; irate customers complaining about badly maintained camels (even camel renters have some expectations!); employees angry and frustrated because they couldn’t get anything done in his absence.

“I knew I should never have taken a vacation,” Arthur thought ruefully to himself. “This happens every time! It’s even worse than when I’m in a meeting or on a call.”

As Arthur dove into sorting out the confusion that came about from his taking his guiding hands off the corporate reins, he kept wondering how much worse it could really be if he allowed his employees to make their own decisions. Would it really be worse than what he dealt with every day? Arthur decided to experiment: instead of solving the problems in one department, he gave them limited decision making power. They could approve all expenditures, including customer returns or gifts, up to a fixed amount. After a couple of false starts as everyone got used to the new arrangements, Arthur found that that department was suddenly taking up much less of his time and energy. Moreover, the increased productivity of his employees more than made up for the occasional decisions that Arthur might have made differently. Indeed, simply by building some structure, Arthur found he could permit much more freedom and limit the downside of the occasional mistake, and create almost unlimited upside. At the same time, he also found that he could now focus much more on the strategic direction of his company instead of spending all his time putting out fires.

Best of all, as Arthur spread these changes throughout his company, he found that work didn’t come to a halt whenever he wasn’t available. Productivity increased because employees no longer needed to look busy in order to appear to have a purpose; instead, they could actually engage in purposeful activity. Sure, there were still moments of frustration, but on the whole, employees were happier and more motivated than he had ever seen them. Motion does not equal progress, Arthur realized. Progress equals progress.

In the end, the ability to give people the freedom to work as they would like to work comes from building the structure to enable them to know what to do. Without structure, there may a lot of motion, but very little progress. What will you do to change that?

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.

Balance the Individual and the Team for Top Performance

As published in Corp! Magazine

In Monty Python’s classic comedy, “The Life of Brian,” there is a scene fairly early in the movie when the people of Jerusalem have decided that Brian is the Messiah and are standing waiting on the street outside his window. Brian’s mother screams out at the crowd, “You are all individuals.”

The crowd replies: “We are all individuals.”

A pause, and then a lone voice yells, “I’m not.”

This is typical Monty Python absurdist humor, but it makes a very serious point. What is standing outside Brian’s window is not a group of individuals, it’s a mob. A mob is a group in which individuality is lost in the urge to conform to the group. As the movie progresses, we see the mob do various ludicrous things as they follow their unwilling prophet. Brian’s followers are, of course, convinced that they are acting according to his instructions and executing his desires, no matter how much Brian screams to the contrary. This being a Python film, the sequence of events is absolutely hilarious.

In a business, not so much. Unfortunately, the tendency for a group to lose individuality in the service of a charismatic leader or a particularly enticing corporate vision is not restricted to comedy. At one large software company, the dynamic became quite extreme: employees were expected to arrive at a certain time, eat lunch at a certain time, visit a certain set of restaurants, leave at a certain time, and so forth. No deviation was tolerated. The mantra was, “We’re a team. We do everything alike!”

Sound fanciful? I wish it were.

The problem is that a team that loses its individuality is not a team, it’s a mob or a rabble. It can be a very disciplined mob or rabble, sort of like the Storm Troopers in “Star Wars,” but it’s still a mob. Like the Storm Troopers, it’s very good at dealing with routine situations, but isn’t very good at dealing with the unexpected: new tactics from the rebels or, if you prefer, new competitors or existing competitors adopting new strategies. The other problem is that when a group focuses on homogeneity, it loses its ability for the strengths of some to compensate for the weaknesses of others: the Storm Troopers, for example, cannot successfully shoot the broad side of a barn.

At a different high-tech company, the only engineers hired matched a very precise and very limited profile. Not only did you have to solve a certain set of puzzles, you had to solve them in just the right way. Alternate solutions were not tolerated. This created a team that was very good at creating intricate, convoluted algorithms, and a user interface that was equally intricate and convoluted.

None of these situations are as extreme as that portrayed in “The Life of Brian,” but then again, they aren’t as funny either.

