The Business Sensei

“She doesn’t know how to lead!”

“Clearly, we picked the wrong person when we brought him on as CEO. He’s just not a leader!”

“We don’t need a leader. We’re all equals.”

These are all comments I’ve heard from Boards of Directors, senior management teams, even groups of college students. Okay, to be fair, college students don’t refer to any of their number as a CEO, but otherwise the sentiment is the same. In each case, the first reaction of the group to any difficulties or controversy is to accuse the leader of being unable to lead. The groups with no leader do avoid that problem, but at the cost of not actually managing to get anything done. Sooner or later, a leader emerges, whether or not openly acknowledged.

Fundamentally, the problem with effective leadership is that most people have no idea what an effective leader looks like or how an effective leader actually leads. I am told over and over by managers, board members, and the like, that what the leader really needs to do is stand up and tell everyone to shut up and do as they are told. Of course, should the leader actually do that, those same people are the first to scream that they are having their opinions ignored. What they really mean is that they want the leader to tell everyone else to shut up and let them speak.

I worked with one company that fired a team leader because the CEO didn’t see that he was contributing anything. He seemed to spend all day doing nothing at all. Once he was gone, though, it became painfully obvious to the company that he was doing far more than nothing. By the time the CEO accepted that he’d made a mistake it was too late to get the team lead back.

The image of the leader as the person who tells everyone what to do, approves all decisions, and controls all aspects of the group has just enough truth in it to be dangerous. When a group is first assembled, there is frequently sufficient uncertainty about the goals of the group and about how the members all fit in that they are quite happy to have a certain amount of very directive leadership. Indeed, a leader can get away with quite a bit at this point, in large part because the members of the team don’t yet actually care all that much about the team’s goals.

At this point, the leader needs to be helping the members of the team build a sense of team spirit and team identity. That means getting to know one another and appreciate each other as individuals, not necessarily for what they bring to the team. As paradoxical as it may appear, you build the team by not focusing on the team. Instead, you focus on the individuals by building a strong foundation of trust and camaraderie. People want to be appreciated for who they are, not just for the skills they bring to the table. The more team members can celebrate each others accomplishments, whether those accomplishments are work related or not, the more likely that team will be successful. That level of cohesion and trust does not come about through telling people what to do.

The toughest moment for the leader is when people start to care. Now that they care, they will actively work to bring about the success of the team, which is where things become challenging for the leader. When they didn’t care, they accepted the leader’s directives with little question. Now that they care, they want to bring their own perspectives, ideas, thoughts, and approaches into the mix. That means that many of them will start to question the leader, argue, and potentially become confrontational. Should the leader respond by squashing the apparent dissent, he also squashes the nascent sense of caring about the team and the company. Instead, the leader needs to slow down, invite opinion, and explain his actions and reasoning. The leader must be open to making changes if someone comes up with a better idea of how to do things. Otherwise, the leader is not fully taking advantage of the resources available to him: the eyes, ears, hands, and brains of his team. Unfortunately, this team strengthening behavior is all too often seen as weakness by many people, including the leaders themselves. As a result, they refuse to do it, and thus limit the capabilities of their team.

The goal of the leader must be to create a team that is more capable than any individual member of the team. Otherwise, why bother having a team in the first place? By building up a sense of team identity, trust, and appreciation for one another amongst the members, each person will be free to ask for and receive help from one another. As MIT’s Ed Schein points out, it is only when each person, including the leader, feels that they can accept and give help freely that the team has the potential to become stronger than any individual member. It is only through the asking and giving of help that the team can determine which member or coalition of members are best suited to solving any particular problem that comes up.

Thus, we come full circle. This process of mutual helping contradicts the image many people have of leaders. Rather than working to build up their teams, far too many so-called leaders act like the leaders they see on television or in movies. Others do not even seek leadership roles because they believe that being a leader means acting in ways that they find repugnant. If they do seek leadership roles, they may be ignored by team members who have bought into the fictional construct of the leader.

The leader who has to constantly tell people what to do is not doing a good job of leading. The leader who has to get out of the way so that his team doesn’t run over him in their rush to accomplish the goals of the team is the true successful leader. What sort of leaders do you have in your organization?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally,

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

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

This one was just published in the CEO Refresher. The link is only good for month, so the text is below:

Once upon a time, the late and unlamented Soviet Union decided to grow wheat in Siberia. Their logic was simple: by growing wheat in the inhospitable conditions of Siberia, the wheat would become stronger. The wheat, however, was indifferent to Soviet philosophy. Despite speeches, threats, and promises from the government, the wheat stubbornly refused to grow.

In 1990s, a group of Nobel Prize winning economists developed some very interesting theories about how the financial markets should work. Their theories were brilliant and attracted billions in investment dollars into the hedge fund they created. Long-term Capital Management almost took down the entire US economy when it collapsed in the summer of 1998.

In both cases, a belief about how the world should work was trumped by the way the world does work.

To bring this a little closer to home, I worked with one high technology company that decided to create a set of coding standards for its software development team. While not an unusual occurrence in software companies, in this case, the manager in charge wrote up a fifty (that’s right, 50) page standards document. Naturally, everyone was overjoyed and memorized everything; at least, that’s what the manager thought. In fact, no one read more than a page or two and most of the engineers ignored even that.

Another company was trying to manage information: design decisions, notes from discussions, and so forth. They had the very good idea that they could manage all their accumulated wisdom as a Wiki. Unfortunately, the Wiki swiftly ballooned into an unmanageable morass of data in which no one could actually find anything useful. The problem wasn’t so much getting people to remember to update the Wiki; it was organizing the information in a manner useful to everyone who needed to use it, and in convincing people to take the time to keep it organized. Indeed, even agreeing on how it should be organized generated controversy and bad feeling.

In both of these cases, beliefs about how people should do their work were trumped by the way people actually do work. Like Soviet wheat, it can be remarkably difficult to motivate or threaten people into doing something that they really do not want to do. Unlike wheat, people can be forced. It’s merely a question of how much time and energy you want to spend: pushing people takes a great deal of effort and tends to result in significant amounts of anger and frustration for all parties involved. Not, in other words, a conducive atmosphere for creating a strong, collaborative team.

Of course, sometimes it is necessary to have people do things they don’t want to do. Code does need to be commented, information needs to be documented, and so forth. Fortunately, unlike wheat, people can be convinced. Instead of pushing them, the key is to get them to pull: the best teams are the ones that know where they should go and will trample anyone who gets in their way. How do you create such a team? Here are some tips:

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

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

Good luck!