The Business Sensei

Take a Future Retrospective

Originally published in Corp! Magazine.

Once upon a time there was a staircase. Although it wound its way up from floor to floor in the manner traditionally associated with staircases, this was no ordinary staircase. Although it stood in a courthouse in Franklin, Ohio, in a fashion much like other staircases, yet it was not like the other staircases. With most staircases, those who look down see stairs beneath their feet. With this staircase, however, those who looked down saw the floor below and those people walking up the stairs. They saw those who stood at the bottom of the staircase, for this staircase, you see, was made of clear glass. While we have no information as to whether those climbing the staircase felt a sense of vertigo when they looked down, we do have definitive information about what they said when they looked down: “Hey, those people at the bottom of the stairs are staring up my dress.”

Although the news report was slightly vague on this point, we may safely assume that this comment was made only by those who were, in fact, wearing a dress.

But yes, it seems that people on the staircase made an observation that had eluded the architects who designed the staircase: that if you can look down through the glass, you can look up through it as well.

When questioned on this point, the architects responded by saying that they had naturally assumed that no one would be so inappropriate as to stand at the bottom of a glass staircase in a courthouse and look up women’s dresses.

When this insightful observation was relayed to the judge, he replied that, “If people always exercised good judgment and decorum, we wouldn’t need this building.”

The architects had carefully considered their building material. They had thought about how to make the glass durable and resilient. They had considered the problems involved in building a glass staircase in such a way that it would continue to look good even after having hundreds of people walking up and down it each day. They had, in fact, solved each one of these problems.

What they had not considered was how the customer, to wit, the people in the courthouse, would actually use the product. They were so fixated on the concept that a staircase is for walking on, not staring through, that they failed to consider the ramifications of their architectural decisions. To be fair, architects are hardly unique in making this type of mistake. It can be very easy to let your assumptions about how something should work or how it will be used to blind you to how it will actually work or be used. Consider the example of the business school competition to design a helicopter. The contest was judged on a number of factors, including the weight of the finished product. The winner was the helicopter without an engine. Apparently, no one had included “able to fly” in the criteria for success. The assumption that, of course, a helicopter should fly was so taken for granted that no one thought to see if it was included in the rules.

On the bright side, it had considerably less severe consequences than the situation involving the helicopter that flipped upside down while in flight. Or the data analysis software package that looked like it had crashed the computer, causing users to reboot shortly before the calculations were complete. Or the organizational improvements that led to a massive talent exodus.

In each situation, the people designing the end result honestly believed they were giving the customers, including the employees in the final case, what the customers had requested — and that belief prevented them from considering any other possibilities.

“We asked!” the designers protested. “That’s what they said they wanted.”

Were the customers really asking for a helicopter that flipped upside down or an expensive glass staircase that had to be subsequently covered? Of course not. But somehow, that’s what the designers heard.

The problem was that they asked the wrong questions, further leading them into their one, narrow, view of the result. Thus, no one ever stopped to imagine how the end product, be it staircase, contest rules, helicopter, software, or organizational procedures would actually be used.

In each situation, rather than seeking information, the people asking the questions sought validation. They already had an idea in their heads, and any inquiries they made were aimed at confirming that idea, not testing it.

When you say, “This is what you wanted, right?” or “What do you think of this approach?” odds are you aren’t requesting information; you are requesting validation. Indeed, even if you are seriously trying to get information, such questions usually get you validation instead. This is because the client assumes that you, as the expert, know what you’re talking about.

So how do you ask for information? One answer is to change the time frame. Instead of asking them to imagine the future, pretend it’s the future and imagine the past: “If we went with this approach, and six months from now you weren’t happy, what would have gone wrong? If you were happy, what would have gone right?”

This small change causes people to actually imagine using the product or living with the new procedures. Now, instead of validation, you’ll get information. That information may shake up your carefully constructed vision of the future, but that’s fine. Better now than after the sightseers congregate at the bottom of that glass staircase. A future retrospective also forces you to be more honest with yourself and to address the issues in front of you.

