The Business Sensei

Princess Bride Problem Solving

Once upon a time there was an organization. It was a fairly good sized business, not too big and not too small. It was a business, in fact, much like your business. And it came up with a way to apply the battle of wits from the Princess Bride to dealing with some long-lasting and thorny problems. For those who may not recall this scene or, hard though it may be to imagine, have never seen the movie, it occurs relatively early in the film. Vizinni the dwarf has kidnapped Princess Buttercup and is fleeing with her to Guilder. In pursuit is the mysterious Man in Black. The Man in Black defeats the master swordsman, in a duel, and Fezzik the Giant in a wrestling match. He then confronts Vizinni in a battle of wits: two goblets, one supposedly containing deadly Iocane powder, sit before the two men. Vizinni must deduce which goblet contains the poison and then both men will drink.

What follows is a dizzying, and often hilarious, chain of logic as Vizinni attemps to solve the puzzle.

Vizzini: But it’s so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy’s? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.

Man In Black: You’ve made your decision then?

Vizzini: Not remotely. Because Iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.

Man In Black: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.

Vizzini: Wait till I get going! Where was I?

Now, the fact is, none of the problems the business was facing were particularly unique or new problems. They were problems that the organization had had for many years: difficulties in setting priorities and making decisions; allocating resources and providing clear direction to employees. In other words, the sorts of problems that many businesses struggle with.

These problems were the topic of much discussion, but despite all that discussion nothing ever changed. Attempts to solve the problems almost resembled the classic model of two steps forward, one step back. The resemblance broke down in the second half: they usually took two steps back.

Eventually, someone suggested bringing in a consultant to help with the problems. This is where things got creative. It turns out that there are two types of consultants, at least for this particular business: those who were closely connected to the business and known to people there, and those who had no connection at all.

We now come to Vizinni and his Dizzying Intellect.

Consultants in the second group could clearly not be hired because they knew nothing about the company. How could they possibly be of assistance? Therefore we must look at consultants in the first group.

Consultants in the first group were too close to the organization. Clearly they too could not be hired. Therefore, we must go back to consultants in the second group.

But consultants in the second group would clearly not care about the results. So they could not be hired. Back to the first group.

But consultants in the first group could not be hired because they might care too much. So they too could not be hired.

And so it went, on and on, until eventually nothing was done. People continued to complain about the problems, but no one wanted to act.

In the movie, of course, Vizzini finally chooses a goblet and drinks the deadly Iocane powder. In reality, it didn’t matter which goblet he chose as the Man in Black had developed an immunity to Iocane powder and poisoned both goblets.

Similarly, in this case it wouldn’t have mattered which choice the business actually made: bring in someone totally unconnected or someone close and known to the people there. The important thing was to make a choice and actually take action to deal with the long-term problems that were interfering with their productivity. Whichever choice they made would have different benefits and different drawbacks, but either could have helped them. It’s only the choice to do nothing that has no hope of success. Let’s face it, if the problems haven’t gone away on their own after months or years, odds are pretty good that they won’t be going away on their own tomorrow or even next year.

Choose a goblet. Take action. Nothing will change until you do.

How to make your company sick by treating the symptoms

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

Did you ever notice that doctors who deal with respiratory illness are known as Ear, Nose, Throat doctors, not Achy, Coughy, Sneezy, doctors? You don’t go to a doctor who specializes in coughs; you go to the doctor who understands the system in which coughs occur. Even when you go to a specialist, said specialist usually, or at least hopefully, has enough knowledge of the overall system to recognize when they are not the right person. We might go to a doctor because of our symptoms, but we do not go to Symptom Doctors.

In this case, the company was not addressing what was wrong; they were addressing a symptom. After their Decision Consultant finished working with the team on whatever it is that Decision Consultants do, things really did look better for a short while. It wasn’t long, though, before other decision making problems cropped up. So they brought their Decision Consultant back again, and so it went. The problem never really got better, but the symptoms were periodically alleviated. There was no increase in productivity, but everyone did feel better about the team, particularly the Decision Consultant.