Later in the movie, we see the opposite end of the spectrum: the members of the People’s Front of Judea are so busy drawing insignificant distinctions between each of their positions that they are not functioning as a team. Rather, they are a horde. Each person is operating according to their own individual needs and goals, with no actual concern about the goals or strategy of the group. In a horde, everyone is a hero, entitled to his or her share of the plunder and devil take the hindmost. Cooperation is almost accidental, and the group is likely to break apart at the slightest disagreement:  the People’s Front of Judea can’t even quite figure out why the Judean People’s Front broke off, but is quite happy to yell, “Splitters!”

At a certain manufacturing company, each department was totally focused on doing its own job. None of the departments considered how their actions or decisions affected the others. Within each department, much the same thing was happening at an individual level. Rather than figuring out how to work together, they spent their time blaming one another for the inevitable failures. Fixing this issue saved the company in question several hundred thousand dollars a year.

The challenge, of course, is to find the middle ground, where the individual and the team are in balance. While it’s extremely difficult to find the exact middle, anywhere in the general vicinity works pretty well. Peak performance occurs when people are committed to the goals of the company and the team, and are also free to pursue their personal goals and work the way they want to work. Is it easy? No: less than one team in five ever gets there. However, it sure beats a horde or a mob of people chanting, “We are all individuals.”

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, contact steve@7stepsahead.com.

Real Science Fiction

As published in Corp! Magazine

See if you can identify the actual science fictional elements from the following description of a scene from the original Star Trek.

Captain Kirk and his officers are sitting around a conference table aboard the starship Enterprise. They are looking at screens set into the table, on which information is being displayed. Occasionally someone taps a screen to get more information. Kirk and the others conduct their meeting, periodically referring to the displays.

Now, the Enterprise is certainly fiction. We don’t have any starships, despite the more optimistic predictions from the TV show.

The touch sensitive video screens were certainly science fiction back in the 1960s. Today, they’re almost quaint. We’ve moved well beyond that, with our Blackberries, iPhones, iPads, laptops, and tablet computers. So, no points there.

The real science fiction in this scene isn’t the array of gadgets or even the starship. It’s the fact that not one person is using the screen for anything other than business. No one is checking email, no one is Tweeting, no one is browsing the InterstellarNet, and no one is playing Angry Birds. Everyone is actively engaged in the meeting. Granted, these meetings usually occurred when the Enterprise was about to be destroyed by Romulans or something, but even taking that into account the behavior of the crew is still pure fiction. How many meetings have you attended where everyone was actively engaged like that? While it does happen, most businesses I speak with would like to see it happen rather more frequently than it currently is happening.

The first, and perhaps most important, thing about getting people engaged in meetings is to recognize the feedback you’re getting. When you start a meeting and everyone is already nose deep in a Blackberry, that’s feedback. The trick is to recognize what it’s telling you. Some possibilities include:

• Participants do not see the point of the meeting.
• Participants are not interested in the topic or material being discussed.
• Participants do not see how the meeting is relevant to the work they’re doing or the deadlines they are facing.
• The meeting is lacking in focus or does not have clear objectives.
• You are boring.

Let’s take the last one first.

Sadly, not all presenters are the most interesting people on the planet. Some speak in a monotone,. Others don’t know when they’ve made their point and keep talking. Still others don’t respect the schedule. Naturally, if you’re reading this, that clearly doesn’t apply to you. However, not everyone listening to you realizes that. Therefore, it helps considerably to pay attention to your own presentation style so that you can be sure to get through to those who might otherwise assume that you are going to bore them.

Why are you holding your meeting? On Star Trek, there’s always a good reason for the meeting: for example, figuring out to avoid being eaten by a giant space amoeba. While it is unlikely that you are facing a similar threat, nonetheless there needs to be a point to the meeting. What is the goal? At the end of the meeting, what do you expect to have accomplished? If the answer is that you simply wanted to convey information to people, or have people share status updates, perhaps emails would better. After all, do the status updates really need to be shared at that moment in that place?

Along with the point of the meeting, it also has to feel important to the people you want present. They need to know that being there matters to them. This can be surprisingly tricky: far too often people assume they need to be present when they don’t. Since there are times when, surprising as this may seem, attendance at meetings is used as a gauge of employee engagement, it’s not too much of a stretch to realize that people might be attending the meeting to avoid being seen as disloyal. You can avoid this unfortunate misperception by having a clear agenda for the meeting and making that agenda known ahead of time.

