The Business Sensei

Outrunning the Ballmer

There’s an old story about two people walking through the woods. One of them, Pete Ahtear, is a track star. The other, that famous dessert maker Eaton Flanagan, may be an expert in the kitchen, but is not otherwise known for his speedy movement. As the two men are walking, they hear behind them the unmistakable sounds of a very hungry bear.

“That doesn’t sound good,” says Flanagan.

“That sounds like a hungry bear!” replies Ahtear. “Don’t you have a pot of honey or something you could toss at it to distract it?”

“Sorry, fresh out of honey.”

At that point, Pete Ahtear sits down, pulls his track shoes out of his backpack, and quickly puts them on.

“Even you can’t outrun a bear!” exclaims Flanagan.

“I don’t need to outrun the bear,” replies Ahtear with, it must be admitted, a somewhat smug tone to his voice. “I only need to outrun you.”

Indeed, were we to look at these two men, the truth of Ahtear’s statement could hardly be more obvious: one, a slender athlete in prime physical condition; the other, well, let us just say that Eaton Flanagan is a man whose skill at making desserts is exceeded only by his enjoyment of eating those desserts. Losing weight, given the time available, is not an option. Although quite possibly as large as that pursuing bear, regrettably Flanagan is sadly lacking in the sharp teeth and long claws department. On the scale of bears, Flanagan may be more closely likened to “Teddy” than “Grizzly.”

Speaking of bears, it’s getting closer.

Thinking quickly, Flanagan knocks Pete Ahtear to the ground, kicks him, and then uses the window of opportunity thereby created to tie Pete’s shoelaces together. Flanagan then lumbers off. He may not be able to outrun a bear, but he can now outrun Pete Ahtear. What follows is best left to the imagination.

As a further exercise of the imagination, consider how this philosophy might play out in a large corporation. What would outrunning the bear look like? What would such a competitive atmosphere do to employee cooperation and collaboration? How about problem solving and innovation?

Unfortunately, according to a number of articles about Microsoft, we don’t need to use our imaginations. Microsoft is one of a number of businesses that practice the fine art of “employee stacking.” In other words, employees are rated on a performance scale. The top performers are highly rewarded, while the bottom performers are… not. Sounds good, right? After all, won’t this push people to constantly push themselves to excel, and won’t it weed out the weakest performers?

Sadly, that’s not what’s happening at Microsoft. Excelling and taking on a risky project or trying something new are often mutually exclusive. Furthermore, what constitutes “excelling” can vary with comparison to others. In fact, as more than one Microsoft employee observed, they quickly learned to look like they were cooperating with their teammates, while actually withholding critical information or otherwise sabotaging their progress. In other words, when the performance review bear is approaching, all I really need to do is outrun you. That can happen in a great many ways: as Eaton Flanagan so ably demonstrated, not all of them involve actually being a better runner.

The side-effects of the Microsoft Way are far-reaching and not always immediately obvious. It goes well beyond employees sabotaging one another in order to make themselves look good. Hiring is effected: will you really hire someone more skilled than you are if that might push you down the rankings? Or will you prefer to hire people less skilled so that someone else will take the fall? What will that do to the overall level of employee skill? What about problem solving? When the goal is to make sure someone else trips and falls, are we going to fix the problem or merely fix blame? How about team work? Are you really going to ask to be on a team with other high performers?  It’s much safer to be surrounded by bear food than it is to work with someone who might be able to run faster than you. How badly will that reduce collaboration, creativity, innovation, and product quality?

Now, one might make the argument that Microsoft’s approach can’t be that bad. After all, they became the world’s largest software company and still dominate the PC market. Indeed, outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer was quoted in one article swearing by employee stacking. He thinks it’s wonderful.

It is possible that during the 1980s and 1990s, when Microsoft was surfing the great PC technology wave, that Microsoft’s review process really did produce high performance. Possible, but unlikely. Far more likely is that having a hot product in a rapidly growing market protects you from a lot of errors. When Microsoft’s stock was doubling practically every year, it was easy for them to constantly hire the best people. Most of those people were motivated to achieve not primarily because of the employee stacking system but because they were excited by their work, the company’s vision, and, yes, the stock options. So what if some of them become bear food? There are always more where they came from! Even if your teams are performing at only a fraction of what they are capable of, being in the right place with the right product can be enough for a long time.

