The Business Sensei

Feedback Systems

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

Feedback takes many forms. Equity, blame versus problem solving, and dealing with jerks provide feedback that tell people how the organization works and handles difficulties. In addition, there are the explicit feedback systems:

There is the feedback that people get that tells them how, and whether, the organization views them as people. This is feedback about the nature of the relationship between members and the organization as a whole.

There is feedback that goes up the organizational hierarchy, informing those higher up about conditions, the market, problems in the organization, and successes. This system often fails.

There is feedback in the form of performance reviews. Done properly, which rarely happens, performance reviews are very powerful and valuable to the organization: they provide a route by which members of the organization can grow, develop their skills, and build their status. They provide an important connection to the organizational narrative.

Relational Feedback

Psychologist Robert Cialdini observes that every culture has a social rule around favors: when someone does something for you, helps you, or gives you a gift of some sort, you are expected to reciprocate in some way. People who do not reciprocate, that is, those who take but do not give, are viewed as greedy moochers, and are often shunned by the rest of the society. Similarly, as Schein observes, those who give help but never accept it, are often viewed with suspicion or resentment.

In an organizational setting, people want to understand what sort of relationship they have with their coworkers, their boss, and with the more nebulous construct that is the “organization.” Reciprocity is one of the ways people explore that relationship. How the team and the organization handle reciprocity thus becomes a proxy for the relationship.

In early stage teams, people might refuse to accept help in order to avoid a feeling of indebtedness or incompetence, or might attempt to help another in the hopes of receiving help later or building status. In fact, for the team to be considered just and fair, there needs to be that mutual exchange of helping behavior in the early stages. Eventually, as the team develops, the mutual exchange of favors turns into a more abstract helping network in which team members automatically give and receive help as necessary to the accomplishment of the task at hand. It’s no longer about the individual ledger; rather, it’s the confidence that we will all engage in helping behaviors for the good of all of us. The trust that enables that to happen comes from demonstrating reciprocity in the early stages of team development.

Similarly, when members of an organization put forth an extra effort or engage in pro-organizational behavior outside the normal expectations, they expect that the organization will, in some way, acknowledge and repay their contribution. When the organization refuses to do that, or, even worse, treats the exceptional effort as “just part of the job,” this creates the image of someone who takes and takes but gives only grudgingly, if at all. For example, when employees work long hours or weekends in order to meet a deadline, they are sacrificing their personal time for the good of the organization. This is not, or at least should not be, a routine event. If it is, you have some serious problems!

How the organization responds to that sacrifice provides feedback on the relationship: reciprocity of some sort says that you are a valuable person; failure to provide reciprocity says that you are a tool or a slave, that the boss is selfish, that the organization does not value its members, or all of the above.

I’ve met many people who tell me that long hours are part of the job, and ask why they should thank or reward people for doing their jobs. The reason is simple: reciprocity is a proxy for the relationship, and the relationship determines trust. Without trust, motivation, team development, and leadership all start to break down.

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 late 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.

Don’t Reach For The Ground

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.

My first jujitsu sensei would constantly yell at us to not reach for the ground when being thrown. His point was that if someone is throwing you and you yield to your natural reactions, you will try to catch yourself with an arm or a leg. In jujitsu, this is good way to end up with a broken arm or leg. What makes learning to fall difficult is that our tendency is reach out is so natural, so deeply ingrained, that we do it without thinking. Students sometimes don’t believe they are doing it until they see themselves on video. Reaching out like that is a very simple, reflexive way of protecting our heads when we fall: it’s better to break your arm than your head. For very young children, it’s great since it takes no training, their bodies are light, and bones are still flexible. However, for adults, it’s not so pleasant and is a serious problem in a great many situations where an untrained reaction is not appropriate or safe: knowing how to fall is why I didn’t get badly hurt the time a car ran a stop sign and helped me dive over the handlebars of my bicycle.

By the same token, we have cognitive shortcuts or biases that are decent default behaviors in many situations, but are of limited value to us in the workplace or other modern organizational settings. Like reaching for the ground, they are simple and easy to use: we are built to use as little energy as possible whenever possible. Particularly when we are tired or distracted, we tend to fall back on these cognitive shortcuts. However, like that untrained jujitsu student’s reflexive reaching for the ground, they are just setting us up for organizational injury. Just as the jujitsu student is being thrown with too much force to reach without serious injury, organizational issues are almost always too complex for us to get away with cheap answers.

