Yesterday, I wrote a post and also posted on Facebook a link to the NYT article about a six year old cub scout being suspended for 45 days because he brought a “weapon” to school: a combination spoon, fork, and knife. The presence of this obviously deadly weapon triggered the school’s Zero Tolerance policy. One of the responses to my post was rather interesting:
“Steve, this issue isn’t really about what’s ethically/morally correct when you’re in the school “trenches”.”
The poster explained that these policies exist to protect the school against lawsuits for discrimination, and added, “sometimes pragmatism gets the nod over the idealism we’d prefer.”
First of all, this is a textbook example of the process of moral disengagement: in other words, people justify unreasonable or unethical behavior by saying that it’s necessary to protect themselves or others. In this case, the argument is that, “We have to do this to protect ourselves from lawsuits.”
But I also have to wonder just how seriously a district takes ethical and moral behavior when the attitude is that ethics can be disposed of if they’re not convenient. In what other areas will they cut corners?
On a deeper level, what I see here is an organization that has forgotten what its mission is. Schools need to educate in a safe, supportive environment. Zero Tolerance doesn’t do that on several levels.
The American Psychological Association, the Department of Education, and the US Secret Service (!) have all found that ZT policies do not improve student safety. ZT is nothing more than a CYA for administrators who want to look like they’re doing something. While they are focusing on imaginary threats, they are not dealing with the real threats, the ones that the Secret Service (for example) found actually do turn into real violence. They are also creating an atmosphere of distrust and fear.
Indeed, the very idea that a well-behaved six year old can be sent to reform school for 45 days for an innocent, childish mistake is profoundly unsettling. How can one possibly feel safe in an environment when having a pocket knife dropped in your lap is grounds for expulsion? No, I’m not exaggerating. That’s happened too: ZT says that if it’s in your lap, it’s yours. How can parents trust a school district when they know that the school is perfectly willing to do serious psychological damage to their children in the name of Zero Tolerance? Let’s face it, sending a well-behaved child to reform school for a quarter of the school year is going to be psychologically and probably physically traumatic.
For a business to work well, it needs to build a sense of autonomy and competence amongst its employees. ZT destroys that. It turns administrators and teachers into robots and creates an atmosphere of fear. When you create an atmosphere of fear, people look for threats and they look for people to strike out against in order to reduce their fear. The schools are striking out against the students, and the parents naturally look for ways to strike back against the schools.
In a for-profit business, you’d see increasing amounts of fighting between teams and within teams. A for-profit business would be in serious danger of going under just from the deterioration of its products and services. Something to think about.
And, by the way, the last thing we need children learning is that ethics should be disposed of whenever they are “not pragmatic.”
I believe it was Dilbert (or more likely Dogbert) who commented that “stupidity is like radiation. You don’t want to get it on your clothes.”
When writing games, we used to joke about the cosmic stupid ray problem: the tendency of inexperienced writers to create a story in which people acted in ways that simply could not be explained by any other means. Unfortunately, it seems that cosmic stupid rays are not a product of the imagination, as I can’t really find any other explanation for this article from the NY Times:
It’s a Spoon, It’s a Fork, It’s a… Weapon?
The article tells the story of a six year old who was suspended and sent to reform school for 45 days because he brought a Spork to school. A spork is one of those all-in-one utensils. The kid received it at that bastion of violence, the Cub Scouts. As we all know, Cub Scouts are trained to use sporks as deadly weapons in order to take down entire armies equipped with modern weaponry. However, a Cub Scout with a spork (or lightspork, as they are known to cognoscenti, due to the fact that they are almost always made from plastic) can bat bullets from the air with the tines, and catch missiles in the spoon bowl and fling them back. As for the knife edge, best not to think about that, but let me just say that if you happen to be made of soft butter, you’re in trouble.
I could go on, but I think I’ve made the point.
What is even more amazing in the article is the argument by school officials that they must have ZT because otherwise they might make unfair or discriminatory decisions. Instead, they will guarantee that they will make unfair and stupid decisions.