The problem with just treating symptoms is that we end up making ourselves feel better while the problem is constantly getting worse. However, when the solution to the problem is to bring in a Symptom Doctor, that’s what ends up happening. Over time, this approach undermines morale and enthusiasm: not only are there clearly problems, but they must be very big problems because the organization is spending lots of money trying to fix them and they are not going away! Eventually, some organizations come to believe that the problems are simply part of doing business; at that point, the business becomes a very unpleasant place to work!

“Author Stephen Balzac has written a terrific book that gets into the realpolitik of organizational psychology – the underlying patterns of behavior that create the all important company culture. He doesn’t stop at the surface level, explaining things we already know like ‘culture beats strategy’ – he gets into the deeper drivers and ties everything back to specific, actionable stories. For example he describes different approaches to apparent “insubordination” by a manager; rather then judging them, he shows how each management response is interpreted, and how it then drives response. Balzac preaches real engagement with one’s own company and a mindful state of operation, especially by executives – who must remember that culture “just happens” unless and until they learn to recognize that their behaviors play a huge part in creating and cementing it. It covers the full spectrum of corporate life, from challenging bad decisions to hiring, training, motivating teams – and the secrets of keeping people engaged and learning – and/or avoiding actions which do the opposite. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to participate in creating and steering company culture.”

 

Sid Probstein

Chief Technology Officer

Attivio – Active Intelligence

What are the symptoms telling us?

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

Earlier, we discussed the process of looking at symptoms as the route to finding the problem. The danger here is that we become too focused on the symptoms. Treating the symptoms will often make us feel better in the short term, but only serves to mask the real problem. For example, if your car is making a weird knocking noise from one wheel, you can simply deal with the symptom by closing the windows and turning the music up. As they said on Car Talk, this approach works great until your axle breaks and the wheel comes off.

Of course, knowing that we get focused on symptoms isn’t the real question. The real question at this point is, why do we get focused on symptoms? The answer is because they’re there. Symptoms are easy to see and they seem easy to deal with. Making a symptom go away feels good. For a short time, everything appears to be working.

In one technology company, one of the engineering teams couldn’t make decisions. Now, we’ve looked at decision making from several different angles, and we therefore know that we’re looking at a symptom. There are any number of factors that can cause this symptom to appear:

1. We could be looking at a so-called leaderless team. As we’ve discussed, leaderless teams don’t work. This is one of the reasons why.
2. The team could be using wrong decision making method for the organizational culture or for the team’s stage of development. Stage one teams that attempt to use voting systems often end up stuck. Stage two teams are particularly resistant to directive leadership.
3. Lack of engagement: if the team isn’t committed, it isn’t really taking the decision seriously. As a result, and note that this is an additional symptom, no one is asking questions or pushing back on ideas.
4. Perceived lack of control: if the team doesn’t believe that their actions will matter, they won’t try. Decisions are a ritual they go through even though they “know” it won’t matter.

Indeed, even the basic problem, “can’t make decisions,” can mean different things: are decisions being made but not implemented? Are decisions not being made at all? Are they being made and then revisited and second-guessed? Each of these scenarios present different symptoms and point to different underlying problems.

Letting it linger

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

A common decision making trap is allowing the decision to linger after it’s made. This is particularly true with difficult decisions that are not easily reversed. At one company, the decision was made to fire the VP of Software Development. This was a very good decision for a very large number of reasons. But then someone decided that they should really hire someone to take his place before they told said VP that he was being fired. This man was not stupid. He could figure out that something was up even if he didn’t know exactly what. More to the point, though, was that keeping him there while they secretly searched for a replacement meant that they were effectively making the fire/no-fire decision over and over again each day! For each person they interviewed, they had to decide not just whether that person was a good hire, but whether he was good enough to enable them to actually go through with firing the current VP. Months later, the VP was still there and the problems at the company were much worse.

When you make a decision and then find excuses to not implement it, either it’s a bad decision in the first place, or the reason you don’t want to implement it is due to decision fatigue. Either way, you are facing the choice again and again. In one way or the other, you need to execute that decision. When you let it linger in some shadowy twilight world between life and death, you only suck the energy and morale out of everyone.

