Killing the Princess: The Dangers of Goal Lockdown

Remember the Ford Pinto? If you don’t, you are not alone. The Pinto’s history was a troubled one, complete with explosions, fires, and lawsuits. In a nutshell, in the 1970s, Ford committed to building a small, light, inexpensive car. It turned out that while they were so committed to that goal, that they also made a car that was prone to exploding in an accident. Why did that happen? According to management professors Lisa Ordonez, Maurice Schweitzer, Adam Galinsky, and Max Bazerman, it was because the management at Ford set goals.

Wait a minute! Aren’t goals are supposed to be a good thing? Normally, yes. However, Ford’s management was supposedly so committed to their goals that they developed metaphorical tunnel vision. In other words, although they knew there were design problems with the Pinto, they ignored those problems in favor of the more powerful outcome goal they were committed to accomplishing. Interesting concept, but are there other examples?

In fact, yes. According to the same four professors, setting specific, high outcome goals led to dishonest behavior at Sears Auto Repair: by requiring mechanics to generate $147/hour of revenue, the mechanics were effectively incentivized to cheat customers. They also implicate goals in the Enron fiasco of the late 1990s. So, if goals are supposedly such wonderful things to have, how can we explain what happened? While it would be easy and comforting to simply say these four professors are ivory tower academics, that would be unjust and incorrect. In fact, they have a point: the best thing about goals is that you might just accomplish them; and the worst thing about goals is that you might just accomplish them.

To put it another way, goals are powerful tools. Like all power tools, it’s important to know how to use them correctly lest you cut yourself off at the knees. In a very real sense, the rules for goal setting and rules for chess have a great deal in common: both sets of rules are relatively simple, but the strategies for success within those rules are complex. Failing to understand the proper strategies leads to defeat. In the case of goals, it can lead to a phenomenon that I refer to as, “Goal Lockdown.” In Goal Lockdown, people become so fixated on their goals that they ignore all feedback or other information that they might be heading into trouble. Indeed, in extreme cases, they will take any feedback as confirmation that they are on track, even when the feedback is someone yelling, “Hey, didn’t that sign we just passed read ‘Bridge Out?’”

The dangers of improper goals are not limited to giant firms like Ford or Enron. I ran an organizational development serious game for a certain high tech company. This particular serious game takes participants outside of the normal business world, instead presenting them with a fantasy scenario with very real business problems. Instead of playing their normal roles of managers, engineers, salesmen, and so forth, the participants are kings, dukes, knights, wizards, and the like. Participants still must recruit allies, motivate others, negotiate over resources, and solve difficult problems. Changing the scenery, however, makes it fun and increases both learning and retention of the material.

In keeping with the fantasy nature of the scenario, a number of plots involve the princess. Unfortunately, for all those people who had plots, and goals, that included the princess, she was eliminated from the exercise; in other words, figuratively killed. What was particularly interesting, however, was that the people whose goals involved the princess found it extremely difficult to change those goals, even though they had just become impossible! This was Goal Lockdown in action. Fortunately, by experiencing it during the exercise, we were able to discuss it during the debriefing and the people at that company are now on guard against it.

Ultimately, if you don’t want to bother with serious games and if you do want to avoid Goal Lockdown, there are some steps you can take. The simplest is to identify your outcome but then focus on your strategy. How will you accomplish the goals? What are the steps you will take? How will you know you are succeeding and how will you know if you’re failing? A system that doesn’t tell us what failure looks like is a system that we won’t trust under pressure. In the long run, the more we focus on process and how that process will move us towards our objectives, the more likely we are to be successful: we are focusing on the things we can most easily change. It’s when we focus on the result and let the strategy take care of itself that we become most likely to fail, sometimes in very dramatic ways!

One life or two?

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

Another area of destructive stress is everyone’s favorite problem: conflict between work life and family life. The problem here lies in the basic premise that we have two lives: a work life and a family life and that these are somehow two separate existences. Perhaps if you are James Bond you get to live twice; the rest of us don’t have that luxury.

One of the biggest sources of frustration for employees is this illusion that these lives are separate. When we ask people to sacrifice family for the sake of the organization, we are putting them into a very stressful situation. In part, we are forcing them into a form of role ambiguity: they are being forced to play two roles at once or choose between two very important roles. We are also forcing them into a mental state where they are doing one thing but thinking about the other: a form of multi-tasking. This is a very bad place to be. Not only does it reduce performance, it also interferes with job satisfaction. As you’ll recall from our discussion of the High Performance Cycle, reducing job satisfaction reduces commitment to the organization, which interferes with goal accomplishment, better known as productivity.