What challenges is your business facing? If, six months from now, you had successfully addressed your most persistent problems, what would you have done to make that happen?

What do you really stand for?

Knowing where you are going as a company, and having a simple, clear, exciting vision that you can communicate well to your employees can improve performance dramatically. So why doesn’t it work more often?

The key to having a powerful vision is to be consistent across all aspects of your corporate behavior. If you want people to care, they have to feel that they are caring about something that matters up and down the company.

Take, for example, the recent debacle at Lowe’s. As several articles in the NY Times discussed,  Lowe’s decided to fund a reality show called “All-American Muslim.” This show committed the unforgivable sin of revealing that Muslim Americans are much like every other American as opposed to being terrorists. In response to complaints from one group, Lowe’s then pulled out of the show, triggering a great deal more complaints, this time from almost everyone else.

Now, Lowe’s might claim to support diversity and oppose racism, as quoted in another Times article:  “In a statement on its Facebook page, Lowe’s said it had ‘a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion’ but had pulled its spots from the show because it ‘became a lightning rod’ for’individuals and groups’ with ‘strong political and social views.’ ”

In other words, it appears that Lowe’s feels strongly about supporting anything that no one argues with. Unfortunately, this does not exactly send a message about strong commitment to your own values. One has to wonder how an employee at Lowe’s will feel about the corporate vision going forward from here.

By comparison, let’s look at the employees of the Taj Hotel in Mumbai. As discussed in a recent news story, when gunman attacked the city three years ago, employees risked their own lives to protect guests at the hotel. This can be directly attributed to the Taj’s consistent vision of providing outstanding customer service no matter what, a vision that is carried out at all levels of the organization and reinforced at every opportunity.

As I discuss in my book, “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” a vision needs to answer some key questions, including:

• “Where are we going?”
• “Why do we care?”
• “Why does anyone else care?”
• How will the world change, even a little, if we accomplish our vision?”

These are all important and necessary questions to address, but they are not sufficient to make your vision work. You also have to believe in the vision, and you have to demonstrate that you will stand up for what you believe in. Otherwise, you shouldn’t waste your time with a vision: you’re better off not standing for anything at all than demonstrating that you won’t stand up for what you claim to care about.

Of Cats and Unwanted Prizes

Originally published in Corp! Magazine

I have three cats. Cats being the creatures that they are, I have only to sit down to read a book and instantly there is a cat on my lap. Regardless of which cat it is, a familiar pattern ensues: first, the cat carefully positions itself in front of my book. Once I adjust to move the book, the cat then carefully positions itself on one of my hands. This continues until I give the cat the attention it’s seeking. At that point, it first butts its head against me and then, purring loudly, turns and sticks its behind in my face.

I am sure that there are people who find this end of a cat absolutely fascinating. I’m even quite sure that there are contests in which cats win awards for having the most beautiful behind. For cat breeders and cat fanciers, it can be a big deal to win one of these cat trophies. It is a cause for great celebration.

In an office environment, however, a catastrophe is anything but a cause for celebration.

The worst thing about catastrophes is that they happen about as often as a cat sitting down on top of the book you’re reading. At least, to listen to some managers, it certainly sounds that way. Somehow, every little thing, every small problem, was magnified until it had the aura of impending doom. In short, every setback was becoming a prize for the cat with the most beautiful behind. At one company, the conversation went something like this:

“We’ve found a major bug in the software.”

“We can’t delay the ship.”

“We can’t ship with this bug.”

At that point, the manager started screaming that the product would go out on schedule, or else. When he finally calmed down and I was able to talk with him privately, he told me that he knew that if the company didn’t ship on time, the customers would abandon them and they would go out of business. He was happy to ship non-functional software to avoid that fate.

When he calmed down still further, he agreed to delay the ship.

I am sure that most readers are chuckling to themselves right now. After all, delays in software are legendary. Obviously, this manager was overreacting. True enough; the question is, why? Why would a perfectly sensible, intelligent man react so negatively to something which is, frankly, a common event in the software business?

