The Business Sensei

The Seven Habits of Pointy-Haired Bosses

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.

Twinkie, twinkie, little star…

The news that Hostess Brands (aka Interstate Bakeries), maker of the legendary Twinkie, is closing its doors after 80 some years is all the rage these days.

Along with that news is the argument about why they are closing their doors. There are so many claims and counter-claims running around that it’s starting to sound like the beginning of a bad detective movie. Hostess is dead! Whodunit?

Some people are claiming that union demands killed Hostess, others that tripling the CEO’s pay did the job. More than likely, what really did the job was the death of a thousand knives: a series of cascading errors that put them in the position where their demise was inevitable; it was just a question of what specific event finished them off.

Of course, to really understand what happened, we then have to ask the question, “How did the cascade get started? What happened, or didn’t happen, what changed or didn’t change, to make the vulnerable in the first place?”

Here we can see the power of organizational culture at work. Specifically, we can see what happens when two cultures that were tightly aligned drift apart from one other.

When Hostess was founded in 1930, it was a product of the culture of the time: created by people living and working in that time period. The foods it sold were the foods of the day, the things people wanted. Over the years, Hostess became very successful selling twinkies, Wonder Bread, and the like. They weren’t just the best thing since sliced bread, they were the sliced bread!

Culture, of course, is the residue of success: the accumulated lessons an organization learns over time about how to successfully navigate the world. Those lessons can be hard to unlearn. Sometimes bankruptcy will do it, but not always. In the case of Hostess, they went bankrupt in 2004 and spent the next five years in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. When they emerged from Chapter 11 in 2009, however, they had apparently failed to learn some lessons, specifically:

1. Sliced bread was no longer quite the rage it had been in 1930.Indeed, today artisan breads, local breads, and the like are extremely popular. Wonder bread is no longer the first choice of many parents.

2. The dessert market changed. Twinkies are not so cool or fun anymore. They are the object of jokes and experiments to see how long before the go bad, or how much oil can one absorb, and so forth. They are not a school lunch staple as they were even 30 or 40 years ago. Same for Hostess cupcakes, ding-dongs, and the rest.

Are there additional factors? Sure. Supposedly Hostess never really modernized its distribution system and it’s not at all clear how much their internal management ever adopted modern goal-setting and motivational techniques. Fundamentally, though, what killed Hostess is the same thing that almost killed IBM in 1992: their market changed; their culture did not. Unlike IBM, Hostess didn’t have the same willingness to confront unpleasant realities and make necessary changes soon enough.

The rest is merely detail.

QWERTY Culture

Remember the last time the keys on your computer jammed because you were typing too fast? Neither do I.

The fact is, our QWERTY keyboards are an artifact of history, a solution to a problem that hasn’t existed for at least half a century: typewriter keys jamming when you type too fast. The solution was to design a keyboard which reduced the speed at which someone could type. Even though that problem hasn’t existed at least since the 1960’s IBM Selectric Typewriter, with its “letter ball,” we still use QWERTY keyboards. Better keyboard layouts do exist, but that hasn’t changed the fact that QWERTY still owns approximately 98% of the keyboard market. QWERTY is so accepted that even my spell-checker recognizes QWERTY as a word.

Now, one can make all manner of arguments about how QWERTY persists because there is a significant investment in QWERTY keyboard manufacturing in place, or because most people are comfortable with QWERTY keyboards and don’t want to learn something new, or that learning the more efficient Dvorak keyboard isn’t a transferable skill, and so forth. All of these arguments are even sort of true, albeit of questionable relevance. Fundamentally, they call boil down to tradition. We’ve always done it this way, so let’s keep doing it this way. Everything else arises in response to that.

Maybe this isn’t such a big deal in the world of keyboards. After all, most people are pretty happy with their QWERTY keyboards, and it’s not that hard to use a Dvorak if you really want to. The QWERTY phenomenon can be more of a problem, though, in large organizations where continually solving a problem that no longer exists wastes time, energy, and resources.