Another advantage of a clear agenda is that the purpose and time requirements for the meeting are known ahead of time. This allows your employees to better plan their schedules. A documentation review session might be held for a specific period of time, while a brainstorming session might be more open-ended. Of course, even then it’s best to not “go until you are done.” Rather, define the duration in advance and also clearly define how you’ll know when you’re done. If you find that people can’t agree on how they’ll know when they’re done, you need to resolve that before you hold your meeting!

I’m occasionally asked when is the best time to start a meeting. Early? Late? Mid-day? The answer is that the best time is the time you specified. When people know when a meeting will start, they can plan accordingly. They walk into the conference room with their brains already focused on the meeting. If you don’t start on time, you create an opening for them to become bored waiting and get sucked into their smartphones. Once that happens, it’s much harder to get their attention back than if you’d not lost it to begin with.

A great deal of Star Trek is no longer science-fiction. What are you doing to make sure that employee engagement in meetings is on that list?

Of Deck Chairs and Ocean Liners

As published in The CEO Refresher

“Just give me the numbers!”

Falling firmly into the “I just can’t make this stuff up” category, the preceding statement was made by the head of a certain engineering department. He wanted the performance figures on a series of database lookups so that he could determine if the database code was performing up to specifications. This would be a perfectly reasonable request except for one minor problem: the database code was not producing the correct results in the first place. Performance was sort of irrelevant given that getting the wrong answers quickly is not necessarily all that helpful, although it may be less irritating than having to wait for the wrong answers. It’s rather like driving at 75mph when lost: you may not know where you are or where you are going, but at least you’ll get there quickly. Or something.

In another example, the engineers developing a bioinformatics data analysis package spent all their time arguing about the correct way to set up the GUI elements on each page. The problem was that when they actually ran one of the calculations, the program appeared to hang. In fact, I was assured by everyone, it just “took a long time to run.” How long? The answer was, “maybe a few weeks.”

This may come as a shock to those few people who have never used a PC, but a few weeks is generally longer than either a PC or a Mac will run before crashing. Besides, the complete lack of response from the program regularly convinced users that the program had crashed. The engineers did not want to put in some visual indicator of progress because they felt it wouldn’t look good visually. They refused to remove that calculation from the product because “someone might want to try it.” Eventually, they grudgingly agreed to warn the user that it “might take a very long time to run.”

In both of these cases, the team was solving the wrong problem. Although there were definitely complaints about the speed of the database, that was very much a secondary issue so long as the database wasn’t producing correct results. And while the user interface decisions were certainly important, designing an elegant interface for a feature that will convince the user that the product is not working is not particularly useful. At least rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic was only a waste of time. It didn’t contribute to the ship sinking.

The element that made each of these situations noteworthy is that in both cases there were people present pointing out that the wrong problems were getting all the attention. The people making the decisions didn’t want to hear that. They wanted to solve a certain set of problems and, by golly, they were going to solve them! This is a version of the Hammer syndrome: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Sometimes, though, that nail turns out to be a thumbnail.

So why were these teams so insistent upon solving the wrong problems? Fundamentally, because they could. Simply put, if you give someone a problem they can solve comfortably, and one that they have no idea how to approach, they will do the former. In addition, they had never established clear metrics for success, never established standards by which they would know if the database was fast enough or the user interface was good enough. As a result, they built their goals and evaluated their performance around those issues. They were not being evaluated on whether they got the right answer, despite the opinions that the customers might have in that regard.

While clear, specific goals are certainly good things, goals also have to make sense. When a company is constantly seeing flaws in its products, it can be a very valuable exercise to look at the goals assigned to each person and each team in the company. Do those goals make sense? What problems or challenges are they addressing? Are the goals complementary, or are there significant gaps? If the engineering team is being evaluated on how many bugs they can fix and the QA team on how many new bugs they can find, what happens to the step where fixed bugs get verified? If no one is responsible for that happening, it won’t get done (and didn’t, in several software companies!). If the team focuses on the wrong problems, they’ll spend their time fighting symptoms or revisiting solved problems, and never deal with the real issues.