It turns out that this particular company prided itself on holding to very aggressive schedules. The schedule was so aggressive that they were virtually always running behind. Therein lay the problem.

Time is a funny thing. We react very differently depending on how we perceive it. Being behind schedule all the time had the effect of generating a certain sense of urgency, which was the stated intent of the aggressive schedule. Unfortunately, the urgency generated in this situation was of the slightly breathless, heart-pounding sort similar to what one might experience if being chased by a very large cat of the “has a big mane” variety.  A cat which, I might add, is looking to do more than just sit on your book.

The problem with aggressive schedules is that, in fact, being behind schedule can generate the same panicked response in people that they would feel in a situation which actually was dangerous. While in those situations, we’re very good at running away or fighting desperately, but we’re not good at making cool, rational decisions or developing innovative solutions to problems. Each pebble encountered along the road becomes a giant boulder. When we do finally get to the end of the project, rather than feeling a sense of accomplishment and success, there’s more of a sense of relief that at last it’s over. What’s missing is the thrill of victory that energizes people for the next project. That feeling of success is the key to getting, and keeping, people excited and motivated.

In short, instead of the team beating the schedule, the schedule was beating them.

Conversely, when a team is running slightly ahead of schedule, something very different happens. Running ahead of the game means that the team is feeling a constant sense of success. When people feel successful, they work harder, they are more creative, and they look forward to coming into work each day. Teams that are running ahead of schedule are more likely to develop innovative new solutions to problems rather than just slap on band-aids. Feeling that you have the time to stop and think is critical: just think about how easy it is to miss the obvious when you are feeling rushed.

The trick is to view your schedule as a living document. It’s something that you will constantly adjust according to the situation, especially at the beginning of a project. The less you know about potential difficulties down the road, the harder it is to plan: so don’t. Instead, plan to plan. As you move forward, you can revise and project the schedule further and further into the future.

If you find yourself running behind, that’s feedback. Pay attention to what it’s telling you. Is something more complicated than expected? Is someone overwhelmed with a task that turned out to be significantly more time-consuming than you thought? Did something go wrong? Is a vendor habitually late with parts? Is your schedule just plain too aggressive?

If you’re running ahead, that’s also feedback. It might mean that the schedule is too easy and your team isn’t being challenged. Be willing to become more aggressive. It could mean that you need to slow down: are people rushing and cutting corners? At one company, pressure on QA engineers to rush product inspections led to some very expensive and embarrassing recalls and some very irate customers. Moving way ahead of schedule could also mean that your team is working too hard too soon: success is a marathon, not a sprint. Burn out early and you won’t reach the finish line.

Leave the catastrophes to the cats.

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” For more information, 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.

It’s Annual Review Time!

I was recently quoted in the NY Times on the subject of preparing for annual performance reviews.

The fact is, performance reviews are extremely stressful. Some business professors argue that we should drop them completely. Far too often, rather than providing benefit to the organization and useful feedback and a promotion to the employee, they only promote the Peter Principle.

Performance reviews can benefit both the employee and the organization, but they have to be done correctly. That means starting by establishing and agreeing upon goals. Of course, even that is tricky, as goals require actual thought to do well. The key point here is to identify desired outcomes and then focus on the behaviors and learning opportunities that will lead to those outcomes. Taking the time to focus on and identify productive and effective behaviors produces the most effective goals. It also means the performance review is now focused on providing the employee useful feedback and opportunities to build their strengths instead of arguing over failures and getting wrapped up trying to remediate weaknesses.

On that point, it helps considerably to recognize that people have both strengths and weaknesses. Yes, I know, this is a great shock to some people, particularly many managers. Tailoring goals to fit people’s strengths produces far more motivated, enthusiastic, and productive employees than goals that are focused around “fixing” their weaknesses. Don’t get me wrong: weaknesses that are based in a lack of knowledge are eminently fixable; but those that are based in a lack of fundamental talent or ability are simply frustrating to everyone when you try to fix them. If you give people some room to experiment and, gasp, fail, you and they will quickly figure out which is which and how to best focus their time and energy. Build people’s strengths enough and their weaknesses matter less and less.