Taking the time to respect people’s lives outside the organization is a powerful tool for building loyalty and commitment. Indeed, as we’ve discussed, time is a powerful gift. Sending people home a little early if you’re running ahead of schedule or accepting that quarterly report a little late so that Fred can attend his kid’s soccer game are extremely effective methods of reducing that work/family conflict. Flexible work from home policies are another good approach. When you make it easy for people to manage the demands of work and family, you build loyalty and increase satisfaction with the organization. That, in turn, feeds the High Performance Cycle.

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

Stephen R Guendert, PhD

CMG Director of Publications

What does lack of control do?

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

As we discussed earlier in this chapter, our own stress response is one of the signals that tells us that we are in danger. When we feel threatened, we look for the threat. If our attempts to identify the threat and make it go away fail, we first start to see the people in other departments as the source of the threat, and eventually our own colleagues as well. Fear is not that precise an instrument! In a very real sense, it doesn’t matter if we are physically afraid or afraid of being embarrassed or losing status, the reactions are the same. If anything, our fear of embarrassment or loss of face is often greater than our fear of physical harm!

Thus, when fear takes over, cooperation and teamwork suffer. People start to fight over little things, as they attempt to exert control over something. When we feel out of control, we seek to take control of what we can in whatever ways we can. When we don’t know what to do, we do whatever we can, whether effective or not, whether appropriate or not.

The stress of 20-20 hindsight

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

The hindsight trap can be best described by Dr. Watson saying to Sherlock Holmes at the end of the mystery, “It’s so obvious once you explain it!” Holmes famously does not reply by saying, “Elementary, my dear Watson,” though one might imagine that he is at least thinking it. The fact is, though, that what Holmes is doing is not elementary or obvious, as evidenced by how few readers can actually figure it out. In fact, being able to look at an apparently random collection of clues and figure out how they fit together is incredibly difficult. However, because after the fact it seems so clear, we are vulnerable to the hindsight trap: we assume that because hindsight is 20-20, foresight must have been 20-20 as well.

In rereading the Sherlock Holmes stories recently, I realized that Arthur Conan Doyle does play fair most of the time: he reveals the clues to the reader, or at least he reveals the fact that there was a clue in such a fashion as to provide the reader the information he needs to figure out what is going on. For example, there are times when Holmes is taking advantage of knowledge not readily accessible to the reader, such as Holmes’ enyclopedic knowledge of mud or cigar ash, but that’s not the point: it is a sufficient clue that Holmes is interested in the mud or the cigar ash. Despite this, it’s extremely hard to figure out the solution to the mystery before Holmes reveals it. Once revealed, though, it’s equally difficult to imagine the pieces fitting together any other way.

Now, if this phenomenon was limited to Sherlock Holmes mysteries, it would be rather thoroughly insignificant. Unfortunately, it happens all the time:

“I can’t believe she didn’t see that coming!”

“How could he have not noticed the problem ahead of time?”

“Were they even paying attention?!”

When something goes wrong, be that in a marketing campaign, a client engagement, developing an app, or launching a new online service, the reasons are almost always obvious… in hindsight. Like a Sherlock Holmes story, once the ending is clear, we can’t imagine any other arrangement of the pieces. Thus, we assume that not only is someone responsible, that person or that team must have been incompetent, indifferent, or careless, because they didn’t recognize what we now know to be completely obvious. Ironically, what I’ve observed over and over is that when someone does point out the potential problem, they are first laughed at for being too nervous and then when the problem is clear to everyone, castigated for not pushing their point more aggressively!

On the flip side, when someone does successfully anticipate and forestall a problem, their efforts are not taken seriously. After all, the problem was obvious, so why did it take them so long to figure it out and prevent it? Clearly, they weren’t working all that hard!

The net result of both of these manifestations of the hindsight trap is that self-confidence and the feeling of being in control are both eroded. This is a very bad combination, because eroding self-confidence makes us less likely to take actions that might demonstrate control, and reducing control also reduces our self-confidence. As we can see, getting caught in the hindsight trap is a very destructive form of stress.  In particularly severe situations, the hindsight trap can produce such a strong focus on the past that it leads to organizational stasis or passivity. No one is willing to make a decision because they are too afraid of being second-guessed for it later. The decision to do nothing is viewed as the safest course.

