The Business Sensei

The Efficient Light Bulb

As published in The Imaging Executive

Once upon a time, there was a light bulb. This light bulb was quite a remarkable light bulb: it was praised far and wide for its incredible efficiency. This light bulb gave off no waste heat. This light bulb did not contribute to global warming. It had no carbon footprint.  It did not rely on fossil fuels. Truly, it was an amazing light bulb and visitors came every day to see this remarkable light bulb.

One day, though, a traveler coming to see the light bulb in action was delayed by an unfortunate flood that closed several roads. He did not arrive until well after night had fallen. Much to his surprise, he found the light bulb sitting in a pitch dark room.

“Why aren’t you giving light?” asked the traveler.

“Give light!” replied the light bulb in shocked tones. “You must be joking. If I did that, I would use fossil fuels. I would have a carbon footprint. I would give off waste heat. I would no longer be efficient.”

“But isn’t the purpose of a light bulb to give light?” asked the traveler.

“I’ve always been told to be efficient,” replied the light bulb with a shrug. If you have never seen a light bulb shrug, it is truly a wonder to behold. The traveler would have been amazed, except, of course, that the room was too dark for him to see the miraculous event.

Once upon a time, there was a software company named “Soak, Inc.” Soak’s product relied upon a very complex database server. One day, the VP of Engineering stormed into the office and declared, “The server is too slow. We need to speed it up.”

From that day forth, every effort was focused on improving the speed of the server. Other issues were deemed insignificant beside the one, critical, goal of performance. Engineers who dared to raise other issues were publically humiliated for wasting the company’s time. Bugs that did not relate to performance issues were deemed “optional.” People who spent time reviewing the optional bugs and trying to fix them were warned that their insubordination would cost them their jobs if it did not cease immediately.

Eventually, Soak developed an amazingly efficient server. It was fast. It was robust. It was ready to demonstrate to potential clients.

The demo started out remarkably well. The server did not crash, causing some to believe that this couldn’t actually be a demonstration of a software product. Indeed, the server performed flawlessly. All would have gone well indeed for Soak had not someone noticed that the data being delivered by the server didn’t make sense. Yes, what the server had gained in performance it had lost in accuracy. In other words, it was incredibly good at very rapidly delivering useless or incorrect information.

When the engineers were questioned about this unfortunate oversight, they shrugged and replied, “We were told to be efficient.”

While it is not nearly as amazing to see an engineer shrug as it is to see a light bulb shrug, the effects are much the same.

Once upon a time, there was a large company called “Red.” Red Inc. had a team of salesmen who were, it seems, not producing the necessary volume of sales.  While this may have gone a long way toward explaining the name of the company, it was not exactly a viable long-term strategy.

One day, the VP of Sales decided that the problem was clearly that the salesmen were not calling enough potential clients. They were wasting their time. They needed to be more efficient with their calls.

Much effort was spent focusing on the calling habits of the salesmen. They were given scripts. They were forced to practice making calls with various managers listening in and rating them on their performance on these practice calls. Those salesmen who demonstrated too great, or at least too obvious, a reluctance to make calls were dismissed. Those who questioned whether this was the right way to approach the problem either learned quickly to shut up or were also dismissed.

The sales team became very efficient at making calls. Sales did not increase. The remaining salesmen shrugged.

It turns out that even the best salesmen are reluctant to make calls. The problem was not with making the calls. The problem was with projecting the necessary confidence and optimism to attract and hold the interest of the client. Clients, it seems, are not all that likely to buy from salesmen who do not appear enthusiastic and confident in what they are selling. It also helps to know how to close the deal.

In each of these situations, a goal was set, a metric for success was defined, and that metric became the sole determinant of progress. Goals are extremely powerful tools: the best thing about them is that you accomplish them. Unfortunately, sometimes the worst thing about goals is that you accomplish them. In each of these examples, they accomplished their goals. A dead light bulb is extremely efficient, but not useful. Similar observations can be made about the server and the sales team.