The other key point on performance reviews is to provide specific feedback: it doesn’t help to tell someone they are “too aggressive” or “too passive.” That is your perception. Tell them exactly what they did that you saw as aggressive or passive. Good or bad, the details matter if you want someone to repeat a positive behavior or end a negative one.

Performance reviews can be a waste of time and energy or a powerful tool to improve performance in your organization. Like all power tools, you need to use them correctly.

What Are You Really Asking For?

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

The names have been changed to protect the silly…

History teacher Norman Conquest had a very difficult student, Sasha Pandiaz. Sasha was constantly disruptive in class, driving Norman up the wall. Finally, Norman decided on a simple solution: when Sasha misbehaved, he would be sent out into the hall for five minutes. If he misbehaved three times, he spent the entire class sitting in the hall.

Inside of a week, Sasha was spending the entirety of each class in the hall. Sasha, it turns out, didn’t like the class. Although Norman thought he was punishing Sasha, apparently no one bothered to inform Sasha of that. As a result, Sasha was quite happy to miss each class; the long-term negative of a bad grade in the class was simply too far off and abstract to change Sasha’s behavior.

Fred was the VP of Engineering at Root-2 Systems. Fred had the habit of indicating his displeasure with engineers in his department by assigning them projects that were not particularly fun or interesting. At least, Fred didn’t find them particularly fun or interesting. Unfortunately, the engineers did. Rather than feeling punished, they thought they were being rewarded! As one engineer put it, “I thought Fred was ready to kill me, but then he gave me this really cool project.”

Thus, for example, instead of realizing that Fred was punishing them for blowing off a meeting, engineers believed he was rewarding them for skipping a meeting that they thought would be a waste of time. As a result, they kept repeating the behaviors that were infuriating Fred. By the time he figured out what was going on, Fred was bald.

At Mandragora Systems, Joe took over a key product team. He regularly exhorted his employees to work together: “We’re a team!” Joe cried loudly and often. But when it came time to evaluate performance, the song was a bit different:

“What were you doing with your time?”

“I was helping Bob.”

“If you’d finished your work, why didn’t you come to me for more?”

“I hadn’t finished.”

“Then why were you helping Bob?”

“It was something I could do quickly and would have taken him all night.”

“If Bob can’t do his job, that’s his problem. Worry about your own work.”

Astute employees soon realized that the key to a good review was to focus on their own work and devil take the hindmost. While Joe won points with his boss for his aggressive, no-nonsense style, and for his success in identifying weak players and eliminating them, something rather unexpected occurred: team performance declined on his watch. Instead of a team working together and combining their strengths, he ended up with a group of individuals out for themselves and exploiting one another’s weaknesses. The fact that this was damaging to the company in the long-run didn’t really matter as it was very definitely beneficial to the employees in the short-run.

There are several lessons to be drawn from these experiences.

First, it doesn’t matter whether you think you’re rewarding or punishing someone. What matters is what they think. If they think they’re being rewarded, they will naturally attempt to continue to get those rewards. If that means you lose your hair, so be it. If, on the other hand, they think they’re being punished, or at least not rewarded for their efforts, they will change their behavior no matter what you might say. Your actions really do speak louder than your words.

Second, no matter how much we might tell employees to think about the long-term rewards and delayed gratification, short-term rewards offer an almost irresistible lure. If you create a contradiction between the short-term and the long-term, most people will go for the short-term.

Third, if you want a strong team, you must reward team-oriented behaviors. If you only reward individualism, you’ll get a collection of individuals. For some jobs, that really is all you need. For many other jobs, though, it’s virtually impossible to succeed without a team.

In the end, people will do whatever they hear you telling them to do. It pays to make sure that what they are hearing is what you think you are saying.