Fundamental Attribution Error

“There’s a guy in your office named Joe. Joe’s not getting his work done, he’s missing deadlines. How come?”

I will often pose this question when I conduct management training or when I speak on leadership. It’s always interesting how people answer. Most of the time, people tell me what’s wrong with Joe: he’s not dedicated, he’s goofing off, he doesn’t care, he’s incompetent. Eventually, someone will say, “Wait a minute. You didn’t give us any information about Joe.” Sometimes this takes ten minutes! It might take longer, but I always stop it by then.

What’s happening here is that we automatically attribute problems or poor performance to the person, not to situational factors. This makes sense when we are all experiencing the same environment and doing essentially identical tasks: for example, people living in a small community or working on an assembly line. If most factors are identical, one person’s poor performance is probably due to the person. This can cause trouble in our modern society: When our dinner date doesn’t show up, we assume it means she doesn’t actually want to spend time with us rather than assuming her car broke down or she was caught in traffic. Did that client not return my call because he didn’t want to talk with me, or was it because his office is in Manhattan and he lost power after Hurricane Sandy? In the actual, real-life situation from which I drew the story of Joe, the reason Joe was missing deadlines was that the vendor who was supposed to provide the material he needed was always late and Joe didn’t have the option of changing vendors.

We will often apply the fundamental attribution error to ourselves retrospectively: how could I have ever made such a stupid decision? We forget that the decision may have made complete sense with the information we had available at the time or that other situational factors might have contributed.

When we know someone well, however, the fundamental attribution error will often reverse itself: I know Bob. Bob is a hard worker. Something must be wrong. If you’ve arranged to meet your wife at a restaurant after work and she doesn’t arrive in time, odds are you’ll start worrying that she might have been in a car accident or something, rather than assuming she doesn’t want to spend time with you.

One of the biggest problems stemming from the fundamental attribution error is that it can trap us into playing the blame game instead of understanding why a system isn’t working. We’ll look at that in more depth shortly.

Riveting! Yes, I called a leadership book riveting. I couldn’t wait to finish one chapter so I could begin reading the next. The book’s combination of pop culture references, personal stories, and thought providing insights to illustrate world class leadership principles makes it a must read for business professionals at all management levels.

Eric Bloom

President

Manager Mechanics, LLC

Nationally Syndicated Columnist and Author

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 late 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.

Recruiting With Confidence

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

Near the end of the award winning movie, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Aragon leads his pitifully small army to the Black Gate of Mordor, realm of Sauron the Dark Lord. Sauron’s forces outnumber Aragorn’s by easily a hundred to one. On the surface, there appears to be little chance of success. Indeed, during the planning of the assault, Gimli utters the famous line: “Certainty of death, small chance of success… What are we waiting for?”

As those familiar with the story know, the attack is diversion. Its goal is to draw the attention of Sauron so that Frodo can destroy the Ring of Power. Aragorn, however, cannot let on that the attack is anything but an all-out assault on Sauron’s fortress. To fool Sauron, indeed, even to convince his soldiers to follow him, he must act and speak as though he has complete confidence that his badly outnumbered army can win. Aragon must not just be confident, he must be so confident that people will be inspired to follow him to almost certain death. That act of confidence is what makes it possible for Frodo to succeed and for Sauron to be defeated.

Small chance of success indeed, but a small chance is better than no chance at all. No chance at all is exactly what they had if they did nothing. It took immense confidence to seize that opportunity, but it worked in the end.

Okay, The Return of the King is fiction. What about reality? Whether in sports or business, confidence is key. Confident teams are more likely to win. Confident entrepreneurs are much more likely to get funding. Confident salesmen are more likely to sell. Confident engineers successfully solve more difficult problems than their less confident brethren. Confident CEOs are much more likely to build a successful business. To hire effectively requires confidence.

Why do people lack confidence in the system?

I heard a hiring manager comment that she would “Prefer not to hire anyone at all.”