Before leaping into setting a goal, especially a goal to solve a problem, it helps to understand the actual problem and to understand what the actual symptoms are. At Red, they assumed that an unwillingness or inability to make calls was the cause of the low sales and set their goals accordingly. We’ll never know how many top salesmen they dismissed because they didn’t realize that even the best salesmen suffer from call reluctance. Rather than create useful goals, they fixated on a symptom. That did not, however, actually change anything.

At both Soak and Red, the respective VPs stated that they were trying to solve the problems their companies were facing as rapidly and effectively as possible. They were setting goals. They were Taking Action! Taking action is certainly helpful, but it is even more helpful to be taking the correct action. Since it’s not always possible to determine just what the correct action is, it becomes even more critical to listen to the feedback and questions from the people who are charged with actually executing the action. The engineers and the salesmen knew that something was wrong, but no one was willing to listen to them. Remember, a key aspect of successful goal setting is understanding the feedback you’re getting.

I realize that many of you reading this are probably chuckling to yourselves and thinking that this scenario could never happen at your companies. The folks at Soak and Red said the same before, during, and even after it happened to them. The light bulb had no comment.

Setting a goal, for example, to be more efficient , seems like it makes sense and certainly feels good. However, it pays to determine if that goal is actually going to get you what you want. Otherwise, you may just end up with a dead light bulb.

Common Hiring Mistakes

When I spoke at ERE Expo, Todd Raphael, editor of the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership, interviewed me on why companies make hiring mistakes. The interview is now up on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUFbWww7Pic.

Balance the Individual and the Team for Top Performance

As published in Corp! Magazine

In Monty Python’s classic comedy, “The Life of Brian,” there is a scene fairly early in the movie when the people of Jerusalem have decided that Brian is the Messiah and are standing waiting on the street outside his window. Brian’s mother screams out at the crowd, “You are all individuals.”

The crowd replies: “We are all individuals.”

A pause, and then a lone voice yells, “I’m not.”

This is typical Monty Python absurdist humor, but it makes a very serious point. What is standing outside Brian’s window is not a group of individuals, it’s a mob. A mob is a group in which individuality is lost in the urge to conform to the group. As the movie progresses, we see the mob do various ludicrous things as they follow their unwilling prophet. Brian’s followers are, of course, convinced that they are acting according to his instructions and executing his desires, no matter how much Brian screams to the contrary. This being a Python film, the sequence of events is absolutely hilarious.

In a business, not so much. Unfortunately, the tendency for a group to lose individuality in the service of a charismatic leader or a particularly enticing corporate vision is not restricted to comedy. At one large software company, the dynamic became quite extreme: employees were expected to arrive at a certain time, eat lunch at a certain time, visit a certain set of restaurants, leave at a certain time, and so forth. No deviation was tolerated. The mantra was, “We’re a team. We do everything alike!”

Sound fanciful? I wish it were.

The problem is that a team that loses its individuality is not a team, it’s a mob or a rabble. It can be a very disciplined mob or rabble, sort of like the Storm Troopers in “Star Wars,” but it’s still a mob. Like the Storm Troopers, it’s very good at dealing with routine situations, but isn’t very good at dealing with the unexpected: new tactics from the rebels or, if you prefer, new competitors or existing competitors adopting new strategies. The other problem is that when a group focuses on homogeneity, it loses its ability for the strengths of some to compensate for the weaknesses of others: the Storm Troopers, for example, cannot successfully shoot the broad side of a barn.

At a different high-tech company, the only engineers hired matched a very precise and very limited profile. Not only did you have to solve a certain set of puzzles, you had to solve them in just the right way. Alternate solutions were not tolerated. This created a team that was very good at creating intricate, convoluted algorithms, and a user interface that was equally intricate and convoluted.

None of these situations are as extreme as that portrayed in “The Life of Brian,” but then again, they aren’t as funny either.

