The Business Sensei

How do I create the rest of the story?

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

In creating the rest of the story, we need to recognize some basic facts: people operate in their own perceived best interest and people preferentially choose higher status over lower status. The problem is that we don’t always know what they perceive their best interest to be, and we don’t necessarily know how someone measures status. However, we do that there are certain things people seek in a job, be that volunteer work or their careers. To paraphrase psychologist Peter Ossorio, when people value a concept or an ideal, they will value and be attracted to specific instances of that ideal. The goal, therefore, is to understand what you offer along the dimensions of things people value. Understanding what you offer along each of these dimensions is critical to being able to construct an organizational narrative that will attract the right people to the organization, provide the framework in which motivation can occur, and maximize your chances of creating a highly motivated, loyal, productive work force: it’s not enough to merely provide opportunity; you have to make sure people both know that the opportunity exists and believe it’s worth chasing.

We need to start by recognizing that everyone is the hero of their own story. We all have dreams, hopes, and aspirations for the future. When the job we are doing fits into our self-narrative, we feel connected and excited. The work matters, it’s helping us get where we want to go. Note that this doesn’t mean that you need to hire a college graduate straight into the role of CEO in order for them to feel heroic; that would be foolish on many levels. Rather, people will work hard at even menial jobs provided those jobs provide a path to something bigger. Conversely, high profile jobs with lots of perks won’t hold someone who feels that, even in such a role, they are relegated to being a bit player or an interchangeable component. Nobody likes being the sidekick forever. People want to feel important, as if they matter as individuals. People who feel like cogs in the machine disengage.

Next, the story has to be exciting, or at least interesting. It has to hold our attention, particularly in today’s distraction filled world. What we are doing has to matter sufficiently that it’s what we’ll choose to do because it matters, not because we’ll get yelled at by the boss or fired. Remember, you might find writing software to be the most boring thing imaginable, but most software engineers find it incredibly enjoyable. In building your narrative, you need to understand at least a little bit about the people you want to attract so that you can speak to them in their language. That means that you will have multiple overlapping stories for different parts of the organization and different jobs within it. Generic stories attract generic people.

In building the story, there are then six key elements that we have to consider: the variety, or lack thereof, of the skills a person will be called up to use; the visibility of a task; the importance of a task; how much autonomy or supervision the person will have; how they will receive feedback; opportunities for growth; and safety. Frequently, we will have to balance different competing values of at least some of the first five elements. A lack of a path for growth, however, never goes over well. A lack of safety, itself a rather complex subject, can undermine everything else.

What Is Organizational Narrative?

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

Humans are pattern-matching creatures. We are built to try to make sense of our environment. Indeed, as more than one psychologist has observed, we see patterns even when they aren’t there! This tendency toward pattern-matching is a very powerful tool, though, because it enables us to impose structure on our environment. If we’ve done a good job of imposing structure, we can not only make sense of what is happening now, we can make reasonably accurate guesses about what will happen in the future. In fact, our ability to impose order and identify patterns is a big part of what enables us to think and plan strategically.

Culture, you will recall, is a device for making the world predictable. It tells us what to do when. Structurally, what we have is a narrative: in a certain situation these actions led to these results or these actions expressed these values, and that’s why we do things that way today. Quite simply, we impose a narrative structure on our own experiences and those of the organization. Consider how many of our metaphors reflect this view: “turning over a new page,” “starting a new chapter in our lives,” “taking a page from his book,” and so forth.

This narrative structure is so powerful that many people will ignore information that doesn’t fit the narrative: for example, there are still many people who believe that Humphrey Bogart said, “Play it again, Sam,” in the movie Casablanca. He didn’t, but he should have. It’s a much better line than the one he actually says.

This narrative structure helps us understand, or at least explain, our own lives: Elizabeth Loftus, a psychologist and Harvard professor, is also the world’s expert on memory. She believed that this stemmed from her experience of repressing her memories of discovering her mother’s drowned body in the family swimming pool. She later recovered her memory of the event and, over the course of a few years, the rest of the details came back to her. It made sense; it explained her fascination with memory. Then one of her relatives told her that she hadn’t discovered the body, her aunt had. Other relatives confirmed this. The memory expert had, herself, created a false memory and believed it because it made sense.