Force of Nature Change

“What are the odds of a snow day in October?”

This was my response to my kids telling me how wonderful it would be if school were to close on Halloween. Not only would they have more time to finish their costumes, but they were imagining the fun of an extended afternoon and evening of trick-or-treating.

While it may not be nice to fool Mother Nature, the converse is apparently not true. Here in the northeast, we got a Halloween snowstorm. Not only did schools close on Halloween, they closed for the next two days as well. So much for the odds.

But Mother Nature’s little treat quickly revealed itself as a trick: due to downed trees and power lines, Halloween was postponed, and ended up being the evening of a school day after all.

Now, the fact is, if someone had proposed moving Halloween in our town, the uproar would have been fast and furious. But when Mother Nature makes a change, it can be best described as, well, a force of nature.

When you are Mother Nature, that approach works extremely well. Unfortunately, attempting to be a force of nature as a way of creating change tends to work somewhat less well. Mother Nature, it turns out, holds the exclusive rights on being a force of nature.

Which brings us to a company known as Mandragora. Mandragora had long been very successful in its markets, and was facing a number of new competitors. They were also finding it extremely difficult to compete against some of the newer, smaller, and more nimble companies they were facing.

Change was necessary! And change was instituted. Like a force of nature, Mandragora’s management team announced sweeping changes to how the company was organized and how it did business. There was the usual grumbling and complaining, which was, of course, ignored. Forces of nature do not listen to grumbling and complaining.

Indeed, the force of nature approach initially appeared to work. Changes did occur in how people worked and how they approached customers. But over the next few months, behavior drifted back to what it was before the change.

A new change was announced. It too had short-term success before people returned to their old ways of working. So it went, with each change initiative lasting for less and less time before returning to the status quo.

Mother Nature never gets tired and never runs out of resources. The same could not be said for the management team at Mandragora. Eventually, having exhausted all other options, they decided to ask for help.

Solving their problem wasn’t terribly difficult, but it did require respecting Mother Nature’s patent on the force of nature approach. Rather than simply announce a new change initiative, the first step was to enable the employees to convince themselves that the status quo wasn’t working and that a lasting change would be a good idea.

Once that was accomplished, the employees were further drawn into the change process by being asked for ideas and suggestions on what should change and how to make the changes work. Where the force of nature approach had yielded unenthusiastic compliance, employees were now taking the lead. As an unexpected benefit, employees also identified several change opportunities that management had missed. The management team incorporated that information into the evolving vision of how Mandragora would look after the changes were complete and fed it back to employees, increasing their enthusiasm and eliminating many of their concerns about the process.

Still, though, when it came time to begin implementing changes, there was a certain amount of reluctance. The solution was to provide opportunities for employees and managers to practice the new ways of working.

Naturally, the initial response to that step was, “It’ll take much too long!”

In fact, it took less than a fifth of the time that had already been spent in failed change attempts and a similar fraction of the cost. Providing practice opportunities meant that employees had time to become comfortable with the new paradigms and see how the changes would improve their lives. Practicing with management reinforced the message that “we’re all in this together.”

Throughout the process, employee concerns were addressed promptly and effectively. Mistakes were handled by identifying and fixing causes as opposed to fixing responsibility. Fixing responsibility, it turns out, does not fix problems. Fixing causes, however, does.

This time around, the changes stuck.

Now, if you happen to be Mother Nature, the force of nature approach can be a natural way of doing things. Mother Nature is also rather unconcerned about outcomes or how much havoc she inflicts along the way. For the rest of us, however, taking things slowly is a much faster way of accomplishing our goals.

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” For more information, 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.

How to Use Sports to Advance Leadership and Organizational Development – Steve Balzac with James Rick

Here’s the blurb from my appearance on the Full Potential Show. For the actual show, click here.

Can sports be used for more than just fun and pleasure? You bet!  The same disciplines or character development, leadership and team based skills applies to almost every other domain in life.