If you’re worried that your employees will not make good decisions, the answer is not to take away all decision making power, and hence all requirement to actually *think*, but to train people in sensible decision making.
In typical bad management fashion that is fully worthy of Dilbert, the response from the president of school board was this: “There is no parent who wants to get a phone call where they hear that their child no longer has two good seeing eyes because there was a scuffle and someone pulled out a knife,” said George Evans, the president of the Christina district’s school board.
This is known as a straw man argument and is being used only to scare people. Rather than attempt to lead, the incompetent manager seeks to coerce obedience through fear: “You can’t question us because something terrible will happen.”
They are right: something terrible might happen if ZT goes away. School officials might have to learn to think, to do their jobs competently instead of copping out, and the ones who can’t might just get the boot.
October 12th,2009
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Here’s one that was just published by the CEO Refresher.
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.
September 20th,2009
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This one was just published in the CEO Refresher. The link is only good for month, so the text is below:
Once upon a time, the late and unlamented Soviet Union decided to grow wheat in Siberia. Their logic was simple: by growing wheat in the inhospitable conditions of Siberia, the wheat would become stronger. The wheat, however, was indifferent to Soviet philosophy. Despite speeches, threats, and promises from the government, the wheat stubbornly refused to grow.
In 1990s, a group of Nobel Prize winning economists developed some very interesting theories about how the financial markets should work. Their theories were brilliant and attracted billions in investment dollars into the hedge fund they created. Long-term Capital Management almost took down the entire US economy when it collapsed in the summer of 1998.
In both cases, a belief about how the world should work was trumped by the way the world does work.
To bring this a little closer to home, I worked with one high technology company that decided to create a set of coding standards for its software development team. While not an unusual occurrence in software companies, in this case, the manager in charge wrote up a fifty (that’s right, 50) page standards document. Naturally, everyone was overjoyed and memorized everything; at least, that’s what the manager thought. In fact, no one read more than a page or two and most of the engineers ignored even that.
Another company was trying to manage information: design decisions, notes from discussions, and so forth. They had the very good idea that they could manage all their accumulated wisdom as a Wiki. Unfortunately, the Wiki swiftly ballooned into an unmanageable morass of data in which no one could actually find anything useful. The problem wasn’t so much getting people to remember to update the Wiki; it was organizing the information in a manner useful to everyone who needed to use it, and in convincing people to take the time to keep it organized. Indeed, even agreeing on how it should be organized generated controversy and bad feeling.
In both of these cases, beliefs about how people should do their work were trumped by the way people actually do work. Like Soviet wheat, it can be remarkably difficult to motivate or threaten people into doing something that they really do not want to do. Unlike wheat, people can be forced. It’s merely a question of how much time and energy you want to spend: pushing people takes a great deal of effort and tends to result in significant amounts of anger and frustration for all parties involved. Not, in other words, a conducive atmosphere for creating a strong, collaborative team.
Of course, sometimes it is necessary to have people do things they don’t want to do. Code does need to be commented, information needs to be documented, and so forth. Fortunately, unlike wheat, people can be convinced. Instead of pushing them, the key is to get them to pull: the best teams are the ones that know where they should go and will trample anyone who gets in their way. How do you create such a team? Here are some tips:
- Involve those who will be affected by the outcome in the process of solving the problem. Nothing gets buy-in like giving people the opportunity to develop the solution.
- Identify the actual problem. Spend some time brainstorming; make sure you know what you’re trying to accomplish. The company with the 50 page style guide needed code that could be maintained over time and easily read by someone other than the writer, and they needed the process to not interfere with actually getting work done. That can be accomplished with a one page style guide. Instead, they were trying to win the World’s Most Beautiful Code Contest. That may be prestigious in certain obscure circles, but it doesn’t sell product. The customers only care that the software works.
- Ask yourself how you’ll know when you have a workable solution. This may seem counter-intuitive since you don’t have a solution yet, but it helps to figure out what success looks like. That way, you’ll know it when you get there and you’ll be better able to recognize if you’re going off course.
