This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.
As for what you have to do to encourage innovation, that’s actually pretty easy. We’ve discussed all of these elements repeatedly throughout this book:
- Continuous learning – As we discussed in chapter 5, continuous learning is key to motivation. It is also key to innovation. Innovation comes from putting together familiar things in new ways. The more you know, the more likely that is to happen. Steve Jobs knew nothing about building computers, but that didn’t stop him from inventing the iPhone.
- Mistakes – At the risk of beating a dead horse, mistakes are feedback. How many light bulbs have you made?
- Take breaks – Another topic we’ve discussed at length. Creativity doesn’t happen when you’re exhausted. The “Eureka!” moment comes when you take a break and see things differently.
- Patience – Innovation is an ongoing process. If you wait until you desperately need a breakthrough before you start, your odds of success will be better in Vegas. Creativity takes time. Innovation is most important when it seems the least necessary.
I hear from many businesses that they’d like to be more innovative. What’s stopping you?
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.
Stephen R Guendert, PhD
CMG Director of Publications
I’m getting tired of hearing people say, “Oh I get it. We didn’t plan to fail, we failed to plan.”
When I’m working with a business to help them understand why their process is failing or their projects are off course, sooner or later someone comes out with this little gem. At that point, everyone nods sagely as though they’ve actually solved something. They are missing the point. If that was all that was wrong, they wouldn’t need help.
Sure, it’s certainly true that if you fail to plan, you’re far more likely to fail, but knowing that doesn’t actually address the real problem: they are taking the “failure is not an option” mindset. This is a fantastic line in a movie, but has some problems in reality.
When we take the mindset that failure is something that cannot be accepted, we are implicitly stating that failure is a terrible thing, something so terrible that we cannot even consider it. It’s an attitude similar to that taken by many martial artists, who teach their students that they must never allow themselves to be taken off balance. All their training is then based on the idea of never being off balance. As a result, when they are off balance, they freeze.
A youthful student once watched Morehei Uyeshiba, the founder of Aikido, sparring with a much younger, stronger opponent. After Uyeshiba defeated the guy, the young student said to him, “Master, that was amazing. You never lose your balance!”
Uyeshiba’s reply: “You are mistaken. I frequently lose my balance. My secret is that I know how to regain it quickly.”
Uyeshiba recognized that loss of balance is a normal part of any fight. By training to rapidly regain his balance, he stripped the experience of its emotional content. It was merely something that happened, and something which he well knew how to recover from. As a result, not only were his opponents unable to capitalize on taking him off balance, when he took their balance, they didn’t know what to do.
Failure is the same. When failure becomes something we fear, it can cause us to freeze. At one company, the first hiccup in a string of successes led to panic by the CEO. He wasn’t used to failing, and he didn’t know what to do about it.
The problem is that fear of failure causes us to avoid risk and not experiment with new ideas. When something goes wrong, as it inevitably will, we figuratively lose our balance and become momentarily stuck. If we think that failure means something terrible will happen, we opt for the safe course. Unfortunately, the safe course is often not the best course or the wisest course. It’s merely the one that minimizes the short-term risk to us, potentially at the cost of long-term risk to the team. That, of course, is just fine: if the entire team fails, no one is to blame.
Conversely, when we accept that along the route to success there will be many failures along the way, and when we practice viewing failures as a form of feedback, the negative emotional component of failure is eliminated. Instead, we simply have information: something we attempted did not work the way we expected. What does that mean? What is that telling us about our plan? About our process? About the competitive landscape?
Failure is a way of calibrating our efforts and focusing our energy. Particularly early in a project, small failures are, or should be, common. The less defined the project, the more exploration needs to occur in order to adequately and accurately define the milestones. Indeed, early milestones are best thought of as little more than wishful thinking: opportunities to put stakes in the ground and see what happens when we get there. It’s the chance to see how well the team members are working together, how effective the leader is being, how effectively the team can make decisions and implement a course of action.
When we fear failure, the fear itself is often more damaging than the failure! The key to succeeding at large, important projects is to recognize that failures will happen along the way. By accepting the information that failure gives us and cultivating the mindset that failures are recoverable and useful, failure truly does make us more, not less, likely to succeed.