Later in the movie, we see the opposite end of the spectrum: the members of the People’s Front of Judea are so busy drawing insignificant distinctions between each of their positions that they are not functioning as a team. Rather, they are a horde. Each person is operating according to their own individual needs and goals, with no actual concern about the goals or strategy of the group. In a horde, everyone is a hero, entitled to his or her share of the plunder and devil take the hindmost. Cooperation is almost accidental, and the group is likely to break apart at the slightest disagreement:  the People’s Front of Judea can’t even quite figure out why the Judean People’s Front broke off, but is quite happy to yell, “Splitters!”

At a certain manufacturing company, each department was totally focused on doing its own job. None of the departments considered how their actions or decisions affected the others. Within each department, much the same thing was happening at an individual level. Rather than figuring out how to work together, they spent their time blaming one another for the inevitable failures. Fixing this issue saved the company in question several hundred thousand dollars a year.

The challenge, of course, is to find the middle ground, where the individual and the team are in balance. While it’s extremely difficult to find the exact middle, anywhere in the general vicinity works pretty well. Peak performance occurs when people are committed to the goals of the company and the team, and are also free to pursue their personal goals and work the way they want to work. Is it easy? No: less than one team in five ever gets there. However, it sure beats a horde or a mob of people chanting, “We are all individuals.”

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, contact steve@7stepsahead.com.

Make a New Plan, Stan

As published in Corp! Magazine

Jesse Livermore, the legendary stock trader of the early twentieth century, was famed for his ability to keep his cool no matter what the market was doing. He neither became discouraged when he lost money or exhilarated when he made money, and he made a lot of money. His greatest triumph was making $100 million (no, that’s not an error) on Oct. 29, 1929, the day of the market crash that preceded the Great Depression. He was one of only two people to make money that day. As people were panicking around him, he calmly covered his short positions into the chaos. What was his secret?

It was simple: Jesse Livermore had a plan. Over the course of his trading career, he developed a plan for when to buy and when to sell. When the plan didn’t work, he stepped back, analyzed the failure, and adjusted his plan. Jesse Livermore’s plan failed many times, especially during his early days as a trader. He went broke more than once and, in 1915, was a million dollars in debt. But Jesse Livermore never failed.

Now this may look like sophistry: he created the plan and the plan led him into bankruptcy. Isn’t that a failure? Sure: it was a failure of the plan. By creating an external construct, a plan, Livermore was able to prevent his emotions from dominating his trading. More broadly, he was able to place the failure outside himself. It’s much easier to change one’s plan than it is to change oneself. On the flip side, when things went well, he could enjoy the fruits of victory without allowing the excitement to color his perceptions and cost him his profits. Each day, he knew that he had followed his plan.

This lesson can be easily applied to the business world, especially today. The news is a steady drumbeat of economic disaster after economic disaster, bankruptcies, shrinking sales, and so forth. It’s extremely difficult to not become discouraged; I regularly hear from business owners that they are no longer listening to the news. It’s simply too depressing. Unfortunately, restricting information only reduces a business’s ability to act when the opportunity presents itself; you won’t even know that the opportunity is there! Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, was reputed to read the papers every day all through the Great Depression. He had a plan, and part of his plan involved staying aware of what was happening around him. He was waiting and watching for his moment of opportunity. That moment came, and the rest, as they say, is history.

So how do you go about making a plan?

• Start by defining a broad vision of what your business wants to accomplish. What will the world look like if you’re successful?
• Identify the steps needed to bring that vision into reality.
• For each step, identify how you will recognize whether or not it is working. It pays to decide upon your metrics before the pressure is on, and to identify the signs of trouble as early as possible. Jesse Livermore never bought a stock without deciding in advance the conditions under which he’d sell it, whether for a profit or a loss. As a result, his losses were small and his profits large.
• Break those steps down into activities that can be done on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
• Define appropriate checkpoints where you can evaluate progress and determine whether or not your plan is working. Remember to allow sufficient time to collect enough data to make a good decision. Evaluating before you have enough information is an excellent way to abandon a successful plan before it has time to pay off.
• Execute your plan, day in and day out. You measure your own success or failure by whether or not you stuck to the plan.
• Constantly review and revise your plan as you learn more. Failures of the plan are simply an opportunity to evaluate and adjust.