Microsoft today is in an interesting position. As I’ve written about in several articles and books, they lost their way in 2000. While some people have argued that employee stacking is the reason for Microsoft’s malaise, it’s really only one factor. Granted, it is a very serious factor: at a time when Microsoft most needs to regain the innovative vision and energy of its early days, that pursuing bear means that few people indeed are going to be taking any chances.

But wait! Shouldn’t the creative vision come from the top? If that were to happen, wouldn’t that solve the problem? While vision may come from the top, leaders are more creative when they are surrounded by creative people. People staring at the ground, looking for an opportunity to trip up their colleagues, are not looking ahead and imagining the future. That’s an awful lot of psychological inertia for a leader to overcome.

In the end, when employees are forced to compete with one another, your productivity gains are brief and inevitably cost you far more than they are worth. It’s always easier to outrun your buddy than the bear, particularly when tripping your buddy is all it really takes.

At least the bear eats well.

 

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

Celebrate Progress

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

One of the most important things you can do as a team is periodically celebrating progress. It is always more motivating to look at how far you’ve come rather than how far you have yet to go. Indeed, it’s more motivating to say, “we’re half done,” than to say, “There’s still half left to do.” The two statements may be mathematically equivalent, and IBM’s Watson, the Jeopardy playing computer, would probably find them identical. If you happen to be employing Watson, then it may not matter what you say. However, if you happen to be employing people, it matters.

In jujitsu practice, the students who always focus on how far off the black belt is tend to not finish the journey. Those who focus on how far they’ve come are the ones who keep coming back.
You don’t need to highlight individuals every time you do this; in fact, you shouldn’t. The goal is not to make anyone feel bad for not getting as much done as someone else; rather, it’s simply about sharing success. Feeling that the team is making progress helps boost everyone’s morale, increases team cohesion, and helps build trust.

Depending on your organizational culture, you can occasionally highlight individual accomplishments in much the way that some sports teams will highlight most valuable players. It’s important, though, to pay close attention to how people work and what they expect. At Atari, a new CEO tried to transform the highly collaborative, team-based culture into a more individual, competitive culture. He focused heavily on “engineer of the week,” and other such awards. However, engineers at Atari viewed game development as a collaborative process, where everyone worked together to produce a quality product. The focus on individual performance shattered the team structure, turning high performance teams back into struggling level one groups. Atari never recovered.

When you celebrate team successes, you build relationships, strengthen competence, and provide the trust necessary for greater levels of autonomy. Success builds on success just as failure feeds on failure. What you focus on is what you get.

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

For the Deadline Was a Boojum, You See

“There was one who was famed for the number of things
He forgot when he entered the ship:
His umbrella, his watch, all his jewels and rings,
And the clothes he had bought for the trip.”

— Lewis Carroll, Hunting of the Snark

 

Lewis Carroll billed the Hunting of the Snark as an “agony in eight fits.” While it’s not entirely clear what Carroll meant by this, the sentiment well describes the process of scheduling and hitting deadlines in many organizations. Certainly it’s clear that the Bellman didn’t have a schedule, or he wouldn’t have left his crew’s belongings on the beach.

Some years ago, I worked for a software company where the CEO decided that missing a deadline was a personal failing on his part. No matter what, the software would ship on the day he had announced. Even if the product had bugs, even if it did not work, it shipped on the day the CEO had promised. “Not a single day of delay,” said he.

He preferred to ship a product that did not work and then release a bug-fix rather than delay the software even a day. He never understood why customers grew increasingly irate and would call the company to complain. He was keeping his promise to ship by a certain date, and certainly adherence to the schedule was important.

There are several problems with this belief. The most obvious, of course, is the stubborn belief that the software must go out on a specific date no matter what. Shipping any product that doesn’t work is going to upset your clients. Doing it repeatedly just makes the company look incompetent or indifferent to its customers. It is not meeting their needs to give them something that they cannot use.