Her company is growing, they are actively looking for people. At the same time, this manager who has been tasked with building up her team is openly telling candidates that if she has her way, not one of them will be hired. Indeed, given the choice, it’s hard to imagine candidates accepting an offer if they did get one, compared, say, to an offer from an enthusiastic and confident employer.
While making the observation that this woman lacked confidence might be something of an understatement, it is only a start. Confidence begets confidence, just as lack of confidence begets lack of confidence. This manager was demonstrating a lack of confidence in herself, her company, their hiring process, and in the candidates. That, in turn, makes it extremely difficult to attract top people: if the hiring manager doesn’t seem confident, what does that tell the candidate about the company? Those who can get other offers will go elsewhere, leaving this manager to choose less qualified people, further confirming her lack of confidence! Therefore, it is important, and far more useful, to understand why she lacked confidence. Only then is it possible to do something to increase her confidence and make it possible for her to hire effectively.

Indeed, this manager cited one major reason for her unwillingness to hire. No surprise, it was the economy. Despite what she’d been told to do by her boss, she fundamentally did not want to hire anyone because she was terrified that the economic recovery would fail and the company would go under. Listening to the news of that day, it’s easy to understand why she felt that way: The fact is, 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. When we hear the same five dire forecasts over and over, it reinforces the message of doom and gloom, even when it’s the same news story being repeated five times! 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.

In the end, though, while this woman’s lack of confidence may have been made obvious by the economy of the time, further investigation revealed the economy wasn’t the actual cause. The actual cause was both more immediate and less obvious: she fundamentally didn’t trust the hiring process her company used. If you don’t trust the process, it’s hard to have confidence in it, and the more vulnerable you are to surrounding influences such as the news. In a strong economy, her lack of trust could easily go unnoticed simply because the positive news flow would allay her fears; without the positive backdrop, however, her fear and her lack of confidence in the system were fully exposed. Sadly, this lack of confidence appears to be the case in a great many different companies.

Now, lest I give the wrong impression here, this lack of confidence is not necessarily unjustified. In fact, when people don’t have confidence in the system, there is often a reason. Let’s take a look now at those reasons and what can be done to build confidence so that you can find the best people and convince them to come work at your company. Believing that they’ll come to you because they’re desperate is not a good strategy! In the best case, you get a lot of desperate people who will likely have second thoughts as soon as they don’t feel quite so desperate any more. If you don’t mind being a way-station for those seeking better jobs, that’s fine. But if you’d like to be a destination for the best, that requires having confidence your system.

Balzac combines stories of jujitsu, wheat, gorillas, and the Lord of the Rings with very practical advice and hands-on exercises aimed at anyone who cares about management, leadership, and culture.

Todd Raphael
Editor-in-Chief
ERE Media

http://www.ere.net

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 late 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.

Celebrate Progress

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

One of the most important things you can do as a team is periodically celebrating progress. It is always more motivating to look at how far you’ve come rather than how far you have yet to go. Indeed, it’s more motivating to say, “we’re half done,” than to say, “There’s still half left to do.” The two statements may be mathematically equivalent, and IBM’s Watson, the Jeopardy playing computer, would probably find them identical. If you happen to be employing Watson, then it may not matter what you say. However, if you happen to be employing people, it matters.

In jujitsu practice, the students who always focus on how far off the black belt is tend to not finish the journey. Those who focus on how far they’ve come are the ones who keep coming back.
You don’t need to highlight individuals every time you do this; in fact, you shouldn’t. The goal is not to make anyone feel bad for not getting as much done as someone else; rather, it’s simply about sharing success. Feeling that the team is making progress helps boost everyone’s morale, increases team cohesion, and helps build trust.

Depending on your organizational culture, you can occasionally highlight individual accomplishments in much the way that some sports teams will highlight most valuable players. It’s important, though, to pay close attention to how people work and what they expect. At Atari, a new CEO tried to transform the highly collaborative, team-based culture into a more individual, competitive culture. He focused heavily on “engineer of the week,” and other such awards. However, engineers at Atari viewed game development as a collaborative process, where everyone worked together to produce a quality product. The focus on individual performance shattered the team structure, turning high performance teams back into struggling level one groups. Atari never recovered.