April 15th,2014
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This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.
Some years ago, when I was getting married, my wife and I engaged in the traditional ritual of the Choosing of the China. After trying to choose between china patterns all afternoon, the thought of being eaten alive by creatures from another planet was looking more and more attractive. Fortunately, it wasn’t an available option! By the end of the day, I just wanted the choices to end. I was ready to agree to anything. Indeed, I’ve often wondered if the reason police shows never use choosing china patterns as a form of interrogation is that it is seen as just too cruel.
In their book, “Willpower,” psychologist Roy Baumeister and NY Times reporter John Tierney discuss the phenomenon of will and decision making in great detail. From an organizational perspective, though, there are some key points that we need to consider as they have far reaching effects on organizational effectiveness.
As anyone who has ever had to choose china patterns can attest, the process is exhausting. We can only make so many decisions in a day before we start to feel like our brains are turning to goo and are trickling out of our ears. Part of the problem is that decisions are not always obvious: you’ll recall in chapter 11 we discussed the point that part of focusing on a task is being able to distinguish what is important from what is not. That separation is a form of decision making. Tuning out that annoying coworker in the cubicle down the hall is a decision. Indeed, what Baumeister found is that our decision making and our overall willpower are inextricably linked. The more decisions we have to make, the less willpower we have left for other things, like focusing on a problem or being creative.
Part of why decision making in groups works the way it does is that the energy people have determines the types of decisions they can make. In stage one groups, people are spending most of their time and energy just figuring out how to work together; thus, we end up with directive leadership being the most effective style in that situation. The group members lack both the decision making skill and energy for more sophisticated decision making techniques. As the group members become more comfortable with one another, the combination of learning to work together and increasing skill at decision making enables the group to develop and move to higher levels of performance.
Unfortunately, unlike physical tiredness, the sort of mental tiredness that comes with decision fatigue isn’t always so obvious. It’s not like we stop making decisions; rather, we just make increasingly poor decisions. When we’re mentally tired, we have trouble making the types of decisions that involve risk. We’re much more likely to just choose the thing that’s easy, which is generally to do little or nothing; to not try that new initiative or explore that new product idea. The planned bold new leap forward at dawn becomes a hesitant shuffle by the end of the day. Whether at an individual or a group level, we are subject to decision making errors of this sort. With groups, though, the poor decision is then amplified by the echo chamber effect of group polarization.
Riveting! Yes, I called a leadership book riveting. I couldn’t wait to finish one chapter so I could begin reading the next. The book’s 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.
Eric Bloom
President
Manager Mechanics, LLC
Nationally Syndicated Columnist and Author
April 11th,2014
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This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.
One of the things that world class successful organizations, the organizations that keep innovating and growing and reinventing themselves, have in common is a remarkably effective ability to solve problems. What is interesting, however, is that they don’t necessarily get it right the first the time; often, perhaps, but not always. What they are extremely good at is knowing how to solve problems in ways that constantly reinforce their cultural beliefs of optimism and success.
To begin with, problem solving is really a question of goal setting. In this case, it is a goal where the outcome is to make the problem go away. Unfortunately, that’s not really enough information to create a specific goal, although plenty of businesses try. There are, however, many ways to make a problem go away at least temporarily. Hence, if that’s all you focus on, you end up with a problem that feels like a boomerang in a Saturday morning cartoon: it keeps coming back and whacking you upside the head. Thus, we need to do a bit more work in order to formulate effective goals around solving our problem.
Before we can solve a problem there is one thing we absolutely have to know. What might that be? Whether I ask this of college students or managers, I always get the same response: puzzled looks and then people start yelling out answers such as, “the solution,” or “the cost of the problem,” or “what resources we need,” or a host of other answers. Eventually somebody says, “Don’t we have to know what the problem is?”
Exactly. Before you can find a solution, you have to identify the problem. As obvious as this may sound, if you don’t know the actual problem, then your solution isn’t likely to fix it. There are a great many solutions out there looking for problems.