Organizational stories are most obvious in older organizations, be they corporations, religious institutions, professional groups, and the like. However, even small organizations, including start up companies, quickly develop their own organizational narratives. Indeed, the question is not whether you will develop a narrative, but who will do it. Will you define your narrative or will others define it for you? If you don’t define your own story, you can be certain that your competitors will be only too happy to do it for you. All too often, companies allow themselves to accept default stories about their business and then wonder why they are seen as “just like everyone else.”

Think about how often you’ve heard someone talk about your company’s “story.” We assemble incidents into chronological events and draw lessons from those events. The following three snippets play out in organizations all the time:

“Bob ignored his assignment to deal with what he felt was a serious problem and the boss fired him even though Bob was right.”

“Bob stood up to the boss, the boss was going to fire him for insubordination, but the boss’s boss said, ‘Hey! Bob just saved the company a ton of money! What is wrong with you?’”

Each of these stories teaches a different lesson about how to behave. The first says never argue with the boss. The second says you should bring up problems. The third says that if you bring up a problem and your boss doesn’t appreciate hearing it, don’t worry, his boss will see that justice is done. I saw this one play out in just my first few weeks at IBM after I graduated from college. When Bob’s boss was subsequently reassigned to a remote branch office, that cemented the lesson that employees should act on serious problems.

The problem with most organizational stories is that they just happen. Events occur and are assembled after the fact into stories that current employees tell one another and pass along to new hires. These stories become part of the background, repeated often without really thinking about it. Frequently, the lessons taught to new employees are not the lessons management thinks are being taught. Taking control of the process, however, can dramatically improve organizational performance in all areas.

Systems, Silos, and Spaghetti

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

Traditional systems engineering argues that we identify the key systems and then decompose them into progressively smaller systems. Thus, a helicopter might be decomposed into a flight subsystem and ground subsystem. The fight system can be further decomposed into a drive system and navigation system, and so forth. Eventually, we get down to the smallest possible subsystems and then start building them up again. Each system communicates with other systems through a predefined interface. This approach is quite common in engineering disciplines, from aeronautic to software. It is also a common approach with human systems.

Unlike mechanical or electronic systems, however, human systems rarely maintain clean interfaces. Human systems are porous. In small organizations, this can work very well, but can become hopelessly chaotic when the organization grows. The lines of communication between different organizational systems start to look like a plate of spaghetti. While it’s great that everyone is talking, the lack of discipline in the process leads to confusion and lost information.

On the flip side, when systems are tightly controlled, they can easily transform into silos. In this case, each group retreats behind its own metaphorical moat and interacts with other silos only through very limited channels. Organization members will typically express great frustration with the “bureaucracy.” The key is to develop loosely coupled interfaces, allowing for flexibility in communications without either chaos or rigidity. Accomplishing that requires understanding a number of different organizational components.

Consider a typical business: Marketing. Sales. Engineering. Human Resources. QA. IT. The litany of departments goes on and on. Every organization, be it a business, a non-profit, a church or synagogue, a school, a sports team, and so on is composed of a variety of moving parts, of departments and teams that themselves can be viewed as smaller organizations. The larger organization comes to life out of the interactions of the smaller organizations.

As anyone who has ever been part of a large organization, be it a corporation or a club, well knows, each subgroup in the organization is constantly struggling for resources, constantly trying to demonstrate its importance to the organization as a whole. Just as the larger organization is a complex system, each subgroup is itself a system, taking in information and resources and, we hope, putting out value to the organization as a whole. These systems all interact with one another, sometimes in very elaborate ways.

Even more important than the obvious and visible departments within the larger organization, though, are the hidden systems: how and why the organization does things, attitudes about success and failure, how the organization hires, fires, and promotes, beliefs about how mistakes should be handled, problem-solving and innovation versus blame, and so forth.

To understand the vortex of interactions between these systems, we first need to understand the organization’s DNA: its culture.

