The Business Sensei

The Missing I

As published in MeasureIT

 

“There is no me. I had it surgically removed.”

— Peter Sellers

At one high tech company that I worked with, I watched an interesting scenario unfold: after completing a major milestone, the engineers were high-fiving and taking some time to brag about their accomplishments. Enthusiasm and excitement were running high when a member of senior management decided to interrupt the gathering with the reminder that, “There is no ‘I’ in team.”

This utterance had an effect not dissimilar to that of a skunk wandering into a fancy dinner party. On the scale of wet blankets, this was one that had been left out in the rain for a week. Within a few seconds, all that enthusiasm was gone, vanished into the ether. Properly harnessed, that enthusiasm could have catapulted the team into its next milestone. Instead, the team approached its next milestone with a shocking lack of energy, especially given the successes they’d had to that point.

The problem is that while there may not be an “I” in team, a team is made up of individuals. There are three “I”’s in individual. What does a team do? Well, in most situations we hope the team will win. There’s an “I” right there in the middle of win. Oddly enough, you can’t win if you take out the “I.”

While it’s critical for a team to be able to work together and for members of the team not to be competing with one another, that’s only a piece of the puzzle. It’s equally important that each member of the team feel that they are an integral part of the team’s success. Without that personal connection, it’s extremely difficult to get people excited about the work.

Unfortunately, I see companies far too often treating team members as interchangeable parts, not as unique individuals. Not only does this undermine the team, it is also a tremendous waste of resources: a major advantage of having a team is that you have access to multiple eyes, ears, hands, and brains. Each person brings unique skills, knowledge, and perspective to the problems the team is facing. When a company fails to take advantage of those people, then they are spending a great deal of money for very little return.

In the Mann Gulch disaster, Wagner Dodge failed to appreciate the perspectives and opinions his team brought to the table. He relied solely on his own eyes, ears, and brains. Had he bothered to obtain information from the rest of his team, it is highly likely that most of them would not have perished under Dodge’s command. When the team has no “I,” the team cannot see.

On the flip side, some companies go too far in the other direction. One company, that shall remain nameless, spends so much time on “I” that there’s no time left for “we.” There have no team; there’s only a group of people who happen to be wandering in something vaguely approximating the same direction. Meetings are characterized by constant jockeying for position and arguments over turf. Different groups in the company see themselves as competing with one another for the favor of the CEO and for the eventual rewards. Oddly enough, the level of excitement and commitment in this situation is about the same as the one in which there is no “I.” When you have too much “I,” no one can agree on what they are seeing. In other words, too much “I” or a missing “I” produce much the same degree of blindness. That’s not good for the individuals, the team, or the company.

So how do you make sure you have the right “I?”

Start by creating something worth seeing. Paint a vivid picture of the company’s future, and show each person how they, as individuals, matter. Remind employees of the skills, knowledge, perspectives, and abilities that led to them being part of the team.

Show each person how they fit into the overall picture, and how their colleagues fit in as well. Make sure each person has a clue about what the others are doing. Ignorance breeds contempt.

Strengthen individual autonomy: find opportunities to allow people to decide how they’ll get their jobs done. Don’t regulate anything that isn’t absolutely necessary to getting the product out the door.

Always praise successes. Highlight significant contributions, remind people of their strengths.

Encourage and provide opportunities for team members to continuously develop their strengths. Improving individual skills dramatically improves team performance.

For a team to win, it needs to see where it’s going. That requires the team to have “I”’s and something to look at. How can you provide both to your team?

There Can Be Only One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

What Are You Avoiding?

The amazing thing about train wrecks is that they are obvious in hindsight. However, while they are happening, everyone involved is gripped by some horrid fascination that, if not forcibly interrupted, leads to the inevitable conclusion.

By the end of this particular train wreck, a member of the senior management team had resigned and the CEO had lost the trust of many of his formerly extremely loyal employees.

The newly hired VP of Sales was given responsibility for supervising a particular product manager, someone who had been with the company for years. They did not hit it off and the relationship went downhill from there.

The PM was charged by the CEO with getting a particular release of the software out the door. The VP of Sales wanted the project manager to be working on something else. The CEO kept promising to straighten things out with the VP of Sales, but never quite got around to it.