When you celebrate team successes, you build relationships, strengthen competence, and provide the trust necessary for greater levels of autonomy. Success builds on success just as failure feeds on failure. What you focus on is what you get.

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 late 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.

For the Deadline Was a Boojum, You See

“There was one who was famed for the number of things
He forgot when he entered the ship:
His umbrella, his watch, all his jewels and rings,
And the clothes he had bought for the trip.”

— Lewis Carroll, Hunting of the Snark

Lewis Carroll billed the Hunting of the Snark as an “agony in eight fits.” While it’s not entirely clear what Carroll meant by this, the sentiment well describes the process of scheduling and hitting deadlines in many organizations. Certainly it’s clear that the Bellman didn’t have a schedule, or he wouldn’t have left his crew’s belongings on the beach.

Some years ago, I worked for a software company where the CEO decided that missing a deadline was a personal failing on his part. No matter what, the software would ship on the day he had announced. Even if the product had bugs, even if it did not work, it shipped on the day the CEO had promised. “Not a single day of delay,” said he.

He preferred to ship a product that did not work and then release a bug-fix rather than delay the software even a day. He never understood why customers grew increasingly irate and would call the company to complain. He was keeping his promise to ship by a certain date, and certainly adherence to the schedule was important.

There are several problems with this belief. The most obvious, of course, is the stubborn belief that the software must go out on a specific date no matter what. Shipping any product that doesn’t work is going to upset your clients. Doing it repeatedly just makes the company look incompetent or indifferent to its customers. It is not meeting their needs to give them something that they cannot use.

Stepping back, though, from that minor problem, we have to ask what the point of the schedule was. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to why the CEO picked the dates that he did. When pushed, his reaction was that scheduling was important, otherwise things didn’t get done. True, but not necessarily relevant. Fundamentally, a schedule is a tool; like all tools, it must be used properly or there is risk of serious injury. In this case, financial injury.

A schedule is not an arbitrary set of dates put down on paper to make sure that everyone works hard and doesn’t goof off. The goal of a schedule is also not to precisely calculate how long each task will take and account for every minute. It is not a holy writ to be held to beyond the bounds of common sense or product quality, nor is it put in place in order to have something to ignore. Sadly, I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen schedules designed with exactly those somewhat dubious objectives in mind. However, a well-designed schedule needs to satisfy some fairly significant constraints:

1. A schedule helps make sure you don’t forget anything. It is both a to-do list and calendar. It helps people know what to work on when so that they don’t have to waste time constantly figuring that out.
2. A schedule is a tool for marshalling resources. Building a product requires different resources, be those resources time, people, or equipment. The schedule helps make sure that the right resources are available at the right times so that the project can move steadily forward.
3. A schedule is a tool for managing dependencies. In any large project, different pieces will depend on other pieces or on obtaining external resources. Some dependencies are obvious from the beginning, others do not emerge until the project is under way. The schedule helps organize tasks and manage dependencies so that they don’t derail the project.
4. The schedule helps you determine what you can do in the time available with the resources you have; alternately, it helps you understand how long it will take to accomplish your goals with the resources you have available.
5. The schedule enables you to define reasonable checkpoints, or milestones, that will let you know if you are moving successfully toward your planned target date or if problems are emerging. Missing a milestone is feedback that something is not working as expected!
6. A schedule needs to have enough slush in it to handle unexpected problems. You can’t always determine all possible dependencies at the start; some parts of the project may turn out to be significantly more difficult than expected; you may discover that a piece that appeared to make perfect sense just won’t work and needs to be redone. When I speak about this to technology companies, someone always claims that they’ve done a few simple calculations and developed the perfect project schedule. Based on the reactions from the rest of that person’s department, I have my doubts.
7. The schedule also needs enough slush to handle external delays. If your schedule is so tight that a severe winter storm closing the roads or having someone come down with the flu or having a vendor be late on a delivery will cause real problems, then you need to rethink the schedule. As that great sage Murphy so wisely said, “If something can go wrong, it will go wrong.” Plan for it.

You’ll also notice that if you design a schedule this way, you’ll tend to be running ahead of schedule, not behind. Falling behind schedule is demoralizing, particularly when the schedule feels arbitrary. Running ahead of schedule energizes the team to work harder. A team that falls behind tends to stay behind, while a team that runs ahead tends to get further ahead. In other words, nothing succeeds like success.

