The Business Sensei

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

High Performance in a Day?

I was recently asked if it’s possible to get a team from just beginning to work together to high performance in a single afternoon.

There is a way to do it. The technique is very similar to how you train for a marathon in a single day.

The trick is in what you do to prepare for that one day.

If, for example, you’ve spent about six months running 3-4 times a week and doing other physical conditioning, then you’ll be ready for your one day. If, on the other hand, you haven’t been running or doing other physical exercise, that one day of marathon training might not work so well and you might not feel like moving for several days afterward.

Team building in a single day is much the same. It’s all a question of how you’ve prepared.

Most training exercises tell you where your team is at and show you how to move forward. Without the proper Read the rest of this entry »

Passports Please

“May I see your passport?”

I’ve heard this request many times. However, as a US citizen, this was the first time I heard it while traveling within the United States. Sometimes customer service just is not what you expect!

The day before Halloween I was on my way to South Carolina with two friends. We were all heading to the same convention and coincidentally happened to be on the same United Airlines flights from Boston to Dulles to Columbia. We arrive in Dulles with just enough time to not quite make our next flight. Okay, that sort of thing happens. It’s a few hours until the next flight, so we got to spend the day at what is probably the Dulles airiport on Earth. At around 9:30pm, our 9:50 flight gets delayed to 10:15. At 10:15, it’s delayed to 11:15pm and then to 12:15am. I ask the gate agent what’s going on, and he says it’s a mechanical problem and the part just arrived from another airport. A half hour later, he tells me they are bringing in another plane. Then there’s an announcement that the flight is delayed due to mechanical issues, but they expect to have it resolved soon. At 12:15am, United cancels the flight and sends us all to customer service to for rebooking. It was clear that we weren’t getting to our destination that night; at least we did get to see the Sox win the World Series.

The three of us get to the head of the customer service line. There are four people there, all of whom are working with us. One of them takes our boarding passes and that’s when he asked for passports. We assume he meant ID, and hand over our driver’s licenses.

“No, I need your passports.”

Now, I realize that Washington DC is arguably in its own reality, but last I checked we still don’t need passports to travel in and out of a Washington airport.

“I don’t carry my passport,” I reply.

“I need your passport to rebook you,” says the, and I realize this may sound oxymoronic, Customer Service representative.

“We’re American citizens traveling within the United States,” says one of my friends. “We don’t have passports with us.”

This triggers a conversation amongst the four representatives. The three of us, meanwhile, were pretty tired; it was around 12:45am by this point. I credit our exhaustion for our failing to realize how honored we were: we were standing face to face with Larry, Moe, Curly, and Shemp. This was the unexpected bit of customer service: a live performance by the legendary Three Stooges. Yes, I know, I just listed four names; I believe this marked the only time that Curley and Shemp ever appeared together. Eventually, Moe, who appeared to be in charge, decided that we didn’t need passports and managed to convince Shemp of this without poking him in the eye. We were rebooked on a flight leaving the next day. We then ask about hotel rooms.

“We only do that for mechanical problems,” says one of the Stooges. I think it was Curly this time.

“You announced it was a mechanical problem,” we point out.

They argue for a while.

“A bird hit the plane,” says Moe.

“Which plane? The original plane or the second plane?”

“A bird hit the plane,” says Moe.

Eventually, they agree to give us discount hotel vouchers. We then ask for our luggage. This triggers more debate before Larry informs us that it will take at least an hour to get our bags since, “no one is on duty.” Fine.

We head on over to baggage claim and start waiting. One of my friends makes a comment about checking with the baggage office. I manage to find it, and right outside the door what do I see? Our suitcases. Apparently, they’ve been sitting there all afternoon. There is also someone on duty. I explain to the woman in the office what is going on. This is the first she’s heard that the flight was cancelled. She releases our bags to us, and then double-checks the status of our flight. She informs us that the computer shows a mechanical problem, and provides us with hotel and meal vouchers. We manage to get to sleep around 2am, and at least get a few hours of rest before coming back to the airport at 11am for our next attempt. This one United agent really went out of her way to help us and made an absolutely miserable experience at least tolerable.