Stepping back, though, from that minor problem, we have to ask what the point of the schedule was. There seemed to be little rhyme or reason to why the CEO picked the dates that he did. When pushed, his reaction was that scheduling was important, otherwise things didn’t get done. True, but not necessarily relevant. Fundamentally, a schedule is a tool; like all tools, it must be used properly or there is risk of serious injury. In this case, financial injury.

A schedule is not an arbitrary set of dates put down on paper to make sure that everyone works hard and doesn’t goof off. The goal of a schedule is also not to precisely calculate how long each task will take and account for every minute. It is not a holy writ to be held to beyond the bounds of common sense or product quality, nor is it put in place in order to have something to ignore. Sadly, I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen schedules designed with exactly those somewhat dubious objectives in mind. However, a well-designed schedule needs to satisfy some fairly significant constraints:

1. A schedule helps make sure you don’t forget anything. It is both a to-do list and calendar. It helps people know what to work on when so that they don’t have to waste time constantly figuring that out.
2. A schedule is a tool for marshalling resources. Building a product requires different resources, be those resources time, people, or equipment. The schedule helps make sure that the right resources are available at the right times so that the project can move steadily forward.
3. A schedule is a tool for managing dependencies. In any large project, different pieces will depend on other pieces or on obtaining external resources. Some dependencies are obvious from the beginning, others do not emerge until the project is under way. The schedule helps organize tasks and manage dependencies so that they don’t derail the project.
4. The schedule helps you determine what you can do in the time available with the resources you have; alternately, it helps you understand how long it will take to accomplish your goals with the resources you have available.
5. The schedule enables you to define reasonable checkpoints, or milestones, that will let you know if you are moving successfully toward your planned target date or if problems are emerging. Missing a milestone is feedback that something is not working as expected!
6. A schedule needs to have enough slush in it to handle unexpected problems. You can’t always determine all possible dependencies at the start; some parts of the project may turn out to be significantly more difficult than expected; you may discover that a piece that appeared to make perfect sense just won’t work and needs to be redone. When I speak about this to technology companies, someone always claims that they’ve done a few simple calculations and developed the perfect project schedule. Based on the reactions from the rest of that person’s department, I have my doubts.
7. The schedule also needs enough slush to handle external delays. If your schedule is so tight that a severe winter storm closing the roads or having someone come down with the flu or having a vendor be late on a delivery will cause real problems, then you need to rethink the schedule. As that great sage Murphy so wisely said, “If something can go wrong, it will go wrong.” Plan for it.

You’ll also notice that if you design a schedule this way, you’ll tend to be running ahead of schedule, not behind. Falling behind schedule is demoralizing, particularly when the schedule feels arbitrary. Running ahead of schedule energizes the team to work harder. A team that falls behind tends to stay behind, while a team that runs ahead tends to get further ahead. In other words, nothing succeeds like success.

When you view a schedule in this way, it has the potential to be a powerful, flexible tool for getting things done as opposed to causing quality, effort, and enthusiasm to softly and silently vanish away. Isn’t that the whole point?

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.”

Sid Probstein

Chief Technology Officer

Attivio – Active Intelligence

Monsters University Goal Setting

Organizational Psychology for Managers is phenomenal.  Just as his talks at conferences are captivating to his audience, Steve’s book will captivate his readers.  In my opinion, this book should be required reading in MBA programs, military leadership courses, and needs to be on the bookshelf of every Fortune 1000 VP of Human Resources.  Steve Balzac is the 21^st century’s Tom Peters. 

Stephen R Guendert, PhD

CMG Director of Publications

 

 

The other day I took my kids to see Monsters University. For those unfamiliar with the movie, it’s the prequel to Pixar’s extremely funny Monster’s Inc, of a decade or so ago, and tells the story of how the main characters of that movie met.

That would be James P. Sullivan and Michael Wazowski, just in case you haven’t been paying attention.

Early in Monsters University, Michael Wazowski arrives on the titular college campus with a list of goals: register for classes, unpack, ace all his classes, graduate, get a job as a scarer. Mike Wazowski is nothing if not ambitious.