Steve Balzac is a man of many talents. He is a consultant, speaker, and author of 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development. He is a popular speaker on such topics as leadership, team building, interviewing skills, and sports performance. In this interview, he shares the lessons he has learned from the sports he excels in – Jiu Jitsu and fencing – and how they tie-in with the honing of leadership and organizational development potential.

THE TIE IN

a)    Use the other person’s force against him (as in Jiu Jitsu)
b)    Meet and go with the force of the other person in order to take him to where you want him to go
c)    In a difficult situation, attract the other person to where you want to take him
d)    Don’t be afraid to try different techniques, even if you have to look like an idiot sometimes
e)    Explore and practice the fundamentals well (as in fencing)
f)    Build yourself to a point where you can stay focused for long periods of time
g)    When you’re up there, you should not care whether you win or lose. If you focus on the outcome, you doubt yourself and hesitate
h)    After preparing your team, give them permission to go off and achieve what they need to
i)    Look at mistakes as the cornerstone of innovation and as a part of the process of evolution
j)    Determine if mistakes repeatedly committed is due to a flaw in the system
k)    Don’t do all your research ahead of time – it’s impossible to know everything ahead of time
l)    Develop a culture where it’s acceptable of everybody to commit mistakes, including you
m)    Consult with your followers to show them you’re interested in listening to their ideas

FINAL POINTERS ON LEADERSHIP AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT:

1)    Tell your own story – what you’re trying to do and why you care about it
2)    While you should have an outcome, dwelling on it during show time can actually hinder performance
3)    Walk your way backwards through the steps from the outcome – this will make the first step very easy
4)    Don’t be afraid to ask someone to show you the way (no team makes it to the Olympics without a coach). This will shorten your learning curve.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• “Experiment” is synonymous with mistakes and breakthroughs.

My Hovercraft is Full of Eels

As published in Corp! Magazine

“Is the product done?” a certain manager asked during a product review meeting.

“It is done,” replied the engineer building the product.

“Are there any problems?”

“There are problems.”

“What is the problem?”

“It does not work.”

“Why doesn’t it work?”

“It is not done.”

I will spare you the transcription of the subsequent half hour of this not particularly funny comedy routine. The manager and the engineer managed to perform this little dance of talking past one another without ever seeming to realize just how ludicrous it sounded to everyone else in the room. It was rather like Monty Python’s classic Hungarian-English phrasebook sketch, in which translations in either direction are random. In other words, the Hungarian phrase, “I would like to buy a ticket,” might be translated to the English phrase, “My hovercraft is full of eels.”

It was extremely funny when Monty Python performed it. As for the manager and the engineer, well, perhaps they just didn’t have the comedic timing of Python’s John Cleese and Graham Chapman.

As it happens, “my hovercraft is full of eels” moments come about far too often. What was unusual in this situation is that it involved only two people. Usually, considerably more people take part. Thus, instead of a not particularly amusing exchange between two people, there is an extremely frustrating exchange involving several people. The most common failure to communicate is the game of telephone: as the message passes along the line, it becomes increasingly distorted.

What I hear from teams over and over is, “We are communicating! We send email to everyone.” This is where the hovercraft starts to fill with eels. Broadcasting is not really communicating: effective business communications require a certain amount of back and forth, questioning and explaining, before everyone is on the same page.

Who talks to whom? When you send out an email, do questions come back to you? Or do people on the team quietly ask one another to explain what you meant? While it’s comforting to believe that every missive we send out is so carefully crafted as to be completely unambiguous, very few of us write that well. Of that select few, even fewer can do it all the time. Particularly in the early stages of a project, if there are no questions, then there are certainly problems.

When someone else asks a question, either via email or in a meeting, does everyone wait for you to respond? Even worse, does Bob only jump into a thread if Fred jumps in first? Who is Bob responding to at that point, you or Fred? Are you still addressing the main topic or is the hovercraft starting to become eel infested?