Organizational Psychology for Managers is an insightful book that reminds the business leader of basic principles of leading a successful organization in an engaging style. As a business owner for over 25 years, I am aware of these principles; however, I need reminding of how these principles work together and impact the energy and success of my company. Throughout the book, the author demonstrates these concepts into a clear perspective  by citing examples within other companies which is always a helpful technique and is often eye opening .  These are situations that I may not have thought about before. This book holds the reader’s interest from start to finish. I look forward to his next book!

 

Elizabeth Brown

President

Softeach, Inc.

Difficult decisions or difficulty with decisions?

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

Some years ago, when I was getting married, my wife and I engaged in the traditional ritual of the Choosing of the China. After trying to choose between china patterns all afternoon, the thought of being eaten alive by creatures from another planet was looking more and more attractive. Fortunately, it wasn’t an available option! By the end of the day, I just wanted the choices to end. I was ready to agree to anything. Indeed, I’ve often wondered if the reason police shows never use choosing china patterns as a form of interrogation is that it is seen as just too cruel.

In their book, “Willpower,” psychologist Roy Baumeister and NY Times reporter John Tierney discuss the phenomenon of will and decision making in great detail. From an organizational perspective, though, there are some key points that we need to consider as they have far reaching effects on organizational effectiveness.

As anyone who has ever had to choose china patterns can attest, the process is exhausting. We can only make so many decisions in a day before we start to feel like our brains are turning to goo and are trickling out of our ears. Part of the problem is that decisions are not always obvious: you’ll recall in chapter 11 we discussed the point that part of focusing on a task is being able to distinguish what is important from what is not. That separation is a form of decision making. Tuning out that annoying coworker in the cubicle down the hall is a decision. Indeed, what Baumeister found is that our decision making and our overall willpower are inextricably linked. The more decisions we have to make, the less willpower we have left for other things, like focusing on a problem or being creative.

Part of why decision making in groups works the way it does is that the energy people have determines the types of decisions they can make. In stage one groups, people are spending most of their time and energy just figuring out how to work together; thus, we end up with directive leadership being the most effective style in that situation. The group members lack both the decision making skill and energy for more sophisticated decision making techniques. As the group members become more comfortable with one another, the combination of learning to work together and increasing skill at decision making enables the group to develop and move to higher levels of performance.

Unfortunately, unlike physical tiredness, the sort of mental tiredness that comes with decision fatigue isn’t always so obvious. It’s not like we stop making decisions; rather, we just make increasingly poor decisions. When we’re mentally tired, we have trouble making the types of decisions that involve risk. We’re much more likely to just choose the thing that’s easy, which is generally to do little or nothing; to not try that new initiative or explore that new product idea. The planned bold new leap forward at dawn becomes a hesitant shuffle by the end of the day. Whether at an individual or a group level, we are subject to decision making errors of this sort. With groups, though, the poor decision is then amplified by the echo chamber effect of group polarization.

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

Effective problem solving

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

One of the things that world class successful organizations, the organizations that keep innovating and growing and reinventing themselves, have in common is a remarkably effective ability to solve problems. What is interesting, however, is that they don’t necessarily get it right the first the time; often, perhaps, but not always. What they are extremely good at is knowing how to solve problems in ways that constantly reinforce their cultural beliefs of optimism and success.

To begin with, problem solving is really a question of goal setting. In this case, it is a goal where the outcome is to make the problem go away. Unfortunately, that’s not really enough information to create a specific goal, although plenty of businesses try. There are, however, many ways to make a problem go away at least temporarily. Hence, if that’s all you focus on, you end up with a problem that feels like a boomerang in a Saturday morning cartoon: it keeps coming back and whacking you upside the head. Thus, we need to do a bit more work in order to formulate effective goals around solving our problem.

Before we can solve a problem there is one thing we absolutely have to know. What might that be? Whether I ask this of college students or managers, I always get the same response: puzzled looks and then people start yelling out answers such as, “the solution,” or “the cost of the problem,” or “what resources we need,” or a host of other answers. Eventually somebody says, “Don’t we have to know what the problem is?”

Exactly. Before you can find a solution, you have to identify the problem. As obvious as this may sound, if you don’t know the actual problem, then your solution isn’t likely to fix it. There are a great many solutions out there looking for problems.