When we fail, it can be difficult indeed to get up and try again. But when the plan fails, it’s relatively simple to modify it and keep going.

What’s your plan?

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, visit www.7stepsahead.com or contact steve@7stepsahead.com.

The Peter Principle of the Thing

As published in Corp! Magazine

A good many years ago, I was working at a small software company. For various personal reasons, the VP of Engineering abruptly left the company and one of the senior engineers was promptly promoted to take this place. Now, this guy was an excellent engineer and I learned a great deal from him. He was a fun person to work with and someone who was always enthusiastic. He was picked for the job exactly because of those qualities and because of his engineering prowess. However, as a manager of engineering, he never appeared to have the same joy and excitement about his job. Indeed, he often gave the impression that he’d rather be writing code than managing other people who were writing the code. After the company folded, as far as I know, he went back to engineering.

At another company, Jim was a star researcher. He was brilliant. He was the person who came up with idea after idea. He did so well that eventually he was put in charge of the lab. At that point, things went downhill. Working through other people drove Jim up the wall. He wanted to be in the lab, not arguing about the best way to do things. He couldn’t go back, though, without being viewed as a failure. At the same time, he couldn’t get promoted until he “shaped up” and “made his lab more productive.” He was trapped doing a job he didn’t particularly enjoy and wasn’t particularly good at.

Both of these stories are examples of a hypothesis first proposed in the 1960s by psychologist Lawrence J. Peter. Today, the “Peter Principle” is spoken about with a certain amusement and a smug “yeah right” attitude. Unfortunately, “yeah right” is the only construction in the English language in which a double positive makes a negative. In other words, the Peter Principle is popularly seen as a joke. In fact, it’s not. Moreover, it turns out that when you have an environment in which someone can be promoted into a job that is significantly different from what they’ve been doing, the Peter Principle is virtually inevitable. The key point lies in recognizing what constitutes “significantly different.”

Well, as it happens, managing engineers is significantly different from being an excellent engineer. Managing researchers is significantly different from being a top researcher. Managing salesmen is significantly different from being a top salesman. However, being a top engineer, researcher, salesman, or whatever is exactly what brings that person to the attention of senior management. If this isn’t disturbing enough, in the study confirming this phenomenon, authors Pluchino, Rapisarda, and Garofalo also found that the best way to avoid it was to either promote people randomly or promote the best and the worst performers equally.

As Monty Python might say, “This is getting silly!” After all, how can it possibly be true that random promotion would work better than promoting the best performers into management?

Consider how much time, effort, and training is required to become a top engineer, researcher, salesman, doctor, or just about anything else. Nothing in the training these people receive prepares them to manage others. In fact, good management is, in many ways, the antithesis of being a successful solo performer: instead of doing the work yourself, you are now doing it through others. Motivating others is a different experience than motivating yourself. Helping others stay focused and on track is different from keeping yourself focused and on track.

So, without resorting to promoting people randomly, what could be done to prevent the Peter Principle from taking over in your company?

Well, if it were possible for someone to both be a manager and not be a manager at the same time, you would be able to see if they could do the job, and allow them to continue along the track they’re on if they don’t shape up. Unfortunately, literally attempting this is pretty hard on the person and the business; someone who tries to be both a manager and an individual contributor at the same time usually ends up doing one, or usually both, badly.

