The Business Sensei

Is Congress Running Your Business?

It’s been pretty impressive listening to the news lately. Will Congress deign to return from vacation to debate whether to grant military authorization to attack ISIL? It seems sort of odd to even be debating whether or not they should be doing their jobs! Now, I could at this point draw some trivial parallel to around how many people get to just blow off their jobs and not really worry about it, but that would be pointless. I doubt anyone is having any trouble seeing that issue!

What I find much more interesting is why they are so eager to avoid debate, and what that can teach us about similar problems in a business.

Politics is an interesting game: in a very real sense, it’s not so much about doing a good job as it is about looking good. Debate military authorization before elections? No matter what you decide, events might prove you wrong. In this case, prove really means that a completely arbitrary and unforeseeable event makes whatever decision you just made appear to be wrong in hindsight. Of course, once this happens, then it becomes an opportunity for your political opponents to swoop in and declare that they would have magically foreseen the future and made a different decision.

In the immortal words of Monty Python, there are three lessons we can take from this and the number of the lessons shall be three.

First, hindsight is very comforting, but is fundamentally an illusion. Hindsight only appears to be 20-20. In reality, what appears obvious in hindsight is frequently only obvious because we know the answer. Go read a good mystery, be it a Sherlock Holmes story or something by Agatha Christie, and try to figure out the clues. It can be done; Conan Doyle, for instance, played fair. You don’t need to know that Holmes picked up a particular brand of cigar ash from the floor; it’s sufficient to just know that he found something interesting. The problem is that it doesn’t help: even with the clues in front of us, it’s still extremely difficult to solve the mystery. Once Holmes explains it, however, then it’s obvious; in fact, it’s hard to imagine that it could have gone any other way. That’s the problem with hindsight: once we know how events turned out, clearly it was obvious all along. That’s why everyone bought Google stock the day it went public and held on to it ever since. While hindsight, used properly, can certainly teach us some useful lessons about our decisions, the hindsight trap teaches us to avoid taking action.

Second, how do we react when someone makes a mistake? In any business operation, mistakes will happen. Are those mistakes feedback or are they the kiss of death? Does a wrong decision become an opportunity to bring out the knives and get rid of a rival or find an excuse to not give someone a promotion or a raise? Or does a wrong decision become an opportunity to revisit the process of making the decision and learn how to make better decisions? In other words, are you fixing the problems or are you simply fixing blame? Fixing blame may feel good, but doesn’t actually solve anything: the same problems just keep reappearing in different guises.

Third, are you evaluating your employees based on results, strategy, or both? Even the best strategy sometimes fails, but when you focus on strategy your odds of successful results are much higher. If you only focus on results, you are telling people to not take risks, not accept challenges, but rather to play it safe. If you only focus on strategy, you lose the opportunity to reality check your plans: if a strategy fails, it’s important to understand what happened. Did the market change? Did something unexpected and unpredictable occur? What are the things that can derail your strategy and what can you do to make your strategies more resilient? What can you control and what is outside your control? Athletes who focus on strategy, process, and winning, win far more often than those who only focus on winning.

When you get caught in the hindsight trap, fix blame, and ignore strategy what you are really doing is telling people that inaction is better than action, pointing fingers is better than improving the business, and playing it safe is better than pushing the envelope and seeking excellence. Is that really the business you want? If it’s not, what are you going to do?

Want High Performance? Have the Village Idiot Run Your Team!

I often hear that building a high performance team is really pretty simple. All you need to do is get the best person, for example the best engineer, and put him in charge of a team of strong engineers. Once you do that, that’s enough, right? The fact is, when you can build a team like that, it doesn’t take all that long to move from a team that’s operating at, let’s say, a “1” to one that’s operating at a “10.” Don’t get me wrong; moving from a 1 to a 10 is pretty good.

The problem is, they could be at 100. That’s a pretty sizable difference; it’s certainly a lot better than Spinal Tap’s famous “but it goes to 11.”

Unfortunately, scarcely one team in five will ever reach 100. Most teams barely make it much past that 10. Why? Because they aren’t putting the village idiot in charge of the team.

Village idiot? That’s an error, right? Well, not really. It may be a slight exaggeration, but only slight.

One of the most interesting, and powerful, aspects of high performance teams is the degree to which members argue with one another. The fact is, members of high performance teams are really good at arguing; it’s one of the things that they do best. Part of why they’re so good at it is that while members of high performance teams like to be right, they don’t need to be right. Thus, team members are able to argue, evaluate, make a decision, and then all get behind that decision. Learning to do this is why you need the village idiot.

When the best engineer is running the team, particularly if she is also doing engineering at the same time, there’s a problem. It’s very hard to turn against your own solution. The stories I hear from different people are all oddly similar: at first, it’s great being on a team run by the expert engineer. It’s a breath of fresh air compared to being on that team run by the person who was always yelling about milestones and who didn’t understand anything about engineering. And there’s a real element of truth here: being on a team run by a bookkeeper isn’t necessarily much fun. But sooner or later, and it’s usually sooner, the people on that team run by the expert engineer find themselves increasingly frustrated: he always knows the “right” way, and it’s always his way; She’s doing the most interesting work because it’s “her” idea; No matter how much we discuss it, he always finds a way to prove that his solution is best; I never know when she’s going to jump in to “save the day,” whether or not the day actually needs saving.

The issue here is that an engineer succeeds by being an excellent individual contributor. A manager, however, succeeds by making the people who report to him excellent. It’s hard to be an excellent individual contributor and also make everyone else excellent as well. It’s hard to let someone else be right when that means you might be wrong. Are there people who can do it? Yes, of course. How many? A small fraction of those who believe they can do it. But when companies insist that’s the best way to run a team, what they are really doing is saying they’re happy with a 10 when they could be at 100.

The role of the leader is to build up others and to think strategically. Even if you’re running a team and not the whole company, building your team, making them excellent individually and collectively, and considering the ramifications of your work and different ways it can help company strategy is a non-trivial job. Being a really good team leader is not easy. It only looks that way, in the same sense that experts often manage to make the impossible look easy… until you try it. So what are some steps toward becoming the sort of leader who can get from 10 to 100?

1. No matter how well you know the subject matter, invite ideas and suggestions from others. When you lead off with your expert opinion, you immediately anchor the team. Keep your opinion to yourself as long as possible. Help others come up with the brilliant ideas.
2. Don’t make decisions based on your expertise. Help your team make decisions based on their expertise.
3. Admit when you don’t know something. In fact, make a habit of being curious: “I’m not sure I understand. Could you explain it to me?” Be the village idiot.
4. Lead the discussion, but don’t own the discussion. Bring others in. Help people learn to argue and don’t worry about being right. As the team gets better at arguing, rotate the job of running meetings or brainstorming sessions. Participate when someone else is running the session.
5. Be predictable. As Google found when they crunched their data, boring, predictable, leaders are better than heroic leaders. Team members need to work with your strengths and your weaknesses. The more predictable your behavior, the easier it is for your team to configure itself to maximize everyone’s strengths and minimize everyone’s weaknesses.
6. Find ways to build people up. Great leaders know that performance increases when you build people up, not when you tear them down. Encourage team members to do the same.
7. Do steps 1-6 all the time, not just when the pressure is on. How well your team performs, particularly under pressure, depends on how effectively you built the relationships ahead of time.

Okay, so maybe the leader isn’t really the village idiot. Or perhaps they’re the sort of village idiot who knows the right questions to ask, helps their team argue effectively, somehow encourages people without threatening them or competing with them, and who manages to make everyone around them excellent. That’s not such a bad village idiot to be.