Therefore, even before you can set goals, you have to know what the problem is that you are trying to solve. That means first separating the symptoms of the problem from the problem itself. The symptoms are only symptoms; frequently, they can point to many possible problems. It’s important to look at the symptoms and brainstorm which problems they could be indicating. When you start developing solutions, you then need to ask what the final product will look like if you go ahead with your solution and you need to know what success looks like. Make sure that your proposed solution will actually solve at least some of the potential problems you’ve identified, and develop some way of testing to make sure you are solving the correct problem. In other words, have some checkpoints along the way so you can make sure that you’re actually improving things. Only then can you start to set goals that will effectively guide you to producing a quality product.

What are you doing to make sure that you are not rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic?

The Accidental Leader

As published in Corp! Magazine

Does this sound painfully familiar?

The team leader left the company or was transferred elsewhere. No one knows anything about the new person coming in. Everything is up in the air. It’s almost impossible to get any work done because everyone is too busy wondering what’s going to happen next. Is the team going to be kept together? Will the project be cancelled?

Or how about this situation:

You were just assigned to take over a strong team. The former leader, well-respected by the team, is leaving. When you get there, there is a marked lack of enthusiasm. Everyone smiles and nods, but the suspicion is palpable. No sooner do the first words leave your mouth when you have a sinking feeling that whatever it was you said, it was exactly the wrong thing.

Although it may seem that the difference is which side of story you happen to be on, in reality, the situations aren’t really any different at all. In both cases a once functional team is tossed into a state of chaotic uncertainty. From feeling comfortable and secure, suddenly everyone is wondering if there’s another shoe about to drop.

Oddly enough, when the new leader comes in, the situation often gets worse. Rather than allaying people’s fears, too often those fears are increased. It’s not that the new leader is trying to scare people; it’s just that whatever she says, it just doesn’t seem to come out quite right.

At one company, the new executive director was welcomed with great fanfare. Thus, she was totally unprepared when her modest proposals to improve how the company delivered products ignited a firestorm of protest and resistance. This was a very painful situation, although I was able to help them work things out in the end. Still, though, perhaps we might want to look at a more upbeat scenario.

At another company, the new president decided to try something different. When he took over, he didn’t tell people how things would be; rather, he asked them how things should be. Rather than set deadlines, he asked employees what deadline the previous, successful president would have set for their projects. Rather than set new rules, or even focus on existing rules, he asked people what sort of structure would most help them. Rather than try to Impose His Mark on the organization, he took the time to understand what mark was already there. Rather than fight the natural resistance people have to change, he invited the rest of the company into the change process. The transition ended up going remarkably well. What was even more interesting was that along the way he took a fair bit of heat from his board that he was not “acting like a leader.”

He ended up being one of the best leaders the company ever had. Despite initial beliefs to the contrary, it was no accident. By now, you might even recognize the company.

Most leaders respond to a chaotic situation by trying to impose order. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea, at least in theory. Chaotic situations are unpleasant and without some sort of structure, nothing is going to get done. Despite this, when order is imposed too rapidly, suddenly everyone is fighting for chaos.

The secret to taking over a new team, indeed, to dealing with any team or company in a chaotic situation, is to move slowly. Speed comes from being in the right place at the right time, not from rushing to get things done. When you take the time to find the most serious pain points, the places where people are most scared or most upset, and you resolve those situations, you build the trust you need to succeed.

How do you find those points? Ask the team. Involve them in the process. Don’t impose order; rather, create order.

Are people concerned about deadlines and how changes in product schedules might impact them? Invite them to help set the deadlines. Is product quality an issue? At one training company, the fear was that the changes would compromise the quality of the training being offered, which would, in turn, drive away clients. The solution was to stop fighting about it and instead identify the metrics currently being used to determine quality: both the official ones and the ones that staff members used privately. Once those metrics were brought to everyone’s attention, then the new CEO could help the staff members see how the new training would actually surpass the old training. Sounds simple, but the experience was anything but!

You impose order when you walk into the situation and tell everyone what to do. You create order when you find points of maximum leverage and invite people to suggest the order they want you to provide. The second may be slower, but, paradoxically, it gets you to where you want to go a lot sooner. How will you create order in your organization?