The “way we’ve always done it” is very attractive. It’s familiar, safe, something we often don’t think much about. Doing things the way we’ve always done them feels good, like putting on a favorite coat. Sure, it may not be as nice or as warm as a new one, but it’s comfortable. We’ve grown used to it. Quite frequently, we’ve built up structures or procedures to help us do whatever it is we’ve always done. Those structures and procedures, like QWERTY keyboard factories, give us a convenient excuse to not make changes.

Founded over a century ago, General Motors learned many lessons about how to sell cars. Those lessons were the results of hard won victories over competitors and economic disasters including the Great Depression. Those lessons made GM the most successful auto maker in the world for many years. Those same lessons, unfortunately, also eventually led to a GM executive pointing to a GM parking lot and declaring there was no need to worry about competition because there were no foreign cars in the lot. The world, and the competitive landscape, had changed and GM hadn’t kept up. They were, metaphorically, still happily using their QWERTY keyboards in a world where everyone else had moved on to something far more effective. It took an economic disaster and the near destruction of the company to force them to start facing modern problems instead of hiding comfortably behind old ones.

By comparison, IBM badly misjudged the computer market in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were so accustomed to being on top that they simply couldn’t imagine any need to do things differently. Thus, the techniques they’d learned selling giant multi-million dollar computer systems to large corporations were the same techniques they applied to selling little tiny PCs to individuals. The results were underwhelming. It took the first loss in the company’s history to shake them out of their complacency. For the first time in IBM history an outsider, Lou Gerstner, was brought in to run the company. He successfully refocused IBM on the market in front of them, not the market they were used to being in.

Giant companies are not the only ones vulnerable to this “QWERTY trap.” It’s a game everyone can play. One Silicon Valley company I worked with asked me to convince all their employees to work twelve hour days. When I pushed them on what they were trying to accomplish, they first spoke about deadlines, fixing bugs, and customer commitments. When I kept pushing, it eventually turned out that they wanted their employees to work twelve hour days because, “This is Silicon Valley and that’s what we do here!” Once I convinced them that a more sane work schedule would make more sense, we saw productivity go up and both the quantity and the severity of software bugs go down. The company actually started hitting its deadlines.

It’s easy to get caught up in the idea that the way to do things today is the way we’ve always done them. It’s also easy to use existing procedures and policies to justify our desire not to change. Doing things the familiar way feels good. However, just because something feels good doesn’t mean it’s actually doing what we think it’s doing. It pays to stop periodically and check to see that we’re doing is actually solving the problems in front of us, not problems that disappeared fifty years ago.

Are You Speaking to Me?

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

“Are you speaking to me?”

–          Fearless Leader

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

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

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

Easy answers are not necessarily correct answers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in 2013. For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

Lost in Map Land

The map, as many people know, is not the territory. However, as discussed in a recent NY Times editorial, some iPhone 5 users are finding that the map app doesn’t even do a job representing the territory. I haven’t had that particular problem yet; I’ve been too busy with a different irritating feature of iOS6: podcast management.

In iOS5, I could download my podcasts through the Music app and assemble them into playlists on my iPhone. In iOS6, Apple removed that functionality from the Music app — oh, you can still make song playlists, just not podcasts — and moved podcast management to Apple’s podcast app. Not only is this app slow and buggy, it doesn’t allow users to assemble playlists.

This leads me to wonder if Apple is succumbing to the Creeping Box trap. The Creeping Box trap is something I wrote about in my book, The 36-Hour on Organizational Development, and spoke about in several talks I’ve given on organizational culture and innovation. Fundamentally, it’s what happens when the box you’ve been thinking outside of finally catches up with you. In Apple’s case, the original iPhone created a whole new standard for smart phones. The iPad created a whole new space for tablet computing. Apple blazed the trail, and plenty of other companies followed them or are on the way. They are all in a new box that Steve Jobs built.