The VP of Sales became ever more frustrated with the constant “insubordination” of the PM; the PM, meanwhile, was increasingly frustrated with getting one set of instructions from the VP and one from the CEO.

The VP of Sales eventually went to the CEO and told him that he was planning to fire an employee. The CEO shrugged and didn’t think much about it. “It’s your department,” was his only response.

The VP told the project manager to leave, that she was suspended without pay pending completion of the paperwork to fire her.

At this point, the CEO noticed that the PM wasn’t in the office, found out what was going on, and “unfired” her. While she was happy to be unfired, she was also furious that he’d let it get to that point. The VP of Sales, meanwhile, was just a tad miffed. He felt he’d received carte blanche and ended up feeling much like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football as Lucy jerks it away.

The CEO’s attitude was that, “these things just happen.” He was, of course, wrong.

Teams are not a group of people operating in their own silos, independent of one another. Rather, they are an interacting system and sometimes parts of that system don’t work quite the way they should. When something goes wrong, it’s important understand the system and how different players contributed to the problem.

The Project Manager was nobly perhaps, but foolishly, focused on the assignment she’d received from the CEO. Her attempts to explain to the VP of Sales just why she wasn’t focusing on his objectives were either insufficient or simply missing. She may have assumed that the CEO would explain things to him, but didn’t force the issue when it became obvious that he hadn’t.

The VP of Sales walked into the company and made a number of assumptions about how work was done and how authority was implemented. Rather than take the time to find out how people worked in the company, how rigid or flexible the lines of control were, and what other projects might be going on, he assumed that an employee put into his department could be assigned to his projects. He didn’t listen to the PM and he never made the effort to go to the CEO and found out what was going on. He assumed the CEO was paying attention to issues in his department that were, quite simply, not where the CEO’s mind was. Even when he went to the CEO to explain that he wanted to fire someone, he didn’t bother to explain the situation.

The CEO, for his part, also contributed in a major way to the final, unsatisfying outcome. He knew he was giving an employee instructions that might contradict what her manager was telling her. He also knew the project manager was extremely frustrated with her new manager. He didn’t act on that knowledge. He was busy, and explaining things to the VP of Sales was not a high priority for him. Even once the situation had reached its climax and the project manager had been fired, the CEO didn’t really address the problem. He simply pulled the rug out from under the VP of Sales and did not consider how that might make the VP look to his other subordinates.

At every stage of the game, the CEO, the PM, and the VP of Sales each had opportunities to address issues that each of them wanted to avoid: the CEO didn’t really want to deal with the disappointment of the PM at having her project cancelled, nor did he want to upset his new VP of Sales. The PM did not want her project cancelled and really wasn’t all that interested in the project the VP of Sales wanted her to take on. The VP of Sales had his own views about power and authority and didn’t really want to find out that the company did things differently than he believed they should be done. He was angry, blamed the PM, and wanted to punish her.

Right up to the end, stopping to address the unpleasant issues and recognizing how each person was contributing to the impending train wreck could have changed the results. Instead, each person operated in a vacuum, and managed to achieve one of the worst of all possible results.

What difficult situations or awkward conversations are people in your office avoiding?

The Seven Habits of Pointy-Haired Bosses

 

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, routinely features tales of bumbling managers. The popularity of Dilbert, and the degree to which it resonates with people, are a testament to his accuracy; indeed, Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss has become an iconic figure. Dilbert aside, however, I have observed that very few leaders intentionally act like the pointy-haired boss depicted in the comic strip. Rather, they engage in pointy-haired behaviors without realizing the effect they are having on the organization as whole. Let’s explore some examples of such behaviors and their unintended consequences.

 

 

1. Pointy-haired bosses break their own rules and figure either no one will notice or no one will mind because they are in charge. In one company, the CEO called everyone together to talk about the importance of really working hard and putting personal needs to one side in order to ship a product. At the end of the talk, he announced he was leaving for a two week vacation in Hawaii and wished everyone good luck. This did not go over well. One vice-president, who had apparently not been warned, almost choked on his coffee. When the CEO came back, two people had quit and the rest were up in arms.