Taking this a little further, we can now understand why fear based motivation sooner or later causes trouble. Fear activates our fight/flight response: just ask Thag! Fear focuses our attention on the source of the fear; if we can’t easily find the source, then our attention is very likely going to be grabbed by anything which we think might be the cause. In the first case, when people are afraid of the boss, they are not focusing on the goals of the organization. Rather, they are focusing on pleasing the boss, or at least avoiding his wrath. While this can be a tremendous boost to the boss’s ego and self-esteem, it doesn’t do much for the employees. Their sense of control is now based not on their actual ability to address problems and accomplish goals, but on the far more nebulous ability to manipulate the boss. Cooperation, creativity, problem-solving, and the high-performance cycle all suffer in this scenario. In the second case, where attention is grabbed by whatever seems to be causing the fear, we again see a loss of control. In this case, the organization or the team spends its time and energy focused on the wrong things, and hence fails to adequately address the actual challenges in front of them. Constantly seeking to change something that doesn’t matter will sometimes briefly create an illusion of control, similar to constantly pressing a “Walk” signal that doesn’t actually work. More likely, though, is that the wrong focus leads to repeated failures to change the situation, and a steady erosion of both individual and team confidence.

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

When is stress destructive?

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

Stress is very much one of those things about which we can truthfully say, “Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.” While we are capable of handling very large amounts of stress and responding quite effectively to the demands upon us, too much for too long is a sure recipe for unbaking your team and burning out the members of your group or organization. It’s also the case that whether or not the stress is good or bad depends on context: being around other people revs us up. When it comes to brainstorming and bouncing ideas off others, this can be a very good thing. However, when it comes to complex problem solving and tasks requiring deep concentration, the presence of others can turn from energizing us to distracting us. In addition, there are certain types of stress that are more destructive than others: it’s not just the raw amount of stress that matters, but the nature of the stressful event.

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

George Washington Bridge Leadership

This article was originally published on the Human Talent Network

I very much enjoyed the Hunger Games, both the books and the movies. The story is a gripping one, of a dystopian future and the corrupt government that holds power through brutality and, of course, the Games. The portrayal of the political environment and machinations are particularly well done, with one notable exception: a certain major figure makes use of poison to further his aims. As a powerful government official, there is no reason for him to do that: he had the full apparatus of the state at his disposal and a team of loyal flunkies ready to act on his behalf. There was no reason for him to use as crude a tool as poison.

The power of the state, along with some loyal flunkies, was on full display in the news lately. The news this past week with was filled with stories of New Jersey governor Chris Christie and a scandal with the unfortunate, but inevitable, name of “Bridgegate.” According to the New York Times, Bridgegate involves having all but one lane of the George Washington Bridge closed down for four straight days last September, causing complete traffic gridlock in Fort Lee, NJ. Although Christie laughed it off at first, subsequent revelations are showing that people in his office were responsible. Indeed, he just fired his deputy chief of staff when it turned out she was involved.

In the political arena, the questions are, “What did Governor Christie know? When did he know it?” He claims that his staff kept the information from him. I am not particularly interested in those questions; this isn’t a political article. Rather, I am much more interested in what the behavior of Chris Christie’s immediate staff and appointees says about him as a leader and what lessons business leaders can learn from these events.

Leadership is a funny thing, and can take many forms. Some leaders and quiet and self-effacing; others are loud and brash. No matter the overt style adopted by a leader, the actions of the leader set the tone for the group. The leader who is organized and focused on building a good process eventually gets a staff who also value process. The leader who values results at all costs eventually gets a staff that values results at all costs. This is the nature of leadership: the leader is the person out in front, setting the example. The team follows the leader and the team imitates the leader. After all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and most people like to flatter the boss. People who imitate, that is, flatter the boss, are those whom the boss is most likely to reward.

Thus, how a team behaves when the leader isn’t looking tells us a great deal about the leader. If the team behaves ethically when no one is watching, then odds are pretty darn good that the leader holds to high ethical standards. On the other hand, if a team behaves unethically, that also says something about the example being set from the top.

Most leaders will also at least go through a period when their staff worships them. Good leaders recognize this can happen and work hard to get past it. Weaker leaders are quite happy to be worshipped and are content to foster and maintain that sort of atmosphere. The best leaders build up their followers and transform them into highly effective, ethical leaders as well.

In Governor Christie’s case, it appears that his direct reports deliberately withheld information from him and lied to him when he asked them about it. They also seem quite willing to take the fall for him, at least if the news reports are correct. Assuming this is all true, it tells us a great deal about his leadership and the state of his team.