An alternative, though, is to take a page from sports and provide practice space for people. Just as a sports team might rotate players through different roles before figuring out what each one is best at, companies can use predictive scenario leadership games and exercises not just to train existing leaders, but to find leaders. Quite simply, when people don’t know what to do, they do what they are most comfortable doing. In predictive scenarios, people have the opportunity to demonstrate talents that might not be obvious or which may never come up in their regular jobs. For example, the best managers create order in chaotic or ambiguous situations and know how to build employees’ confidence. When you enable an entire department to participate in a predictive scenario, you can see who is actually doing those things. Rather than promote randomly, you can pick the people who most strongly demonstrate the desired skill set for the position you are looking to fill!

Is this easy? Not necessarily. It takes some serious effort to avoid the Peter Principle. I suspect that many of you reading this are thinking that you simply can’t afford do anything about it. The real question is, can you afford not to?

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead (www.7stepsahead.com), 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.” Contact him at steve@7stepsahead.com.

The Engines Cannae Take Much More…

As published in the CEO Refresher

Imagine for a moment Mr. Scott giving his famous, “Captain, the engines cannae take much more of this,” line and Kirk responding, “No problem, Scotty. You take a break and I’ll fix the engines.” Even for Star Trek this would be ludicrous. Kirk may be pretty smart, but he’s not the master engineer that Scotty is. It makes no sense for him to try to do Scotty’s job; that’s what he has Scotty for. Oddly enough, Star Trek is one of the few places where this scenario never happens.

Where does this scenario play out? In far too many businesses. I am always fascinated when a manager tells me that he would never ask his employees to do something that he couldn’t do. What is the point of having a team? A team that limits itself to the abilities of the leader is not really a team. It’s a group of henchmen who may be good at carrying out instructions, but who are not capable of achieving high levels of creativity or performance. It would be like Kirk refusing to order Scotty to fix the engines because Kirk can’t do it himself.

In an effective team, the abilities of the team are greater than the sum of the individuals. It is the capacity of the team to work as a unit, to be able to put the right person or subset of people in the right place to deal with problems that makes the team strong. Fictional though they are, the crew of the Enterprise is an effective team exactly because they know how to put the right people in the right place at the right time. While it certainly helps to have a cooperative script writer, the fact is that the level of teamwork that they demonstrate is not fictional at all. It is something that all teams can achieve, for all that barely one in five actually do.

To bring this into the real world, or at least as real as the software industry gets, I worked once with a software company that had the idea that every engineer should become expert in every other person’s code. Unfortunately, this was a fairly large project and the different pieces required different areas of highly specialized knowledge. Each of the engineers had spent many years building up that expertise and could not simply transfer it to every other engineer. While having partners working together makes a great deal of sense, trying to have everyone doing everything is self-defeating. It sacrifices the benefits that come from applying specialized knowledge to specific problems.

However, this was not nearly as dysfunctional as the suggestion by one senior manager at a high tech company that part of having everyone in the company better understand one another’s jobs, each person should spend time doing each of the other jobs. When it was pointed out that engineers are not always the most socially adept people, and that perhaps having the engineering team trying to market to customers wasn’t the best choice, his response was, “Then they need to learn.” When it was pointed out that marketing and sales professionals, talented as they are, generally are not trained engineers, he had the same response. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed: while those engineers who wanted to become more involved in customer facing activities were given the opportunity to do so, the engineers did not end up trying to sell the product and the sales force did not end up attempting to build it.

Now, the fact is, this manager did have a point. Helping people to become more knowledgeable about one another’s jobs is important. If you understand just a little about what other people are doing, you have a much better sense of what is a reasonable request and what is not, what you can do that will help them accomplish their jobs, and what you can do to help them to help you do your job.

So how do you develop that level of mutual helping? Different people bring different skills to the project. The more people can get to know one another, to appreciate the perspectives, experiences, and ideas that each one brings, the more they will start to come together as a team. The leader needs to set the example that asking for help is not a sign of weakness and accepting help is not a sign that you can’t do your job. It is exactly because you have multiple perspectives and approaches, multiple skill sets and ideas, that the team becomes strong.