Mousetrap Company

As published in Corp! Magazine

Remember the classic kid’s game, Mousetrap? In this historic tribute to the legendary Rube Goldberg, players have to assemble an exceedingly convoluted and baroque mechanism that will supposedly catch a mouse. As I have young kids, I recently had a refresher course in the game. What was interesting was the debate about which part of the trap is the most important: the crank turn at the beginning? The shoe that kicks the bucket, the ball bouncing down the stairs, the diver that flies into the washtub or the trap itself falling down the pole? In the end, most of the kids decided that it must be the trap, since without that you can’t actually catch the mouse.

Listening to the debate, I had the rather disturbing experience of being reminded of a certain software company. A similar debate occurred there as well: the engineers who were supposedly designing and implementing the software were being raked over the coals because they hadn’t successfully produced a workable product by the deadline. At first glance, it was clearly their responsibility to build the product, and their failure was costly indeed to the company.

The first glance is not, however, always the most accurate one.

In the game of Mousetrap, a number of things have to happen correctly in order for that all important trap to fall. If the shoe doesn’t kick the bucket, the ball won’t go bouncing down the stairs. If the crank doesn’t turn, the gears won’t rotate and the shoe won’t move. Indeed, while a failure at any point in this wonderfully elegant mechanism will derail the whole thing, failure at the start means that it won’t even get going.

At this software company, the process for getting a release out the door was, unfortunately, even more elaborate than the mousetrap. The biggest problem, though, was the crank at the top. The company had several products, and competition for resources was fierce. What the CEO seemed to be paying attention to was what received the time and energy of the engineers. Although the CEO kept saying that this particular release was critical to the future of the company, he made no effort to organize the company around that release, nor did he delegate that task to anyone else. Thus, the assumption from the top down was that this release couldn’t really be as important as all that.

By the time engineering got involved, the engineers were focused on multiple tasks. Without any direction from above, they took their best guess on which direction to go. Being engineers, that meant that they pursued the interesting technical problems, not the serious business priorities: when not given direction, most people will do the thing they are best at doing, whether or not that is the thing that really needs to be done at that moment.

When it came time to ship the product, the best that could be said about it was that it didn’t crash too often. The customer was not pleased.

What happened here was that there was no logical flow of control or means of prioritizing tasks. Superficially, an unhappy customer was the fault of the engineers; certainly, they took the blame. However, was that really accurate? The engineering team did their job as best they could with the information they had available. The real failure was in the leadership: when no one is leading, people follow the path of least resistance. That may not get you where you want to go. Although the failure did not manifest until the very end, the seeds of that failure were sown long before the engineers ever started working on that particular product.

Fundamentally, it is the job of the leader to set the direction for the company and keep people moving in the right direction.

It is the job of the leader to build the team so that the employees will follow him in that direction. It is the job of the leader to build up his management team so that he does not become the bottleneck.  It is the job of the leader to make sure that the technical problems and the business problems are in alignment and that the biggest contracts are the ones that get priority. This seems obvious, but for something obvious, it certainly fails to happen in far too many situations.

In this particular situation, the company’s mousetrap didn’t work very well. The trap didn’t fall. The rod didn’t move. The diver didn’t dive. The crank might have turned, but it didn’t turn particularly well. Indeed, the company really only got one part of the mousetrap process to work well.

They did manage to kick the bucket.

Stephen Balzac is a consultant and professional speaker. He is president of 7 Steps Ahead (www.7stepsahead.com), an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses to increase revenue and build their client base. Steve is a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play,” and the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill. Contact him at steve@7stepsahead.com.

When the CEO Meets Frankenstein

As published in Corp! Magazine

Horror movies follow some fairly predictable tropes: the monster slowly awakens; someone sees it happening, but no one really believes him. As the story unfolds, people go to investigate and are captured, killed, driven mad and so forth. There’s always something terrible going on, and there’s always some helpless innocent caught up in it, acting the way helpless innocents generally act.

Of course, when the helpless innocent doesn’t act as expected, well, that can cause the whole story to change. The classic comedy, “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” is a traditional period horror film, complete with the legendary Bela Lugosi, in which the helpless innocents are Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, acting like, well, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. This, of course, causes the plot to go flying off the rails, at least as far as Count Dracula’s dastardly plot to reawaken Frankenstein’s monster is concerned.