What sort of example was Christie setting that led his people to believe that their behavior was acceptable? Had it been one person involved, well, occasionally bad apples do get in. The correct behavior is to fire them as soon as you find them.  Had the actions in question been taken by people far down the organizational hierarchy, that too would be less meaningful: The influence of the leader is always strongest at the top, and does weaken as we move further and further away from the centers of power. But the people involved in Fort Lee’s Traffigeddon were members of Christie’s inner circle. They apparently thought that using state power to pursue a private agenda was acceptable and that their boss would want them to do it. They also apparently thought that it was okay to lie to their boss about it. What sort of leader conveys those messages to his subordinates?

So how does this apply to business? Ultimately, the attitude the CEO exhibits is the attitude that the staff will imitate. At one maker of scientific software, the CEO viewed the customers as a bunch of incompetent idiots. Why did he take that view? Well, apparently they had the temerity to criticize aspects of his software. Of course, he never expressed his views to his customers, but he was quite open about them in private with his subordinates. This led to a general atmosphere of amusement and condescension when a customer called in for help. The customers, highly educated professionals, were not idiots; at least, they were sufficiently not idiotic to know when they were being laughed at and condescended to. Moreover, because customers were viewed as idiots, their feedback was routinely ignored. Eventually, as competing products entered the market, customers deserted the company in droves. In the end, the company went out of business.

If team members view the leader and the team as indistinguishable, the problem can get even worse. When the leader is too much the center of mass of the team, team members won’t wait for instructions. Instead, they will attempt to do what they think the boss wants, often without really considering whether those actions are necessarily the best actions to take. When you add to that mix a sufficiently inappropriate role model, you have a serious problem brewing. Of course, in Chris Christie’s case, it didn’t just brew; it boiled over, and he will have to clean up the mess. High performance teams, on the other hand, understand their goals, think through the process of accomplishing those goals, and consider the ramifications of their actions.

Ultimately, the more your team likes you, the more they want to impress you. Assuming they are sufficiently skilled to take action without your specific instructions, the actions they do take will be governed by how they feel about you and by the example you set. The initiative they take will be the initiative you’ve taught them is good. In other words, if you’re wondering how your team could have done something amazingly brilliant, or utterly stupid, all you really need to do is look in the mirror. If you want to change what your team is doing, that’s the place to start.

How Do You Make Sure You’re in the Right Place at the Right Time?

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

“Slow down.”

I can’t count the number of times that my original sensei would say that to me when I started practicing jujitsu. It drove me nuts. I never felt like I was moving fast. Besides, what was wrong with going fast? Now, after twenty years of jujitsu practice, I’m constantly telling my students to “slow down.”

Speed is a funny thing. It appears to be the most important thing in martial arts: being able to block quickly, hit quickly, throw quickly. However, when you move fast, there’s a tendency to overshoot the target, to over-commit. The block is too wide or the punch is over-extended, leaving you vulnerable. It’s easy to miss obvious feints by an opponent, and walk into a fist. Speed also leaves you physically and emotionally exhausted, unable to actually complete a workout. Indeed, the most skilled practitioners never seem to move all that fast. Rather, they become extremely good at always being in the right place at the right time. Speed comes from precision, but precision does not come from speed.

I’m frequently reminded of this phenomenon when I work with my clients. There is a tendency at many companies to try to do more and more in less and less time. The logic seems to be that if people just worked quickly enough, they would be able to get the job done. Instead, though, the error count is increasing even faster than the productivity. The time spent going back and correcting problems and fixing bugs more than makes up for the time saved by moving faster.

In jujitsu, moving fast can appear to work for a while. Eventually, though, you run into someone who knows what they are doing and you get punched in the nose. In a business, moving fast can also appear to work for a while. The major difference is that when you get punched in the nose, it’s not quite as obvious. It still happens though, and usually when you least expect it.

The problem once again is that moving rapidly does not equate to moving precisely. In a corporate setting, that lack of precision translates to instructions not being read closely, exceptions not being recognized, assumptions not being tested, or flat out inaccurate information not being corrected. It can also mean overreacting to a competitor’s product release or to a news story. In jujitsu, you may not have time to stop and think: if you haven’t prepared and trained, then you may just be out of luck. In a business environment, you may feel that you can’t stop and think, but the reality is far different. Unlike jujitsu, decisions don’t need to be made in fractions of a second. There is time to pause and consider the situation: even in the Apollo 13 disaster, NASA’s Eugene Krantz slowed everyone down and collected information before deciding what to do. Knowing when to slow down is what saved the astronauts; moving too quickly would have only compounded the problems beyond recovery.