 

 

2. The pointy-haired boss believes that he is separate from the group he leads. In fact, leaders are also group members, with a very important and well-defined role. Through their actions, leaders set the norms for their group. For example, the manager of a team at a large software company imposed a $.25 penalty for being late to meetings. When he was subsequently late himself, the team gleefully demanded he pay up. After a brief stunned moment, he tossed a quarter into the pot. No one complained about the fine after that. What the leader does is directly mirrored in the organization. When leaders find that employees are not living up to the standards of the organization, they often need to look in a mirror and see what example they are setting.

 

 

3. Pointy-haired bosses fail to recognize the culture they are creating. To be fair, it’s hard to see your own culture from the inside, and despite what many managers and CEOs believe, culture is formed not from what you say but from what you do. As MIT’s Ed Schein observes, “Culture is the residue of success: success in dealing with external challenges and success in internal advancement.” What behaviors are successful in the organization? What behaviors are rewarded? The very behaviors that people tell me they want to change are frequently the ones they are encouraging.”

 

 

4. Pointy-haired bosses lack an understanding of group/team dynamics. They like to say that their organization is “different,” and the research on group dynamics doesn’t apply. That’s like the people in early 2000 who said about the stock market that “This time, it’s different.” If you’re dealing with people, patterns repeat. It pays to recognize the patterns and understand how they are manifesting in your specific situation.

 

 

5. Pointy-haired bosses are often unable or unwilling to create a clear, compelling vision for their organization that gets everyone involved and excited. The best way to attract and retain top talent is to make people care about what the company is doing. That’s best done through painting a vivid picture of the outcome and creating clear goals.

 

 

6. Pointy-haired bosses motivate through short-term rewards and/or intimidation. They assume they know what their employees want, rather than taking the time to ask or to observe how people are responding. Short-term rewards and intimidation generate short-term spikes in performance, but build neither loyalty nor the desire to go the extra mile. Unfortunately, far too many people are willing to sacrifice the longer-term performance of their team for a short-term gain. In one company, the head of engineering “motivated” employees by inviting them to join him for happy hour in a bar on Friday nights. Had he asked, he would have realized that what the team wanted on Friday nights was to go home and have dinner with their families. Instead of motivating the team, he made them feel imposed upon.

 

 

Finally,

 

 

7. Pointy-haired bosses do not believe in asking for or accepting help. It’s not about asking for help, it’s about investing time and money to enable the company to accomplish its goals. The boss’s time is a resource; skilled leaders invest their time and the time and money of their business where that will produce the best return. Sometimes the best return is obtained by investing in an employee, sometimes by investing in a contractor.

 

 

Very few leaders deliberately engage in these Pointy-haired boss behaviors. Rather, their behaviors are the result of their own corporate success story. Therefore, for all that even one or two Pointy-haired boss behaviors can derail an organization, behaviors acknowledged to be counter-productive are very difficult to eradicate. Nevertheless, the ability of a manager or CEO to recognize these failings and invest in changing themselves is the true test of great leadership.

 

 

Trust the Force, Luke

This article was originally published in Corp! Magazine.

 

The (now) classic movie, “Star Wars: A New Hope,” features a scene aboard the spaceship Millennium Falcon in which a blindfolded Luke Skywalker attempts to use a lightsaber to deflect energy bolts from a floating drone. This scene is presented to the viewer as a Jedi training exercise. As the old Jedi Master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, calmly instructs Luke to “trust the Force,” Luke attempts to feel the energy bolts before they arrive. Luke gets zapped frequently, to the vast amusement of Han Solo.

As Obi-Wan repeatedly exhorts Luke Skywalker to “trust the Force,” Luke eventually manages to successfully deflect a few of the energy blasts. This is an important step for Luke: In order for a Jedi to exercise their powers, they must be able to feel the Force and trust it. If they can’t trust the Force, all their tricks collapse like a cheap special effect.

Trust, the speed of trust, the importance of trust, and almost anything else that has anything to do with trust, gets a great deal of press in business books and articles. There is a good reason for this: For a team to function at its maximum capacity, the leader must be able to trust the members. Trust, however, cannot be one way — the members must also be able to trust the leader and to trust one another. Unfortunately, trust is not something we can just turn on or off at will. Just because we are told to trust someone, or told how important it is to trust someone, doesn’t mean that we can immediately do it. As with Luke Skywalker learning to trust the Force, it takes time and practice for trust to develop.