It can be extremely frustrating to ask, “Are there any questions?” and receive either dead silence or questions about something trivial. It can easily become tempting to assume that there are no questions and just race full speed ahead. However, until employees figure out how much each person understands about the project and how you will respond to apparently dumb questions, they will be cautious about what they ask. Their curiosity is as much about one another and about you as it is about the project. How that curiosity gets satisfied determines whether you have productive conversations or a hovercraft that is full of eels. In the former case, you get strong employee engagement; in the latter case, you don’t.

If you’ve been working with a team for some months, or longer, and people are still not asking questions then there are really only two possibilities: either your team is composed of professional mind-readers or you are about to find a room full of those pesky eels. No project is ever perfectly defined from the beginning. Questions and debate should be ongoing throughout the development or production cycle. A lack of questions tells you that there is a lack of trust between the team members and between the team members and you. When trust is lacking, so is engagement.

Now some good news: remedying that lack of trust isn’t all that complicated. It does, however, require a certain amount of persistence and patience.

Start by highlighting each person’s role and contribution to the project. Why are they there? What makes them uniquely qualified to fill the role they are in? Be specific and detailed. If you can’t clearly define their roles, you can rest assured that they can’t either.  Questions come when people are clear about their roles. Disengagement comes when people are not clear about their roles.

Prime the pump with questions. Demonstrate that you don’t have all the answers and that you need the help of the team to find them. Give each person a chance to play the expert while you ask the dumb questions. When you set the tone, the others will follow. Communications start with the person in charge.

Separate producing answers from evaluating answers. Collect up the possibilities and take a break before you start examining them and making decisions about them. Brainstorming without evaluating allows ideas to build upon one another and apparently unworkable ideas to spark other ideas. Pausing to examine each potential answer as it comes up kills that process.

Encourage different forms of brainstorming: some people are very analytical, some are intuitive, some generate ideas by cracking jokes, others pace, and so on. Choose a venue where people are comfortable and only step in if the creative juices start to run dry or tempers start to get short. In either case, that means you need to take a break.  Intense discussions are fine, heated discussions not so much.

Initially, you will have to make all the decisions. That’s fine, but don’t get too comfortable with it. As trust and engagement build, the team will want to become more involved in the decision making process. Invite them in: that demonstration of trust will further build engagement and foster effective communications. Effective communications, in turn, builds trust and engagement.

Having a hovercraft full of eels isn’t the real problem. The real problem is what a hovercraft full of eels tells you about the trust, engagement, and communications in your company.

Who Betrays One Master

A nervous looking man in a suit slips furtively through the streets of an unnamed city. He comes to an office building and, checking to make sure that he isn’t being watched, slips inside. There, another man greets him.

“Do you have the plans?” the second man asks.

“Do you have the money?” replies the first.

Perhaps they haggle for a moment, but then the second man hands over the money and the first man hands over an envelope. The second man glances into the envelope.

“I see you kept your word.”

“You earned it,” replies the first man as he turns to leave.

“No,” says the second, as he pulls a gun and shoots the first man, “I bought it.”

“I betrayed my company for you! I proved my loyalty.” gasps the first man, as he falls to the floor.

The second man looks down at the body on the floor and says, “The man who betrays one master will assuredly betray another.”

If this scene sounds familiar, it probably is. Some variation of it appears in hundreds of movies, from James Bond to WWII action films to fantasy adventure. The trope is a simple one: a man betrays his country, company, organization, or teacher. The person to whom he sells out reaps the rewards, but never believes the traitor’s protestations of loyalty to his new masters. Eventually, it ends badly for the traitor.

Now, if this scenario were only a work of fiction, there would be little more to say. Unfortunately, the fictional part is the end: in real life the disloyal person is rewarded and given every opportunity to betray his new masters.

Read the rest in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership

Goof Gas Change

As published in The Business Enterprise

“We’re going to make this company great!”