Fortunately, most of us will never face the kind of life-or-death scenario that Eugene Krantz had to face. That, in turn, only makes the tendency to move too fast even more inexcusable.

The first problem, of course, is recognizing that you are moving too fast. Just as in jujitsu, it is surprisingly not obvious to the person, or team, that they need to slow down. It helps, therefore, to learn to recognize the symptoms of speed.

One of the easiest ones to spot is when the same types of errors just keep cropping up no matter what you do. You fix them in one place, they appear somewhere else. You come up with procedures for reducing the errors and for each mistake that you remove, a new one takes its place. One health related company demanded such a high throughput of patient claims that they were constantly dealing with forms being rejected because of mistakes. So they put in a layer of checklists to make sure the forms were done correctly. Then a layer of paperwork to make sure the checklists were correct. The errors simply kept shifting and the responses only created a slower and steadily more unwieldy system in which the ability to generate billable hours is limited by the need to do paperwork. The company is now one of the leading exporters of red tape. If they had but slowed down a little, they would have finished considerably more quickly.

Another common symptom of moving too fast is feeling like you’ve spent the day on a treadmill: you’re exhausted but it feels like nothing really got accomplished. Items on the to-do list never seem to go away or items that are crossed off keep coming back a few days or weeks later. When problems that were thought solved keep reappearing, that tells you that you need to slow down and put more time into understanding what’s going and devising more robust solutions. Unfortunately, when you’re feeling rushed, a quick solution feels good and creates a temporary oasis of calm. That feeling can be addicting: at one software company, one department developed the habit of simply marking any bugs that had been around for a while as fixed. They knew that it would sometimes take at least two or three weeks before the bugs could be verified. Maybe they’d go away. Maybe they would no longer be relevant. Maybe there’d be more time later to actually look at them. Sure, they almost always came back, but so what? They bought themselves time to relax, and managed to make themselves look good because their bug count was always low. The actual problems with the product, on the other hand, were never addressed.

If you want to move fast, you first have to learn to move with precision. That means starting slowly and learning how to be in the right place at the right time. Otherwise, you spend all your time and energy rushing about overshooting your target and fixing your mistakes.

Are You Helping Your Business Team to Warm Up?

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

Not so long ago, a friend of mine walked into a meeting moving with all the fluidity and grace of the Tin Woodsman after a rainstorm. He was doing a credible job of moving forward while doing his best to not actually move his legs. As a form of locomotion, I would not have believed it possible if I hadn’t seen it.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I was practicing layups last night, and this morning I couldn’t move.”

A serious amateur basketball player, he had done some serious practice the night before. Unfortunately, he had neglected to warm up: he was in a hurry and felt that he didn’t have time to do a slow warm-up. Instead, he had “warmed up” by doing a number of fast, sharp moves, which ended up straining his lower back and legs. It was no wonder he was having trouble walking. The time he “saved” by not warming up, he paid back with interest over the next several days.

At this point, I suspect many readers are nodding sagely and thinking that only an idiot forgets to warm up before an activity. Unfortunately, they’d be wrong. Very smart people, very knowledgeable people forget to warm up. Furthermore, it’s not just individual athletes who forget to warm up; teams do as well. Moreover, it’s not just athletic teams that occasionally forget. Work teams routinely forget to perform the functional equivalent of warming up; even worse, most of them believe that it’s not necessary. In sports, many an athlete has learned the hard way that no matter how often you can get away without warming up, it only takes one time when you didn’t get away with it to drive home the error of your ways.

Unfortunately, businesses tend to be slower learners, perhaps because the pain is not so obviously connected to the actions taken or not taken. What does it mean for a team to warm up? In sports, the answer is pretty easy. They run, they stretch, they practice the skills of their sport. They might eventually play practice games.

In business, however, it’s less obvious. However, just as athletic warm-ups are based in understanding the activities that the athlete needs to perform, the equivalent behaviors can be deduced for a business team. In sports, an athletic team needs to be able to function as a seamless unit, each member automatically moving to where they need to be. Top basketball players often seem to have an almost uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time to assist one another.