The leader can do this by, well, leading. Not by ordering or threatening or attempting to coerce people, but by demonstrating the behavior that he wants other people to engage in. The leader must be the first one to acknowledge that the reason there is a team in the first place is because the leader can’t do it all himself. If he could, why is anyone else there? Whether it’s Captain Kirk trying to run the Enterprise single-handedly or one man trying to play all nine positions on a baseball team, a leader who can’t accept help is not a leader.

What are you doing to help your team members help you?

Death of a Thousand Knives

As published in Corp! Magazine

Very few companies are ever driven out of business by their competitors.

I’ve found that this statement upsets a great many people, all of whom are quick to jump up and start providing examples of companies that were, in fact, driven out of business by their competitors. This is missing the point. Indeed, it’s rather like a detective in a murder mystery concluding that the cause of death was that the victim’s heart stopped. It matters whether the heart stopped due to lead poisoning, for example in the form of a bullet, or due to some other cause. Indeed, understanding exactly what led to that heart stopping moment is a key part of solving the mystery.

Similarly, while it’s not so unusual for a failing company to have the coup de grace administered by a competitor, how they got to that point makes all the difference. Focusing only on the end point provides a very simple, comfortable solution, but not necessarily a particularly useful one.

Robotic Chromosomes, for example, was a company that dominated a particular niche in the bioinformatics market. They were an early entrant into the field and their products were initially the best on the market.

Over the course of several years, though, they developed a view of their clients as idiots. The fact that their clients were all highly educated research scientists did not enter into the equation. If they had trouble using the software, they were idiots. As a result, the company became increasingly less open to feedback from either clients or the market. While their market share was increasing faster than the market itself, they could get away with that attitude. Eventually, though, their growth started lagging the growth in the market. Phrases like “law of large numbers” and “temporary aberration” were batted about. When their market share started shrinking, phrases like, “temporary aberration” became even more popular. The view of the clients as insanely stupid for buying competing products became more common.

Today, they no longer exist. Were they driven out of business by their competitors? Only in the sense that they put themselves in a position to allow their competitors to drive them out of their dominant position in the market. Sure, their competitors may have pushed them over the cliff, but they were the ones who chose to walk to the edge and lean over.

Now, it may reasonably appear from the preceding description that Robotic Chromosomes was taken down by a clearly defined event, that is, viewing clients as idiots. That is not, however, quite correct. While it may appear that way in retrospect, the reality is that Robotic Chromosomes suffered from a series of cascading errors. Each mistake was small, easily overlooked or ignored. Each mistake led to more mistakes until eventually the company was suffering from so many small cuts that it eventually had no strength left to resist when its competitors moved in. So how does a company avoid this death of a thousand knives?

The obvious answer is that they needed better communications. While true, it again misses the point. Communications is where problems show up, but the communications are rarely the problem. Rather, the dysfunctional communications are the symptom of the problem. It’s critical to look beyond the symptoms to identify the real problem. Otherwise, you spend all your time looking at the wrong things, as Robotic Chromosomes so eloquently demonstrated.

Avoiding that fate requires a willingness to accept negative feedback; it means being willing to hear what people are saying about your product, your service or your management style. If you aren’t willing to listen, or if you structure the way in which you listen to negate the feedback, you’re setting yourself up for failure, one step at a time. For example, creating a culture that mocks and demeans your clients is not a recipe for success, and closes you off from valuable feedback from those clients.

Being willing to accept feedback is only a first step though. You have to create a context in which employees are not afraid to give you that feedback, and in which they believe that providing feedback is worthwhile. If people believe they’ll be punished for being critical or regarded as “not a team player,” it’ll be hard to get them to provide feedback.

Next, you need to clearly define your goals and also define how you’ll know whether you’re succeeding or failing. Robotic Chromosomes had very fluid definitions of success, definitions that shifted regularly to avoid facing unpleasant results. It’s important to separate the evaluation of the feedback you’re getting from the testing to see if the criteria for that evaluation are valid. In fact, verifying the validity of your criteria should be done before you then evaluate your feedback: otherwise, it’s too easy to redefine success and give yourself a few more cuts. None of them seem all that bad at the time.