When you view a schedule in this way, it has the potential to be a powerful, flexible tool for getting things done as opposed to causing quality, effort, and enthusiasm to softly and silently vanish away. Isn’t that the whole point?

What Is Organizational Narrative?

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

Humans are pattern-matching creatures. We are built to try to make sense of our environment. Indeed, as more than one psychologist has observed, we see patterns even when they aren’t there! This tendency toward pattern-matching is a very powerful tool, though, because it enables us to impose structure on our environment. If we’ve done a good job of imposing structure, we can not only make sense of what is happening now, we can make reasonably accurate guesses about what will happen in the future. In fact, our ability to impose order and identify patterns is a big part of what enables us to think and plan strategically.

Culture, you will recall, is a device for making the world predictable. It tells us what to do when. Structurally, what we have is a narrative: in a certain situation these actions led to these results or these actions expressed these values, and that’s why we do things that way today. Quite simply, we impose a narrative structure on our own experiences and those of the organization. Consider how many of our metaphors reflect this view: “turning over a new page,” “starting a new chapter in our lives,” “taking a page from his book,” and so forth.

This narrative structure is so powerful that many people will ignore information that doesn’t fit the narrative: for example, there are still many people who believe that Humphrey Bogart said, “Play it again, Sam,” in the movie Casablanca. He didn’t, but he should have. It’s a much better line than the one he actually says.

This narrative structure helps us understand, or at least explain, our own lives: Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist and Harvard professor, is also the world’s expert on memory. She believed that this stemmed from her experience of repressing her memories of discovering her mother’s drowned body in the family swimming pool. She later recovered her memory of the event and, over the course of a few years, the rest of the details came back to her. It made sense; it explained her fascination with memory. Then one of her relatives told her that she hadn’t discovered the body, her aunt had. Other relatives confirmed this. The memory expert had, herself, created a false memory and believed it because it made sense.

Organizational stories are most obvious in older organizations, be they corporations, religious institutions, professional groups, and the like. However, even small organizations, including start up companies, quickly develop their own organizational narratives. Indeed, the question is not whether you will develop a narrative, but who will do it. Will you define your narrative or will others define it for you? If you don’t define your own story, you can be certain that your competitors will be only too happy to do it for you. All too often, companies allow themselves to accept default stories about their business and then wonder why they are seen as “just like everyone else.”

Think about how often you’ve heard someone talk about your company’s “story.” We assemble incidents into chronological events and draw lessons from those events. The following three snippets play out in organizations all the time:

“Bob ignored his assignment to deal with what he felt was a serious problem and the boss fired him even though Bob was right.”

“Bob stood up to the boss, the boss was going to fire him for insubordination, but the boss’s boss said, ‘Hey! Bob just saved the company a ton of money! What is wrong with you?’”

Each of these stories teaches a different lesson about how to behave. The first says never argue with the boss. The second says you should bring up problems. The third says that if you bring up a problem and your boss doesn’t appreciate hearing it, don’t worry, his boss will see that justice is done. I saw this one play out in just my first few weeks at IBM after I graduated from college. When Bob’s boss was subsequently reassigned to a remote branch office, that cemented the lesson that employees should act on serious problems.

The problem with most organizational stories is that they just happen. Events occur and are assembled after the fact into stories that current employees tell one another and pass along to new hires. These stories become part of the background, repeated often without really thinking about it. Frequently, the lessons taught to new employees are not the lessons management thinks are being taught. Taking control of the process, however, can dramatically improve organizational performance in all areas.

The Cultural Immune Response

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

“That person might destroy our culture.”

I hear that line often in organizations, usually to explain why a potential new hire was rejected. The logic of it is somewhat dubious since cultures are extremely robust and do not accept change easily. Indeed, far from being damaged by a new person joining, the culture is more likely to change that person or drive them out.