Here’s the thing: Apple’s competitors have much less to lose than Apple. They are trying to knock Apple off its perch. Assuming the have the sense to not bet the farm, the worst that can happen to them is that the status quo remains unchanged: “The <new, revised, improved> <Google, Amazon, Samsung, Nosuchco> <Nexus, Kindle Fire, Galaxy, Clay Slab> is really nice but doesn’t live up to the <iPhone, iPad>. Still consumers will like… and so they’ll sell enough of their tablets to make it worthwhile to try again. And, if they beat the iPhone or iPad, the rewards are immense. Indeed, I know many people would argue, with a great deal of justification, that there are plenty of phones out there as good or better than the iPhone 5.

Don’t get me wrong: the iPhone 5 is a beautiful piece of technology. I’ll probably upgrade to one eventually (unless I decide to stick it out and see what the iPhone 6 looks like 🙂 ). But it’s a lot closer to the iPhone 4s than the iPhone 3g was to the original iPhone. Apple may be growing the box, but it sure isn’t outside it, and they have lots of company in there.

So here’s the thing: Apple’s competitors are looking to find a way out of the box that Steve Jobs created. Is Apple?

Flawed Execution — Don’t Lose Your Head Over It

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

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

There’s an old joke about a lawyer, a priest, and an engineer being sent to the guillotine during the French Revolution.

The lawyer goes first. He kneels, and the blade comes swishing down. Suddenly, it stops just before it hits his neck. The crowd gasps. After a hurried discussion, the executioner announces that since the lawyer survived, it wouldn’t be legal to try again. He’s released.

The priest goes next. Once again, the blade stops just before it severs his head. The executioner declares that clearly it was the divine hand of providence at work, and so the priest is released.

Now it’s the engineer’s turn. Just as he’s about to kneel down, he looked up at the blade and says, “Hey, I see the problem.”

Leaving the engineer aside for the moment, what we have here is a classic case of flawed execution. It’s a fairly common, though less dramatic, event in many businesses. Unlike this particular example of flawed execution, however, when it happens in a business heads often end up rolling.

This, of course, is exactly the problem.

Now, it may seem like flawed execution is a bad thing. In fact, though, what is more important than the execution itself is how the company responds to its success or failure. This is particularly true in organizations that claim to promote innovation or organizational learning.

When a leader takes the view that mistakes mean that heads will role, that sends a very clear message to the rest of the organization: mistakes are something terrible. They are to be avoided at all costs. In other words, always play it safe because if you make a mistake, you’re in trouble. It also means never experiment because your experiment might not work out. In fact, most experiments don’t work; we conduct them to find out what will work.

To put this in perspective, at one software company the engineers on one project had to make some decisions about how users would interact with the program. They had several possible designs, but could not choose between them. Eventually, they made the logical decision to pick one and conduct some user tests. The first few rounds of tests did not go well, but eventually they hit on a design that the users liked. The response from the department head was, “That’s great, but why didn’t you get it right the first time? Your errors cost us a lot of time and money.”

On the next product cycle, the engineers simply picked one alternative and when it didn’t work blamed marketing for not providing them sufficient information. Naturally, marketing responded by blaming engineering, and so it went. Once heads start to roll, the most important thing is to make sure that someone else’s head is the one that goes. This rapidly undermines trust and teamwork.

Conversely, in highly innovative organizations, mistakes are accepted as a necessary part of the game. Indeed, these organizations try to avoid simply jumping to an answer. They recognize, as the engineer in our little joke did not, that jumping to a solution can have fatal consequences. Palm Computing, for example, conducted numerous user tests before releasing the first Palm Pilot. Many of those tests simply involved people walking around with pieces of wood in order to find the right form factor for the Palm devices.

The trick with both innovation and organizational learning is recognizing that you often don’t exactly know what you’re going to build or learn. Learning in particular is a product of making mistakes; when you don’t allow mistakes, you also don’t allow learning. As for innovation, well, it’s very hard to pick the right answer when you’re exploring unknown territory. Rather, getting to a right answer is a process of exploration and experimentation. That process of collaborating with your team, sharing successes and failures along the way, is what truly builds a strong and resilient team, as well as high quality products and services.

