The Business Sensei

8 Questions About Your Hiring Process

What is the most important factor in successfully recruiting top candidates? If you said things like salary, benefits, or the economy, you’d be wrong. It’s your organizational culture. I have a longer article in the upcoming Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership about the role of organizational culture in the hiring process. To give you a taste of it here … let me first say that when you start to throw around terms like “organizational culture” you may think that it’s academic, or that it’s abstract. It’s not.

Read the rest at ERE.Net

Deja vu All Over Again

“This is like déjà vu all over again.”

–          Yogi Berra

In the classic British science fiction series Doctor Who, there is a scene in which the Doctor is trapped in a time loop: the same events keep taking place over and over with no end in sight. Naturally, this being fiction, the Doctor quickly recognizes what’s going on and figures out a way to break out of the loop. In real life, it’s not quite so easy. Granted, actual time loops tend to be pretty rare; not so the feeling of being stuck in one.

Read the rest in the CEO Refresher

Of steaks and lions

There’s an old saying about throwing steaks to lions in the hopes that they’ll become vegetarians. Apparently, if you do it long enough, the lion eventually grows old, loses his teeth, and gums the steak to death. But they’ll at least consider vegetables at that point.

The current political dance in the Senate is a rather interesting example of lions and steaks. We have a minority party that has found that the best way to succeed is to do everything possible to prevent the majority from accomplishing anything. The majority keeps throwing them steaks and hopes that they’ll become vegetarians. Why? Well, let’s look at this as if it were a corporate boardroom and see what lessons can be learned.

Now, to be fair, most businesses don’t have 100 vice-presidents. However, they have enough. I regularly hear tales of businesses (sorry, I can’t name names) with small coalitions competing with or refusing to cooperate with the majority. In each case, the minority players are working to make the majority look bad. Why? To gain the favor of the CEO, and hence to accrue more personal power to themselves. It seems more than a little silly, since it doesn’t do the company any good: even if the minority is right in their ideas, the cost of the infighting does more to hurt the company than any benefit that the minority’s policies would have brought. And when the minority’s policies are wrong, the damage is even greater.

Unfortunately, what has happened is that the minority coalition has lost track of the goals of the company: they are focused on their own goals, which usually involve succession to the CEO position, a larger scope of authority, bigger pay packages, and so forth. The reasons are as varied as the companies. Sometimes the minority coalition fails and is fired by the CEO or the Board. Sometimes they succeed, and the majority is fired.

What determines the result of the struggle is how the majority handles the competition. If they try to be nice and refuse to compete back, the minority is only encouraged. If they are so afraid of looking bad that they refuse to compete, they just end up looking bad.  It’s only when the  majority demonstrates that they are willing to play the same game, and compete as viciously as the minority that the game changes. Quite simply, in every group in which competition arises, the only way to end that competition is for the majority to demonstrate that the cost of competition is greater than the cost of cooperation and the rewards of cooperation are greater than the rewards for competition.

It doesn’t much matter if we’re talking about IBM or the US Senate. So long as we’re dealing with people, the dynamics are the same. Only the scenery changes.

Who’s in Charge Here?

This was just published in the CEO Refresher. Full text is provided here since the link expires after a month or so.

Tuning Your Team

It’s easy to put together a group of knowledgeable and skilled individuals, but a team of high performers is not the same as a high-performance team. Just think about the Olympic Basketball Dream Team of 1992, made up of top American players. While they certainly played great basketball, the team never performed at the level people expected, given the skills of the individual players. Transforming your group from a set of people who happen to be going in roughly the same direction into a high-performance team isn’t always easy, but the results are always worthwhile:

Read the rest in The Imaging Executive

Stalking the Elusive Leader

We like to think of ourselves as highly rational beings, but the fact is we’re just not that good at being rational.The recent Star Trek movie demonstrated the normally imperturbable Mr. Spock making foolish decisions based on emotional reactions. Later in the movie, Spock’s reasoned, logical approach is less than sufficient to rally the crew. Certainly they follow him, because he is the legitimate commander at that moment — but they are not excited. When Kirk takes command, however, it is another story. Kirk engages them on an emotional level, a level deeper and considerably more powerful than logic.

I hear all the time about how there is no room for emotions in the workplace.Yet, the companies where I’ve seen this implemented are about as unemotional as Mr. Spock: in other words, they put on a good front. Under pressure, though, they are as emotional as anyone else. I still remember, from early in my consulting career, the manager of a team screaming at me that he did not allow emotions to influence his behavior. For some odd reason, the irony of the moment was lost on him.