Understanding Organizational Culture

J. J. Abram’s 2009 Star Trek movie featured, as a major plot point, a good deal of back story to explain how the iconic Captain James Kirk became the person he was in the original series. What is interesting, however, is that when Star Trek first went on the air in 1967, the character of James Kirk was immediately recognizable to viewers: he was an exaggerated version of another famous military figure known for his heroic feats, charisma, womanizing, and connection to outer space. That famous figure was, of course, John Kennedy, and Star Trek was a product of the culture of the space race inextricably linked to the assassinated president.

How did James Kirk came to represent John Kennedy? What does that have to do with the vortex in your company or, indeed, organizational psychology?

Culture is an odd beast, most often described as “the way we do things around here.” This description has just enough truth in it to be dangerous. There is truth in the definition since culture is, on the surface, what we do and what we see. These obvious components of culture, what MIT social psychologist and professor of business Ed Schein referred to as artifacts of the culture, are also the most trivial aspects of culture. When we focus on the artifacts, we are missing the depth of the culture’s influence. Furthermore, we foster the dangerous illusion that organizational changes can be accomplished simply by making a few alterations to the way things are done.

Balzac combines stories of jujitsu, wheat, gorillas, and the Lord of the Rings with very practical advice and hands-on exercises aimed at anyone who cares about management, leadership, and culture.

Todd Raphael
Editor-in-Chief
ERE Media
http://www.ere.net

We Can’t Afford That!

“Where are the computers?”

“We can’t afford computers.”

“How can we write software without computers?”

“You’ll figure out a way.”

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

“Hey, the computers aren’t working.”

“I can’t get the lights to turn on.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attivio – Active Intelligence

Microsoft Yawn

Microsoft president Steve Ballmer put out a long letter detailing changes taking place at Microsoft.

After wading through the announcement, I was reminded of some of the restructuring announcements that IBM used to send out back in the late 1980s: long, boring, and ultimately pointless. It’s impressive to see how much Microsoft has really taken on IBM’s mantle… although perhaps they’d have been better off if they’d done something new instead of picking up what IBM got rid of!

Unless he’s trying to produce a sleep aide, Ballmer’s memo leaves a great deal to be desired. Effective organizational change requires clearly defining the outcome, painting a bold, exciting, and engaging picture of the destination. In other words, it requires a vision. Without vision, we don’t know where we’re going.

Vision, however, requires far more than vague statements like, “Helping people achieve their full potential.” What does that mean? If the Microsoft Surface is any indication, it might well mean “buy an iPad!”

Microsoft’s original vision, “A PC on every desktop,” had power. It was bold, it was exciting, and it was measurable. Yes, measurable. They could see their vision coming true and see how their actions mattered.

Now, though, Microsoft is wandering around lost in the wilderness of defining full potential. Ballmer’s memo fails to excite, fails even to provide context or any real vision. Instead, it reads like the rearranging of the proverbial deck chairs, done more out of a belief that if enough things get changed something will happen; for example, the deck chairs will look better… Hardly the stuff of inspiration!

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 21st century’s Tom Peters.

CMG Director of Publications

Princess Bride Problem Solving

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

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

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

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

We now come to the Princess Bride.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Riveting! Yes, I called a leadership book riveting. I couldn’t wait to finish one chapter so I could begin reading the next. Organizational Psychology for Managers’ combination of pop culture references, personal stories, and thought providing insights to illustrate world class leadership principles makes it a must read for business professionals at all management levels.

Nationally Syndicated Columnist and Author

If You Want Competence, Ignite Passion

I recently read Lou Adler’s interesting article on why not to hire competent people.

He has some good points, but he also misses a few key points as well.

He talks about finding out if the candidate has been excited in the past by work similar to what you’re hiring them for. While that’s one thing to look at, it’s really fairly limited. Gauging similarities between jobs is actually surprisingly difficult: apparent similarity, like beauty, is often skin deep, while apparently different jobs often turn out to be surprisingly similar.

It’s a far better approach to identify someone’s passions. What gets them excited? Don’t stop there, however! Now you need to find out why that gets them excited. Does your job offer similar opportunities?

For example, someone passionate about chess might be passionate because they love logical thought, challenge, strategic thinking, and the opportunity to outwit an opponent. Does your company provide some or all of those opportunities? If so, you’re already on the right track to engaging their passions.