And he does accomplish the first two goals on his list.

After that, well, it got tricky.

Creating goals is more than just writing down what you hope will happen: that’s the easy part. The hard part is breaking those goals into manageable chunks. While big goals might inspire us, left only as big goals they don’t give us good directions. It’s on a par with driving from San Francisco to Boston by “going east.”

It helps to be a bit more precise if you want to end up in the right city. If you don’t know at the start how to be that precise, then you have to create goals to find out before you overshoot your destination. That can leave you embarrassed, not to mention all wet.

At their best, goals force us to anticipate potential problems and plan to avoid them; goals enable us to identify our strengths and figure out how best to use them to our advantage. Done well, goals turn into strategy, and when they fail that’s warning us that something isn’t going according to plan. While no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, the very fact that our battle plan is failing is telling us that we have made contact.

I run into businesses all the time whose goals are like Mike Wazowski’s: they start easy and then jump to the big, bold, and vague. There are two major differences, however, between them and Mike: their failures to set clear goals don’t make a good movie and it doesn’t always work out well in the end. In other words, it pays to understand how to really set goals.

 

Preorder Organizational Psychology for Managers.

Make It Easy

In jujitsu, there are two ways to throw someone: you can make it hard for them to stand up or you can make it easy for them to fall down.

When you make it hard for someone to stand, something very interesting happens. The harder you make it, the more they fight back. Unless your opponent happens to be asleep or under the influence of mysterious hypnotic powers, the very act of attempting to force them off their feet triggers and instinctive and intense resistance. This happens even when training with a cooperative partner who is perfectly willing to be thrown! It is the moral equivalent of standing on someone’s foot while trying to pick them up.

Conversely, when you make it easy for someone to fall down, they naturally follow the path of least resistance. It’s not that they make a conscious effort to fall, rather it’s that if you gently let them have your way, they suddenly discover that they are enjoying an up close and personal relationship with the ground. For the practitioner, this is a much more pleasant and much less effortful experience than trying to make it hard for the other person to stand up. Oddly enough, the fall is also more devastating.

Jujitsu, in short, is about minimum effort, maximum results. In a very real sense, the best practitioners are also the most lazy. They get what they want and they work exactly as hard as they need to get it, no harder.

Now, I’ve rarely seen a manager literally stand on an employee’s foot and try to throw her, but I do frequently see the equivalent behavior over and over.

In one particularly egregious case, a manager at one large and rather well-known technology company told an employee that he wouldn’t get a raise because he made the work look too easy. In a judo match, your throw is not annulled because you made it look effortless. In fact, those judo players who can make throws appear effortless are the best regarded in the sport. Does it really make sense to dismiss the value of an employee’s results in such a cavalier fashion? Is the manager encouraging future productivity or simply future activity?

At Soak Systems, engineers actually wanted to spend time fixing bugs in the software. Management, however, developed an arcane and excessively complex method of prioritizing bugs and scheduling people’s time. By the time the process was complete, the engineers had no say in which bugs were fixed or when they should be worked on. Functionally, that meant that when engineers uncovered serious bugs in the software, they weren’t allowed to fix those bugs: instead, they had to sneak in over the weekend to do the work. After a while, many of the engineers became increasingly discouraged or burned out, and eventually started shrugging and letting management have its way. At least, that way they stayed out of trouble. Management successfully made it so hard to fix the bugs that the bugs didn’t get fixed.

Does it really make sense for the managers to, metaphorically, be standing on employees’ feet so dramatically? After all, management did want to ship a working product! The more management tried to control engineering and force them to fix the bugs in a specific way, the less work actually got done.

In a very real sense, the goal is not to impose your will on people but to make it easy for them to do their jobs, to get them to focus their time and energies to produce the maximum possible return. When you figure out what your actual goals are and then create a path of least resistance to accomplishing them, people will naturally and instinctively move along that path. So how do you do that?