Read the rest in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership

Boiling the Frog

There is an old and hoary claim that if you put a frog in boiling water, it will immediately jump out, but if you put it in cold water and slowly increase the temperature, the frog will sit there until it cooks. In fact, this happens only if the frog is equipped with little frog cement galoshes rendering it unable to jump: frogs are too smart to be boiled alive. They leave long before the water gets hot enough to cook them. Why, then, does this story have such longevity?

Read the rest at the CEO Refresher.

Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!

I recently had the CEO of a certain business very proudly tell me that she was so busy looking for clients and helping her staff deal with the economic crisis that she didn’t even have time to sleep. Was she serious? Yes, she was. Were things actually working out for the business? That was less clear, however it didn’t matter. They were Taking Action, and that’s what really counted.

When we’re feeling stressed, the instinctive response is to take action. Taking action feels good; it provides an outlet for our energy and a feeling of accomplishment. It just may not actually be useful. Sometimes it really is better to follow the advice of the old joke, “don’t just do something, stand there!” After all, if you take the wrong action too frequently, you may well find yourself without the time, money, or energy to take the right actions.

Now, it’s certainly true that sometimes the toughest problem is just to get started. It’s sometimes the case that taking some action is better than taking no action at all. However, it does help if the actions being taken are those that have at least some chance of moving the business forward. It helps even more if the CEO can clearly evaluate the success or failure of each action and adjust course as necessary. That’s hard to do when you aren’t sleeping.

A lack of sleep leads to more than just a desire for an extra cup, or ten, of coffee. There is a reason why athletes want a good night’s sleep before a big game and why legendary investor Jesse Livermore stated that one his secrets of success on the stock market was being well rested. Lack of sleep interferes with motivation, judgment, and planning. It makes one more reactive, less able to stop and look before leaping. Worst of all, lack of sleep very quickly degrades a CEO’s ability to recognize a losing strategy and replace it with one that might work.

As anyone who has taken a first aid class recently will recall, the first thing you need to do in an emergency is evaluate the situation. That’s difficult to do when sleepy. Part of that evaluation involves determining how quickly you need to act. Even if there’s a wall of flame rushing toward you, a few seconds of thought can still make the difference between life and death: caught in a massive forest fire, firefighter Wagner Dodge stopped and thought. He survived the fire while those around him were engulfed. Wagner Dodge had only seconds to come up with an innovative solution to his problem. The good news: he did. The bad news: he had never developed strong bonds of trust and loyalty with his team. Under pressure, they ignored him and perished in the flames.

Today, many businesses are still facing the financial equivalent of that wall of flames. Instead of stopping and thinking, they are leaping into action. In many cases, those actions are not working out so well. The CEO who isn’t sleeping isn’t helping her company or herself. She is, however, giving herself the opportunity to undermine her own credibility with her staff. The longer that goes on, the more likely they’ll give up on her at just the wrong moment.

So what should a CEO do?

• Build up a reservoir of trust and reinforce it daily. Help employees understand your decisions. Invite employee feedback, ideas, and suggestions.
• Build and maintain loyalty: this is the worst time to cut employee benefits or have an opaque layoff policy. As demonstrated by IBM’s Tom Watson or HP’s Hewlett and Packard, building employee loyalty makes a tremendous difference in tough times. Without it, they won’t follow you when you most need them.
• Don’t just react to the crisis. Stop and think. Brainstorm solutions with others. Find someone who will give you unbiased feedback. Take full advantage of the eyes, ears, and brains around you.
• Take care of yourself. Exercise and sleep are critical to maintaining perspective and functioning effectively under pressure. Despite the failing equipment around them, even the Apollo 13 astronauts took the time to sleep before attempting their return to Earth.
• Anticipate success. Never pass uncertainty down to your team members.

Many companies will survive the current economic tsunami. Fewer will prosper as the economy turns around. It will be those who know when to stand there before they act who will be in the second group.

Click here for a printable version.

Ethics? Not pragmatic.

Yesterday, I wrote a post and also posted on Facebook a link to the NYT article about a six year old cub scout being suspended for 45 days because he brought a “weapon” to school: a combination spoon, fork, and knife. The presence of this obviously deadly weapon triggered the school’s Zero Tolerance policy. One of the responses to my post was rather interesting:

“Steve, this issue isn’t really about what’s ethically/morally correct when you’re in the school “trenches”.”