A problem can be broken down into three major pieces: there is the actual problem, whatever that may be. We don’t know what the problem is because we can’t actually see it; what we can see are the effects of the problem. That may mean deadlines being missed or angry customers calling to complain or a lack of motivation or difficulty hiring or retaining talent, or countless other things. Those are the symptoms of the problem. Finally, there are the things that occur around the problem, things which attract our attention but which are basically irrelevant to the situation. They look important but they’re not. That’s known as chrome: the shiny stuff that draws our eye and distracts us from what really matters.
Balzac preaches real engagement with one’s own company and a mindful state of operation, especially by executives – who must remember that culture “just happens” unless and until they learn to recognize that their behaviors play a huge part in creating and cementing it. It covers the full spectrum of corporate life, from challenging bad decisions to hiring, training, motivating teams – and the secrets of keeping people engaged and learning – and/or avoiding actions which do the opposite. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to participate in creating and steering company culture.”
Sid Probstein
Chief Technology Officer
Attivio – Active Intelligence
This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.
Basically, a routine is a series of actions that we perform so often that they become automatic and which often produce a particular mindset. The more we practice the routine, the more rapidly we create the mindset. Eventually, merely contemplating the routine will initiate the mental state, although performing the routine is still essential most of the time if we want it to last. When an athlete executes a pre-performance routine, that routine is intended to get them physically and mentally prepared for competition. Many people create morning routines around breakfast, coffee, and reading the news as a way of mentally preparing to focus on the day’s work. My first jujitsu sensei used to tell us that the reason we bowed as we entered the dojo was to leave the day’s baggage at the door so that we could concentrate on the workout. If we practiced the routine with that image in mind, it worked. If we didn’t, it didn’t.
Quite often, though, routines are created less carefully. They just build up over time: for example, the student I described in the opening to this chapter was in the process of building up a routine around her throws. Throw, focus on the negative, produce a negative, pessimistic mindset, repeat. Of course, as she built that mindset, her throws would get worse, there would be more negatives to focus on, and so it went. When this process isn’t interrupted, students start dreading the practice of throwing because they’ve built such negative associations.
I’ve encountered this phenomenon in jujitsu, and also when conducting seminars on mental skills techniques for athletes in other sports. It comes up in the business world as well: as I alluded to at the beginning of this chapter, in one particularly dramatic example, a software engineering team at one major company would conduct a post-mortem review after each product ship. Unfortunately, as we know from chapter three, group polarization can produce extremes of behavior in a team. In this case, team members all wanted to demonstrate that they were serious and dedicated and open to giving and receiving criticism. It wasn’t long before each product ship was followed by a laser-like focus on the flaws, while the very real successes were minimized or ignored. Over time, the ability of the team declined simply because they convinced themselves that they just weren’t all that good and eventually product quality followed. Then they really did have something to complain about! Performance reviews are another area in which routines develop over time, a point well illustrated by the number of managers who complain to me about how unpleasant it is to even contemplate the review process!
Riveting! Yes, I called a leadership book riveting. I couldn’t wait to finish one chapter so I could begin reading the next. The book’s 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.
Eric Bloom
President
Manager Mechanics, LLC
Nationally Syndicated Columnist and Author
March 24th,2014
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Marvel Comic’s Avengers are a pretty impressive bunch. Thor, Captain America, Ironman, and the Hulk make a fearsome combination: Captain America is practically indestructible, Thor flies around throwing lightning, Ironman, aka Tony Stark, is like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs rolled into one, and the Hulk is, well, the Hulk. When it comes to fighting off alien invasions, these guys have power to spare. That’s a good thing, because impressive as they are individually, as a team they aren’t so hot. Their inability to coordinate well would have been a total disaster if they hadn’t had such tremendous power and a friendly script writer in the basement to back them up. In fact, after watching them in action, it’s easy to understand why Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Nick Fury, is bald.
But wait! Sure, the Avengers have their issues, but they do pull together and beat off the invasion. They may have been at each other’s throats earlier in the movie, but aren’t they a team by the end? What’s the problem?
Fundamentally, the problem is that the Avengers are not really ever a team; rather, they are a group of people, more or less, who are able to agree that working together is less awful than the alternative. That, as the poet said, is not exactly a ringing endorsement! Even without Loki’s mind games, they were already barely civil to one another. He merely accentuated what was already happening, pushing them into open conflict.