- Brainstorm possible solutions. Don’t be afraid to come up with wacky ideas.
- Do not evaluate any solution until the end of the brainstorming process. Off-the-wall ideas frequently trigger creative solutions.
- For each solution, ask yourself if it will actually get you to the outcome you want. Focus on the idea, not the person who came up with it. Even Nobel Prize winning economists can make mistakes.
- Take the time to honestly assess what might go wrong.
- Recognize that “oh, we’ll figure that out later,” is often a warning of trouble ahead. Make sure there is either a way past potential roadblocks or that you have identified the work you’ll need to do to determine how you’ll know if there’s a way.
- Test your solution before you commit to it, or at least look for examples of similar solutions being successfully implemented. Why learn from your own mistakes when you have the opportunity to learn from someone else’s mistakes? The latter is a lot cheaper.
- If more than one solution has survived to this point, pick one and implement it. Be willing to abandon it and pick another if it becomes obvious that it won’t work. You can’t foresee everything that can go wrong. Solutions that looked good from a distance sometimes turn out to be unworkable or too expensive when you get closer.
- Be willing to reformulate the problem if the solution doesn’t work.
- Give people as much autonomy as possible in implementing the solution. When possible, allow them to develop their own implementations. The company with the Wiki could have used email and encouraged each person to maintain their own records in whatever form was most individually useful. Instead of trying to figure out how to maintain a central repository, perhaps what they should have done was to present different ways of organizing the information and allow each person to pick the one most useful to them.
This may seem like a lot of steps, and there certainly is effort involved. The Soviet Union decided it was easier to yell at the wheat. Given the amount of wheat they imported, it’s clear which method is cheaper in the long run.
Good luck!
August 6th,2009
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I was just quoted in an article titled, “5 signs you’re not cut out to be a project manager”
If you’d rather not read the whole article, here’s what I said:
”
In my experience, there are "natural" project managers in much the same
way that there are natural athletes, musicians, writers, etc. In other
words, some people might start with more natural talent than others, but
if you want to be really good, you have to practice and develop your talent.
Unfortunately, there are so many poor managers out there that someone
who is even marginally skilled looks fantastic.
That said, I've observed that the best project managers have as a common
trait the ability to yield power. It's the ability to give people as
much autonomy as possible while still maintaining a sense of team
cohesion that makes the best project managers. While some people might
do that naturally, almost anyone can learn to do it."
The reporter didn't use the whole quote, but I think he got the point across.
Ever wondered why some teams are a pleasure to work for and others are a royal pain? You can find out on my live radio interview on Leadership and Team Formation.
You can also read a discussion of the show here.
July 31st,2009
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I was interviewed recently on Motivational Minds radio on the value of making mistakes in creating an innovative organization. Check it out!
July 27th,2009
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The holidays are the season for Yankee Swaps. Now, a Yankee Swap would seem to be a fairly simple and straightforward activity: each person either chooses a wrapped gift or steals an opened gift from someone else. This latter activity can, of course, trigger a chain reaction, but that’s part of the fun. At the end, everyone feels like they had at least some measure of control over the outcome. One would think it difficult, if not impossible, to mess up a Yankee Swap.
However, all things are possible. In this case, one company held a Yankee Swap with incredibly detailed and complicated rules which had as its most salient feature that no gifts were opened until the very end. In other words, the experience was transformed into the equivalent of a very slow grab bag: a long, frustrating, totally random process at the end of which people felt that they had no control over the outcome. Ironically, the most common complaint from employees at this company is that many of the rules are complex, time consuming, and leave them feeling like they have very little control over how they get their work done.