In the end, it’s the flawed execution that really gets you what you want, while jumping to the apparently correct answer too quickly can be fatal. No joke.

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. He is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck, and the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development.” Contact him at steve@7stepsahead.com.

Following Prince Charming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He didn’t.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Team Driver Paradox

Originally published in Corp! Magazine.

Imagine for a moment that you’re taking a ride on the subway, or, as we say here in Boston, the “T.” Somewhere up in that front car is a driver. That person sits in a little chamber and drives the train along the tracks. Someone not familiar with the T might assume that the driver isn’t doing much at all: after all, the trains are traveling through tunnels most of the time and along tracks all of the time. Yet, when an accident occurs due to a driver texting, it becomes painfully clear that the driver is doing a great deal. It just may not be obvious.

Driving a car is oddly similar to the train: When my children were very young, they didn’t understand just how much I was doing as the driver. They couldn’t understand why I couldn’t pick up a dropped toy or why I was tired after a long drive. Adults who don’t drive have more of an appreciation of the concentration involved than do children, but still tend to grossly under- or overestimate it. Indeed, if you were driving along a large, empty Midwestern highway, someone unfamiliar with driving might well assume that you were doing nothing at all, just sitting there as the car effortlessly zoomed down that long, straight road. The actions and almost constant adjustments you make are so small, so apparently insignificant, as to easily escape notice, unless, of course, you didn’t do them. Then everyone would notice!

In a very odd way, a successful team is much like that car, and the leader of the team much like the driver. In the best performing teams, it often appears that the leader isn’t doing much of anything. In fact, it often seems that the leader could be removed and the team would go on without a problem. That’s true, in the same way that the car would continue down the highway if you removed the driver and simply put a brick on the accelerator. If you decide to try that, please let me know so that I can be somewhere far away!

I have had CEOs, vice presidents, directors, and other executives and senior managers tell me that their company has leaderless teams. They even insist that their teams are performing at a very high level. Despite that, earnings are not where they could be, products are shipping late, and there is a very high degree of failure work. The teams, when looked at more closely by an outsider, turn out to be more along the lines of disorganized hordes. There is little sense of team spirit or community, rather each person is out for him or herself. Goals are vague, often to the point of uselessness. That’s OK, though, because everyone is operating on the basis that “there’s never time to do it right, but always time to do it over.” In one particularly egregious example, the following conversation occurred at product review meeting I attended:

Manager: “Is the feature complete?”

Engineer: “Yes.”

Manager: “Does it work?”

Engineer: “There are some bugs.”

Manager: “What’s wrong with it?”

Engineer: “The code’s not written.”

Luckily, I had already swallowed my coffee!

The most amazing part of the whole meeting is that no one seemed to find this particularly odd. It was simply seen as a normal part of how business was conducted. If that guy got fired, oh well, someone else would take his place. Without someone to lead, the team really never figured out which way to go and no one really cared.

That said, there are certainly times when it appears that a team is functioning just fine without a leader. You may even have been lucky enough to have seen such a team in action. Like the driver of the car, there’s a leader there. He or she just may not be obvious, until you take them away. That team and that leader did not start out working at that level. Rather, like any new driver, there were undoubtedly some bumps and wrong turns along the way. Even for experienced drivers, it can take a while to get used to a new car, to learn all of its idiosyncrasies and quirks. The apparently leaderless team is the product of a lot of hard work. It’s also not really leadless; it just appears that way.

Like the driver of the car, the apparently insignificant, or even invisible, adjustments made by that leader are working to keep the team from going too fast and burning out, from going off the road, or even from smashing into an unexpected obstacle. The results are only obvious when the leader is removed. By then, of course, it’s often too late.

If you truly think you have a leaderless team, look again. The leader may not be obvious, but he or she is there. And if you want to have a leaderless team, be patient. You can’t start that way and you won’t get there without some bumps along the road!

My Hovercraft is Full of Eels

Originally 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.

[SYSTEM-AD-LEFT]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.

Happy Groundhog Day!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.