When someone joins an organization, they need to come up to speed on appropriate behavior fairly quickly. A good orientation program can help with this, as we’ll discuss in chapter 8. The good news is that people tend to be tolerant of newcomers, provided they respond to feedback. In fact, what typically happens is that other employees will informally inform newcomers when their behavior is inappropriate. Provided the person appears to be attempting to respond to the feedback, their occasional lapses will be tolerated. However, should someone not respond to feedback, the intensity of the feedback escalates into a more formal process which may involve disciplinary action. If all that fails, ostracism often results. At that point, the person may then be fired or may quit because they feel they “just don’t fit in.” The culture has rejected them.

When a senior person doesn’t fit, however, the consequences can be more severe. Recall that leaders are viewed as exemplars of the culture; thus, when a leader fails to embody the values of the organization, this creates a great deal of confusion and cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the unpleasant feeling we get when our actions and values do not match: for example, when the person who does not believe in violence loses his temper and punches someone, he may then feel a great deal of confusion and guilt along the lines of, “How could I have done that?” This will often happen even if the violence was objectively justified, for instance out of self-defense. Similarly, when employees are asked to follow a manager who violates cultural norms, they will often feel guilty or uncomfortable. They might seek to avoid that manager, passively resist instructions, perceive their job as inherently less interesting, and hence less attractive, become less loyal to the company, or even become depressed.

If the person who doesn’t fit the culture is the CEO, the problems are considerably worse. In this case, the reaction will spread throughout the company. Mistakes increase, motivation and loyalty decreases, and many top employees may leave. It also becomes harder to attract new people who quickly find the atmosphere oppressive: an organization filled with unhappy people is painfully obvious and not a fun place to be. Apple under John Scully and Digital Equipment Corporation under Robert Palmer are classic examples of this immune response in action. Apple, of course, eventually rejected Scully and brought Steve Jobs back in. DEC went out of business and was eventually bought by Compaq as employees rebelled against Palmer’s efforts to dramatically change the culture.

 

Balzac combines stories of jujitsu, wheat, gorillas, and the Lord of the Rings with very practical advice and hands-on exercises aimed at anyone who cares about management, leadership, and culture.

Todd Raphael
Editor-in-Chief
ERE Media

Systems, Silos, and Spaghetti

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

Traditional systems engineering argues that we identify the key systems and then decompose them into progressively smaller systems. Thus, a helicopter might be decomposed into a flight subsystem and ground subsystem. The fight system can be further decomposed into a drive system and navigation system, and so forth. Eventually, we get down to the smallest possible subsystems and then start building them up again. Each system communicates with other systems through a predefined interface. This approach is quite common in engineering disciplines, from aeronautic to software. It is also a common approach with human systems.

Unlike mechanical or electronic systems, however, human systems rarely maintain clean interfaces. Human systems are porous. In small organizations, this can work very well, but can become hopelessly chaotic when the organization grows. The lines of communication between different organizational systems start to look like a plate of spaghetti. While it’s great that everyone is talking, the lack of discipline in the process leads to confusion and lost information.

On the flip side, when systems are tightly controlled, they can easily transform into silos. In this case, each group retreats behind its own metaphorical moat and interacts with other silos only through very limited channels. Organization members will typically express great frustration with the “bureaucracy.” The key is to develop loosely coupled interfaces, allowing for flexibility in communications without either chaos or rigidity. Accomplishing that requires understanding a number of different organizational components.

Consider a typical business: Marketing. Sales. Engineering. Human Resources. QA. IT. The litany of departments goes on and on. Every organization, be it a business, a non-profit, a church or synagogue, a school, a sports team, and so on is composed of a variety of moving parts, of departments and teams that themselves can be viewed as smaller organizations. The larger organization comes to life out of the interactions of the smaller organizations.

As anyone who has ever been part of a large organization, be it a corporation or a club, well knows, each subgroup in the organization is constantly struggling for resources, constantly trying to demonstrate its importance to the organization as a whole. Just as the larger organization is a complex system, each subgroup is itself a system, taking in information and resources and, we hope, putting out value to the organization as a whole. These systems all interact with one another, sometimes in very elaborate ways.

Even more important than the obvious and visible departments within the larger organization, though, are the hidden systems: how and why the organization does things, attitudes about success and failure, how the organization hires, fires, and promotes, beliefs about how mistakes should be handled, problem-solving and innovation versus blame, and so forth.

To understand the vortex of interactions between these systems, we first need to understand the organization’s DNA: its culture.