The Avengers, of course, are fiction. Sadly, this unity of crisis is not. A common problem in business settings are teams whose members barely interact until the pressure of the oncoming deadline forces them to work together at least enough to get something out the door. At one company, this non-interaction took the form of endless debates and decisions that were revisited every week or two. At another company, the team ended up dominated by a couple of loud members, while the rest simply tried not to be noticed. In neither situation was there productive debate, problem solving, or effective decision making; unlike the Avengers, the motions they went through were not particularly dramatic or exciting. On the bright side, again unlike in the movie, no flying aircraft carriers were harmed.
When I’m speaking on organizational development, it’s at about this point that someone interrupts to tell me that they are communicating: they are sending email. Don’t get me wrong; email is a wonderful tool. However, it’s not some sort of magic cure-all. When I actually sit down with groups to look at their communications patterns, we quickly find out that while emails may be sent to everyone in the group, they are really only for the benefit of the team lead. Quite often, the email chain quickly becomes an echo chamber or an electronic trail useful only to prove a point or hurt a competitor when reviews come around.
The challenge every team faces is helping its members learn to communicate. It seems so simple: after all, everyone is speaking the same language. As we see in the Avengers, though, that is not entirely true. While the words all may sound the same, each person is bringing their own perspectives, assumptions, and beliefs to the table. Moreover, each person is bringing their own assumptions about what the goals are and the best way to accomplish them. Also, not unlike the Avengers, there is often a certain amount of friction between different team members. While most business teams do not explode into physical violence, the verbal equivalent does occur. Unlike the Avengers, when that happens many teams simply fall apart. Although the Avengers avoid that fate, it was close. While that experience may be exciting in a movie, I find that most business leaders would rather skip the drama.
So what can be done to create real unity, instead of a unity of crisis? To begin with, it takes time. Sorry, but just like baking a cake, if you simply turn up the temperature of the oven, all you get is a mess. Teams are the same: if you rush, you still spend the same amount of time but with less to show for it.
Assuming that you use your time well, it is particularly important for the team lead to set the tone: invite questions and discussions, but also be willing to end debate and move on. At first, team members will be happy to have the leader end the debate; eventually, though, they’ll start to push back. That’s good news: your team is coming together and starting to really engage. Now you can start really dissecting the goals of the team, and really figure out the best ways of doing things. Start letting the team members make more of the decisions, although you may have to ratify whatever they come up with for the decision to be accepted. Encourage questions and debate, but do your best to keep your own opinions to yourself: the process of learning to argue well isn’t easy and if the team members realize you have a preference, the tendency is for the team to coalesce around that preference. Alternately, the team may simply resist your choice just because it’s coming from you. Better to not go there.
A unity of crisis can be very useful for a one off event, such as saving the world from an alien invasion. But for more mundane, ongoing, projects, real unity is a far better outcome.
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 McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” and “Organizational Psychology for Managers.” He is also 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.
March 14th,2014
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This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.
The powerful thing about providing people control is that it builds their sense of competence and autonomy. They become more likely to tackle difficult projects and are less willing to give up. However, if we approach control in the wrong way, we can easily reverse those effects. It’s easy to order people to do something and then tell them exactly how to do it: that’s not giving them control. That’s micromanaging.
The more serious problem, though, is when you routinely second-guess people’s decisions: a form of the hindsight trap we discussed in the previous chapter. Remember that your goal is not to have people make the decisions you would make, but to make the decisions you can work with. As we discussed in the section on feedback, focus on what people did right. When you do have to correct something, make sure you clearly explain why the decision the incorrect and how they can fix it in the future. Avoid doing this unless it really is necessary: frequent correction only undermines confidence and destroys the sense of control. I’m not in control if I’m always wrong! If you are finding that you have to frequently correct people, either you haven’t adequately conveyed the goals to them, you have the wrong people, you haven’t provided them proper training, or you are too sensitive.
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
This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.
It’s worth a brief discussion at this point of the concept of making things easy. My first jujitsu sensei used to frequently remind me to not stand my partner’s foot when I was trying to throw him. It was frustrating for me and didn’t particularly amuse my partner.