Your first obstacle is the hardest one to overcome. As every martial artist learns, the toughest opponent is the one they see in the mirror. If you find yourself getting angry or falling into a “I’ll show them!” mindset, it’s time to step back and take a break. Give yourself some perspective. Getting an opponent angry is an old martial arts trick and one that never stops working, especially on beginners. Don’t make beginner mistakes.

The next step is to find out if you’re standing on their foot. Ask questions. Understand what problems or obstacles your employees may see. Involve them in brainstorming and discussion. Help them help you to build a picture of the desired outcome and invite their suggestions on how to get there. The more you get them involved, the more you educate yourself. Pay attention to how your actions or the company’s rules are being perceived. Are they pinning people in place or are they making it easy for employees to accomplish the goals of the company?

You may not always like what you hear. Jujitsu students are frequently quite frustrated when their training partner says, “Hey, you’re standing on my foot!” When someone tells you something you don’t want to hear, they’re demonstrating their respect for and trust in you. Appreciate that and build upon it. If you respond harshly or with anger, you only cut yourself off from information; you don’t change anything.

Pay attention to what behaviors you are encouraging and which ones you are discouraging. When you stand on someone’s foot, you are encouraging pointless activity and exhausting, wasteful conflict: what do you suppose that employee at that high tech firm I mentioned earlier did on future projects? When you make it easy for people to do their jobs, you are encouraging constructive argument, innovation, and productivity.

So go ahead and make it easy. What’s stopping you?

The Missing I

As published in MeasureIT

 

“There is no me. I had it surgically removed.”

— Peter Sellers

At one high tech company that I worked with, I watched an interesting scenario unfold: after completing a major milestone, the engineers were high-fiving and taking some time to brag about their accomplishments. Enthusiasm and excitement were running high when a member of senior management decided to interrupt the gathering with the reminder that, “There is no ‘I’ in team.”

This utterance had an effect not dissimilar to that of a skunk wandering into a fancy dinner party. On the scale of wet blankets, this was one that had been left out in the rain for a week. Within a few seconds, all that enthusiasm was gone, vanished into the ether. Properly harnessed, that enthusiasm could have catapulted the team into its next milestone. Instead, the team approached its next milestone with a shocking lack of energy, especially given the successes they’d had to that point.

The problem is that while there may not be an “I” in team, a team is made up of individuals. There are three “I”’s in individual. What does a team do? Well, in most situations we hope the team will win. There’s an “I” right there in the middle of win. Oddly enough, you can’t win if you take out the “I.”

While it’s critical for a team to be able to work together and for members of the team not to be competing with one another, that’s only a piece of the puzzle. It’s equally important that each member of the team feel that they are an integral part of the team’s success. Without that personal connection, it’s extremely difficult to get people excited about the work.

Unfortunately, I see companies far too often treating team members as interchangeable parts, not as unique individuals. Not only does this undermine the team, it is also a tremendous waste of resources: a major advantage of having a team is that you have access to multiple eyes, ears, hands, and brains. Each person brings unique skills, knowledge, and perspective to the problems the team is facing. When a company fails to take advantage of those people, then they are spending a great deal of money for very little return.

In the Mann Gulch disaster, Wagner Dodge failed to appreciate the perspectives and opinions his team brought to the table. He relied solely on his own eyes, ears, and brains. Had he bothered to obtain information from the rest of his team, it is highly likely that most of them would not have perished under Dodge’s command. When the team has no “I,” the team cannot see.

On the flip side, some companies go too far in the other direction. One company, that shall remain nameless, spends so much time on “I” that there’s no time left for “we.” There have no team; there’s only a group of people who happen to be wandering in something vaguely approximating the same direction. Meetings are characterized by constant jockeying for position and arguments over turf. Different groups in the company see themselves as competing with one another for the favor of the CEO and for the eventual rewards. Oddly enough, the level of excitement and commitment in this situation is about the same as the one in which there is no “I.” When you have too much “I,” no one can agree on what they are seeing. In other words, too much “I” or a missing “I” produce much the same degree of blindness. That’s not good for the individuals, the team, or the company.

So how do you make sure you have the right “I?”