In a very real sense, trust and safety go hand in hand: When we don’t trust someone, we don’t feel safe around them and, conversely, when we don’t feel safe around someone we also don’t trust them. We tend to be more on our guard and less willing to engage. Commitment, innovation, feedback, and intelligent risk taking are sharply reduced. Careless risk taking, on the other hand, tends to increase.

Trust, it must be remembered, is a two way street. As your employees learn to trust you, you also learn to trust them. That means developing an accurate picture of their strengths and weaknesses. If you force people to operate in their areas of weakness, they will be more likely to fail. This reduces your trust in them and causes them to view you as setting them up for failure. That, in turn, reduces their trust in you.

Part of building trust is recognizing process. Every person in an organization tries to work in the ways they work best. Each person seeks to develop his or her own process. That process is, in a very real sense, a manifestation of who that person is in the organizational community. If you cannot trust someone’s process, you will not be able to trust them; conversely, if you do not trust someone’s process, they will not trust you — you are essentially telling them they cannot be who they are. When you trust someone’s process, however, you build trust in him or her and enable them to trust you. This increases productivity, motivation and loyalty. Fundamentally, as psychologist Tony Putman observed, a person becomes what he is treated as being. How you treat the process is how you treat the person.

So how do you learn to trust someone’s process?

Start by recognizing that trusting the process is not just about trusting that the results will be what you expect. That is important, but it’s a surprisingly small piece of the puzzle. There is no such thing as a perfect process and no process will always execute without something going wrong. True trust comes when you know that people can be trusted to handle mistakes and unpredictable events. Trust in our own skills comes from learning that we can make a mistake and recover; without that, trust is brittle. Trust in a process comes from recognizing that the process may sometimes give us the wrong answer, but it also gives us the ability to recognize that fact and recover.

The best approach is to start small. Your employees are feeling you out just as you are feeling them out. Don’t launch into something so large that you won’t be able to resist jumping in all the time to tell people what they should do. Rather, give people some degree of autonomy and safe space to experiment with their process for getting work done.  Help them develop their process and be there for them when they make a mistake. In the practice of jujitsu, for students to develop expertise, they need the freedom to practice and screw up, and the freedom to then ask for help. If you punish people for making mistakes, you are demonstrating that they can’t ask for help and you are demonstrating that you don’t really trust their process.

To be a Jedi, Luke Skywalker had to work through the often painful and unpleasant process of learning to trust the Force. To be an effective leader, you will need to work through the often painful and unpleasant process of learning to trust your employees’ processes. No, it’s not easy and you won’t experience the immediate feedback of being able to block blaster bolts while blindfolded. Far too many leaders give up, dooming their teams to under performance. If you can succeed, though, the performance of your team will increase dramatically.

This article is drawn from Stephen Balzac’s upcoming book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers.” 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.  For more information, visit www.7stepsahead.com, or contact Balzac at steve@7stepsahead.com.

Dial M for Manager

I am pleased to announce that my next book, Organizational Psychology for Managers, will be published by Springer in 2013.

 

 

James Bond movies always follow some very predictable patterns. The movies always open with Bond involved in an extremely dangerous mission, which he single-handedly accomplishes to the tune of numerous explosions. Bond then shows up in M’s office in London to be briefed on the mission that will be the focus of the current movie. That done, Bond picks up his arsenal of tech toys from R (formerly Q), and is off. M, meanwhile, remains behind trying to keep track of what is going on and presumably coordinating other agents and missions.

James Bond is, of course, the ultimate individual contributor. While various people might help him from time to time, he’s basically on his own. Because Bond has a script writer, he’s never going to become a manager: that would spoil all the fun. Of course, we can imagine what might happen were Bond to end up behind a desk running the operation. SPECTRE would hatch some sort of dastardly plot and the agents sent out to stop them would all be killed, except for the dying guy who escapes to tell Bond what happened. Bond would then have to go back into the field and foil SPECTRE himself.

Unlike James Bond, many individual contributors do end up in management. Perhaps it has something to do with their jobs not being as exciting as Bond’s, or maybe it’s just that that’s the only promotion path in the business. Either way, it’s not unusual to see excellent salesmen becoming sales managers, excellent engineers, engineering managers, excellent marketers, marketing managers, and so forth. Like our hypothetical Bond scenario, however, many of them unsuccessfully fight the urge to do everything themselves.