Read the rest at Affluent Magazine
July 20th,2009
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I was recently invited to contribute some tips on how a business can survive rapid growth (and hopefully thrive along the way!). You can find my response here:
http://budurl.com/wahx
-Steve
Here’s one just published in the CEO Refresher:
“You know the nearer your destination
The more you’re slip slidin’ away”
— Paul Simon
Some twenty years ago, I had a rather odd experience while working for a Silicon Valley software company. As we came closer and closer to shipping the product, more and more problems would crop up. Not problems with the software, as one might expect, but interpersonal problems. There was an increase in argument, bad feeling, and ineffective conflict at exactly the point where it would seem the most likely and logical that people would be feeling the greatest sense of unity and triumph. I experienced the same phenomenon at other companies, both in and out of high tech. In more than one instance, the team would successfully snatch defeat from the very jaws of victory.
In each of these situations the problem was simple; unfortunately, the solution was not. The team in each circumstance had never truly learned to work together, to handle disagreement, or to tolerate variations in working style. The only thing the team had ever agreed upon was the necessity of getting the product out by a certain time. The strength of that agreement was enough to forge sufficient common ground for the team to work together. Unfortunately, as the project drew nearer and nearer to completion, the glue holding the team together became weaker and weaker. Would the team hold together? Would everyone start fighting again? Would people leave the company? After all, working with people you don’t always agree with is often easier than working with complete strangers: as the old saying goes, better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Ironically, then, people would engage in the very behaviors they were most afraid of in order to delay the completion of the project and keep the team intact.
Sounds ridiculous, does it not? Why would trained professionals make such a mistake? Managers and CEOs tell me over and over that this would never happen in their teams. In a couple of cases, they’ve said this even as it was happening around them. Wishful thinking is not a good strategy.
The great benefit of teams is that they provide a variety of skills and perspectives. The great weakness of teams is that they provide a variety of skills and perspectives. In order to reap the benefits of having a team, the members of the team need to learn to work together. This involves more than just agreeing on a set of goals, especially since agreement on goals is difficult to get when team members cannot even agree on how to work together.
The solution is to recognize the importance of the early days of the team’s existence. How many professional sports teams go into competition with a team that’s just been assembled? Very few. Of those few, how many win? Even fewer. Basketball fans might well remember the Olympic Dream Team of a few years ago: some of the best basketball players in the United States all playing on the same team. While they were certainly competent, they did not demonstrate the level of brilliant basketball everyone expected: despite their individual excellence, they never really came together as a team.
In business, the only difference from the sports world is the belief that a team can be assembled and instantly jump to performing at a high level. It simply does not work, no matter how much we may want it to. A team in this situation is particularly vulnerable to cracking under stress at exactly the moment when it most needs to be working together.
So what can the manager or the leader do to build a strong team?
Start by fostering common ground and appreciation of one another amongst the team members. What’s the vision of the company? What are you trying to accomplish? Get everyone excited by the outcome you’re after and help each person understand how they and their colleagues fit into bringing that outcome to fruition. If you can’t figure out how each person fits in, then perhaps your project is insufficiently well defined or your team is too big.
Create as much freedom for people to work according to their own styles. Think in terms of mechanisms that permit maximum autonomy while still enabling the team to communicate and be aware of one another’s progress and needs. Allow for autonomy to increase as the team gets better at working together. Encourage the use of email as much as possible, minimize meetings, and have clear checkpoints where you can easily monitor progress.
Approach problems with the attitude of “evaluate and adjust” not “judge and punish.” There will be false starts and mistakes made, especially in an early version of the product. If people are afraid to be wrong or make mistakes, they will also be less willing to advance different ideas or experiment with novel solutions. Set aside time for brainstorming.
What roles do the members of the team take on? Are those roles truly taking advantage of each person’s skills? As the project advances, are you prepared for roles to change or for team members to take on different roles in the project? Frequently, the roles people start with are not the best ones for them; being able to change as the project develops helps build team cohesion and increases productivity.
How do you recognize status? Everyone on the team is good at something; otherwise, why did you hire them? It pays to find ways of building up the status of your team members and developing the strengths each person brings to the table. The more each person can demonstrate their competence and apply their expertise, the more motivated they will be and the stronger your team will become.
What’s happening when you get nearer your destination?
July 1st,2009
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