A problem can be broken down into three major pieces: there is the actual problem, whatever that may be. We don’t know what the problem is because we can’t actually see it; what we can see are the effects of the problem. That may mean deadlines being missed or angry customers calling to complain or a lack of motivation or difficulty hiring or retaining talent, or countless other things. Those are the symptoms of the problem. Finally, there are the things that occur around the problem, things which attract our attention but which are basically irrelevant to the situation. They look important but they’re not. That’s known as chrome: the shiny stuff that draws our eye and distracts us from what really matters.

Balzac preaches real engagement with one’s own company and a mindful state of operation, especially by executives – who must remember that culture “just happens” unless and until they learn to recognize that their behaviors play a huge part in creating and cementing it. It covers the full spectrum of corporate life, from challenging bad decisions to hiring, training, motivating teams – and the secrets of keeping people engaged and learning – and/or avoiding actions which do the opposite. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to participate in creating and steering company culture.”

 

Sid Probstein

Chief Technology Officer

Attivio – Active Intelligence

Unity of Crisis

Marvel Comic’s Avengers are a pretty impressive bunch. Thor, Captain America, Ironman, and the Hulk make a fearsome combination: Captain America is practically indestructible, Thor flies around throwing lightning, Ironman, aka Tony Stark, is like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs rolled into one, and the Hulk is, well, the Hulk. When it comes to fighting off alien invasions, these guys have power to spare. That’s a good thing, because impressive as they are individually, as a team they aren’t so hot. Their inability to coordinate well would have been a total disaster if they hadn’t had such tremendous power and a friendly script writer in the basement to back them up. In fact, after watching them in action, it’s easy to understand why Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Nick Fury, is bald.

But wait! Sure, the Avengers have their issues, but they do pull together and beat off the invasion. They may have been at each other’s throats earlier in the movie, but aren’t they a team by the end? What’s the problem?

Fundamentally, the problem is that the Avengers are not really ever a team; rather, they are a group of people, more or less, who are able to agree that working together is less awful than the alternative. That, as the poet said, is not exactly a ringing endorsement! Even without Loki’s mind games, they were already barely civil to one another. He merely accentuated what was already happening, pushing them into open conflict.

The Avengers, of course, are fiction. Sadly, this unity of crisis is not. A common problem in business settings are teams whose members barely interact until the pressure of the oncoming deadline forces them to work together at least enough to get something out the door. At one company, this non-interaction took the form of endless debates and decisions that were revisited every week or two. At another company, the team ended up dominated by a couple of loud members, while the rest simply tried not to be noticed. In neither situation was there productive debate, problem solving, or effective decision making; unlike the Avengers, the motions they went through were not particularly dramatic or exciting. On the bright side, again unlike in the movie, no flying aircraft carriers were harmed.

When I’m speaking on organizational development, it’s at about this point that someone interrupts to tell me that they are communicating: they are sending email. Don’t get me wrong; email is a wonderful tool. However, it’s not some sort of magic cure-all. When I actually sit down with groups to look at their communications patterns, we quickly find out that while emails may be sent to everyone in the group, they are really only for the benefit of the team lead. Quite often, the email chain quickly becomes an echo chamber or an electronic trail useful only to prove a point or hurt a competitor when reviews come around.

The challenge every team faces is helping its members learn to communicate. It seems so simple: after all, everyone is speaking the same language. As we see in the Avengers, though, that is not entirely true. While the words all may sound the same, each person is bringing their own perspectives, assumptions, and beliefs to the table. Moreover, each person is bringing their own assumptions about what the goals are and the best way to accomplish them. Also, not unlike the Avengers, there is often a certain amount of friction between different team members. While most business teams do not explode into physical violence, the verbal equivalent does occur. Unlike the Avengers, when that happens many teams simply fall apart. Although the Avengers avoid that fate, it was close. While that experience may be exciting in a movie, I find that most business leaders would rather skip the drama.

So what can be done to create real unity, instead of a unity of crisis? To begin with, it takes time. Sorry, but just like baking a cake, if you simply turn up the temperature of the oven, all you get is a mess. Teams are the same: if you rush, you still spend the same amount of time but with less to show for it.