Step by step, over the course of several years, Robotic Chromosomes successfully created an environment where any negative feedback could be ignored because that feedback was always coming from idiots. Their competitors didn’t drive them out of business. They drove themselves out of business; their competitors simply put them out of their misery. How will you avoid the death of a thousand knives?

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead (www.7stepsahead.com), an organizational development firm focused on helping leaders grow their businesses. 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.” Contact him at steve@7stepsahead.com.

The Accidental Leader

As published in Corp! Magazine

Does this sound painfully familiar?

The team leader left the company or was transferred elsewhere. No one knows anything about the new person coming in. Everything is up in the air. It’s almost impossible to get any work done because everyone is too busy wondering what’s going to happen next. Is the team going to be kept together? Will the project be cancelled?

Or how about this situation:

You were just assigned to take over a strong team. The former leader, well-respected by the team, is leaving. When you get there, there is a marked lack of enthusiasm. Everyone smiles and nods, but the suspicion is palpable. No sooner do the first words leave your mouth when you have a sinking feeling that whatever it was you said, it was exactly the wrong thing.

Although it may seem that the difference is which side of story you happen to be on, in reality, the situations aren’t really any different at all. In both cases a once functional team is tossed into a state of chaotic uncertainty. From feeling comfortable and secure, suddenly everyone is wondering if there’s another shoe about to drop.

Oddly enough, when the new leader comes in, the situation often gets worse. Rather than allaying people’s fears, too often those fears are increased. It’s not that the new leader is trying to scare people; it’s just that whatever she says, it just doesn’t seem to come out quite right.

At one company, the new executive director was welcomed with great fanfare. Thus, she was totally unprepared when her modest proposals to improve how the company delivered products ignited a firestorm of protest and resistance. This was a very painful situation, although I was able to help them work things out in the end. Still, though, perhaps we might want to look at a more upbeat scenario.

At another company, the new president decided to try something different. When he took over, he didn’t tell people how things would be; rather, he asked them how things should be. Rather than set deadlines, he asked employees what deadline the previous, successful president would have set for their projects. Rather than set new rules, or even focus on existing rules, he asked people what sort of structure would most help them. Rather than try to Impose His Mark on the organization, he took the time to understand what mark was already there. Rather than fight the natural resistance people have to change, he invited the rest of the company into the change process. The transition ended up going remarkably well. What was even more interesting was that along the way he took a fair bit of heat from his board that he was not “acting like a leader.”

He ended up being one of the best leaders the company ever had. Despite initial beliefs to the contrary, it was no accident. By now, you might even recognize the company.

Most leaders respond to a chaotic situation by trying to impose order. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea, at least in theory. Chaotic situations are unpleasant and without some sort of structure, nothing is going to get done. Despite this, when order is imposed too rapidly, suddenly everyone is fighting for chaos.

The secret to taking over a new team, indeed, to dealing with any team or company in a chaotic situation, is to move slowly. Speed comes from being in the right place at the right time, not from rushing to get things done. When you take the time to find the most serious pain points, the places where people are most scared or most upset, and you resolve those situations, you build the trust you need to succeed.

How do you find those points? Ask the team. Involve them in the process. Don’t impose order; rather, create order.

Are people concerned about deadlines and how changes in product schedules might impact them? Invite them to help set the deadlines. Is product quality an issue? At one training company, the fear was that the changes would compromise the quality of the training being offered, which would, in turn, drive away clients. The solution was to stop fighting about it and instead identify the metrics currently being used to determine quality: both the official ones and the ones that staff members used privately. Once those metrics were brought to everyone’s attention, then the new CEO could help the staff members see how the new training would actually surpass the old training. Sounds simple, but the experience was anything but!

You impose order when you walk into the situation and tell everyone what to do. You create order when you find points of maximum leverage and invite people to suggest the order they want you to provide. The second may be slower, but, paradoxically, it gets you to where you want to go a lot sooner. How will you create order in your organization?