Here’s the problem: good customer service should not require finding the one person in the airport who is willing to do her job. The very fact that happened really says a great deal about how leadership at United Airlines views their customers. Good customer service is about recognizing that when you fail to deliver it’s not just an entry on the balance sheet; at best, it’s an inconvenience for some number of people. At worst, it can be a major problem. The least you can do is take steps to apologize and, in some way, mitigate the damage. Sure, at 12:30am maybe you can’t just book people on another flight that night. But looking for excuses to save the company a few dollars at the expense of your customers is simply foolish. I guess that United assumes that since there are limited choices in the airline business, they get to do what they want. That doesn’t build loyalty and it means that when people do have a choice, they won’t choose you.

Amazon.com, for example, has raised customer service almost to an art form. Whenever I’ve had a problem with a product I’ve ordered through them, it’s been fixed immediately. It’s not just about the choices people have, but the stories they tell about your organization and other how people react to those stories and make choices. Sooner or later, the choices your potential and actual customers make will come back to your bottom line. In the end, it’s the leadership at the top that sets the tone for what the customers will perceive. What are you doing to make sure that you’re leading in the right direction?

What Is The Momentum of Time?

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

As we discussed when we looked at the High Performance Cycle and goal setting, goals have momentum. In a more precise sense, success has momentum. When we are succeeding, we feel better about ourselves, our work, and the organization we are a part of. How we manage time plays a major role in our perceptions of success.

As we saw earlier in this chapter, when we feel rushed, our perceptions narrow. We don’t see things that are right in front of us. We will even miss things that matter deeply to us: when they felt rushed, our divinity students speaking on the Good Samaritan completely missed their opportunities to live up to the content of their talks. In business settings, people in a hurry will spend days, weeks, or sometimes months not noticing the solution that is staring them in the face.

Whenever we are running behind our schedules, we end up feeling rushed. Being behind schedule might trigger people to work hard, but they do so at the expense of working smart. When we are behind schedule, every minor problem becomes a major disaster. It’s just one more thing that is preventing us from hitting our deadlines and getting the job done! As a result, we tend to respond with quick fixes and overly simple solutions just to get the problem to go away. At one software company, when the product team was clearly not going to make the deadline, the director of engineering grudgingly allowed them another two weeks. They still weren’t ready, so he did it again. This proceeded for about three months! Half of each two week chunk was spent undoing the quick fixes they’d implemented in their frantic race to finish during the prior two weeks, and the other half was spent instituting a new set of quick fixes! The constant feeling of pressure meant that no one had time to think or consider any solution that took more than a few days to implement. In three months of being behind schedule, they probably made about one month worth of actual progress! Had they just extended the schedule by six weeks or two months right from the start, they would have finished a lot sooner.

Conversely, when a team is running ahead of schedule, people are much more energized and creative. The feeling that there is time available means that people feel they have more space to consider alternatives and look for lasting solutions to problems. Unexpected problems become challenges rather than disasters. When a team is ahead of schedule and team members work long hours because they are excited, they are choosing to put in that extra time. When the team is behind schedule, team members are often pushed to work long hours to try to catch up. The choice is no longer really theirs.

Fundamentally, being behind schedule means feeling that we don’t have control of the situation and our time. Being ahead of schedule means feeling that we do have control of the situation and our time. The more control we think we have, the more motivated and focused we are. Individuals and teams that feel in control work harder and produce higher quality results than those that feel that they don’t have control. Thus, a team that is ahead tends to pull further ahead and teams that are behind will often tend to fall further behind until the inevitable triaging of incomplete work allows them to declare themselves done.

Going back to the High Performance Cycle, when we complete goals with a burst of effort and blast across the finish line after being triumphantly ahead of the game, we feel a much greater sense of satisfaction and internal reward. The external rewards also tend to be greater in that situation. When we stagger across the finish line after completing the equivalent of the Bataan Death March, we just feel exhausted and relieved. Internal rewards are lower and satisfaction is lower. It’s the first case that really builds high performance.

Build schedules that you can beat with hard work. If you consistently finish with lots of time left, then your goals are not aggressive enough. If you are always falling behind, then you are too aggressive. Pay attention to the feedback that you are getting as you set deadlines and see if you are making them. It takes a certain amount of effort and practice to make your schedules appropriately challenging but not impossible, particularly because we tend to routinely underestimate the difficulty and time requirements of most tasks: just think about Boston’s Big Dig or that latest home remodeling task you still haven’t finished. Remember that you want to start with easy goals so you can experience early successes and quickly move out ahead of the schedule: that will set the tone for the entire project. Starting with success gets momentum on your side.