As the villainous Boris Badenov spreads his goof gas, America’s most brilliant scientists are transformed into idiots. Even the smartest investigators are not immune. In desperation, the country turns to the one person, well, animal, who can save them: Bullwinkle J. Moose. Bullwinkle, it turns out, is immune to goof gas because he is, quite simply, simple. Bullwinkle cannot be affected by Boris’s goof gun because Bullwinkle has no intelligence to start with.

Moving from the world of cartoon satire to reality, we come to sunny California, and Clovis, the CEO of Clovis Systems. One fine day, Clovis announced a major restructuring.

“We are good,” he said, “but as a company, we need to be great.”

His particular choice of words was inspired by the title of the book that had inspired him to action: Jim Collin’s “Good to Great.”

The only problem with “Good to Great” is that you have to recognize the implicit assumption: that you’re starting from “good.” If you’re starting from “pathetic,” well, it doesn’t work quite so well. In fact, Clovis Systems was immune to “Good to Great,” for reasons eerily similar to why Bullwinkle Moose is immune to goof gas.

To make matters worse, Clovis’s approach to the whole concept of moving to greatness was lacking. “Great” is an impressive sounding word, but what does it mean? The answer depends on the person and the organization. By never defining what he meant, by never painting a picture of what “great” would mean, Clovis doomed his efforts from the start. But even if he had conveyed a clear destination, that wouldn’t have been enough.

Clovis made his announcement and then he didn’t follow through. If you want people to change, you need to do more than just tell them about the change.

To begin with, Clovis needed to help his employees recognize that some major changes were even necessary. From their perspective, things were pretty good. Having Clovis announce a major restructuring out of the blue looked to them like goof gas. All Clovis managed to do with his announcement was generate confusion, and confused people don’t move forward: they dig in their heels and try to stop moving until they can figure out what is going on. Therefore, Clovis should have started by talking with his employees about the disadvantages of the status quo. What were they unhappy about? What would they like to see done better? What was getting in the way of their doing their jobs?

Only by getting his employees thinking about what was wrong would they become open to the idea of change.

Once people start to think about change as desirable, the next step is to get them to think about it as possible and is something that they are capable of bringing about.

Trying to persuade them rarely works. The more you push, the more they resist. Instead, it’s time for a new set of questions. What would help you make the change? How have you made successful changes in the past? What resources do you have to help you make the change? What resources do you need? What strengths do you have that will make this work? What strengths does the company have?

Notice that every one of these questions focuses on the positive: on why the change is possible. If you focus on the negative, then all you’ll get is a litany of objections. While it’s important to identify and overcome obstacles, first you need to convince people that they are capable of overcoming those obstacles! Focus on success, not on failure.

Once Clovis had his team thinking of change as desirable and as something they could do, then it’s time to get concrete. If you wait too long, you’ll lose momentum, so it’s important to take advantage of the enthusiasm while it lasts. How will we make these changes? What do we need to do? How will we get started? How will we know we’ve started? How will we know we’re making progress?

Sometimes, if it’s hard to figure out how to start, it can help to forget about the how and focus purely on what you want to have happen. Get people talking and brainstorming and see how many different ideas you can generate. Do it right, and you’ll be amazed how many different approaches you’ll have.

Periodically, pause and summarize the progress you’re making. Echo it back to your employees. Let them see the small successes from the start. Each success builds momentum and keeps people believing that they can succeed. Recognize that people will make mistakes and that’s not a problem. Make it easy to recover and move on; you want employees to admit mistakes and correct them, not hide them out of fear of punishment.

Finally, keep everyone in the company moving forward together. When people move as a group, they support and encourage each other. When you leave people behind, the others stop to help their friends, or they insist on going back to get them. Either way, you lose forward momentum. If you already have strong teams, take advantage of their strength. If you don’t have strong teams, think of this as an opportunity to build team work. In either case, provide coaches, opportunities to practice the changes, room for experimentation, and vivid images of what the results will look like. Done right, not only will the mediocre teams become strong, but the strong teams will become excellent.

Clovis claimed he was serious about making his company great. However, he never did the work or committed the resources to make the change happen. In the end, he was breathing goof gas.