Assuming that you use your time well, it is particularly important for the team lead to set the tone: invite questions and discussions, but also be willing to end debate and move on. At first, team members will be happy to have the leader end the debate; eventually, though, they’ll start to push back. That’s good news: your team is coming together and starting to really engage. Now you can start really dissecting the goals of the team, and really figure out the best ways of doing things. Start letting the team members make more of the decisions, although you may have to ratify whatever they come up with for the decision to be accepted. Encourage questions and debate, but do your best to keep your own opinions to yourself: the process of learning to argue well isn’t easy and if the team members realize you have a preference, the tendency is for the team to coalesce around that preference. Alternately, the team may simply resist your choice just because it’s coming from you. Better to not go there.

A unity of crisis can be very useful for a one off event, such as saving the world from an alien invasion. But for more mundane, ongoing, projects, real unity is a far better outcome.

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 McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” and “Organizational Psychology for Managers.” He is also 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.

We Can’t Afford That!

“Where are the computers?”

“We can’t afford computers.”

“How can we write software without computers?”

“You’ll figure out a way.”

It’s hard to imagine a conversation like this happening in any company. The truth is, it’s hard to imagine because it basically doesn’t happen. No manager is crazy enough to tell his team to write software without computers. So let’s posit a slightly different scenario:

“Hey, the computers aren’t working.”

“I can’t get the lights to turn on.”

“It’s getting hot in here. What’s going on?”

“Oh, we decided to save money by not paying the electric bill.”

Sorry, that’s still pretty ludicrous. Let’s try another scenario.

I was recently at MIT giving a talk on organizational development. In response to a question about maximizing team performance, I explained that the secret is to have a manager whose job is to be a coach: just like on a top sports team, the manager’s job is to encourage the players, brainstorm with them, push them to achieve more than they thought possible, and make sure they don’t forget to stop and take breaks. It is, after all, the manager’s enthusiasm and sincerity that sets the example for the team, and transforms a team of experts into an expert team.

The immediate response from one member of the audience was, “We can’t afford to have someone just sitting around and watching.”

Now, if they’d left it at that, I would have let it go. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, since it led to this article, they didn’t. They went on to say that the manager needs to do the work of the employees: sales managers should be selling, engineering managers should be doing engineering, and so forth. Resisting the urge to point out that they clearly hadn’t heard a word I’d said to that point, I observed that a manager sits around and watches in the same way that a coach sits and watches. This needs further explanation.

As any Olympic coach can tell you, building a team and keeping it operating at peak performance is a full-time occupation. No one ever says, “These are professional athletes! They shouldn’t need a coach!” If the team wants to compete at a serious level, it needs a coach. If all you care about is playing in the D leagues, well, then perhaps you can get away without the coach. Of course, if that’s what you think of your business, why are you bothering?

When the manager is doing the work of a team member, you have a conflict. Salesmen try to outsell one another; sales success is their currency of respect. Engineers will argue over the best approach to solving a problem; being right is their currency of respect. When the manager is also doing the sales or the engineering or what have you, that shuts down the team. How can the members of the team compete with the manager? While it is a comforting thought to argue that professionals will compete with one another in a respectful manner, and a manager will respect the employee who out-competes him, it just doesn’t work. Comfort thoughts, like comfort foods, may feel good but can easily lead to fattening of the brain.

Athletes trust their coaches in large part because the coach’s job is to make the team successful: the coach is measured by how well he builds the individual athletes and the team. If the coach were being measured on how well he did as an individual competitor, few indeed are the athletes who would trust his advice.

Thus, when a company hires a “manager” who is nothing more than a glorified individual contributor who also signs time sheets, the results are often disappointing. At Soak Systems, it led to constant conflict and eventually to the loss of half the engineering team. If nothing else, the team will never achieve the level of performance that it could reach with a skilled manager.

Further guaranteeing that this problem will occur, most companies hire managers based on their technical, sales, marketing, and so on, skills. They do not hire, or promote, based on their coaching skills. They don’t provide them the training or coaching they need to succeed. Putting someone with no management training into a management role will, at best, produce someone who sits around and watches. More likely, it’ll produce someone who is actively harmful to the team. No wonder companies want “managers” who are also individual contributors: at least they are getting some work out of them and keeping them from causing trouble! Such “managers” really do look like an unnecessary expense. Since most people have never experienced really competent management, they also don’t realize just how much opportunity they are missing.