Storming the Black Gate

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

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

Read the rest in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership

Smell Test

As published in Corp! Magazine

The door opens onto a room filled with equipment: banks of computers, spectrometers, air and tissue samplers and things that you cannot even recognize. The hum of electronics fills the room and there is a definite odor of fish. As you look around, you can see dozens of fish waiting to be analyzed for oil contamination. The purpose of all this machinery is to determine if seafood is safe to eat after the Gulf oil spill.

Sounds like something out of a science-fiction movie. That’s because it is something out of a movie: reality is not nearly so visually impressive. It turns out that the most sophisticated instrument for determining the safety of seafood is the trained human nose. With remarkably little training, the human nose can do something that all the expensive and elaborate electronic equipment cannot do: figure out whether a fish is contaminated or not.

About 20 years ago, a Japanese business decided to conduct a thorough chemical analysis of fine wine. They used sophisticated equipment and complex computer analysis to determine the chemical composition of the perfect bottle of wine. They then produced a wine that perfectly matched their profile.

In the ensuing blind test, tasters had no trouble recognizing the Japanese wine: it was universally described as “having the taste of dishwater and a bouquet of dirt.”

Once again the human nose proved superior to all the fancy equipment that was brought to bear on the question.

When speaking to a group of managers, I asked them to describe their company’s goals. The response was a rather confusing medley of Gantt Charts, Microsoft Project, comments on the latest decision support software and so forth. What was their approach to management? Once again, the same cacophonous medley ensued.

Fish, wine and management have a couple of things in common.

First and foremost, all those fancy tools and gadgets are tools, nothing more. There is nothing inherently special about them, any more than there is anything inherently special about a hammer. In the hands of a master craftsman, a hammer can be a very useful and versatile tool; in the hands of someone without that skill, a hammer is little more than a device for making sure that every problem looks like a nail.

By the same token, the value of management support software, or whatever other power tools are being used, is only as great as the skill of the manager using it. Tools leverage skill; if there is no skill, there is no leverage. There is also a strong possibility of cutting yourself off at the knees: power tools can be dangerous. In other words, all the management support tools in the world won’t help someone who doesn’t know how to manage. More to the point, just as a trained human nose is the best tool for detecting contaminated fish, the best leaders and managers are those who have actually learned how to lead and manage.

From a very practical perspective, the best leaders are those who can connect with their followers. It’s not about Gantt charts or other fancy tools. It’s about building trust and enabling people to feel that they can count on you.

Wait, isn’t that backwards? Doesn’t the leader need to be able to count on his followers? Sure. And the way you get there is by demonstrating that they can count on you, that they can trust you.

In a sadly familiar tale, at Soak Systems, no trust exists between different departments, between marketing and engineering, between engineering and the CEO. Why is there a lack of trust? The CEO constantly visits clients and makes promises that engineering can’t possibly fulfill. Even worse, he regularly changes direction and priorities: one day project X is vital to the future of the company, even when it fails to ship on time or when it ships and doesn’t work. The next day, it’s project Y. Each prediction of impending doom is followed by another prediction of impending doom if the project doesn’t work.

At this point, no one believes the CEO. No matter how important or unimportant his pronouncements, they are all greeted with the same level of skepticism. All his charts and graphs are failing to convince anyone. Is it possible for the CEO to reverse the trend and actually build credibility? Sure! The easiest way is for his prediction of doom to come true just once. Granted, that’s not particularly useful, but it is the easiest approach.

A more difficult approach is to put aside all the shiny tools and actually pay attention to the people. If he is willing to learn how to build trust and establish connection with his followers, then there’s a good chance he can turn things around. But he has to be willing to learn instead of being distracted by all the pretty toys.

I said earlier that there are two things that wine, fish and management have in common. We’ve discussed one. The other is pretty simple.

They all stink when they’re bad.