Being an individual contributor means being in the trenches getting your hands dirty. While it’s very frustrating at times, it can also be very rewarding. Perhaps more important is the fact that you get to be the person taking action. You don’t have to sit around and wonder, you know what’s happening. You’re in the middle of it. You are like James Bond, only without the explosions, deadly tech toys, and, of course, the women. On the other hand, odds are pretty good that no one is trying to kill you.

Now, like Bond’s boss, M, you are a manager. Being a manager means not being in the thick of things. It means not doing the work yourself. It means going against years of training because now you have to work through others. Now you have to give instructions to your team of individual contributors and wait to hear back from them. You no longer know exactly what is going on, because you are not doing it. This can be a very stressful and unpleasant experience, especially if your manager is someone who is always asking for updates because she finds not knowing as unpleasant and stressful as do you.

Truth be told, the transition to management can be a very disorienting experience. Unlike a James Bond movie, if you don’t manage your team well and there’s a problem, your direct reports won’t appreciate you coming in to save the day. In fact, such an act would only make it harder for you to gain respect as a manager instead of an individual contributor who happens to sign time cards.

So what can you do to make the transition easier?

Start by embracing your role as someone whose job it is to build up others. You’re now the coach, not the player. Look for opportunities to improve the skills of your team, build their confidence, and foster a sense of team unity. Remember that there really is an “I” in team, so praise both good teamwork and individual initiative.

As you and your team build out goals, make sure you mark logical checkpoints on the calendar. That way, both you and they will know when you expect an update on what’s going on. Then make sure they know that if someone is having trouble, you’re there to act as a sounding board, help brainstorm, or just bounce ideas around. You may not have the answers, but you can help your experts figure out the answers.

If you do have to solve problems for the team, don’t just give them the answer. Let them see how you work through the problem to arrive at a solution. Then, the next time around, have them solve the problem while you coach from the sidelines. Sometimes you have to teach your players new moves. That’s okay.

If something goes wrong, make sure they know that you’re there to help them fix it, not to yell at them. You want people to feel comfortable bringing problems to your attention early, while they are small, rather than after they’ve had time to get large and unwieldy.

Finally, periodically take the time to see how far you’ve come and celebrate your progress with the team. The positive feedback will build your skills as a manager, and their skills as team members.

Good luck!

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.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in 2013. 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.

The Team Driver Paradox

Originally published in Corp! Magazine.

Imagine for a moment that you’re taking a ride on the subway, or, as we say here in Boston, the “T.” Somewhere up in that front car is a driver. That person sits in a little chamber and drives the train along the tracks. Someone not familiar with the T might assume that the driver isn’t doing much at all: after all, the trains are traveling through tunnels most of the time and along tracks all of the time. Yet, when an accident occurs due to a driver texting, it becomes painfully clear that the driver is doing a great deal. It just may not be obvious.

Driving a car is oddly similar to the train: When my children were very young, they didn’t understand just how much I was doing as the driver. They couldn’t understand why I couldn’t pick up a dropped toy or why I was tired after a long drive. Adults who don’t drive have more of an appreciation of the concentration involved than do children, but still tend to grossly under- or overestimate it. Indeed, if you were driving along a large, empty Midwestern highway, someone unfamiliar with driving might well assume that you were doing nothing at all, just sitting there as the car effortlessly zoomed down that long, straight road. The actions and almost constant adjustments you make are so small, so apparently insignificant, as to easily escape notice, unless, of course, you didn’t do them. Then everyone would notice!

In a very odd way, a successful team is much like that car, and the leader of the team much like the driver. In the best performing teams, it often appears that the leader isn’t doing much of anything. In fact, it often seems that the leader could be removed and the team would go on without a problem. That’s true, in the same way that the car would continue down the highway if you removed the driver and simply put a brick on the accelerator. If you decide to try that, please let me know so that I can be somewhere far away!