Start by creating something worth seeing. Paint a vivid picture of the company’s future, and show each person how they, as individuals, matter. Remind employees of the skills, knowledge, perspectives, and abilities that led to them being part of the team.

Show each person how they fit into the overall picture, and how their colleagues fit in as well. Make sure each person has a clue about what the others are doing. Ignorance breeds contempt.

Strengthen individual autonomy: find opportunities to allow people to decide how they’ll get their jobs done. Don’t regulate anything that isn’t absolutely necessary to getting the product out the door.

Always praise successes. Highlight significant contributions, remind people of their strengths.

Encourage and provide opportunities for team members to continuously develop their strengths. Improving individual skills dramatically improves team performance.

For a team to win, it needs to see where it’s going. That requires the team to have “I”’s and something to look at. How can you provide both to your team?

What Are You Avoiding?

The amazing thing about train wrecks is that they are obvious in hindsight. However, while they are happening, everyone involved is gripped by some horrid fascination that, if not forcibly interrupted, leads to the inevitable conclusion.

By the end of this particular train wreck, a member of the senior management team had resigned and the CEO had lost the trust of many of his formerly extremely loyal employees.

The newly hired VP of Sales was given responsibility for supervising a particular product manager, someone who had been with the company for years. They did not hit it off and the relationship went downhill from there.

The PM was charged by the CEO with getting a particular release of the software out the door. The VP of Sales wanted the project manager to be working on something else. The CEO kept promising to straighten things out with the VP of Sales, but never quite got around to it.

The VP of Sales became ever more frustrated with the constant “insubordination” of the PM; the PM, meanwhile, was increasingly frustrated with getting one set of instructions from the VP and one from the CEO.

The VP of Sales eventually went to the CEO and told him that he was planning to fire an employee. The CEO shrugged and didn’t think much about it. “It’s your department,” was his only response.

The VP told the project manager to leave, that she was suspended without pay pending completion of the paperwork to fire her.

At this point, the CEO noticed that the PM wasn’t in the office, found out what was going on, and “unfired” her. While she was happy to be unfired, she was also furious that he’d let it get to that point. The VP of Sales, meanwhile, was just a tad miffed. He felt he’d received carte blanche and ended up feeling much like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football as Lucy jerks it away.

The CEO’s attitude was that, “these things just happen.” He was, of course, wrong.

Teams are not a group of people operating in their own silos, independent of one another. Rather, they are an interacting system and sometimes parts of that system don’t work quite the way they should. When something goes wrong, it’s important understand the system and how different players contributed to the problem.

The Project Manager was nobly perhaps, but foolishly, focused on the assignment she’d received from the CEO. Her attempts to explain to the VP of Sales just why she wasn’t focusing on his objectives were either insufficient or simply missing. She may have assumed that the CEO would explain things to him, but didn’t force the issue when it became obvious that he hadn’t.

The VP of Sales walked into the company and made a number of assumptions about how work was done and how authority was implemented. Rather than take the time to find out how people worked in the company, how rigid or flexible the lines of control were, and what other projects might be going on, he assumed that an employee put into his department could be assigned to his projects. He didn’t listen to the PM and he never made the effort to go to the CEO and found out what was going on. He assumed the CEO was paying attention to issues in his department that were, quite simply, not where the CEO’s mind was. Even when he went to the CEO to explain that he wanted to fire someone, he didn’t bother to explain the situation.

The CEO, for his part, also contributed in a major way to the final, unsatisfying outcome. He knew he was giving an employee instructions that might contradict what her manager was telling her. He also knew the project manager was extremely frustrated with her new manager. He didn’t act on that knowledge. He was busy, and explaining things to the VP of Sales was not a high priority for him. Even once the situation had reached its climax and the project manager had been fired, the CEO didn’t really address the problem. He simply pulled the rug out from under the VP of Sales and did not consider how that might make the VP look to his other subordinates.