The poster explained that these policies exist to protect the school against lawsuits for discrimination, and added, “sometimes pragmatism gets the nod over the idealism we’d prefer.”

First of all, this is a textbook example of the process of moral disengagement: in other words, people justify unreasonable or unethical behavior by saying that it’s necessary to protect themselves or others. In this case, the argument is that, “We have to do this to protect ourselves from lawsuits.”

But I also have to wonder just how seriously a district takes ethical and moral behavior when the attitude is that ethics can be disposed of if they’re not convenient. In what other areas will they cut corners?

On a deeper level, what I see here is an organization that has forgotten what its mission is. Schools need to educate in a safe, supportive environment. Zero Tolerance doesn’t do that on several levels.

The American Psychological Association, the Department of Education, and the US Secret Service (!) have all found that ZT policies do not improve student safety. ZT is nothing more than a CYA for administrators who want to look like they’re doing something. While they are focusing on imaginary threats, they are not dealing with the real threats, the ones that the Secret Service (for example) found actually do turn into real violence. They are also creating an atmosphere of distrust and fear.

Indeed, the very idea that a well-behaved six year old can be sent to reform school for 45 days for an innocent, childish mistake is profoundly unsettling. How can one possibly feel safe in an environment when having a pocket knife dropped in your lap is grounds for expulsion? No, I’m not exaggerating. That’s happened too: ZT says that if it’s in your lap, it’s yours. How can parents trust a school district when they know that the school is perfectly willing to do serious psychological damage to their children in the name of Zero Tolerance? Let’s face it, sending a well-behaved child to reform school for a quarter of the school year is going to be psychologically and probably physically traumatic.

For a business to work well, it needs to build a sense of autonomy and competence amongst its employees. ZT destroys that. It turns administrators and teachers into robots and creates an atmosphere of fear. When you create an atmosphere of fear, people look for threats and they look for people to strike out against in order to reduce their fear. The schools are striking out against the students, and the parents naturally look for ways to strike back against the schools.

In a for-profit business, you’d see increasing amounts of fighting between teams and within teams. A for-profit business would be in serious danger of going under just from the deterioration of its products and services. Something to think about.

And, by the way, the last thing we need children learning is that ethics should be disposed of whenever they are “not pragmatic.”

Cosmic Stupid Rays from Outer Space

I believe it was Dilbert (or more likely Dogbert) who commented that “stupidity is like radiation. You don’t want to get it on your clothes.”

When writing games, we used to joke about the cosmic stupid ray problem: the tendency of inexperienced writers to create a story in which people acted in ways that simply could not be explained by any other means. Unfortunately, it seems that cosmic stupid rays are not a product of the imagination, as I can’t really find any other explanation for this article from the NY Times:

It’s a Spoon, It’s a Fork, It’s a… Weapon?

The article tells the story of a six year old who was suspended and sent to reform school for 45 days because he brought a Spork to school. A spork is one of those all-in-one utensils. The kid received it at that bastion of violence, the Cub Scouts. As we all know, Cub Scouts are trained to use sporks as deadly weapons in order to take down entire armies equipped with modern weaponry. However, a Cub Scout with a spork (or lightspork, as they are known to cognoscenti, due to the fact that they are almost always made from plastic) can bat bullets from the air with the tines, and catch missiles in the spoon bowl and fling them back. As for the knife edge, best not to think about that, but let me just say that if you happen to be made of soft butter, you’re in trouble.

I could go on, but I think I’ve made the point.

What is even more amazing in the article is the argument by school officials that they must have ZT because otherwise they might make unfair or discriminatory decisions. Instead, they will guarantee that they will make unfair and stupid decisions.

If you’re worried that your employees will not make good decisions, the answer is not to take away all decision making power, and hence all requirement to actually *think*, but to train people in sensible decision making.

In typical bad management fashion that is fully worthy of Dilbert, the response from the president of school board was this: “There is no parent who wants to get a phone call where they hear that their child no longer has two good seeing eyes because there was a scuffle and someone pulled out a knife,” said George Evans, the president of the Christina district’s school board.

This is known as a straw man argument and is being used only to scare people. Rather than attempt to lead, the incompetent manager seeks to coerce obedience through fear: “You can’t question us because something terrible will happen.”

They are right: something terrible might happen if ZT goes away. School officials might have to learn to think, to do their jobs competently instead of copping out, and the ones who can’t might just get the boot.