In a business, it’s critical that a team be able to bring the right person or right combination of people to bear on any given problem. That can only happen if the members of the team are fully knowledgeable about one another’s strengths and weaknesses, are comfortable asking each other for help, and feel safe in admitting that they might need help. The last point is critical: far too often members of a team are seen as less competent or less capable if they ask for help. I’ve been in many companies where the stated attitude was that you were hired to do a job, and if you need help, you don’t belong here. That’s rather like Michael Jordan trying to sink the basket without any help from the rest of his team. If the rest of the team wasn’t backing him up, he wouldn’t be so successful.

Therefore, for a business team to “warm up,” they need to focus on preparing their teamwork skills so that those skills will be there under pressure. That means spending time getting to know one another and developing an appreciation of one another’s skills, interests, accomplishments, perspectives, and working styles. That includes, by the way, skills, interests, and accomplishments that are not obviously work related. Knowing that a coworker is a chess master, for example, tells you something about their ability to concentrate, plan tactics, execute strategy, anticipate problems, and deal with distractions. Knowing that someone is a marathon runner might tell you a great deal about their tenacity and ability to focus. Team members can only truly become comfortable with one another when they know each other as individuals, not as someone hired to do a job.

As paradoxical as it might seem, the secret of a successful team is strong individual connection! Just as top athletes look for ways to assist their teammates, so too must members of business teams practice helping one another. That means getting past the “I can do it myself!” attitude: it may be endearing in a 4 year old, but it’s extremely frustrating in a coworker. No matter how much you can do on your own, you can do more when backed by a strong team. We would have no patience with a basketball player who lost the game because they turned down an assist. Indeed, someone who took an “I can do it all myself” attitude would probably be cut from the team.

Finally, management needs to think about how it’s evaluating the team and its members. Are they being evaluated on individual contribution only? It’s extremely hard to help someone else score if only the scorer gets the credit. It’s hard to accept help if that’s seen as reducing one’s own status on the team. Part of enabling a team to “warm up” its helping skills is removing any obstacles that may be in the way of using those skills. What if the team doesn’t bother to warm up? Will disaster necessarily ensue? Of course not. You might not have any problem at all, nine times out ten. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing in advance which time is the tenth time.

How are you helping your team warm up?

Passports Please

“May I see your passport?”

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

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

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

“No, I need your passports.”

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

“I don’t carry my passport,” I reply.

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

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

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

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

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

They argue for a while.

“A bird hit the plane,” says Moe.

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

“A bird hit the plane,” says Moe.

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

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

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

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

The Final Frontier

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

“Space, the final frontier.”

–          Captain James T. Kirk

To be fair, Captain Kirk was talking about a different kind of space than what concerns us here. It may seem a little odd that a book on organizational psychology would be concerned with space; fundamentally, however, we are creatures of our environment. We respond to what is around us and how we perceive the space we are in can affect our moods, our creativity, even our perceptions that our team is worth our time. How people feel about the space they are in can influence whether or not they believe a leader is authentic!

Imagine that you are going to rent an office: you approach the building and see peeling paint and dead trees outside. How does that shape your impression of the building? What will your clients think when they see it? What if you were going to visit a doctor whose office was in that building? Perhaps you’re already beginning to have doubts. Sure, she has great recommendations, but could someone competent really work out of a building like that? Of course, once you step inside you might find a brightly lit, professional office, but first you have to get that far.

Well known psychologist Martin Seligman once observed that as the chair of the psychology department at the University of Pennsylvania, he interviewed many people who went on to become quite famous in the field of psychology… somewhere else. Why were none of the candidates accepted? Reviewing the applications, he and the rest of the faculty found something wrong with each candidate and consistently felt that their strengths just weren’t strong enough. Eventually, Seligman noticed that they were holding all their candidate reviews in a gray, windowless, conference room. When he tried holding the meetings in a brightly lit, colorful space, suddenly the candidates’ flaws didn’t seem so bad and their strengths were considerably more obvious.

Our moods and our environment feed off one another. It’s hard to be discouraged on a bright, summer day, and hard to be excited when it’s cold and gray outside. Similarly, when our work environment is gray or boring, we tend to be less trusting, less creative, less open to new ideas, and less cooperative. We spend more of our mental energy just trying to be vaguely cheerful, and less on actually getting the work done. Conversely, when we are in open, brightly lit spaces, we tend to be more willing to trust and cooperate with others, happier, more energetic, more creative, and considerably more open to new ideas and experiences. If successful innovation and brainstorming requires that we suspend disbelief and open ourselves to off-the-wall ideas – and that is exactly what they do require – then we need to construct our environment to encourage that mindset.

“…[Organizational Psychology for Managers] 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