Understanding Organizational Culture

J. J. Abram’s 2009 Star Trek movie featured, as a major plot point, a good deal of back story to explain how the iconic Captain James Kirk became the person he was in the original series. What is interesting, however, is that when Star Trek first went on the air in 1967, the character of James Kirk was immediately recognizable to viewers: he was an exaggerated version of another famous military figure known for his heroic feats, charisma, womanizing, and connection to outer space. That famous figure was, of course, John Kennedy, and Star Trek was a product of the culture of the space race inextricably linked to the assassinated president.

How did James Kirk came to represent John Kennedy? What does that have to do with the vortex in your company or, indeed, organizational psychology?

Culture is an odd beast, most often described as “the way we do things around here.” This description has just enough truth in it to be dangerous. There is truth in the definition since culture is, on the surface, what we do and what we see. These obvious components of culture, what MIT social psychologist and professor of business Ed Schein referred to as artifacts of the culture, are also the most trivial aspects of culture. When we focus on the artifacts, we are missing the depth of the culture’s influence. Furthermore, we foster the dangerous illusion that organizational changes can be accomplished simply by making a few alterations to the way things are done.

Balzac combines stories of jujitsu, wheat, gorillas, and the Lord of the Rings with very practical advice and hands-on exercises aimed at anyone who cares about management, leadership, and culture.

Todd Raphael
Editor-in-Chief
ERE Media
http://www.ere.net

The Perils of Perception

I was flying through the air. Unlike the common experiences of flying, this did not involve an airplane. Rather, I was practicing jujitsu and my partner had just executed a very well-timed throw. As I went over, I suddenly realized that my partner had turned the wrong way and was throwing me off the mat and onto the concrete floor.

Needless to say, the landing was painful. I started to say something to my partner when I suddenly realized that I was still on the mat. While I thought my partner was throwing me onto concrete, he was, in fact, throwing me exactly where he was supposed to: onto a nice, soft mat. Believing that I was about to land on concrete, however, was enough to cause me to take a hard fall.

Perception, in other words, is reality.

Now, it is easy to argue that maybe the expectation of falling on concrete was enough to make me tense up and hence take a bad fall. On a separate occasion, I really was thrown off the mat and onto the concrete floor. I didn’t realize it was happening and fully expected to land on a soft mat. Far from being a painful shock, the landing was completely comfortable, exactly how I’m used to feeling when I hit the mat. It wasn’t until I stood up that I realized that I wasn’t where I expected to be.

Perception is, once again, reality.

A certain company was experiencing explosive growth. Their hot new product enabled them to dominate the niche they had created. As their product became more and more successful, the senior management team became more and more concerned about the future. They focused on the consequences of failure and the decisions they made were based on protecting their turf, not continuing to innovate and expand. Despite their successes, they viewed themselves as fighting a doomed battle against encroaching competitors. Over time, just as they envisioned, their competitors chipped away at their market share and they saw their revenue decline.

Perception can become reality.

The company was seriously stuck. They knew they had a good product, but they couldn’t get any traction. Engineering teams were spending all their time arguing over minute details; everyone was so afraid of making a mistake that making a commitment to any course of action was seen as high risk behavior. Even when they did make a commitment they made almost no progress: every decision had to be reevaluated and rejustified at every meeting.

Rather than focusing on what could go wrong, the management team had to learn to focus on what could go right. Rather than viewing every decision in terms of avoiding failure, they had to plan for success. The only way to never fall off a bicycle is to never get on one in the first place. If you want to ride, though, you have to risk falling over. This company needed to stop being afraid of falling off the bike and simply start pedaling. They needed to perceive success around the corner.

As management started to change their attitudes, the rest of the company followed. We always assume that the person highest up the ladder can see the furthest. In this case, once the people at the top started perceiving success, everyone else could perceive it too.

The company regained its dominant position. Were their mistakes along the way? Of course there were. At one time, those mistakes would have led to heads rolling and projects being canceled. Even worse, the mistakes would have led to interminable meetings arguing over the causes and making elaborate plans to avoid any possibility of failure in the future. However, with the new mindset that success was inevitable, mistakes were merely feedback, opportunities to collect information and adjust strategies.