I have had CEOs, vice presidents, directors, and other executives and senior managers tell me that their company has leaderless teams. They even insist that their teams are performing at a very high level. Despite that, earnings are not where they could be, products are shipping late, and there is a very high degree of failure work. The teams, when looked at more closely by an outsider, turn out to be more along the lines of disorganized hordes. There is little sense of team spirit or community, rather each person is out for him or herself. Goals are vague, often to the point of uselessness. That’s OK, though, because everyone is operating on the basis that “there’s never time to do it right, but always time to do it over.” In one particularly egregious example, the following conversation occurred at product review meeting I attended:

Manager: “Is the feature complete?”

Engineer: “Yes.”

Manager: “Does it work?”

Engineer: “There are some bugs.”

Manager: “What’s wrong with it?”

Engineer: “The code’s not written.”

Luckily, I had already swallowed my coffee!

The most amazing part of the whole meeting is that no one seemed to find this particularly odd. It was simply seen as a normal part of how business was conducted. If that guy got fired, oh well, someone else would take his place. Without someone to lead, the team really never figured out which way to go and no one really cared.

That said, there are certainly times when it appears that a team is functioning just fine without a leader. You may even have been lucky enough to have seen such a team in action. Like the driver of the car, there’s a leader there. He or she just may not be obvious, until you take them away. That team and that leader did not start out working at that level. Rather, like any new driver, there were undoubtedly some bumps and wrong turns along the way. Even for experienced drivers, it can take a while to get used to a new car, to learn all of its idiosyncrasies and quirks. The apparently leaderless team is the product of a lot of hard work. It’s also not really leadless; it just appears that way.

Like the driver of the car, the apparently insignificant, or even invisible, adjustments made by that leader are working to keep the team from going too fast and burning out, from going off the road, or even from smashing into an unexpected obstacle. The results are only obvious when the leader is removed. By then, of course, it’s often too late.

If you truly think you have a leaderless team, look again. The leader may not be obvious, but he or she is there. And if you want to have a leaderless team, be patient. You can’t start that way and you won’t get there without some bumps along the road!

Help Star Performers Ramp up the Whole Team

Originally published in Corp! Magazine.

Do basketball players have hot hands? A hot hand in basketball is when a player is shooting better than normal. A star player with a hot hand is, therefore, going to be shooting incredibly well. Many players claim that it happens, and many statisticians point out that it doesn’t. The argument against basically says that when you look at the frequency that a missed shot follows a successful shot, you find that the whole “hot hand” thing is just an illusion. It may feel like something is happening, but the results don’t match.

The statisticians, however, are missing a key point: a basketball player is not on the court by himself. In other words, he’s not playing in isolation. When a player is shooting extremely well, the other team is going to put more effort into guarding him. Of course, if that’s correct, the extra effort expended guarding that star player should leave less available to guard other players on the team. In other words, the increased performance of a star should have the effect of increasing the performance of the entire team.

Once someone actually thought to ask that question and look at star performance in that context, the answer turned out to be that hot hands exist and that true star performers don’t just perform well on their own –they increase the performance of everyone on the team.

Star performers in a business setting are the same, or at least they can be. The trick is to set up your team so that star performers increase everyone’s productivity rather than just their own.

To begin with, what are your incentives? If you’re only rewarding team members for their individual performance, you’ve got a problem. You’ve told your star performer to make herself look as good as possible, even at the cost of other team members: Imagine a basketball team where each player was only concerned about his own personal record and not about whether the team won or lost. The fact is, such a team wouldn’t be all that successful. I’ve seen any number of software development teams, for example, structured in just that way, with exactly the expected results.

Part of what enables a star to be a star is the strength of the team. While it can be comforting to argue that focusing on individual incentives will weed out the weaker performers and leave you with the star players, that’s a bit like arguing that your basketball team only needs Michael Jordan. He’s a fantastic player, but even he can’t be everywhere on the court. Jordan is so good in part because he has a strong team supporting him. Conversely, the team is so good in part because of Jordan.

This brings us to the next point: how do people communicate on the team? This can be tricky: everyone sends emails around, but that doesn’t mean they are communicating. It’s important to look at the patterns of conversation and communication in the group: quite often, one person is the center of the wheel; even when a team member is ostensibly addressing the group, he’s really talking to that one person, and no one responds until that one person weighs in.