Another way to gauge someone’s excitement is through your own excitement: are you excited by the work your company is doing and are you willing to show that excitement? How do they respond? Is there a spark?

If you are doing your best imitation of the PC from those old Mac vs. PC commercials, don’t be too terribly surprised if the person across the table from you responds accordingly. Far too often, we ignore highly competent people who are great potential hires because we are doing the equivalent of calling sushi “cold, dead fish” and then wondering why they aren’t excited.

Leaving motivation aside for a moment, how are we even judging competence? How do you know that works? Have you really identified what skills are needed on the job? Technical skills are all well and good, but if you don’t focus on the much larger constellation of “soft” skills, you’re going to have problems: is this person skilled at communicating? How about team work? Are you asking them to describe how they’ve helped their teams work together in the past?

We like to focus on technical skills because we think they’re easier to assess than the softer skills. Unfortunately, even that depends on how you go about doing the assessment. Most assessments seem to be as much about making the interviewer feel good as actually measuring competence or end up defining competence much too narrowly.

A real challenge here is that most interviewers are convinced that they can tell a great deal about a candidate from a very short interview. Why is this a challenge? Because most interviewers are wrong. That’s not what they’ve trained to do; indeed, the candidate probably has far more experience being interviewed than the average interviewer has in conducting the interview.

Perhaps the real answer here is to focus on getting reasonably competent people in the door and building an environment that makes them more competent and ignites their passions, instead of believing we can predict it all at the start.

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 21st century’s Tom Peters.

CMG Director of Publications

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?

There Can Be Only One

The other morning, I noticed one of my cats running around with her catnip mouse. Now, this isn’t such an unusual occurrence. However, the difference this time was that the other two cats also wanted to play with the mouse. This is unusual: normally, when one cat gets the toy, the others ignore it.

It wasn’t until the cat dropped the mouse that I realized that either it wasn’t a catnip toy or the cat had been playing with a Pinocchio mouse that had picked a very unfortunate moment to become a Real Mouse.

As soon as the mouse was on the ground, it immediately tried to run from the cat. The only thing that saved the mouse was when another cat got in the way. It was a bit hard to tell, but I’m pretty sure that the cats were more interested in competing with one another over which one would get the mouse than in working together. It reminded me of an old Tweety and Sylvester cartoon.

What was particularly interesting, though, was how the mouse behaved whenever a cat did catch up to it: it would open its little tiny mouth, raise its front paws, and try to look fierce. It was pretty funny watching a mouse trying to intimidate a cat that outweighs it one hundredfold. Oddly enough, though, every time the mouse did this, the cat would hesitate, which usually gave enough time for another cat to get in the way. At that point, the mouse would run and the third cat would quickly chase and catch it, causing the whole process to repeat. Eventually, I managed to trap the mouse in a container and release it outside.

To be fair, one can hardly blame the cats for taking an “every cat for herself” attitude. After all, in this situation, we’re talking about a very fixed pie, or mouse. Only one cat will get the prize. Whether that prize is then eaten or proudly left as a gift on a bedroom pillow, there can be only one winner, and it’s not the owner of the pillow. For cats, this is quite normal. Unfortunately, it is also quite normal on far too many so-called teams. Indeed, it is quite disturbing how often teams work together almost as well as did the cats.

Like the cats, though, in a very real sense you can’t blame the team members either. When there is only one mouse, or pie, suddenly the priority becomes getting it. Put another way, whenever team members are in a position of “I win, you lose,” you don’t really have a team; you have a mob or a horde of cats out for themselves.

It doesn’t matter whether there’s a fixed amount of money being given out to the “best” members of the team, or bottom ten percent are being fired. Quite simply, when members of a “horde” are competing with one another for the rewards, performance is drastically and dramatically reduced compared to a strong team. How bad can this be, you ask? A team outperforms a horde by at least tenfold, and can sometimes outperform by a factor of a hundred or more. What is that level of performance worth to you?