At every stage of the game, the CEO, the PM, and the VP of Sales each had opportunities to address issues that each of them wanted to avoid: the CEO didn’t really want to deal with the disappointment of the PM at having her project cancelled, nor did he want to upset his new VP of Sales. The PM did not want her project cancelled and really wasn’t all that interested in the project the VP of Sales wanted her to take on. The VP of Sales had his own views about power and authority and didn’t really want to find out that the company did things differently than he believed they should be done. He was angry, blamed the PM, and wanted to punish her.

Right up to the end, stopping to address the unpleasant issues and recognizing how each person was contributing to the impending train wreck could have changed the results. Instead, each person operated in a vacuum, and managed to achieve one of the worst of all possible results.

What difficult situations or awkward conversations are people in your office avoiding?

The Doom of Yahoo?

If creativity were simply a matter of having a bunch of people in an office, well, IBM of the 1980s and 1990s would have been the most creative business on the planet. The company employed close to 300,000 people worldwide, all working out of offices. As we all know, IBM went on to invent Windows, the Internet, online search, social networking, and the mobile phone. Oh wait, maybe not.

Creativity is an odd beast. According to the New York Times, Marissa Mayer at Yahoo decided that the reason she had to end Yahoo’s telecommuting policy was to make the company more creative. Another article in the Times claimed that the reason was because Yahoos weren’t actually working at home: the article mentioned Yahoo employees founding startups while on Yahoo’s payroll. At least the explanations for Mayer’s actions are creative, so maybe her policy is already bearing fruit!

Unfortunately, the idea that forcing everyone into the office will somehow enable managers to “keep an eye” on employees is both pointless and counterproductive. Again, if that were all it took, we’d be seeing a lot more amazingly productive employees at all those companies that don’t allow telecommuting. Yet, the reality is the other way around, provided the organizational culture and metrics for measuring performance actually encourage the appropriate behaviors. Frequently they don’t, which certainly appears to be the case at Yahoo. Bringing people into the office isn’t going to change that. Fixing a culture trapped in a cycle of defeat is much harder than a few slogans and forcing people to all mix at the water-cooler; however, forcing everyone into the office certainly feels like Taking Action. It is an Exercise of Power. It feels good, even though the actual results are likely to be both less positive than its supporters believe, and less negative than the naysayers are predicting. In short, a few people will probably leave and the rest will get used to working in the office again. At that point, all the old problems will still be there and will still be killing Yahoo. If Yahoo wants to fix that, perhaps they should learn how to set actual effective goals, with a well-defined strategy that they can then evaluate. I’m sure that’s what they think they’ve already done; I’m also quite sure that if they had actually done it right, they wouldn’t be having the problems they claim they are trying to fix.

Let’s face it, if you have effective goal setting and measurable strategy, then an employee who founds his own startup while on the payroll should be picked up simply because he won’t be meeting his objectives. Moreover, employees with goals they believe in and who are working for an organization they value do not, as rule, start their own companies on the side. Forcing people to sit where they can be watched over may force some people to behave, but it won’t make them enthusiastic or creative. If Yahoo is looking for compliant employees, they’re on the right track. If they really want creativity, maybe not so much.

As far as creativity, again that’s a tricky problem. In the 1990s, Yahoo was so far outside the box that they created a new box. Since early 2000, however, Yahoo’s been stuck in that very same box of their own creation while other companies, notably Google, thought outside of it. As I discuss in my talk, “Organizational Culture and Innovation: A Two-Edged Sword,” creativity is largely a function of environment and culture. Individuals do matter, of course, but even the most creative people will be stifled if the culture doesn’t truly support innovation. Even in organizations that claim that their culture supports innovation, what they really mean is that they support innovating in what they already do, not coming up with something radically different: the desire to protect existing products is very powerful, although it won’t stop your competitors from eating your lunch. Thus, after a certain point organizations become better and better at making what they already do more and more effective, but become equally resistant to doing something that’s really new. In other words, you can improve your better mousetrap all you want until someone shows up with a cat. You have to know how to change your culture and build up the four elements that support creativity if you really want to see serious innovation.

Google built a creative culture from the ground up. That culture involves people working closely together. Yahoo does not have that culture. Just bringing people back into the office isn’t going to change that. Yahoo is far more likely to end up not with creativity but with compliance.

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.