Related to communication is the question of how well your teams argue and makes decisions. A team which never argues is also incapable of making good decisions. Sure, they may get lucky once in a while: a blind basketball player might also sink the occasional basket. Effective decision making requires being able to debate issues, ask pointed questions, disagree strongly, and eventually come to a consensus that everyone can work with. Teams that can’t do that tend to not benefit from star power.

What is the boss’s attitude toward giving and receiving help? At one company, the manager who took over a particularly high performing team had the attitude that, “you do your job, and let the other guys take care of themselves.” Although the star performers continued to do relatively better than everyone else, overall productivity dropped off rapidly after that manager took over the team. People stopped helping each other. Conversely, in a different department, the manager who came in with the “we’re all in this together” attitude saw his team performance skyrocket. Although the best performers on his team were not as individually strong as the best performers on the first team, on the second team the stars really brought everyone else up, and everyone else really supported the stars. In basketball, five people working together will beat five people working apart.

Hot hands exist, in basketball and in virtually all other areas of team performance. It’s only a question of whether or not your team is set up to take advantage of them when they occur.

That’s An Amazing Serve!

One of those little tricks known to certain expert tennis players is saying to an opponent, “That’s an amazing serve! However do you do it?”

They’ll typically do this as they switch sides of the net, and suddenly the opponent’s amazing serve fizzles. By making the other player think about what he’s doing and focus on his body, instead of on the ball, that one question can completely change the course of a game.

Many practitioners of jujitsu and aikido learn the unbendable arm: they are told to extend their arm and imagine water jetting out at high pressure. Their arm becomes incredibly hard to bend. If they try to focus on the muscles, the arm is relatively easy to bend.

A similar trick is used by proponents of medical magnets and various other magic therapies: they’ll ask you hold your thumb and forefinger together on your right hand, and really focus on keeping those fingers together. They’ll then grab your fingers and pull them apart. Next, they have you hold the magnet or the magic herb packet in your other hand, and imagine the strength it’s giving you. Suddenly, your fingers can’t be pulled apart.

It’s a cool trick. I do it regularly by claiming my MIT class ring is magnetic and having the other person hold it in their off hand. Even though people know there’s obviously a trick, it works virtually every time.

So what’s going on? It turns out that when you focus someone on the mechanics of how their body moves, it scrambles their ability to do it. On the other hand, when you focus someone on a particular effect, be that a good serve, an unbendable arm, or keeping your fingers together, the body figures out the best way to achieve the desired result.

To put this another way, we become less capable when we attempt to micromanage ourselves. We become more capable when we learn to trust ourselves to exercise our skills in the ways that make the most sense for us. We do best when we have the freedom to focus on what we want to accomplish and discover the best way of accomplishing it, instead of being locked into one way of doing it.

What is even more interesting is that the behavior of teams mimics the behavior of individuals. The more a manager attempts to control the details of how the team is doing its job, the less capable the team becomes. The expert leader knows how to trust his team and gets out of their way.

The beginning jujitsu player attempts to make every piece of the move perfect: they try to turn their arm at just the right angle, step to just the right spot, and so forth. They are stiff and awkward. The master knows the result she wants and produces it, confident that her body will do the right thing. What is the difference between the novice and the master? Correct practice. Obvious though this point may be, if you practice the wrong things, you’ll do the wrong things.

The team is no different:  a leader learns to trust his team and the members learn to trust the team and the leader through constant practice. Like jujitsu, however, it must be correct practice. The novice who practices incorrectly improves slowly, if at all. He may do more advanced techniques, but he does them with the same awkwardness and wasted energy of a beginner. The team which focuses on the wrong skills may be given more difficult projects, but it does them with the same lack of coordination and poor use of resources as it did when it first got together.

When teams come together and attempt to leap straight into project definition and problem solving, they are focusing on the wrong skills. They haven’t yet learned how to be a team. Before they can define the project or solve problems they have to learn how to make decisions that they can all support. That doesn’t mean they all have to agree with the decision, but every team member must be able to enthusiastically implement whatever the team decides. That won’t happen if the team doesn’t know how to settle disputes and achieve consensus without splitting itself into factions.

Unfortunately, when teams focus on the wrong skills, leaders are unable to trust those teams to make good decisions. The leader, therefore, takes it upon herself to make all the decisions. While this may be a great way to get started, it starts to break down as the problems become more complex. This causes the leader to attempt ever tighter control of the team, with increasingly poor results.