It’s quite true that you can’t afford to have an untrained manager sitting around and watching. There is also no point in buying computers if you won’t use them or paying for electricity if you don’t have anyone in the office. But if you want to write software you can’t afford to not buy computers. If you have people coming into the office, you can’t afford to not pay for the electricity. If you want to achieve top performance, you can’t afford to not train someone to sit around and watch.

“Author Stephen Balzac has written a terrific book that gets into the realpolitik of organizational psychology – the underlying patterns of behavior that create the all important company culture. He doesn’t stop at the surface level, explaining things we already know like ‘culture beats strategy’ – he gets into the deeper drivers and ties everything back to specific, actionable stories. For example he describes different approaches to apparent “insubordination” by a manager; rather then judging them, he shows how each management response is interpreted, and how it then drives response. Balzac preaches real engagement with one’s own company and a mindful state of operation, especially by executives – who must remember that culture “just happens” unless and until they learn to recognize that their behaviors play a huge part in creating and cementing it. It covers the full spectrum of corporate life, from challenging bad decisions to hiring, training, motivating teams – and the secrets of keeping people engaged and learning – and/or avoiding actions which do the opposite. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to participate in creating and steering company culture.”

Attivio – Active Intelligence

Princess Bride Problem Solving

Once upon there was an organization. It was a fairly good sized business, not too big and not too small. It was a business, in fact, much like your business. And it came up with a way to apply the battle of wits from the Princess Bride in dealing with some long-lasting and thorny problems.

None of these problems were new problems… they were problems that the organization had had for many years: difficulties in setting priorities and making decisions; allocating resources and providing clear direction to employees.

These problems were the topic of much discussion, but despite all that discussion nothing ever changed.

Eventually, someone suggested bringing in a consultant to help with the problems. This is where things got creative. It turns out that there are two types of consultants, at least for this particular business: those who were closely connected to the business and known to people there, and those who had no connection at all.

We now come to the Princess Bride.

Consultants in the second group could clearly not be hired because they knew nothing about the company. How could they possibly be of assistance? Therefore we must look at consultants in the first group.

Consultants in the first group were too close to the organization. Clearly they too could not be hired. Therefore, we must go back to consultants in the second group.

But consultants in the second group would clearly not care about the results. So they could not be hired. Back to the first group.

But consultants in the first group could not be hired because they might care too much. So they too could not be hired.

And so it went, on and on, until eventually nothing was done. People continued to complain about the problems, but no one wanted to act.

In the movie, of course, Vizzini finally chooses a goblet and drinks the deadly iocaine powder. In reality, it didn’t matter which goblet he chose as the Man in Black had developed an immunity to iocaine powder and poisoned both goblets.

Similarly, in this case it wouldn’t have mattered which choice the business actually made: bring in someone totally unconnected or someone close and known to the people there. The important thing was to make a choice and actually take action to deal with the long-term problems that were interfering with their productivity. Whichever choice they made would have different benefits and different drawbacks, but either could have helped them. It’s only the choice to do nothing that has no hope of success. Let’s face it, if the problems haven’t gone away on their own after months or years, odds are pretty darn good that they won’t be going away on their own tomorrow or even next year.

Choose a goblet. Take action. Nothing will change until you do.

Riveting! Yes, I called a leadership book riveting. I couldn’t wait to finish one chapter so I could begin reading the next. Organizational Psychology for Managers’ 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.

Nationally Syndicated Columnist and Author

Being Fred Flintstone

Remember the classic kid’s TV show, the Flintstones? Fred and Wilma Flintstone are a stone age couple who live in something that looks oddly like the 1950s with rocks. Lots and lots of rocks. Despite this, the show had nothing to do with either rock music or getting stoned. It did, however, have an episode which predicted that the Beatles were a passing fad. So much for prognostication! Fortunately, that episode is not the point of this article.