All too often, we get in our own way when we want people to do something. There is a big difference between making it hard for someone to say “No” and making it easy for them to say “Yes.” When we make it hard to say “No,” we are also making it hard to say “Yes” because we are, in effect, denying the other person autonomy or control. When we make it easy for them to say “Yes,” we are constructing the situation to produce the results we want and letting the other person freely choose to give us those results. As one Googler in that NY Times article put it, even on days off she comes into the office: there’s always healthy food available and it’s a more interesting place to be.
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.
Stephen R Guendert, PhD
CMG Director of Publications
This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.
As we’ve discussed in previous chapters, celebrating success is a critical part of building motivation and accomplishing long-term goals. Celebrating success is part of how we know we’re on track. One component of celebrating those successes along the way is to periodically pause to admire your handiwork. The basic rule here is this:
You will never admire it more than you do right now.
This requires some explanation. Any complex project has intermediate steps. Those steps are opportunities to stop and take a long, hard, look at your work. Do you like what you see? If you don’t, sleep on it. If you still don’t like it, you won’t like it more when you’re done; in fact, the odds are very high that you’ll like it much much less. If you ignore that feeling, then each subsequent step is going to remind you of the thing you didn’t like, which is only going to to undermine your enthusiasm for the project. When we’ve worked hard at something and we just don’t feel good about the result, that’s a clue that something is wrong. It may not be immediately obvious what that wrong thing is, but the odds are pretty darn good that it’s there and whatever it is isn’t going to just get up and walk away on its own.
When we were remodeling one of the bathrooms in our house, my wife designed and built several ceramic tile shelves, complete with colored glass trim that matched the shower enclosure. She completed the shelves, and stopped to admire them. She wasn’t happy with the result. She couldn’t really put her finger on why, but something wasn’t right. She ended up redoing them. The second time around was not only much better, but once we had the redone shelves to look at, even I could clearly see why the originals didn’t work. One very important lesson here is that you can’t always tell what’s wrong until you redo it; if you redo it and you and find you can admire it, it’ll also often be obvious what was wrong before.
An important caveat here is that this method works in the context of having defined goals for what you are trying to accomplish. Without goals, you have nothing to measure against. Without that sense of comparison, your ability to admire is likely to be influenced by any number of extraneous factors. As with all skills, this technique gets better with practice.
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.
Stephen R Guendert, PhD
CMG Director of Publications
This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers.
“It was a terrible throw!”
This statement was made to me by a student in my jujitsu class. She then proceeded to elaborate on all the ways in which she had executed the throw incorrectly. Her partner, meanwhile, was patiently lying on the ground at her feet where she had thrown him. Observing this fact, I eventually commented that the throw couldn’t have been all that bad. After all, it had accomplished its primary objective: putting the other person flat on his back.
In jujitsu, it’s easy to perform a technique and then focus on everything wrong with it; after all, a technique can always be improved. The problem, however, is that when you focus on all the problems you lose sight of the big picture which, in this case, was that the technique was successful. Was there room for improvement? Of course there was. That room for improvement doesn’t change the basic success, unless we allow it to.
The same phenomenon happens in business all the time. After a grueling marathon of long days and late nights, the team finally ships the product. Rather than celebrate the release, they focus entirely on the bugs that didn’t get fixed, or the features that they didn’t have time to put in. In one rather egregious case, the director of engineering was busily berating his team for their “lousy” work even as the customers were singing their praises!
As we have discussed in a number of different contexts throughout this book, a focus on success is far more rewarding and, well, successful, than a focus on failure. When we only look at failure, we start to think of ourselves as failures. When we look at success, we think of ourselves as successful. Failure is depressing; success is exhilarating. When we feel like we’re failing, our willpower is wasted just forcing ourselves to keep going. We try to make things easier in order to feel a success, any success. When we are successful, we start setting our sights ever higher. Think about the motivation trap and the high performance cycle!
Riveting! Yes, I called a leadership book riveting. I couldn’t wait to finish one chapter so I could begin reading the next. The book’s 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.
Eric Bloom
President
Manager Mechanics, LLC
Nationally Syndicated Columnist and Author