At one major manufacturing firm I worked with, a certain engineering director was the go-to guy. He could solve every problem, and the team knew it. The director often complained that if he was stuck in a meeting, work came to a screeching halt, assuming it ever got moving fast enough to screech as it halted! The idea of taking a vacation wasn’t even in the cards.

The solution was to help him back off and let go of his control. Instead of solving their problems, he started walking the team through his problem solving process. Instead of answering questions, he showed them how he found the answers to those questions. Instead of making the decisions, he helped them develop effective decision making skills. It was pretty uncomfortable at first: the team got it wrong a lot, and he kept imagining what his boss was going to say to him if things didn’t work out. After a while, though, the team started to get the idea. Their problem-solving and decision making skills improved.

One of the very difficult transitions for jujitsu practitioners is discovering that doing very little yields the biggest response. Focusing on what should happen to their partner allows the technique to become effortless. This director had the equivalent experience:  although he felt like he was doing less and less, his team was accomplishing more and more. The less he focused them on the details of getting things done, the more they were able to do. Eventually, he was able to focus his time and energy on long-term strategic thinking, instead of day-to-day minutia.

Trusting yourself, or your team, to do the right thing isn’t magic. It’s the result of hard work and correct practice. The more you control the details, the harder the task becomes. The more you enable your team to deal with the details, the easier it is for everyone, and the higher the quality of the results.

Sometimes less really is more.

North Korean Rocket Change

I was listening to a news report this morning about North Korea’s latest rocket launch. It was quite the show, with hordes of journalists invited to watch and report on North Korea’s military might. According to one report, North Korea was also showing off for potential buyers of its military equipment.

As anyone who has ever given a software demo might suspect, North Korea’s rocket demo had similar results: it crashed. Unlike software, you don’t get to reboot the rocket and try again.

Although the news report wasn’t entirely clear on what happened, it appears that just before the first stage of the rocket finished its burn and dropped away, stages two and three both tried to ignite.

This did not go well.

Although perhaps less visually spectacular, the results are much the same when a business attempts to implement a “North Korean Rocket” approach to organizational change.

Organizational change is never easy, and on top of that, most companies make it considerably harder than it needs to be.

Change is a process: like launching a rocket, each stage needs to fire in turn. Attempting to fire the stages all at once or out of order only leads to a spectacular boom.

At least with a rocket, you might get some visually stunning fireworks.

The first stage of organizational change is getting your employees comfortable with the idea of making a change in the first place! This is one situation where focusing on what’s wrong is the right thing to do. You want your employees talking about why the status quo isn’t so hot, and how things really could and should be better. After all, if they’re all happy with the status quo, why would they want to change? As many a manager has learned, the more force you apply to make people change, the slower they go and the more likely your change initiate will fail.

Once people are in the mood for change, it’s time for the second stage: building some excitement. Rather than grumbling about how bad things are, it’s time to ask how things could be better. What would the company be like if we did make a change? How would that feel? What would working at that changed company be like? Look at both benefits to the company and benefits to the individual: no one wants a change that will leave them worse off.

In stage three, it’s time to focus on creating the confidence to change successfully. No matter how excited people may be at the idea of change, if they don’t believe they can do it, they won’t really try. It’s time to get them talking about previous successes, especially successful changes they’ve made in the past.

Finally, in stage four, it’s time to get people contributing ideas for change. Getting everyone involved dramatically increases the odds of success. The more confident and excited people are, the better the ideas they’ll come up with. The more involved they are in the idea generation process, the harder they’ll work to make the changes happen.

I worked with one client who would say to me, “Okay, I get it. I should do this, and then this, and then this.”

About then, I’d stop him, and say, “No, just do this one thing.”

He didn’t like that: it was too slow.

Every week, he’d complain that the project wasn’t moving forward. Every week, I’d ask him what he’d done, and he’d list off “this, and this, and this.”

Eventually, he decided to try going through the stages in order and one at a time. Suddenly, he saw progress.

Like the rocket, ignite the stages in the right order, and you make very rapid progress. Try to ignite them all at once or in the wrong order and you have a North Korean rocket launch: straight up in the air and then straight down into the ocean.

If they’re lucky, they might still be able to sell arms to Pottsylvania.