In one episode, Fred complains to Wilma that he can’t understand what she does all day. How hard can it be to take care of a house? Of course, as Fred swiftly learns, after he and Wilma make a bet, the answer is very hard. Fred, of course, makes a total mess of the whole thing. Now, obviously, the cartoon was playing off of social issues of the time and was intended to make people laugh. The obvious lesson, that a “non-working mother” is a contradiction in terms, is hopefully one that most people have figured out by now. The less obvious lesson is the much more interesting one: it is often impossible to gauge from the results, or from watching someone work, just how difficult a job actually is or even how hard they are working! Conversely, how people feel about the results has little bearing on how hard you worked to get them.

At one company, a manager told an employee that he wasn’t going to get a raise because he made the work “look too easy.” Of course, one might argue that most people who develop their skill in a field eventually become good enough that they manage to make the job look easy. It’s not until we try to imitate them that we realize just how hard it is to do what they are doing.

In another situation, the Principle Investigator in a biology lab had an employee who wasn’t producing results. He first told the employee that she wasn’t working hard enough and quickly moved to haranguing her to work harder. She quit and was replaced by another scientist. He also failed to get results and the process repeated until he quit. So it went through another two employees before the PI, quite by accident, discovered that there was an error in a protocol the scientists were required to follow. Each one had tried to discuss the possibility with him, but he consistently refused to listen, taking the attitude that any problems were purely a result of their lack of dedication. They simply weren’t working hard enough and if they just buckled down and took the job seriously, they would get results! This attitude cost the lab four excellent employees and set them back over a year on one of their projects.

On several occasions, when I’ve stood in front of audiences ranging from management students to senior executives, I’ve presented the following scenario: “Someone at your company isn’t completing their work on time. Why not?”

Invariably, the responses I get back are: “He’s not dedicated,” “he doesn’t work hard enough,” “he’s goofing off,” and so forth. Eventually, I point out that they really have no information from which to draw a conclusion. Occasionally, someone beats me to the punch, but it always takes several minutes before that happens. After the point is made, the number of dumbfounded looks is amazing.

Fundamentally, when we see something not working or something not getting done as fast as we’d like, we tend to blame the person doing the work. The tendency is to assume that they aren’t working hard or that they don’t care or some other fault in the person. We often assume that the difficulty of the task is proportional to how hard someone appears to be working, not what they are actually accomplishing. We tend to ignore the situation, often to the detriment of our companies. In that bio lab, if the PI had been willing to consider other possibilities than blaming the scientists, he could have saved a year of effort and not potentially damaged people’s careers.

By extension, there is also a tendency to assume that when the result looks small or insignificant, that the effort involved in producing it must have been lacking. Large and clunky is thus appreciated more than small and elegant, particularly in software. Unfortunately, this runs afoul of the Mark Twain principle: “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” Transforming something clunky into something well-built and efficient is not easy! Most corporate vision statements are wordy, vague, and meaningless. It actually takes a great deal of effort to create a short vision that works and that can inspire people for years.

Now, let’s look briefly at the converse: that how people feel about the results has nothing to do with how hard you worked to attain them. At one startup company, the VP of Marketing told me that she expected everyone to work long hours because “our customers will want to know that we worked hard to produce this product!” Actually, with apologies to Charlie Tuna, what your customers want is a product that will work hard for them. They really don’t care how hard you worked to make it. They only care that it meets their needs. If it does, they’ll buy it. If it doesn’t, you’re out of luck.

The fact is, it’s very easy to underestimate both how hard the work actually is, and how much work went into producing something. In both of these situations, the key is to figure out what feedback is really important. Results are a form of feedback. However, as long as you’re on track to accomplish those results, then it doesn’t much matter how hard or how easy it looks; as Fred Flintstone discovered, you probably can’t accurately gauge that anyway. When something doesn’t work, then you need to know the process so you can figure out why.

In other words, you need to clearly define your expected results and also clearly define meaningful and useful interim steps that should yield those results. The advantage of having those interim steps is that you can recognize fairly quickly when something is going wrong and you can figure out the real cause. A failure to achieve results is not necessarily the problem: it’s the symptom. Perhaps it’s because the person didn’t work hard enough. Perhaps it’s because the situation was untenable. Treat the symptom and not the problem and before too long you’ll be right back where you started from.