Change perception and you change reality.

What you perceive determines how you act. This isn’t some sort of magic, it is simple psychology. Teach people to perceive success at the end of the journey and they perceive the opportunities to get them there. Teach people to perceive failure and they avoid anything that might be risky, including the opportunities to succeed.

Hard landing or soft landing, it’s up to you. What are you doing to make sure your team perceives success?

What Are You Avoiding?

The amazing thing about train wrecks is that they are obvious in hindsight. However, while they are happening, everyone involved is gripped by some horrid fascination that, if not forcibly interrupted, leads to the inevitable conclusion.

By the end of this particular train wreck, a member of the senior management team had resigned and the CEO had lost the trust of many of his formerly extremely loyal employees.

The newly hired VP of Sales was given responsibility for supervising a particular product manager, someone who had been with the company for years. They did not hit it off and the relationship went downhill from there.

The PM was charged by the CEO with getting a particular release of the software out the door. The VP of Sales wanted the project manager to be working on something else. The CEO kept promising to straighten things out with the VP of Sales, but never quite got around to it.

The VP of Sales became ever more frustrated with the constant “insubordination” of the PM; the PM, meanwhile, was increasingly frustrated with getting one set of instructions from the VP and one from the CEO.

The VP of Sales eventually went to the CEO and told him that he was planning to fire an employee. The CEO shrugged and didn’t think much about it. “It’s your department,” was his only response.

The VP told the project manager to leave, that she was suspended without pay pending completion of the paperwork to fire her.

At this point, the CEO noticed that the PM wasn’t in the office, found out what was going on, and “unfired” her. While she was happy to be unfired, she was also furious that he’d let it get to that point. The VP of Sales, meanwhile, was just a tad miffed. He felt he’d received carte blanche and ended up feeling much like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football as Lucy jerks it away.

The CEO’s attitude was that, “these things just happen.” He was, of course, wrong.

Teams are not a group of people operating in their own silos, independent of one another. Rather, they are an interacting system and sometimes parts of that system don’t work quite the way they should. When something goes wrong, it’s important understand the system and how different players contributed to the problem.

The Project Manager was nobly perhaps, but foolishly, focused on the assignment she’d received from the CEO. Her attempts to explain to the VP of Sales just why she wasn’t focusing on his objectives were either insufficient or simply missing. She may have assumed that the CEO would explain things to him, but didn’t force the issue when it became obvious that he hadn’t.

The VP of Sales walked into the company and made a number of assumptions about how work was done and how authority was implemented. Rather than take the time to find out how people worked in the company, how rigid or flexible the lines of control were, and what other projects might be going on, he assumed that an employee put into his department could be assigned to his projects. He didn’t listen to the PM and he never made the effort to go to the CEO and found out what was going on. He assumed the CEO was paying attention to issues in his department that were, quite simply, not where the CEO’s mind was. Even when he went to the CEO to explain that he wanted to fire someone, he didn’t bother to explain the situation.

The CEO, for his part, also contributed in a major way to the final, unsatisfying outcome. He knew he was giving an employee instructions that might contradict what her manager was telling her. He also knew the project manager was extremely frustrated with her new manager. He didn’t act on that knowledge. He was busy, and explaining things to the VP of Sales was not a high priority for him. Even once the situation had reached its climax and the project manager had been fired, the CEO didn’t really address the problem. He simply pulled the rug out from under the VP of Sales and did not consider how that might make the VP look to his other subordinates.

At every stage of the game, the CEO, the PM, and the VP of Sales each had opportunities to address issues that each of them wanted to avoid: the CEO didn’t really want to deal with the disappointment of the PM at having her project cancelled, nor did he want to upset his new VP of Sales. The PM did not want her project cancelled and really wasn’t all that interested in the project the VP of Sales wanted her to take on. The VP of Sales had his own views about power and authority and didn’t really want to find out that the company did things differently than he believed they should be done. He was angry, blamed the PM, and wanted to punish her.

Right up to the end, stopping to address the unpleasant issues and recognizing how each person was contributing to the impending train wreck could have changed the results. Instead, each person operated in a vacuum, and managed to achieve one of the worst of all possible results.

What difficult situations or awkward conversations are people in your office avoiding?