The key element of a horror film is that our helpless innocents are put into a situation in which they have no idea what to do. As in most situations, when we don’t know what to do, we do what we know how to do. Indeed, successful horror relies on that phenomenon: the terror comes from seeing how our ordinary actions lead deeper and deeper into trouble. Alternately, if those ordinary actions are slightly askew, the horror becomes comedy. In that case, the humor comes from seeing Abbott and Costello responding to a deepening horror by doing what they normally do.

The movie works because the tendency to do what we know how to do is both powerful and universal. Most people, confronted by novel situations, react that way. When there is truly nothing they can do, they attempt to exert control anyway by doing something that they can do. The results are often comedy or horror, depending on perspective and circumstance.

At one nonprofit, the founder of the organization was a man who had started out working in a stockroom. When the organization hit a financial crisis, he fixated on doing inventory. There was simply nothing useful he could do. Rather than feel helpless, he did the thing he could do. This made his board very happy as it kept him busy while they raised money for the organization.

At a high-tech company, a product deadline was threatened by a vendor not delivering a critical software component on schedule. There was nothing that could be done: the entire product was designed around that deliverable. The department head responded to the situation by demanding his employees work long hours, before the vendor delivered. After it was delivered might have made some sense, as the company would need to make up the lost time, but before? The department head had no control over the vendor, so he dealt with the situation by controlling the people around him.

Comedy and horror might be quite enjoyable when viewed from a safe distance, like a movie screen, but are much less fun to be in the middle of. How, though, does a leader avoid having her actions turn the situation into a comedy of errors or frustrating, painful experience for her employees?

The key is to practice dealing with chaos. Consider successful athletes: they learn all the moves and drills of their particular sport. Then they practice by competing against other athletes in order to become comfortable with the unexpected actions of their opponents. Indeed, Judo competition is referred to as “randori,” or “seizing chaos.” Because it’s not possible to predict what strategies people will employ or control what an opponent does, the successful athlete learns to adapt to the situation. Rather than becoming stuck on one response, they become adept at switching strategies to counter their opponents.

Successful leaders need to develop the same skill. It’s not enough to just know the theory of leadership; you also must practice in a chaotic or ambiguous scenario. Sadly, for many leaders, that means practicing on the job. As most athletes learn the hard way if they move straight from drilling to competition, getting used to chaos takes its own practice.

Fortunately, just as athletes have multiple training tools at their disposal to learn to deal with chaos before they enter competition; tools are available for business leaders as well. Predictive scenarios, a type of live action serious game, provide the sort of detailed, ambiguous situations that enable a leader to become comfortable with chaos. Unlike traditional leadership training exercises, there is no one, right answer. Participants need to motivate others, win deals, provide feedback, and execute strategies in a constantly shifting environment. Rather than just talking about leadership, participants need to display leadership and do it well enough to convince others to follow them.

Like the athlete, the leader becomes adept at switching strategies and at managing unpredictable situations. Rather than being trapped by doing what they can, they become able to apply what they know. Instead of comedy or horror, they achieve success. Now, that is something you do want to be in the middle of!

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead (www.7stepsahead.com), an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses to increase revenue and build their client base. 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.” Contact him at steve@7stepsahead.com.

I Don’t Believe It!

Recently, I was running a leadership and negotiation exercise, which involved participants attempting to determine who they could and could not trust. The exercise required that participants work with one another and included various techniques for verifying the truth or falsehood of someone’s claims.

The dynamic between two of the participants, we’ll call them Fred and Barney, became extremely interesting: Fred needed Barney’s help, but Fred was convinced that Barney was lying to him and looking for a way to double-cross him on a business deal. Barney, meanwhile, was going to great lengths to prove that he was telling the truth and dealing in good faith. The more evidence Fred found that demonstrated Barney was telling the truth, the more Fred was sure he was lying. Not only was Fred not convinced, he even came up to me and complained that he thought that Barney was violating the rules of the exercise because he was clearly lying. When the exercise was over and I debriefed the participants, Fred was stunned when he found out that Barney was telling the truth all along.

Part of the value of this particular exercise is that behavior in the exercise tends to correlate well with behavior in the office. Unlike the exercise, however, in real life we don’t have any magical means of verifying the truth. Of course, as we can see, even that doesn’t necessarily matter. Once an opinion is formed, sometimes nothing will change it. That may be fine in some obscure situations, but in business it can get you in trouble.

Read the rest at Corp! Magazine