Like the cats being “intimidated” by the mouse, members of a horde are also more likely to be flummoxed by relatively simple problems. By behaving in an unexpected fashion, the mouse could startle the cats, in large part because each cat was devoting the bulk of its efforts to competing with the other cats. Thus, they were less able to focus on the mouse. Similarly, when team members are devoting the bulk of their efforts to competing with their supposed colleagues, they spend less effort solving problems. After all, the reward is not for finding the best ideas, but to finding an idea that looks better than the ideas that other team members came up with. In some cases, just being good at making someone else’s ideas look bad is enough to win. Well, at least the individual wins; the team, and the company, end up with a dead mouse on their pillow.

Competition on the team also means that you, the manager, have to spend most of your time keeping your cats walking in the same direction and focused on your goals. This can be exhausting, as anyone who has ever taken their cats for a drag can attest. Team members will only care about the goals of the team when no other way of getting ahead is available. As for taking risks, forget it. Why take a risk when that means someone else gets the mouse? It’s smarter to play it safe and let another person make the mistake.

Far better to eliminate competition within the team and focus team members on competing against other teams, preferably teams at other companies. Use the competition to bring them together instead of driving them apart. If someone on the team isn’t carrying his weight, it’ll become obvious and can be dealt with simply and directly at that point. Building a strong team takes effort, but it sure beats herding cats.

The Perils of Perception

I was flying through the air. Unlike the common experiences of flying, this did not involve an airplane. Rather, I was practicing jujitsu and my partner had just executed a very well-timed throw. As I went over, I suddenly realized that my partner had turned the wrong way and was throwing me off the mat and onto the concrete floor.

Needless to say, the landing was painful. I started to say something to my partner when I suddenly realized that I was still on the mat. While I thought my partner was throwing me onto concrete, he was, in fact, throwing me exactly where he was supposed to: onto a nice, soft mat. Believing that I was about to land on concrete, however, was enough to cause me to take a hard fall.

Perception, in other words, is reality.

Now, it is easy to argue that maybe the expectation of falling on concrete was enough to make me tense up and hence take a bad fall. On a separate occasion, I really was thrown off the mat and onto the concrete floor. I didn’t realize it was happening and fully expected to land on a soft mat. Far from being a painful shock, the landing was completely comfortable, exactly how I’m used to feeling when I hit the mat. It wasn’t until I stood up that I realized that I wasn’t where I expected to be.

Perception is, once again, reality.

A certain company was experiencing explosive growth. Their hot new product enabled them to dominate the niche they had created. As their product became more and more successful, the senior management team became more and more concerned about the future. They focused on the consequences of failure and the decisions they made were based on protecting their turf, not continuing to innovate and expand. Despite their successes, they viewed themselves as fighting a doomed battle against encroaching competitors. Over time, just as they envisioned, their competitors chipped away at their market share and they saw their revenue decline.

Perception can become reality.

The company was seriously stuck. They knew they had a good product, but they couldn’t get any traction. Engineering teams were spending all their time arguing over minute details; everyone was so afraid of making a mistake that making a commitment to any course of action was seen as high risk behavior. Even when they did make a commitment they made almost no progress: every decision had to be reevaluated and rejustified at every meeting.

Rather than focusing on what could go wrong, the management team had to learn to focus on what could go right. Rather than viewing every decision in terms of avoiding failure, they had to plan for success. The only way to never fall off a bicycle is to never get on one in the first place. If you want to ride, though, you have to risk falling over. This company needed to stop being afraid of falling off the bike and simply start pedaling. They needed to perceive success around the corner.

As management started to change their attitudes, the rest of the company followed. We always assume that the person highest up the ladder can see the furthest. In this case, once the people at the top started perceiving success, everyone else could perceive it too.

The company regained its dominant position. Were their mistakes along the way? Of course there were. At one time, those mistakes would have led to heads rolling and projects being canceled. Even worse, the mistakes would have led to interminable meetings arguing over the causes and making elaborate plans to avoid any possibility of failure in the future. However, with the new mindset that success was inevitable, mistakes were merely feedback, opportunities to collect information and adjust strategies.

Change perception and you change reality.

What you perceive determines how you act. This isn’t some sort of magic, it is simple psychology. Teach people to perceive success at the end of the journey and they perceive the opportunities to get them there. Teach people to perceive failure and they avoid anything that might be risky, including the opportunities to succeed.

Hard landing or soft landing, it’s up to you. What are you doing to make sure your team perceives success?